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FakeDetector

The Truth about WU servers

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The Truth about WU servers

 

This is something that I have been watching for nearly a year now. And it is starting to spread like a disease.

There are a few servers out there which are blatantly faking their player count to get more players joining. The new server Zenath is a great example for this. I watched this server since the beginning a few days ago.
At the start they faked their player count by around 50% so they had around 30 players showing in the WU Launcher when they in reality only have had 20.

BUT now they can't get enough attention and pulled it up to 100%.


Here is the proof:


Wurm Launcher (showing faked player count): http://i.imgur.com/3f7x9Zz.png
Wurm-unlimited.com (showing real player count): http://i.imgur.com/ykxFnNd.jpg
source query: http://i.imgur.com/ctfeDO4.png

In the source query you can cleary see that the "real" player count is at 27 and the Bot count (which should be at 0 if it would be a legit server) is at 51....

 

More and more servers are starting to do this...

 

Now I don't expect this post to be open for a very long time neither will the WU devs do anything against this but i hope maybe one of Wurm Devs will think for a second and see that such servers will
ruin this game. But I guess in the end every server will be faking its own player count and all will have 254/255 players....

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I personally will not fake my player count ever. I have requested the official code be changed to show player count of all servers in the server cluster, but I do not like how some servers are showing all players, alts, stuck online, and never finished being created players. I also can but will not change the code myself to show the cluster players. I think all servers should have an even playing field on this. The reason I request the cluster count is so server owners could make a proper golden valley style login server. As it stands you can not make a proper login/tutorial server because you would always show no players, or only players going through the tutorial before choosing a server.

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Posting the reply I made here too (as he posted in our advertisement thread)

 

We are indeed showing amount of players logged into the server rather than unique steam accounts, this is exactly what Wyvern has been doing since 2015/12/19 and since nothing has been done since then (and no official word has been put out regarding it) then we figured that to be on an even field with them we would apply our own patch but as you see we left it so a direct query shows the steam accounts and not the real amount logged in.

 

It would of course be best if codeclub made this the default as well as combining all clustered servers into one number for the login server.

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I see no problem with clusters showing players on non-login servers as "bots". There are significant performance benefits in having your login server not have many players on it (see: GV in WO), but if you do that your cluster says 0 players in the browser (unless you "fake" the count).

 

Bottom line: Player counts in the browser are all kinds of borked on multiple levels and CC should fix that.

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Id like to start a poll to require Wurm Online to not show Alt characters on the player chart's, As it's FAR MORE misleading than un-official Wurm Unlimited Servers showing active characters and not real people. Like, These are Official Servers were talking about here, They should show the REAL player count right! /s

 

Real post:

 

This is nothing new and in my opinion, Absolutely nothing wrong with it. If you want to show steam players only and retain some kind of made-up prestige you hold dear, Go for it, Nobody is gonna stop you. However, It isn't something to shame others on if they don't follow suite. If they want to show the amount of players instead, Let them. Simple as that. Its no different then WO, Why diverge THERE.

 

tl;dr: OP just want's to start a fight over population numbers, Regarding something WO Has been doing since day 01

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Who cares?

 

You make an alt forum account so you can call out a server?

Does this even matter? Does this change the player experience?

 

I am not affiliated with this server but player count doesnt matter. It doesnt change the WU gameplay at all. 

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It's WU, what'd anyone really expect?  Don't worry, most those servers won't stay online more then a few months anyway...  WU = Minecrap

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20 minutes ago, Nomadikhan said:

It's WU, what'd anyone really expect?  Don't worry, most those servers won't stay online more then a few months anyway...  WU = Minecrap

 

Most of the bigger servers have been online close to a year now. Now sod off to troll elsewhere.

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Every time someone brings this up I ask this question: What would you have the devs do?

 

It's very easy to stand there feeling offended and demanding justice, but it's much harder to actually come up with a solution to perceived injustice.

 

Let's start though. How about...

Force servers to report individual players and not alts. (i.e. No duplicate SteamIDs) - Okay! I can do this. And a mod could undo it in less time than it would take me to fix it.

 

We could stop allowing mods. This isn't impossible, and I could work out a nice way to wrap everything up in a protective anti-cheat layer, but you can kiss any and all modding good-bye. Would that be better? Hundreds of the same identical server? I don't think we'd be very popular if we did this.

 

So what else? Even if we did these things, it's absolutely trivial to spoof the data working around these things - and that's way beyond our control. But you knew this already, or you wouldn't have ended your post as you had.

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Personally, word-of-mouth works better for pointing out private servers that are being shady. Granted even that isn't perfect. People can manipulate and cherry pick positive reviews. Entire companies devoted to such activities.

 

Even massive companies like EA had issues investigating and enforcing private servers for games (without mods) such as Battlefield 2. Talking companies with armies of employees and vast resources.

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So glad Sklotopolis doesn't do this.  Our player base is 100% real.  Thank you Dominikk!

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14 hours ago, Nomadikhan said:

It's WU, what'd anyone really expect?  Don't worry, most those servers won't stay online more then a few months anyway...  WU = Minecrap

 

wow. Jealous much?

