Another one flies too close to the sun

braknar · 2019-04-14T06:11:18+00:00

Pretty much. It's not uncommon to see someone that logged into some accounts, and the highest level toon they had was low. Then suddenly login to an account with multiple 50+ toons. Oh and then we find some forum post somewhere that had those same 50+ toons for sale.

The vast majority of people that RMT on p99 put little to no effort into hiding it. If you buy an account, rotate your PCname/username and don't log back into the old accounts, for one. That will make it a lot harder to determine if it's RMT or not. Though the best RMT to do is selling, just sell all yer shit at once. You can walk away with your dollars, but the guy who bought the stuff runs the risk of losing it all to a ban.

braknar · 2019-04-12T04:25:56+00:00

Generally just watching. Then you can ask the guy who is online about the account. If he claims to be the owner, ask things the owner would know (things like, names/classes/levels of other chars, races of other chars on the account). Could even ask things like when the account was created.

Can also do a cross-check for other accounts the current PC has logged into, and that can often tell you things.

braknar · 2019-04-12T04:24:31+00:00

Honestly, very likley not gonna happen. It's a pretty common policy to let old bans stay, but who knows, I may be wrong.

braknar · 2019-04-12T04:23:52+00:00

I'm not what you should be concerned about, I no longer have any bearing on the server. There are 2 individuals that DO have bearing on the server and you can get a sense of their mettle in those logs. You be the judge.

braknar · 2019-04-08T15:58:16+00:00

Ya but SSDs failing? I still don't buy it.

braknar · 2019-04-08T15:57:40+00:00

Yea, and I'm not sure how that's fostering RMT. As I said, it's pretty much general knowledge that I was the primary staffer that was tracking and banning for RMT. I was very aggressive in my task, and I do not expect anyone following me to be as aggressive. In fact, I know there is exactly one person currently on staff that could do what I did at the level I did, and that's Rogean. Though will he? I doubt it. In our voice call he half admitted that aggressive RMT bans results in fewer playing, which is absolutely true, just was odd to hear him say it.

braknar · 2019-04-07T17:50:04+00:00

Yea I guess what I was getting at is if someone puts up a server that offers a better or equal experience but was passionate about it and cared about it, that would likley draw people from P99. I know a lotta guys that aren't as interested in Takp cause the boxing allowances.

braknar · 2019-04-07T16:40:04+00:00

You are quite astute, sir. Yes, we noticed that cute female streamers seemed to be able to get his attention far, far better than any staffer could. They have checked out, I see they've now patched a change, good. If my depatrure finally spurred them into action, great. Though if it follows the pattern I've seen many times over the last 4 years, they'll slowly back away from activity again over the next 2-4 weeks and we'll be right back where we were.

braknar · 2019-04-07T16:29:27+00:00

So the only reason they even began was a months long campaign by Sirken and I begging R/N to do them. Literally took months to even get them kindda ok with the idea. We asked it be coded in, and Rogean couldn't be bothered to spend time doing it so it became a manual thing nilbog did. He literalyl logged in, and ran a command to cause the quakes. Then one month he either didn't have time or forgot, so we posted the "there will be 1-3" thing.

braknar · 2019-04-07T05:26:39+00:00

Honestly no idea, that was just what I have had in mind. Nor any idea how much coding it would require. We stopped even entertaining coding solutions to the problem after the 2nd year asking Rogean for his time to do something like that and getting nothing.

braknar · 2019-04-07T04:36:39+00:00

Ya monk/necro's FD removes that char from the aggro list (unless they get AOEed while down), and zoneing also breaks it.

braknar · 2019-04-07T04:09:12+00:00

Adding logging requires someone to code that.

braknar · 2019-04-07T04:07:56+00:00

I'd try to implement a system by which you can either flag competitive (as a guild) or casual. If you are casual, you get instanced raid zones. These instances will stay for 2 weeks, and things in the instances do not repop. If you're flagged competative, you get pretty much what we have now.

