The war on unapproved 3rd party

CovenantX

DeadThing5 said:

CovenantX said:

  Third-party clients would probably get approved for UO if they removed the scripting capabilities but it won't happen, that's the reason the vast majority of people use it for.  you could probably count the people who are using it for the FPS & hi-res on one hand... whether you believe them or not, well that's a different story.

     Do you have a lot of experience with the third party clients? It sounds like you've just heard things about them and have decided to go with it, or just made assumptions. AFAIK everyone uses assistant programs for scripting, which are independently run from the clients. I'm not aware that the clients themselves (except the official EC) have ANY scripting functionality. That's not to say that they don't, it's just if they do I didn't know. Honestly, since you can lua script in the EC I'd be surprised if there is anything that the assistant programs can do that couldn't just be built in to the EC. But, I'm not a lua scripter either. 

     I think most people using third party clients are using them for a improved experience, not in any way that rises to the level of cheating. I get the sense though that there's a camp here that believes anyone not using the official clients is a cheater full stop, and that's honestly unhelpful. It makes it difficult to have a reasonable discussion about this when tempers flare and personal attacks come out so fast. