Re: Regarding the Use of Third-Party Programs and Player Safety

[ovIm]

And you're still wrong. If the blacklist is handled server side, I don't need to be given any information other than a boolean true/false value for whether a character is blacklisted. I don't need to have access to the character id, never mind the account id that the character belongs to.

All I need to know are the names of the characters that I've blacklisted and that I'm sent [message from blacklisted user] instead of the actual content of a message from a blacklisted user.

Well, they are not entirely wrong technically, however, the whole reverse lookup process would be incredibly awful and convoluted to do to the point of not only being impractical, but also borderline impossible.

To find alts of someone else all you have to do is blacklist someone, and then constantly look around the world for characters that are not the blacklisted behaving like the blacklisted one, taking notes. However, given how much effort one singular actor would have to do that, and the fact that you would have to be incredibly lucky to stumble upon someone elses alt (considering the amount of servers / maps said character could be), I'd say this case is negligible at best. Especially considering we are currently dealing with a handful of automatic scrapers being able to catalogize every player account + their retainers.

ETA: no, I am not advocating to do these things. going lengths like that is actually creepy and anyone who considers that should reevaluate what they are doing there.

[BigCheez]

Well, they are not entirely wrong technically, however, the whole reverse lookup process would be incredibly awful and convoluted to do to the point of not only being impractical, but also borderline impossible.

To find alts of someone else all you have to do is blacklist someone, and then constantly look around the world for characters that are not the blacklisted behaving like the blacklisted one, taking notes. However, given how much effort one singular actor would have to do that, and the fact that you would have to be incredibly lucky to stumble upon someone elses alt (considering the amount of servers / maps said character could be), I'd say this case is negligible at best. Especially considering we are currently dealing with a handful of automatic scrapers being able to catalogize every player account + their retainers.

ETA: no, I am not advocating to do these things. going lengths like that is actually creepy and anyone who considers that should reevaluate what they are doing there.

Why would it be awful and convoluted? How is this different from the checks that need to take place if you try to enter someone's house and they have access set to friends only? Do you think the game sends you someone's entire friend list to check if you're on the list? It isn't awful or convoluted, it's incredibly simple and basic.

[ovIm]

Why would it be awful and convoluted? How is this different from the checks that need to take place if you try to enter someone's house and they have access set to friends only? Do you think the game sends you someone's entire friend list to check if you're on the list?

I fear you misunderstand me, or I worded my reply awfully - I am saying that using the method of finding alts of an account using a blacklist feature I described is awfully convoluted, to the point that it can be ignored. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I fully agree with you that the way you described the blacklist feature to work should be the way to go and anyone with sensible knowledge about client - server programming would do that in the exact same way.

[Exmo]

And you're still wrong.

If the blacklist is handled server side, I don't need to be given any information other than a boolean true/false value for whether a character is blacklisted. I don't need to have access to the character id, never mind the account id that the character belongs to.

All I need to know are the names of the characters that I've blacklisted and that I'm sent [message from blacklisted user] instead of the actual content of a message from a blacklisted user.

When you go to a store and buy something, do they take your money, put it in the cash register and hand you back your change, or do they hand you the cash register and let you do what you want with it? Same thing. You're effectively claiming that there's no way to handle the transaction without the customer having access to the money in the cash register.

Incorrect. Your thinking is in the clouds rather than of results. It would be extremely easy for a stalker to use player search to discover an alt of someone blocking them by comparing the list against a control account. Doesn't matter if blacklist is handled client side or server side. There is no way around it.

[BigCheez]

I fear you misunderstand me, or I worded my reply awfully - I am saying that using the method of finding alts of an account using a blacklist feature I described is awfully convoluted, to the point that it can be ignored. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I fully agree with you that the way you described the blacklist feature to work should be the way to go and anyone with sensible knowledge about client - server programming would do that in the exact same way.

Ah, I thought you were saying that moving the blacklist check server side would be more convoluted than having it happen client side.

While you're right in that you could still use the blacklist to confirm if a character belongs to the same account as another character this way, it would only be possible to confirm that character A and character B belong to the same account. You would also need to know when the alt would be online and catch them doing something like typing in a public chat channel to be able to confirm that they were blacklisted.

It would be a long-winded process to confirm that character A and B both belong to the same account. It would be much better than being able to click on character A and see that they own character A, B, C, D and E, along with all of their retainers and location/activity history, as is the case right now.

