Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
ACT exists to give people better access to information, and better access to information is an in game advantage.
Discord exists to better communicate with people, and better communication is an in game advantage.
Explain your reasoning for allowing Discord.
The title seems related to this thread. I'll watch the video too later.
i did earlier. people used to play games in the same room but with multiplayer games over the internet, we cant really talk to people because they are in the same room. ventrilo, ts, mumble, discord, etc emulates that.
there is a difference between me telling my friend "im going in, heal me" than a program telling me "you didnt press this button enough, you need to press this button more" in real time.
if you build a tool that reads the combat logs after you close the game and shows them to you in a more user friendly way, then sure go for it. who is gonna know.
Which is not at all what the discussion is.
Given the Intrepid statement that anyone attempting to circumvent things will be punished, proceed at your own risk.
Also, the plugin does not hook into fflogs. I use it heavily every raid tier as a way to study what I do against what other players do against what the boss is doing to figure out the optimal use of abilities to reach the fastest possible kill time. I like to speed run, its fun for me to try to get even just that 4second faster kill.
The plugin reads the data, and computes dps, tallying everything you could ever want into its own category too. it saves this computed data into a local .txt file on your computer. You use a separate program called FF logs uploader to load that .txt file to that website, where you can then compare ability use and buff timings or whatever it is you are optimizing.
More than all that even, SE stance on third party tools is more lax than what Intrepids is. SE stance is, do not use any third party tools. However if you are not harassing anyone, or no one reports you then they dont care what you do. Intrepids stance suggests they will be actively looking for people using third party apps and punishing them, so again, use at your own risk.
Since there were never really any computer games like an MMO that used to be played commonly with peolle in the same room, im going to assume you are talkong about tabletop games.
Discord is a more advanced tool for talking to your friend across the table.
ACT, on the other hand, is a more advanced tool for writing down the dice rolls of the encounter.
A combat tracker can not tell you that you didnt press a button enough times.
Keep in mind, I'm not the one saying ACT is a cheater app. I'm also not actually saying Intrepid should ban anything, as i am aware of the practical fact that they can't do anything more than ask people to not use things.
As such, I have no goalpost to move.
What I'm doing is telling you that ACT in itself is not a cheater app as you claim. ACT simply takes information and displays it. If you are cheating in the way in which you get that information to ACT, then that is where you should be pointing the finger.
For the most part though, in basically every game I've used ACT in other than Archeage, the information that ACT uses comes from the log.txt file that the game in question creates in real time.
Hell, one of the base functions of early ACT was to allow users to set a file size for the log file the game created and once it hit that size, rename it so the game would start a new log.txt file.
well, basketball, soccer, etc, any sport.
then you have games like hide and seek, tag, etc
video games? you have 2 player arcade games, pong and sf come to mind.
then you have nintendo games
you also had lan parties.
anyways what are all the things that act can do without plugins, just the base app? maybe us who dont use it think that it has capabilities, such as dps meter and combat assist, that it doesnt?
You said that Discord is the modern equivlent of being able to talk to the people you are playing with, and I said ACT is the equivlent of being recording dice rolls in a table top game.
My first issue here is the number of things you have listed where analytics have literally always been a part of it - all sport fits in to this. Then there are the things in which talking to the person you are playing with isn't an advantage - hide and seek, pong etc.
I'm really just not sure what it is you are saying here. Without a plugin, ACT can literally do nothing at all.
I'm going to give you a some what fake example of game log files in order to illustrate my point;
(1697330593)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:13 2023] \aNPC 59815 a Tae Ew hunter:a Tae Ew hunter\/a says in Thulian, "Fall back! They are stronger than we thought!"
(1697330593)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:13 2023] You have killed a Tae Ew hunter.
(1697330593)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:13 2023] Your faction standing with The Tae Ew Lizardmen could not possibly get any worse.
(1697330593)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:13 2023] \aNPC 59849 a Tae Ew gatherer:a Tae Ew gatherer\/a says in Thulian, "Soft skin, you are mine!"
