Neo Nyzul Isle (Will FFXI continue? Find out on the next FFXI XP Pack!)

[NynJa]

are very explosive and angry lol.

How do you know in what context they are using the numbers?

Idiot is explosive and angry? What would you consider $3:&&::KSJDBEN$;$;WTFISWRONGWITHYOU?!?

theres no telling how SEs logs are recorded, but you can be pretty certain that "/p hey guys im at Runic Lamp #3" when no one else has said anything reeks of dat swap.

[Yugl]

Depends on how you renamed them. If you assigned numbers to PT members, you're probably declaring your order. In fact, doing so will save you time rather than saying the order each time you find a lamp.

P1=1
P2=2
etc

P2 finds a lamp: Found <t> 2

The flaw is inconsistency, but have fun searching for inconsistency across all runs.

[NynJa]

Whats the difference between these two scenarios:
1a-A group goes 30/30 on order lists, 100% accuracy every time
1b-A group goes 30/30 order lists, but a couple people say this in pt chat "/p I'm at <t> (Runic Lamp #x)", where x is always the right order in the list

vs

2a-Someone plays texas hold em and wins every hand they play through and always knows to fold the hands they cant win, never needs to bluff, and always calls out other bluffers...
2b-Someone plays texas hold em, and wins every hand they play through, same as above, but turns out the dealer gets caught rigging their hands (or something, I couldnt find a better way to explain it)

vs

3a-An athlete is suspected of taking illegal supplements, due to timely statistical and performance increases, but are always clean, either through masking or they just try harder at certain times
3b-An athlete is suspected of taking illegal supplements, is caught on camera taking something suspicious (they know its illegitimate, dont ask how), but their test result comes back negative, either because its a new product or some other reason


a-you cant prove anything, only suspect that someone cant be that lucky
b-theres proof of shady business.

[Yugl]

What's the difference? Ventrillo access. BAM!

[Churchill]

Could also argue ESP for the Poker players and low testosterone as a male over 25 for the athletes.

[NynJa]

Ventrillo/Skype falls under "a", nothing tangible on SE's servers.

And also, since theres going to be no GM, but some people want to discuss as if there is a chance if they get picked out of a hat, to continue the discussion to sate the naysayers:

How do you know in what context they are using the numbers? It could be them guessing or using their own system they made up to deal with lamp order as most have their own way of doing it with abbreviations and such. Point is that you can't tell for fact what the numbers are being used for, they can only assume which isn't as much proof as seeing three drops in a zone when there was only one from the boss.

I think the point is that you can't prove that by Runic Lamp #5 that they meant the actual Runic Lamp #5 the #5 could simply be a mistype.

Once again, purely hypothetical, you're in a discussion with a GM to save your account trying to prove you werent using dat swaps:
SE: In this one run, you were the first to a lamp, and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #3"
You: We pre-determined our lamp order and would modify it as we go, we just hit it 1/1, pure coincidence.
SE: Alright, fair enough...10 minutes later though you hit another lamp order floor and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #5". I thought you pre-determined lamp order?
You:

[Churchill]

I'm just going to let you know now that there is no way SE tracks position inside the game.

[pchan]

Just missing Niki from this thread

We have nikia.

It seems unlikely any bans will happen, a few reasons: Using the word "bug" is a nice PR way of saying exploit and by not simply saying "exploit" or "cheat" it helps them to remove focus and if they do patch it they then can feel like the job is done.

It is going to be hard to prove cheating since it is client side. Even if they did somehow use "hash tags" as someone mentioned it would be easy to bypass them by downloading the BG update torrent.

Keep in mind there is a boxed expansion coming out, last thing they want to do is ban a ton of people then see even more leave due to people's friends being gone.

The simpliest thing is to "fix" the lamp issue it self and then move on. Truth is however only time will tell.

The exact same arguments you used in the salvage thread.

[Darkmagi]

Also the difference with finding salvage cheaters was that it was extremely easy to track.

