so, absolutely no sleight intended, but how is it that the official Elder Dragons forums and these here have been so quiet about this project?
was this all done without any publicity until this post?
I'm really interested, signed up, DL'd and ready to log into EQ for the first time in like 15 years... just surprised that there isn't more noise being made!
There's been basically no advertising done, and it's not on the EQEmulator server list, so the fact that it hasn't been advertised heavily is unsurprising. From what I could gather, the server is made for thalix and his European guild & their friends, similar to what P2002 was for Arm & Hammered, except there's no exodus from another server to make it.
I had asked in EQEmu's coders chat about this with him last night and he accused me of personally attacking him and subsequently left the discord, when in fact there was no personal attacks. I just asked him bluntly why he didn't list it on the EQEmulator loginserver in addition to his own, and got excuses as replies that were technically and factually incorrect.
Then, someone else (not me, actually, for a change) made a brand new emu account to parrot my points on the forums, and he instantly accused me of being that anonymous account. I can't blame him, given that if it was anyone else, it'd probably be the case, but given his attitude to me on the discord, it wouldn't surprise me if he created the anonymous account to post on my behalf so he could berate me further.
The anonymous, 1-reply account posted the following below basically parrots my conversation in Discord. I'm posting the full thing for transparency below.
I have been following this project since the original post.
I was very excited to play here but unfortunately after seeing the server operator's attitude towards others and propensity for lying about their experience & skills, in combination with the server not being on the public LS means I will have to pass on this one.
The reason being I don't think this server is going to last more than a couple of months. Every time the operator runs into someone who doesn't share the same opinion as them they seem to just shut down and claim everyone is "attacking" them.
I will continue to keep tabs on this project. If proven wrong, and if the server operator's attitude improves, I may give it a shot in the future.
Thanks for reading.
-Dave
Thalix's reply to that on the EQEmulator forums is listed below:
A new account, created today, who could that possibly be after last night's discussion? To clarify, there is a user in the EQEmu community who himself admitted to have spied on his players, more precisely he read the browser titles and published the "porn" he found there in the EQEmu Discord. This very person claimed yesterday that Elder Dragons would never be a success because we decided not to use eqemulator's login server. And now today someone creates a new account to claim exactly that again.
Strange coincidence.
By the way, the costs for the server are paid well in advance - to be prepared for worst case scenarios. Even if no one plays on it, it will be online for a long time.
I was looking forward to actually playing on this, but given his attitude about a simple technical question that was not personal, and lack of ways to use an EQEmulator account on it, I'll have to pass on trying it out. I'm sure it's fine to play on if you use a VPN and sandbox his patcher with credentials that are generic. Assume any information you pass in there is to be compromised, and to be honest that goes for any website you don't trust fully.
For a person who prides himself on being professional, he's far from it. Unless the professional skills are the ability to use nonsensical buzzwords to anyone with a microcosm of intellect could see through, and deflect to make himself look like he's in the right.
Here's the discussion about the 'rewind packet' that thalix claims is his 'machine learning anticheat' from the context above, which is actually a standard EQ packet that is interpreted differently. (we're calling it floatlistthing, as it was a list of recent positions that the EQ client sends to the server for anticheat and rewind purposes)
Context for reference to what 'machine learning anticheat' he has:
The code itself was submitted to EQEmulator's repository, which contains no usage of ML or any algorithms:
github.com
Lastly, as I know there's gonna be some confusion or accusations about the classless3 anticheat and what I could see, yes, I did store process window titles on the PC, no, I don't currently look at them, nor do the new folks running classless3 utilize that functionality anymore as it's commented out, plus there's no need for it with the aforementioned warp detection code that operates on the server and is 100% serversided.
I'd like to point out the anticheat for classless3 is actually open source now, as I made public the source code for the dll, including the floating combat text, DPS addon, etc, and you can review its functionality here:
EQ Classless 3.0's DLL. Contribute to SecretsOTheP/classless-dll development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
PS: If I am going to berate you like this, I am going to publicly do it as myself, Thalix, and it won't be a dismissive, anonymous, 1post June account.