A blog about gaming and random stuff

This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

Introduction. What’s all this about?

Part 1: The History – A Timeline. Take a walk down memory lane from 2012 to today.

Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo ⬅ You’re here!

Part 3: What Can Be Done (not yet published). What do we know, and what does the future hold in store for us?

Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

Last time we talked about what happened and when, but now we’re going to get into the how. How do DPS meters and tera-proxy work? How even do the skill prediction and other things work? I’ll be answering that in this installment.

First, a disclaimer. This post analyzes in detail the alteration of game behavior. Many places will consider this “discussion of cheats, hacks, or exploits”. If you want to post a link to this post anywhere, make sure it follows any submission rules there about this sort of topic.

If it’s so sensitive and controversial, why am I still posting it? Because I would argue this post has nothing new to offer to anyone with malicious intentions. Remember, TERA has been out for 5 whole years already, and there’s plenty of underground communities dedicated to illicit activities. Plus, the recent storm has only brought even more attention to tera-proxy. The proxy, along with ShinraMeter, CasualMeter, and Alkahest, are all open source. Everyone can look at the code, and anyone with the technical knowledge and ability to do bad things would have already figured out what we’re doing by now.

So, again. I’ll be doing my best to explain everything with the expectation that you, the reader, have minimal knowledge of these sorts of systems. For developers, this may be a total slog and you probably already knew all of this anyway. For anyone else, bear with me, and if there’s anything confusing, please let me know what could use some clarification and I’ll be happy to edit it in.

For those unaware, EME has banned me for my work with the proxy. Bernkastel was also banned and did a writeup (see justpaste.it or the original PDF download) with their thoughts on the situation, and I myself don’t have much to add there. So, instead of writing yet another wall of text to explain why I agree or disagree with things for reasons everyone’s heard hundreds of times by now, I’m going to write something different.

This is going to be a series of posts describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing. I am writing this for a general audience, so if you’re a casual passerby who just wants to know exactly how things work and why they came to be, this series is for you. I’ll be doing my best to introduce topics and concepts in a way that even “halp how do i computer” should be able to follow along.

There’s a lot of misinformation being spread around, largely because people just don’t know what’s really going on beyond a few technical buzzwords. And I don’t expect them to know, either. So this series is for the people that care to know and want to become a little more educated on the topics involved.

I will not be trying to make any arguments about right or wrong. I’m not here to ruin anyone’s reputation. I simply want to share facts and share information that may not be so easy to casually Google, and put it all into one convenient place for anyone interested in finding out more about this whole drama stuff. As with everything written, you’ll be reading things through my own filters and biases, but I will attempt to remain as neutral as I can. Feel free to send me messages with questions, corrections, or suggestions because I’ll happy to entertain any discourse on this subject.

However, do note that each part will be very, very, very detailed. If you’re not down to read 2,000 word novellas, now’s the time to back out.

This series will be published over the next few days (I’d like to do one a day) and is currently planned to be divided into these sections:

Introduction ⬅ You’re here!

Part 1: The History – A Timeline. Take a walk down memory lane from 2012 to today.

Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo (not yet published). The technical details of how and why these mods work.

Part 3: What Can Be Done (not yet published). What do we know, and what does the future hold in store for us?

Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

Pied Piper Candidates There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to: • Ted Cruz • Donald Trump • Ben Carson We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously. 

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428

happy together with @salty-valkyrie ♥