[TERA PC & Console] En Masse is closing, but TERA lives on! We will continue to support TERA PC (NA) and TERA Console until service is transferred. Stay tuned for more information.
[TERA Console] The Grotto of Lost Souls update (v85) is now live! Read the patch notes here: https://bit.ly/TERACon_v85
[TERA PC] The 64-bit update (v97) is now live. Check out all the changes delivered on August 11 here: https://bit.ly/tera64_patchnotes
[TERA PC & CONSOLE] Summerfest Part 2: The Beach Bash is on from August 11 until September 1! Participate in event activities to earn tokens redeemable for costumes, consumables, mounts, and more! Details: https://bit.ly/tera_sf20
Comments
The game has no way of detecting things, therefore you can't prove they are cheating or not unless they admit it. Although, the amount of people who cheat and admit it are well... low. This means, no one will face a penalty. Not that it matters, even passed systems were exploited and nothing was ever done about it, even when there was proof.
I don't see what is the point in even keeping a system that adds nothing positive to the game all while it annoys a large group and gives EME more headaches.
Alright, well that tells me that EME has no way to detect or enforce this kind of thing. Guess we should all cheat our way through these events since EME's not going to do anything about it unless we physically break into these people's homes and film them using a script.
I'm pretty sure there are logs of those actions that can prove the use of a script. But EmE is sitting on top of them asking players to provide proof that we have no access to in the first place.
Really? Okay I'm going to fire up my macro on multiple computers then. Going to see if I can beat the other guys
And macro can not be detected, there is no difference in input from an actual user. If you know how easy it is to macro a rally quest, you'd laugh lol.
Btw you don't even need a script, all you need is a basic macro command and a decent computer/network.
Keep in mind there's a lot of basic functions Tera completely lacked that were added later on, and still lacks to this day. I would not be surprised if they lack a way to detect these things. Other games for a while couldn't differentiate the difference between a player who used a script and one who did other than by looking at their habits. A script can mimic a person's actions, but scripts come with 2 things humans aren't capable of, doing something with minimal error the same way every time, and no delay aside for anything related to ping or any delay programmed into the script. Humans have a delay in anything they see, and act on, although, EME is not going to take into consideration the fact these quests may be accepted faster than humanly possible as a form of argument that people may or may not be cheating. They want to plainly see they are using one, no matter how obvious it may be that they are. Something I don't agree with, but they can do what ever they want.
If I'm getting the Imp box 3 or 4 times, and someone else also got 2 or 3 Imp boxes, that will make up reacher and will keep the boxes at same price. Its an issue since the same guild getting the rally quest multiple times allow them to get 1st, 2nd and 3rd ranks easier.
The point is that they DO have a way to determine whether someone is cheating as none of those scripts mimic a human. They choose not to, that's all this comes down to. "This quest was accepted 4ms after popping? Nothing to see here, keep walking, might just be Superman playing Tera. And we wouldn't want to ban Superman, would we?"
To be honest, there's no guarantee that the TERA logs are even in microseconds, or contain log entries for when the quest was spawned and claimed exactly. You might think "surely they have detailed logs of every activity that are fine-grained enough to prove this" but I'm not sure why people have such high expectations of BHS's server team considering the state of the client and the various server issues we've had recently (including the CU bug and today's instability). And even if such logs do exist somewhere on the server, how likely is that it's presented in an easily-digestible/searchable manner that allows for verification by EME Support staff? By assuming they surely can, you're implying a level of sophistication, skill, and foresight that BHS hasn't really generally proven when they're the ones who programmed the system to allow this sort of "exploit" in the first place. (If BHS realized the importance of logging this to the millisecond to detect potential cheating, surely they could have put measures in place to prevent this cheating from occurring...)
That being said, I think they should push BHS that it's important to a) put measures in place that prevent the potential cheating, and b) provide an ability to verify that this sort of fraudulent play is not occurring, because having faith in the fairness of the system is important. However, I strongly suspect that, rather than putting in this added effort to bring integrity to the system, they'll more likely just remove it entirely.
I mean, I said I don't really agree with their stance, but there honestly isn't going to be anything done about it unless there's enough people upset by it. As I said, this isn't the first exploited system done by BHS, and nothing was done about the others beyond removing/replacing them.
I have seen game logs and, yes, they are extremely hard to read. Depending on the structure and purpose of the part you are reviewing, it can be insanely large amounts of data. But we are, after all, talking about a few seconds of logs related to a specific part of the game. Unless Tera's logs were designed by a moron, it should be easy to extract the relevant parts and go over them. They also didn't say that the logs don't record sufficient data, they said they are unable to tell the difference between a human and a script. And then mockingly asked players for proof when proof can only exist in the logs. Unless they are asking players to literally hack the computers of other players in order to monitor their activities and record what's happening on their screens. And I'm not entirely sure that's even legal.
(The fact that the same person keeps winning it would be the more suspicious issue, except for the fact that it's always happening at the exact same time due to randomization being apparently broken.)
That's obviously not at all what they meant. They mean evidence that information has been shared/communicated on how to write such a script. For example, when there have been exploits to various battlegrounds, you could go on "certain sites" to find people explaining how to do the exploit. Of course, I think in this particular case there probably isn't that kind of evidence because it's not something that would require it, but they clearly were not implying you needed to hack someone's computer to find evidence.
Don't get me wrong; I absolutely despite all cheats and exploits and want to see the cheaters banned. I've gotten mad at EME in the past for being too soft on cheaters due to lacking sufficient proof of "intention to exploit" when game mechanics were clearly broken. I do actually think that cheating is occurring, and that measures could be put in place to detect and prevent it (and should be if this content will last). But I really do guess that BHS did not have the foresight to provide this level of logging because, clearly, they never even considered how it might be exploited when they wrote it. If not for that reason, you would never need millisecond-accurate logs for any of this sort of behaviour in a game like TERA. Just like the reason this exploit is happening in the first place, the programmers fail to truly think through the nature of players and the ways they'll try to abuse the system.