[Yugl]

Ventrillo/Skype falls under "a", nothing tangible on SE's servers.

And also, since theres going to be no GM, but some people want to discuss as if there is a chance if they get picked out of a hat, to continue the discussion to sate the naysayers:




Once again, purely hypothetical, you're in a discussion with a GM to save your account trying to prove you werent using dat swaps:
SE: In this one run, you were the first to a lamp, and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #3"
You: We pre-determined our lamp order and would modify it as we go, we just hit it 1/1, pure coincidence.
SE: Alright, fair enough...10 minutes later though you hit another lamp order floor and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #5". I thought you pre-determined lamp order?
You:

The claims work without relying on a hypothetical GM discussion. You know who banning by PT chat hurts the most? Console and non-windower groups (The people closely associated with non-Vent access groups). That's the closest correlation in any set of bans based on PT chat with lamp numbers. Not to mention that looking for for Lamp Number + 1/1 + Consistency is more work than searching for 1/1. If they do ban, which I doubt they will, they'll probably take shortcuts for amassing bans rather than checking each individual on a case-by-case basis.

Edit: Churchill is wrong too btw; the difference between the atheletes/poker dude was also ventrillo.

[Daiiawn]

The biggest difference between this and salvage, is the salvage exploit had a substantial gil advantage to it (people made a fucking fortune using that same exploit to dup SW drops and to a lesser extent alex). It wasnt unusual around that time for our LS to kill LW and get ~15m worth of items, multiply that by 3 and you've suddenly got a large amount of gil going to a group for cheating

[Byrthnoth]

Looooook guys. SE can ban you for doing anything or nothing at any point regardless of how justified you or your friends feel the process is. This is our November Salvage patch. In a a few months we'll find out how serious SE is about banning people for this.

[Viar]

Once again, purely hypothetical, you're in a discussion with a GM to save your account trying to prove you werent using dat swaps:
SE: In this one run, you were the first to a lamp, and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #3"
You: We pre-determined our lamp order and would modify it as we go, we just hit it 1/1, pure coincidence.
SE: Alright, fair enough...10 minutes later though you hit another lamp order floor and you were logged saying "I'm at Runic Lamp #5". I thought you pre-determined lamp order?
You:

You: We just changed our pre-determined order 5 min ago, problem?

Chat log CAN NOT be hard evidence of .dat swapping, you can communicate lamp order in any way that maybe only pt member understands. However if you <t> on the lamp, server received data of <t>, but chat log displays Runic lamp 1, then that's hard evidence.Unless what displays in chat log is on client side and server can't record it.

Simply typing 1 2 3 4 in chat log doesn't prove you .dat swapped.

[Byrthnoth]

You guys are overly fixated on hard evidence. SE doesn't need hard (or any) evidence to ban you, and they've proven that in the past and may do so again.

I said "Runic Lamp 3" once and emoted "waves at Runic Lamp 1" once. Will I be banned? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Either way, we aren't going to know for months.

[Eurell]

You: We just changed our pre-determined order 5 min ago, problem?

Chat log CAN NOT be hard evidence of .dat swapping, you can communicate lamp order in any way that maybe only pt member understands. However if you <t> on the lamp, server received data of <t>, but chat log displays Runic lamp 1, then that's hard evidence.

Simply typing 1 2 3 4 in chat log doesn't prove you .dat swapped.

They DONT NEED hard evidence. SE can and will ban people for whatever the fuck they want. They can do that shit on a whim, whether you cheat or not, and thats 100% their right to do so. Holy shit, people have been banned no questions asked for gardening too much, do you really think they are going to sit down and have a goddamn trial where you guys can explain away your cheating? People have always known the risk of cheating (and of course renaming shit in the game to give yourself an advantage that other people don't have is cheating. Not an bug or a glitch or an exploit, it's cheating lol). If you get banned, oh well. Either give up FFXI or start over fresh like so many salvage people did. It's not like it's gonna take more than 6 months to completely regear your characters now a days.

