kemp said:
"Additionally, failure to secure a script against spoofs IS laziness. I write my own scripts."
ok, so all scripters think that non-scripters are lazy.
notice that everyone on that side of the boat is "elite" and has played for prolly 2 years+ and scripts well themselves. what about the little guy? what about the guy who joined two weeks ago, wants to be competitive, learns the game back and forth, gets twx and all the *public* scripts he can. he joins a game with an "elite". he gets spoofed all to hell and dies repeatedly. he tries to goto the author of the script to get it fixed. hmm, almost all public scripts have retired authors. i guess new players are ****ed. odds are, they will just walk away from twars and not look back. is this what you guys want? sure, you'll "win the game" but at what cost?
i personally want this game to grow.
**** like this does not help tradewars.
until the "elites" either give every noob their perfect scripts or start to play the game straight up, this game will continue to dwindle.
i am a noob, but am one of the lucky few who has a friend who writes very good scripts. (though that didnt help this time.. ****, hehe)
but how many countless other players are gonna be driven away because they weren't lucky enough to find a prominant server first with some very good and very helpful players on it.
sure, learning the game and becoming competitive should be an uphill battle. but i don't think we need to throw rocks down from the top of the hill.

Slim

From what I understand this major happening happend in USO, this year, a very experinced corp of elites, spoofed a script(s) of another corp, and my question to that corp is, I know your awesome, everyone on your corp was, so why did you have to script spoof in order to **** up the competion?

quote:Originally posted by Daniel_E_Higginbotham

From what I understand this major happening happend in USO, this year, a very experinced corp of elites, spoofed a script(s) of another corp, and my question to that corp is, I know your awesome, everyone on your corp was, so why did you have to script spoof in order to **** up the competion?




To win maybe?

EDIT:
wrong quote, meant to quote PSION.

If someone deliberately smashed your knee in a Soccer game, he should have been taken behind the shed after the game.

TW is cyberspace. Very different. All that gets hurt is ego's.

It is SIMPLE to write code that cannot be spoofed/busted (someone should tell microsludge to write that on the wall of each office in Redmond).

Regardless of what should have been done to him OUTSIDE the game, there was nothing "illegal" about it, within the context of the game. Perhaps I'm not being clear. The knee doesn't matter. The bot spoof from USO doesn't matter. I'm talking about sportsmanship. Not whether you can do something. Not whether something will help you win. But whether you SHOULD do something. And if you would care to re-read my last post, I think its pretty clear that while it may be simple for you to write useful, spoof proof scripts, it is not easy for the vast majority of players.

quote:Originally posted by Psion

Regardless of what should have been done to him OUTSIDE the game, there was nothing "illegal" about it, within the context of the game. Perhaps I'm not being clear. The knee doesn't matter. The bot spoof from USO doesn't matter. I'm talking about sportsmanship. Not whether you can do something. Not whether something will help you win. But whether you SHOULD do something. And if you would care to re-read my last post, I think its pretty clear that while it may be simple for you to write useful, spoof proof scripts, it is not easy for the vast majority of players.


I daresay it might not be simple for them to do so. Point is, if they use 3rd party scripts, caveat emptor applies.

As to busting/spoofing scripts? I agree, not sporting. I dont do it. Having so written, I have absolutely no problem with anyone doing so as a tactic.

People seem to be under the impression that the privacy of a subspace channel is somehow a right; that because I pick an arbitrary channel and use it for communication that nobody else should be privy to that channel. Of course, such a notion is preposterous - the only reason that channels in the game even give the impression of privacy is because the game mechanics are not necessarily conducive to efficient scanning - ie. only being able to monitor one at a time. Using a script, especially one dependant on subspace communication, is simply a risk that one considers negligible.

I remember a time when rev's eprobe script would print out the name of planets it saw on subspace. Someone I know decided to exploit that by naming a planet ".^Mcby^M" or something along those lines. Obviously a deliberate attempt at spoofing a script - most people did not consider that underhanded. I remember a game where people would attempt to trick a tholian to land by blowing up planets in sector named after the string one sees when being shot at. Again, no problems there. There is no reason to be under the assumption that using a tactic is without risk. Using a script can provide benefits; getting screwed by the script is simply a risk that most people don't like to consider. Knowing how a script behaves and attempting to cirumvent its design is a common practice. EVERYONE does it. EVERYONE. The next time you plant mines in a sector and then hit the adjacent sector hoping to nail a beam dropper, remember you are attempting to exploit the function of the script. Remember the next time you place 5k offensives in a deadend to stop a scout gridder - you are attempting to exploit the fact that someone is using a blind script.

good points diddy.
specially about subspace.
hailing others just to attempt to **** them up i equate to spamming, but hails can be turned off, so i dont have much ground there.
however, i think having to turn off fed/hails etc.. just to prevent spamming/holes in scripts takes away from the social aspect of the game, and also turns off new players.
while some people may not care, because they've played for years and are retired or soon to be, i do care. i have not played that long and still have fun playing twars.