Incorrect. Your thinking is in the clouds rather than of results. It would be extremely easy for a stalker to use player search to discover an alt of someone blocking them by comparing the list against a control account. Doesn't matter if blacklist is handled client side or server side. There is no way around it.

It would not be "extremely easy". It would also only confirm that character A and B belong to the same account, it would not give you as much information as you're able to obtain now. Just take the L. You don't know what you're talking about.

[Exmo]

It would not be "extremely easy". It would also only confirm that character A and B belong to the same account, it would not give you as much information as you're able to obtain now. Just take the L. You don't know what you're talking about.

You're not engaging your brain and you're being a rude little boy as is usual for you so I'm not going to respond to you after this.

I'm not saying it gives you the exact same info as the stalker plugin does. I said it allows you to discover an accounts alts, and it does. Please read people's posts better. And it's incredibly easy for a stalker to get that info, especially considering a stalker likely already knows their targets common online times. The in-game player search even tells you a character's location in the overworld.

Given how you think that an N^N search server side is the exact same as an N^1 search client side, you should not be talking down to people on this matter. You're clearly not a developer and that's ok, but then keep your opinions on software architecture to yourself.

[ValynS]

And you're still wrong.

If the blacklist is handled server side, I don't need to be given any information other than a boolean true/false value for whether a character is blacklisted. I don't need to have access to the character id, never mind the account id that the character belongs to.

All I need to know are the names of the characters that I've blacklisted and that I'm sent [message from blacklisted user] instead of the actual content of a message from a blacklisted user.

When you go to a store and buy something, do they take your money, put it in the cash register and hand you back your change, or do they hand you the cash register and let you do what you want with it? Same thing. You're effectively claiming that there's no way to handle the transaction without the customer having access to the money in the cash register.

But since the blacklist functions also prevent characters from being displayed (to stop in game 'following', poses, emotes, etc) there would need to be more information sent (or omitted) from the servers responses, e.g. the server wouldn't send 'char abc is standing at x.y' type data for blocked chars. Someone could probably view the network traffic and compare that against network traffic when the blacklist is not enabled and use the difference to determine alts. More time consuming and possibly not as 100% as the existing stuff, but still possible. We also don't know the performance impact of all traffic having to be ran through that kind of filter. I'd like to say it wouldn't be much but this game and network perf ... Well, who knows

[BigCheez]

But since the blacklist functions also prevent characters from being displayed (to stop in game 'following', poses, emotes, etc) there would need to be more information sent (or omitted) from the servers responses, e.g. the server wouldn't send 'char abc is standing at x.y' type data for blocked chars. Someone could probably view the network traffic and compare that against network traffic when the blacklist is not enabled and use the difference to determine alts. More time consuming and possibly not as 100% as the existing stuff, but still possible. We also don't know the performance impact of all traffic having to be ran through that kind of filter. I'd like to say it wouldn't be much but this game and network perf ... Well, who knows

There shouldn't be much overhead. You'd only need to check if the player is blacklisted once and then cache the result for as long as you're receiving data about that player.

If, for some reason, they can't implement account-wide blacklist in a way that doesn't create more problems than it solves, they probably shouldn't have implemented it.

[BigCheez]

You're not engaging your brain and you're being a rude little boy as is usual for you so I'm not going to respond to you after this.

I'm not saying it gives you the exact same info as the stalker plugin does. I said it allows you to discover an accounts alts, and it does. Please read people's posts better. And it's incredibly easy for a stalker to get that info, especially considering a stalker likely already knows their targets common online times. The in-game player search even tells you a character's location in the overworld.

Given how you think that an N^N search server side is the exact same as an N^1 search client side, you should not be talking down to people on this matter. You're clearly not a developer and that's ok, but then keep your opinions on software architecture to yourself.

lol.

How exactly does "is character 1's account id in character 2's blacklist?" differ from "is account id 1 in my blacklist?" in terms of time complexity? They're both linear at worst, O(n) - where n is the number of accounts in your blacklist. There isn't a huge amount of additional overhead required to do this server-side.

This is all based on assumptions about the way that the data is stored, so claiming to know the time complexity of the required algorithm is questionable, but if the data is stored in such a way that they can't implement it properly - either change the way that the data is stored or don't implement the feature.

[Collin_Sky]

You're not engaging your brain

lol

and you're being a rude little boy as is usual

lmao I cannot believe these two statements came one after another

Remember kids, the first one to start name calling is the real winner of the argument.