Edit:Byrth beat me to it lol

[Slycer]

However if you <t> on the lamp, server received data of <t>, but chat log displays Runic lamp 1, then that's hard evidence.Unless what displays in chat log is on client side and server can't record it.

I think the server actually receives the name of the target, not <t>. I think that translation is done client-side. Also, I think it's opposite for pre-programmed (but not /emote) emotes; for example, if I emote "/point <t>" and I have a Runic Lamp named Mark, it'll say "Slycer points at the Mark" in my log when (*I think*) everyone else who did not rename will see "Slycer points at the Runic Lamp," but if I "/p Hello <t>" everyone will see "Hello Mark" (and the server will receive "Hello Mark").

[NynJa]

I'm just going to let you know now that there is no way SE tracks position inside the game.

I'm aware of this, but where in anything did I post is there anything that relies on position?

[Damane]

You guys are overly fixated on hard evidence. SE doesn't need hard (or any) evidence to ban you, and they've proven that in the past and may do so again.

I said "Runic Lamp 3" once and emoted "waves at Runic Lamp 1" once. Will I be banned? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Either way, we aren't going to know for months.

noone is denying that. Just saying if they massbann people, they are gonna shoot themself in the knee. As hell am I not gonna restart if I get banned, so they can also shove SoA up their ass if that happens.

I really dont think people can compare Salvage bans to this Nyzul-Isle incident. First of you could dupe Alex in there to make "some" money, second the game was in a much healthier state back then. Doing the same banning now would just be hilarious, tough I wouldnt rule the stupidity of SE out to do it. However the outcome is, i dont care. If they permaban? fine moveing on to guild wars 2 and not gonna look back to FFXI ever again, if not fine too.

[Slycer]

As far as bannings and shit go, the only major difference I can see between this and what happened with Salvage is that there was considerable effort on the part of involved people to keep the glitch a secret. It was only fully admitted to (and even then, only by a handful) once the patch was put in place to prevent it from happening. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any effort to cover it up this time. Plus, from what I gather, the lamp order dat mods have been around for quite some time (since old Nyzul), and, as far as I know, no one was banned over them in old Nyzul. I suppose whatever action they take here could retroactively apply to dat mods within old Nyzul if they somehow come up with a way to track that.

I'm not sure exactly how they detected the Salvage exploits to identify bannable offenders, but if the game stores logs of item creation, which I assume it does, it would be an extremely obvious sign when they saw three of the same drop being created at the same time (and I think this didn't just apply to Salvage, but to other similar arenas as well such as Sandworm). In the case of Nyzul, there would be no obvious sign they could use to parse through logs, even assuming that every single chat communication is stored in some massive searchable datalog somewhere. I don't find it likely or even a possibility that they will ban people based on chat logs alone, based on what I translated over from the JP dev tracker (the comment that discussion of third party tools is not something they can ban for or punish). If they store logs that contain, for example, successes and failures on lamp orders, and can somehow tie that data together with chat logs of people in the zone, then that could be proof positive of dat modding. That sounds like an awful lot of work, however.

I may be mistaken here, and there's really no way to tell other than guessing, but I believe that the quantity of players who abused lamp dat modifications is greater than the number of people who abused the item dupe glitch. So any serious banhammer-type action taken by SE will most likely have to go through the same rigor that their Salvage ban process went through (remember it took months from the time they patched Salvage to the time the bans occurred), and potentially will take even longer than that process took as I'm sure SE will be hesitant to ban even one player who was not involved with dat modding for reasons I stated above (potential PR nightmare for something like "Square Enix Bans MMO Player Deemed 'Too Lucky'").

[Deader2818]

Really, even if they do ban for this, at most they will ban like 5% of the player base. You will likely remove a lot of "top end" players, but the middle to bottom tier players that didn't use dats, etc, vastly out number those who do.