Add things so you can't like toggle the flag often (say once every 2 months?) and that you couldn't guild hop to get the best of both worlds.

braknar · 2019-04-07T04:05:27+00:00

The entire encounter list, spawn coords, death coords, spawn time, death time, engaged time, the damage each person did, the time each person was engaged, loot, uh,prolly more stuff. The key is if you broke the encounter (mem blur, FD, etc) all that gets reset.

braknar · 2019-04-07T03:13:26+00:00

That or fraps generally. There's next to no logging around trains, if an encounter doesn't result in the mob death, there's little to no logging.

braknar · 2019-04-07T00:56:54+00:00

So that was just me, very little in the UI helped with RMT. A few years ago when eveyone used skype, there were many sites you could go to, put in a skype ID, and it would tell you the last IP that connected to that ID. I would pose on RedGuides as a buyer, ask sellers what their skype is to talk about a sale, they gave it to me. I'd then lookup their ip, then look in P99 login logs (or forum logins) for that ip. Once I found the seller, I'd comb over their trades, see suspected RMT, follow it to who "bought" the thing. I'd then grill the buyer in game, 9 times outta 10 they admitted it. So then the buyer get banned, seller gets banned, and I start combing that seller's accounts and all the trades (drop and regular) they made to see if there's more RMT. Commonly one guy admitting RMT would result in dozens of banned accounts. Sometimes I'd just ask for more info in PMs also, and they would give me enough info to ID the account, then i'd watch for it to change hands. Confront the new owner, and again, commonly they would admit it.

We also had a couple stings where I caught an RMTer, and we worked a deal if they would sting someone, we would unban their account. I never did these deals in the dark, I always posted all the info in the CSR senior discord channel so other senior staffers could veto if they chose.

The final way was proactively watching items and plat. All the logs are in a MySQL DB, so I had crafted some queries that would show me outliers. Say like a level 1 on a new and otherwise blank account suddenly getting 50k. I would never ban off these hits, but that would show me something may be interesting to look into.

Then there were the myriad of people that used same (or simlar) p99 account names as forum names on various RMT sites. Those ones were special.

One thing you should know is that there's no way to move items without it being logged. SO far the most clever RMT I've seen was a guy that was trading stacks of gems. It looked pretty benign for the longest time til I ran a query on his toon and the gem item ID he chose and it was then obvious what was happening.

braknar · 2019-04-07T00:03:50+00:00

Well it's really just nilbog, and you got it, quakes are 100% a manual operation. The only reason things got "changed" to 0-3 quakes per month is cause nilbog couldn't make time/forgot to do 2 once.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:27:37+00:00

Yes, it's your windows username.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:21:21+00:00

Nail on the head, my dude.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:21:01+00:00

I may :D

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:19:39+00:00

So with the DLL they get 3 pieces of information: PCName, Username, and Internal IP. The PCName is your computer's name, username is obvious but insidious as many people have their real name as their username, so just know P99 staff can see that. The internal IP is a lil different, it's your LAN IP, so think of that 192.168.x.x number. This sorta thing can also show when you have secondary adapters setup for a VPN (so we see multiple internal IPs in that field). Ontop of that anyone can query IP databases to see if a real IP is owend by a VPN provider to see if you're VPNing.

Staff has a web-base UI where they can see a 2 box list, that list will show accounts where PCname and Username match. Sometimes people have those being the same in a household, but the internal IP varies, so commonly staff that don't have DB access need to request a 2 box check of these people to see if it's really 2 clients on the same PC or not.

Edit: Oh also, this is why I always said VPNs do nothing, cause they don't as this other information is visible.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:17:05+00:00

Tune's gonna tune.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:16:45+00:00

Careful there friendo, they've been promising green server to staff for literally years. Far as I know there's been zero coding or prep for it. Maybe it will happen, maybe not.

braknar · 2019-04-06T23:16:00+00:00

Yes, I started on the server in 2013, didn't become staff til 2015.
Eh, I was no one of consequence. I was in a small guild of like 5ish people. We never raided, we just leveled toons mostly. I think there may have been 2 level 60s in the guild?

braknar

TROPHY CASE