Slim

I believe that script spoofing is something of ethical debate. The fact is that script spoofing will be done, even by those traders that are among the elite. Even the traders who write the best scripts around, will attempt to spoof it they believe it is in their best intrest.

I just thought it was above many of you, I thought you were all better than such a dumb thing, but hey, we live to learn...

still find it funny that OZ spoofed his own public released script, lol and im fairly confident u knew it would work

I'm not postive if it was OZ aka Havok in USO that ran this little script spoof, I never thought that OZ would have to use weakness in his own scripts to help his corp win a game, but if thats what happend, I will delete OZ's bot and never use it again becucase this weakness has been brought into the publics eyes...

Guess time to play the old fashion way, at the keys.

And if it was OZ running and Jhereg didnt stop him, I no longer have any respect for Jhereg or OZ. You guys are better than that, 2 of the best, you dont have to spoof to win...but Stockton and Corp was becoming a powerhouse in USO, is that why you cheated??

I hope not.

quote: hailing others just to attempt to **** them up i equate to spamming, but hails can be turned off, so i dont have much ground there.
however, i think having to turn off fed/hails etc.. just to prevent spamming/holes in scripts takes away from the social aspect of the game, and also turns off new players.

I dun think it will ever get to that point. Guarding against comm spoofs is so simple that its rarely used as a tactic anymore.

quote: I will delete OZ's bot and never use it again becucase this weakness has been brought into the publics eyes...

The hole's been patched and a fix has been released.

quote: Stockton and Corp was becoming a powerhouse in USO, is that why you cheated??

I don't believe this tactic was used on Stockton's corp.

Since you're one of the few who seems to believe that this is somehow 'cheating', I'd like to ask - what's with this free lunch crap ? Scripts have a lot of strengths compared to a human player, so why is it so unreasonable that they should have weaknesses a human player wouldnt?

I dont think I understand your question, "why is it so unreasonable that they should have weaknesses a human player wouldnt?" But if your asking what I think your asking the fact is that OZ wrote the script, OZ deployed the script, OZ developed the script, and OZ used a weakness in the script to destroy someone.

If OZ wants to do things like that, he shouldnt deploy his scripts to the public...

quote:Originally posted by Daniel_E_Higginbotham

I dont think I understand your question, "why is it so unreasonable that they should have weaknesses a human player wouldnt?" But if your asking what I think your asking the fact is that OZ wrote the script, OZ deployed the script, OZ developed the script, and OZ used a weakness in the script to destroy someone.

If OZ wants to do things like that, he shouldnt deploy his scripts to the public...


I was curious as to the logic behind the 'cheating' accusation.
If your argument centers around Oz's intentions... then I think we're at an impasse cause i have no clue what anyone's motives were in all this, but my hunch is they weren't nearly as malicious as you make them out to be

Regardless of what you people think about it, script spoofing will continue to be used. It has for as long as I've played and I see absolutely no reason why attempts at it will stop. So, we're left with this, does throwing a fit about it and quitting games over it make things better or worse in terms of the game? If you're concerned about newbies, what do you think is better: To teach them that this sort of thing will happen and you just have to adapt and play through it, or that this sort of thing happens and you should quit over it? Tell me, which one is better?

Now, a couple of tangents:
1) Script spoofing in the current context happened to one of the most experienced corps in the game. Why do people keep talking about newbies? That is irrelavent in terms of this conversation.

2) Just because you don't want to learn to write scripts (or don't want to take the time to learn) does not exempt you from the responsibility of making sure your **** works the way intended. If you don't take the time to make sure something is secure, then shame on you for running it.

3) Traitor - I said script, not script type. The issue involves scripting. I argue that if one script is spoofable, simply use a different one that is not.

4) Hails/fed/etc don't have to be turned off to play the game. Just quit relying on scripts that are made by lazy scripters. For example, I told my entire corp that Oz bot was insecure, and they still continued to use it. Guess what, it bit them in the Butt. Even just a simple precaution like not giving out your bot name or picking something a little harder to guess than ss (slim shady) and rr (river rat) would have stopped it from happening. It's like building your base next to StarDock. If you're going to be that obvious, things are likely to turn out poorly.