(1697330593)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:13 2023] \aNPC 59871 a Tae Ew hunter:a Tae Ew hunter\/a says in Thulian, "Soft skin, you are mine!"
(1697330594)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:14 2023] a Tae Ew hunter tries to pierce YOU, but misses.
(1697330595)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:15 2023] a Tae Ew gatherer tries to disease YOU with Atrophy, but YOU resist.
(1697330595)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:15 2023] a Tae Ew gatherer hits YOU but fails to inflict any damage.
(1697330597)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:17 2023] YOUR Solar Flare hits a Tae Ew gatherer for a critical of 20,014 heat damage.
(1697330597)[Sun Oct 15 00:43:17 2023] You have killed a Tae Ew gatherer.
All ACT can see if you point it at that text is, well, that text. What a plugin does is tells ACT which lines of that text you want it to pull data from, and specifically what data you want.
In the case of this specific example, the data a combat tracker would pull is that I cast Solar Flare on a Tae Ew hunter for 18,150 heat damage, then it died (first three lines of text). Then a second later another Tae Ew hunter attacks me with a piercing attack and misses, followed another second later by a Tae Ew gatherer attempting to cast Atrophy on me but I resist, then in the same second trying to hit me but misses, then two seconds later I cast Solar Flare on a Tae Ew gatherer and deal 20,014 damage and kill it.
So basically, a plugin takes the log in the spoiler element above and translates it to the basic information the player wants to see. Without that plugin, ACT doesn't know how to read the log in question.
This is why ACT can be used for tracking market activity in the game - if the games log file contains this activity, all you need to do is have a plugin that tells ACT that you want it to get that data rather than combat data.
In the above example, the log file is created by the game itself, and dumped in the games installation folder. This is what a combat log actually is - so any game with a combat log should have thing, or have the option for it.
This is why the notion that ACT is reading network traffic is so absurd - ACT is literally just reading the information the game is giving it to read, and the only reason plugins are needed is because games don't format that information in the same way.
It is worth noting that because plugins for ACT are a thing, and because plugins can do basically what ever they are coded to do, there are some plugins for ACT that do add other functionality. Some of this I consider to be fine, some of it I wouldn't use - but since my hope is still for a built in combat tracker with Ashes preventing the need for an ACT plugin to even exist, I don't have a particular desire to talk about that.
And there it is, you can say I am taking something out of context, but this right is is what makes ACT so dangerous.
If the game provides a .txt file, then whoever writes the plugin is going to use that .txt file as you say.
If it does not, nothing stops the writer from looking directly at the game executable data as well as network traffic.
Nothing stops the plugin writer at all from writing a simple javascript code to do whatever (most pluggins are written in javascript), all the way to combat assistance and drawing cheaty overlays on the screen telling you where to stand.
ACT itself enables that functionality because of the plugins, as you say, without a plugin ACT does nothing at all. If ACT specifically forbid the plugins from using anything other than a .txt file I could see the case for it not being a cheater app being made, however this is not the case.
And as many others have said these things are going to happen eventually. And truly probably a lot faster than we expect also. I'm just an amateur coder, I write what I need to do my own calculations in an afternoon, so already the bar is pretty low these days to making a parser. GPT AI can do a faster and better job of what I can, just feeding the little example log that you showed to GPT you can get it to write a javascript code to parse and format for you, give it enough sample data and it can work with network traffic too.
What makes it dangerous?
The fact that with the right plugin, it can do things?
Again though, this applies to literally every application that has plugins, because that is what plugins do - they expand the scope of the original application.
I'm not sure which part of this it is that you aren't getting. If ACT as you are using it is reading network traffic, that is because of the plugin. If you consider this to be cheating, then the culprit is the plugin that is reading the network traffic.
Now, you can start arguing all you like about whether or not this is something that may or may not happen in Ashes - that isn't a part of this discussion.
This discussion between you and I is about you stating that ACT is a "cheater app", and me pointing out that it is the plugins that you are using that give it the functionality you are talking about, and those plugins need not exist for any given game if the developer really wants to not have them.
I would say, ACT does not have to allow its plugins to be able to pull data from network traffic or game memory. But it does, thus, its a cheater app. It enables cheats by allowing plugins to go that far.
I was a lot happier with it in the past.
If you are asking where Intrepid's line is the sand is, its anything and everything that can be used to give an advantage. At least so far as we know based on what they have said.
edit--
Just so you dont try to look for contradictions in my posts now and before, I do use ACT, today still, even though I view it as a cheater app, because I simply have no other options in the games I play to pull the combat log out of the game to be parsed into useable data to be analyzed. Its always been a gray area thing to me, not black and white. Which again, does not seem to be the stance Intrepid is taking, they view it all as black and white, yes or no.
They can either allow addons, or not allow addons. There isn't a middle ground.
Actually, it does.
If it was only reading a .txt file and parsing it and formatting the output to show you stuff, it doesnt need access to any of that at all. Keep in mind this is YOUR claim that in the game you use it for, it reads a .txt file generated by the game itself and formats data for your use. This is actually what I want in ashes. I want AoC to give me a .txt file when I open the combat chat log and click a button that says something like 'export encounter to txt file'. (Do I think Intrepid will give me that? Its possible to be honest, because they do not want us to develop cheater apps)
Since it DOES execute those commands, it can do a lot more for us than simply format data for us, such as doing cheaty things like combat assistance.
ACT could absolutely limit what access plugins have to be simple .txt file reading, but it doesnt.
edit--
I am tired and drunk so I forgot to write this part lol.
You point at chome often as an example of another program that can simply access other stuff.
Chrome does not allow access to other stuff by default, it absolutely has the ability to block chrome plugins from doing things that it does. As a user, you have to give chrome permission to access data it wants.
Access to webcam
Access to other program data
Access to whatever isnt part of web browsing data that you want to think of.
Chrome doesnt NEED it and denies access to those things by default. ACT can absolutely forbid access to network traffic and other game data as well if it wanted to.
And that is how I use it - it is unable to do anything else the way I currently have it installed.
If you have it set up differently, that is an issue with how you have it set up.
No it can't.
ok i understand now. so basically act doesnt do anything without a plugin. it just basically opens a text file and reads it, then plugins do stuff with that information. but then, we go back to what i was saying but now its probably ven worse.
if act cant do anything without a plugin, and plugins can be made for cheating, then do we block the plugins? (not sure how would that work) or just block the entire app?
if act had basic functionality (other than just reading a file) without a plugin, then we can argue that it shouldnt be blocked (like chrome or excel, since they werent intended for cheating in a game), and then id say you are right, act shouldnt be blocked. but act cant do anything without a plugin...so maybe thats the issue.
but then atc isnt the only combat tracker. other combat trackers mgiht have the combat tracking functionality in them without a plugin, but they also have other cuntinality that intrepid doesnt want people to use (lets say combat assist, etc) in those cases, the entire app should be forbidden. but then, atc (and apps like atc) are special and get special treatment? @_@
i dont think we ever gonna find the answer, as it seems to be more of an arbitrary answer based on what intrepid wants. just no because, basically.
In my opinion, which has trivial value, AoC should err on the side of banning too much rather than banning too little.
I'm going to do the obligitory semantics thing and start by stating that you can't ban ACT or plugins, nor block the app. These are simply things Intrepid can not control.
With that out of the way;
In terms of what we do or do not accept, I always revert back to functionality. I *will* use a combat tracker, but I will only accept that combat tracker using information that is given to me, as a player.
As such, I will happily scan the screen in order to get that information if that is what I need to do. Doing so is literally just taking the information the developers wanted me as a player to have, and using it in a smarter way than some others may use it. I would prefer it if the information was just given to me in a log.txt file, but I will get it either way.
I am aware that others will happily make use of any information on their system/client (including reading the memory or network traffic), and others still will happily go back to the server for information. I wouldn't personally do either of these (my line in the sand, if you will), but others absolutely will. However, it should be pointed out that each of these only happen if developers aren't supplying players with enough information.
As far as I am concerned, everything from that point on is in developers hands.
If developers don't want players reading the memory or network traffic, give them good enough logs so that they don't need to do that. There is a reason that of the dozens of games in which ACT plugins exist, FFXIV is the only game where this happens (edit: and only happens with a specific plugin).
The same can be said of combat assistants - that is in the hands of the developers.
Now, an argument could be made that the most basic form of combat assistant is in timing an ability between each use. If a boss has an ability that it uses every 15 seconds, a timer starting when it is used and alerting players after 12 seconds is really basic functionality of a combat tracker that some may consider combat assistant in nature. If developers agree, all they need to do is not use abilities on such a rigorous timer. Developers use secific and exact timers so that players can time abilities , as such if they don't want players to time abilities, they just shouldn't use such timers.
Going any deeper in to combat assistants requires specific hooks in the games API. This means again that if developers don't want it for their game, they can simply not have it.
Combat assistants (DBM style ones) aren't as inevitable as combat trackers. Developers have the ability to prevent them - or more specifically, they have the ability to allow them.
If they aren't allowed and people bypass them then it is a cheat, correct? It's not like it would be hard to figure out if someone is using one.
Let's be honest, in most cases a combat tracker in pve is no different than your typical non aim hack in pvp.
If people use them, suspend the account. Depending on severity of what they are using and number of offenses up to and including a ban.
It is certainly a slippery slope because the decision to not have them has to clear and apply everyone and everything at all times or it will be made trivial and eventually made normal.
Maybe a potential compromise would be a instanced area for solo or raid groups to practice with some level of these tools built into the engine to keep them out of the mmo from a code stand point but give people a medium to learn and build their skills.
You are at the bargaining stage of grief.
Really easy.
For those curious, here are the terms & conditions, which as a section on third-party software: https://ashesofcreation.com/terms-and-conditions
Our goal is to make the game's UI robust and in-depth so that addons won't be necessary! It'll be important to give feedback during the game's testing phases, so we can make the UI the best we can going into launch.
@NiKr xD
It also depends on what those plugins can gain from AoC's network traffic, right? Maybe Intrepid can somehow limit that shit to a minimum.
I feel its interesting since more info is coming about what it can do and have combat assistance, like I mentioned ages ago that the goal post would be moved once you start allowing some stuff.
This is just information that you specifically didn't know, though.
There are no goalposts here, you know... programmers can do pretty much whatever they want. The difference between a 'plugin/mod' and a 'crack' is entirely how much the people who make the thing expose its functions.
So, before this gets stupid and basically 'us killing an Add that spawned from the DPS Meter thread', @Taerrik is KINDA wrong. It's like saying that Ashes Forum software allows sentiment tracking or user analysis just because I can run those on posts. Ashes Forum software has an 'input' and an 'output' function that must be accessible for it to work, and as long as my code can interact with those in any way, I can create 'forum software plugins'.
If a thing takes its input as a Text File and then does its function from there, anything anyone calls a 'plugin' could just be 'a thing that generates a Text File in a specific way'.
And to you, NiKr, since you haven't much played too many 'stronger PvE' games... it's pointless. You shouldn't be caring about what information people get from the network traffic. Your usual perspective is the better one. 'Make everything really transparent and design around that'. Don't drop your class change now, man! We need you on DPS!
Obviously ideally the game just tells us everything it can tell us and just be difficult enough that not everyone can overcome the challenges even with that info.
Sure, just remember not to get yourself caught up in a spiral with Mag about how 'PvE is never really challenging so it doesn't matter' or whatever it is.
This is Ashes of Creation, you have MP despite your class change.
Jungle Greystone ftw.