Lot Hacking - Is it possible?

[Xavierus]

I was wondering if it is possible in any way, from a technical standpoint, to manipulate lots. Are there any programs developed to do this at this time? One of the shells i'm an officer in has seen a member consistantly lotting 950+ when there is competition for the said drops. I never thought anythign of it, but I've had several people send me tells asking about this, so is this possible in any way or is this member just extremely lucky? I'm leaning towards luck myself, but I'm not very well educated on the subject so I dont know.

Thanks,

[DaGod]

Well, it depends if the lot system is a random on your machine, with the results send to the server (in case you absolutely can, as for pos hack etc) or if it is a random on the server, with results on your machine. I personnally think that it is the second option, else it is really poorly designed (/random shouldn't overload the server, while it is a lot safer to calculate such things on the server and not on the client machine...)

But, well, we all know SE had not designed everything in a proper manner in this game so who knows? ^^'

[rithridan]

isn't random based on time? i wouldnt be surprised if lots are too so if you design a program that lots at exactly xxx then you always get a highest (or really lowish) lot, no?

[Oulanbator]

Randomness shouldn't be involved in any serious ls decision ( like gear distribution).
Either leaders control, either players control, but don't let luck control.

[Vail]

Randomness shouldn't be involved in any serious ls decision ( like gear distribution).
Either leaders control, either players control, but don't let luck control.

for sanity purposes, I agree with this man

[Delekii]

Randomness shouldn't be involved in any serious ls decision ( like gear distribution).
Either leaders control, either players control, but don't let luck control.

Plenty of linkshells run on lot systems that work perfectly.

[Sekkite]

isn't random based on time? i wouldnt be surprised if lots are too so if you design a program that lots at exactly xxx then you always get a highest (or really lowish) lot, no?

Unless you somehow have equal latency at any given time and have absolutely no lag with the server, lot hacking is not possible.

[Tricen]

2 people who work equally hard should both get the equal chance at an item.

[Kaslo]

At this level of technology there is not such thing as random

[Zephyre]

isn't random based on time? i wouldnt be surprised if lots are too so if you design a program that lots at exactly xxx then you always get a highest (or really lowish) lot, no?

Typically pseudo random number generators work by picking a seed and then doing some simple arithmetic operations, dividing by a number, and getting a remainder as the final result. The next time the random number generator is invoked, the last result is used in place of the seed in the computation. It is possible then that if you know the seed, the exact formula and the modulus that you can calculate the exact sequence of random numbers generated. However, the seed can be picked any number of ways and is usually not the same from instance to instance. Additionally, even if you were to find the seed and the formula SE uses, you would need to know the last random number generated by their computers.

What this means is that there is no feasible way to predict lots because some person killing a mob in Bostanieux Oubliette, or some other non-FFXI related program running on the server computer that has to generate random numbers will mess up your calculation.



Now it is possible that SE doesn't use the standard pseudo random number generators and instead created their own "less-random" method (such as relying on moon phase, or your personal /random history), but this would require more programming work and would be less efficient and less random, so no sane programmer would do this. Therefore you can confidently laugh at the retards who /random a bunch before playing casinos or claim that moon phase affects /random or whatever other bullcrap these people spew.

[Hashmalum]

Multiple previous SE games do not in fact use a standard pseudo-random number generator, but have a fixed table of "random" numbers that they go through in order. Games that do this include FF4 and FF6--in fact, there is a somewhat well-known exploit in FF6 that can be used to force Setzer's Slot command to do a Joker Doom killing all enemies instantly. So no, you can't ever take it for that "random" factors in a FF game are actually random.

[MisterBob]

Multiple previous SE games do not in fact use a standard pseudo-random number generator, but have a fixed table of "random" numbers that they go through in order. Games that do this include FF4 and FF6--in fact, there is a somewhat well-known exploit in FF6 that can be used to force Setzer's Slot command to do a Joker Doom killing all enemies instantly. So no, you can't ever take it for that "random" factors in a FF game are actually random.

That's from ages ago when processing power and memory were limited. It's the same reason you could rig the random number generator in GBA games like Golden Sun. There are so many easy to use random number generation algorithms for modern systems that there's no way that they're using something as simple as FF6's.

That's not to say their system isn't exploitable, but there's no way it's THAT easy.

[Wenslydale]

....

[Zosi]

That's from ages ago when processing power and memory were limited. It's the same reason you could rig the random number generator in GBA games like Golden Sun. There are so many easy to use random number generation algorithms for modern systems that there's no way that they're using something as simple as FF6's.

That's not to say their system isn't exploitable, but there's no way it's THAT easy.

To add on to that, while the system random() function in most OSs isn't cryptographically secure, it is sufficiently pseudo-random for the purpose of lotting, given the other factors involved. They'd have to either fuck up the seed value really badly or implement their own faulty PRNG.

[Ambir]

I didn't win so they must be lothacking!

There are enough people poshacking/botting/fleehacking that if there was a lot hack floating around, I think you'd have heard. Much greater rewards for lothacking than any of the others...

[rithridan]

I remember a thread about a guy who could random the exact same number because he waited a certain amount of time between randoms. He also figured out how to random really high by randoming exactly on a certain game time.

Yay, search features : http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/showt...ghlight=random

The guy concluded that if you /wait 1.8 between 2 /randoms that you get roughly the same random and if he did that when the clock stuck XX:X1 then it would be either a really high or really low number. Maybe this applies to lotting as well as randoming, is what I was trying to say in my first post.

[ringthree]

That guy didn't "conclude" anything, he just noticed it a couple of times. Definitely doesn't mean anything.

[Therin]

At this level of technology there is not such thing as random

The funny thing about this statement is that nothing is ever truly random on a computer, and as technology progresses, the likelihood of us working toward encountering truly random anything becomes better and better, not vice versa.

[Valisk]

Kirin poortal ez randamn lolz

[setzor]

Seriously reading too much into this, the server generates the randoms, and it goes pretty much like this:

iRandomValue = floor(rand() % 1000); // generates a number between 0-999

there's no moon phase/day of the week shit, it's just a C function that comes with the standard libraries