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16 hours ago, Wreck said:

So glad Sklotopolis doesn't do this.  Our player base is 100% real.  Thank you Dominikk!

 

Yeah thanks god, that we have got such a great staff team, who is spending a lot of time doing events, welcoming players on join and helping out where they can. All of you are doing a great work, I will never be able to give so much back to you, you are awesome! :)

 

 

20 hours ago, Keenan said:

Every time someone brings this up I ask this question: What would you have the devs do?

 

It's very easy to stand there feeling offended and demanding justice, but it's much harder to actually come up with a solution to perceived injustice.

 

Let's start though. How about...

Force servers to report individual players and not alts. (i.e. No duplicate SteamIDs) - Okay! I can do this. And a mod could undo it in less time than it would take me to fix it.

 

We could stop allowing mods. This isn't impossible, and I could work out a nice way to wrap everything up in a protective anti-cheat layer, but you can kiss any and all modding good-bye. Would that be better? Hundreds of the same identical server? I don't think we'd be very popular if we did this.

 

So what else? Even if we did these things, it's absolutely trivial to spoof the data working around these things - and that's way beyond our control. But you knew this already, or you wouldn't have ended your post as you had.

 

Reviews are breaking down while fake servers are spreading, more negative than positive reviews in the last 2 months. Many bad reviews mentioning supposed "big" servers without players, without support, without help, without CAs. They are giving a bad review because they suspect the whole game to be bad when the supposed "best" and "biggest" servers are dumb, because they can't know it is all fake what they do. Next reason it is really unfair for hard working servers.

 

Keenan why you want a server side protection, just think like a developer. Let's get a bit deeper... So in WO we have the following situation, you can control the server but you can't really control the client for anti cheat system, so you go for a very good server protection and clients sending special data to the server. Now in WU we have the opposite version of the problem you can't control the servers but you can control the clients at some level. In the time you are explaining us that there is nothing which can be done, I have an almost finished proof of concept showing that there is a really good and easy solution for this problem.

 

Personally I have no problem with this, but I worry much about the staff teams who are doing hours of work every day to compensate the player loss they have, especially my staff team works really hard, with welcoming players, huge events and so on. We and of course all other servers too really deserve it that every server is treated in a fair and solid way and no server should have the chance to get the success, a staff team is receiving after many hours of community work, just with one line of code. (it really isn't more at the simplest level of faking players)

 

So what I am working on is a simple modification for the client which detects and later hides faked or hacked servers from the Wurm launcher, problem solved it is really that easy and of course when it is client side NO server can do any modification in code so the client doesn't check if the player count is faked, clients will always check no matter what server. If you have that on all clients by default it is done. Time has passed and situation is getting out of hand, now we have the drama once again here on the forums. If you are interested I will continue finishing the system and send you an early alpha of it, so you can review the code and put it in. It will not be too big, because it is really a simple system using public steam API, like wurm-unlimited.com does too. Of course it is not a 100% protection but to continue faking players you will need to modify the steam dll in a very complicated way if it is even possible, so secure enough for now. It is all about #fairplay, otherwhise many good servers will go poof, which would be very sad for the game. Do it not for us do it for the game.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Sklo:D
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20 hours ago, Sklo:D said:

 

Yeah thanks god, that we have got such a great staff team, who is spending a lot of time doing events, welcoming players on join and helping out where they can. All of you are doing a great work, I will never be able to give so much back to you, you are awesome! :)

 

 

 

Reviews are breaking down while fake servers are spreading, more negative than positive reviews in the last 2 months. Many bad reviews mentioning supposed "big" servers without players, without support, without help, without CAs. They are giving a bad review because they suspect the whole game to be bad when the supposed "best" and "biggest" servers are dumb, because they can't know it is all fake what they do. Next reason it is really unfair for hard working servers.

 

Keenan why you want a server side protection, just think like a developer. Let's get a bit deeper... So in WO we have the following situation, you can control the server but you can't really control the client for anti cheat system, so you go for a very good server protection and clients sending special data to the server. Now in WU we have the opposite version of the problem you can't control the servers but you can control the clients at some level. In the time you are explaining us that there is nothing which can be done, I have an almost finished proof of concept showing that there is a really good and easy solution for this problem.

 

Personally I have no problem with this, but I worry much about the staff teams who are doing hours of work every day to compensate the player loss they have, especially my staff team works really hard, with welcoming players, huge events and so on. We and of course all other servers too really deserve it that every server is treated in a fair and solid way and no server should have the chance to get the success, a staff team is receiving after many hours of community work, just with one line of code. (it really isn't more at the simplest level of faking players)

 

So what I am working on is a simple modification for the client which detects and later hides faked or hacked servers from the Wurm launcher, problem solved it is really that easy and of course when it is client side NO server can do any modification in code so the client doesn't check if the player count is faked, clients will always check no matter what server. If you have that on all clients by default it is done. Time has passed and situation is getting out of hand, now we have the drama once again here on the forums. If you are interested I will continue finishing the system and send you an early alpha of it, so you can review the code and put it in. It will not be too big, because it is really a simple system using public steam API, like wurm-unlimited.com does too. Of course it is not a 100% protection but to continue faking players you will need to modify the steam dll in a very complicated way if it is even possible, so secure enough for now. It is all about #fairplay, otherwhise many good servers will go poof, which would be very sad for the game. Do it not for us do it for the game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PM me on IRC or on the forums and we can discuss. 

