DPS Meter Megathread

We have not received permission from Sapiverenus to share the quoted post.

We already understand that you are absolutely willing to insult Steven's team, Steven's Vision, and technically Steven himself.

We are having this conversation using the 'limitations' of avoiding those things though.

Steven says "I don't want Trackers, but I also want an MMO with a Combat Log and Tab Target as a somewhat viable playstyle."

And all we are doing is saying 'Uh... Steven, that doesn't work, how about trying this instead...'

You going "Steven your vision sucks there's no real skill in it lol change it and make sure there's no Trackers" is fine, but the point is we're not even trying to have the same conversation at that point.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

This is not true, I will go right ahead and explain why.

I can write a script that, at the 'hardware' level, takes a 'screenshot' of a part of my screen that I specify every time a specific thing happens. That can be 'every X frames', 'every time I press ANY button or move my mouse', etc.

This can save the 'screenshot', but it doesn't have to, it just stores the image information in the program I'm running (which, again, I can write myself, it's easy, and while you could probably detect it, you could not 'prove what it is doing is related to Ashes' in any way).

This image information then gets fed into the Character Recognition code/software in a multitude of extremely easy ways OR...

I write even simpler code to do the 'Character Recognition' (this is my usual preference because it's easier and takes less processing).

Logs are now read from the game real time as it is played. Now, the obvious concept from there would be 'well that would create a program that Intrepid could detect because of some other stuff'. No, you'd just have it write the results to the text file.

See the problem? I ran a script that 'reads a small part of my screen for an image, and puts the text from that into a text file' or WORSE, NOT a text file (because then you can't check for any evidence of the text while Ashes is running even if you had super-surveillance).

A person doing this is not going to be the sort of person who calls this program 'AoCScreen2Log_ver2.sh'.

We have not received permission from Sapiverenus to share the quoted post.

I believe that 'no logs' would work (to stop most people).

The instead was 'make it so that the people who want trackers only group with each other for anything serious while making it obvious to everyone else so that they can avoid those people'.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

I agree with what you are saying, but the only way to make ANY display that my code can't read is to make it so that a HUMAN can't read it.

You think of this as going through loops. I'm telling you that this code is not only easy, it doesn't even require understanding of it to run.

As for deciphering the information, I'll give you an example.

"Azherae used Castigation. The Desert Scorpion took 189 points of damage."

^(?P<player>.+?) used (?P<ability>.+?)\. (?P<enemy>.+?) takes (?P<damage>[0-9,]+) points of damage\.$

This is the regex required to parse that line.

You could give me a text file with 1 million lines. I will type ONE line into a command prompt containing the above and it will give me output of all abilities used by all players in the log on all enemies including other players and damage done, in a file, in less than ten seconds on my current computer.

It is EASIER to parse logs now than it is to install a parser.

If you are suggesting 'the Combat Log should just lie to players then', I accept your point. There isn't much the average player can do if the developer tries to avoid parsers by just straight up misrepresenting the information in the game's UI.

But as the spartans didn't quite ever actually say...

"If they can detect things they very well could take action even if the name of text file is not obvious but they can pick something up."
" If. "

We have not received permission from Sapiverenus to share the quoted post.

You make yourself really hard to respond to because in many cases I either agree with you or don't care when it comes to Hostile Architecture.

But I also know that Hostile Architecture doesn't actually stop Scripters, Botters, or Trackers, it only stops people who don't understand how those actually work.

For the game to be incomprehensible to scripts, it has to be incomprehensible to most humans. For it to be hostile to bots, it has to be hostile to most average humans. For it to be hostile to Trackers, it has to be hostile to 'Presenting Clear Information Ever'.

None of those things affect ME, but I like when MMOs have more than 80 players.