 

I think see where you are going with this, but I don't think it will be as useful as you think it will - but I'm definitely open to investigating it.

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The "truth" about this topic is that the displayed player counts on the server log in screen are only an initial added draw to log onto that server to check it out. When players then log onto those servers they will then start to build on their impressions of what is contained within it that will encourage them to continue to play there.

 

In light of this individual server count means little more than an impulse draw to it based upon being uninterested in doing at least minimal research by checking out the WU Server Listing section wherein prospective players will in a few minutes reading about these servers will get a more clear indication of which ones will appeal to their desires. There prospective players can get a much more clear idea of what these WU server owners are doing to offer interesting servers for others to play on, their longevity and prospective stability going forward.

 

WU server counts, much ado about nothing of substance for puddle traversing. Use some common sense and put a little effort into reading what is available about them and these server counts will mean nothing to you as an individual player once you try out of the fewer ones with a history to them. Newer servers will just have to prove their worth over time as these few servers have done. No quick fix here nor is one needed for the impatient.

 

Happy Trails

=Ayes=

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On 14/09/2016 at 6:00 PM, FakeDetector said:

The Truth about WU servers

 

This is something that I have been watching for nearly a year now. And it is starting to spread like a disease.

There are a few servers out there which are blatantly faking their player count to get more players joining. The new server Zenath is a great example for this. I watched this server since the beginning a few days ago.
At the start they faked their player count by around 50% so they had around 30 players showing in the WU Launcher when they in reality only have had 20.

BUT now they can't get enough attention and pulled it up to 100%.


Here is the proof:


Wurm Launcher (showing faked player count): http://i.imgur.com/3f7x9Zz.png
Wurm-unlimited.com (showing real player count): http://i.imgur.com/ykxFnNd.jpg
source query: http://i.imgur.com/ctfeDO4.png

In the source query you can cleary see that the "real" player count is at 27 and the Bot count (which should be at 0 if it would be a legit server) is at 51....

 

More and more servers are starting to do this...

 

Now I don't expect this post to be open for a very long time neither will the WU devs do anything against this but i hope maybe one of Wurm Devs will think for a second and see that such servers will
ruin this game. But I guess in the end every server will be faking its own player count and all will have 254/255 players....

 

They aren't faking the numbers... its simply steam accounts against actual player count + alts? I don't see why it needs changing?

 

It's not like Zenath are purposely logging alts in to boost there numbers? Everyone uses alts for sermons and those boring task... get over it.

 

The fact you're called FakeDetector says it all...

Edited by Moonpoppy

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Short update: I have spent the weekend with developing and could bring up a first working detection system already in beta test on the client mod loader, now my team and I will be discussing about a possible implementation into the WU Client live branch with the WU dev team, so such servers are hidden by default. 

Edited by Sklo:D

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FWIW i think that penalizing servers with "fake" counts on the vanilla client in any way is completely unacceptable until CC changes the system in a way that can show correct player counts for multi-server clusters.

 

On 9/16/2016 at 4:56 PM, Keenan said:

PM me on IRC or on the forums and we can discuss. 

 

This is a discussion that needs to happen in public, not in PMs between "chosen" people.

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26 minutes ago, bdew said:

FWIW i think that penalizing servers with "fake" counts on the vanilla client in any way is completely unacceptable until CC changes the system in a way that can show correct player counts for multi-server clusters.

 

This would be the next thing on my list, I also got a very good idea on that too. I see the problem there of course, but this is no excuse for what is currently happening. So I think we are on a good way by developing such a detection system atm.

 

I also don't agree that such things need to happen in public, in the end it is a Quality of Service problem with such servers, so it is up to CC.

Edited by Sklo:D

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The people saying this is a dumb idea or doesn't make a difference are dead wrong. The majority of people who start WU are looking to join a server that's got an actual playerbase and not one that's flat out lying. It happens in other games? Big deal...I want this fixed. Population of the server is the number one thing people look for first. If there is some software that can hide the dishonest players client side then please implement this.

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4 hours ago, Sklo:D said:

 

This would be the next thing on my list, I also got a very good idea on that too. I see the problem there of course, but this is no excuse for what is currently happening. So I think we are on a good way by developing such a detection system atm.

 

I also don't agree that such things need to happen in public, in the end it is a Quality of Service problem with such servers, so it is up to CC.

 

It should be the first thing on the list, not the next one. At least as long as implementation in the official client is concerned.

 

Also i'm sure many would like to hear and discuss the actual details before this gets pushed down our collective throats.

Edited by bdew
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Oh hey posts are starting to disappear from this thread. I see where this is going, gg.

 

Calling for transparent discussion is now against the rules i guess.

Edited by bdew

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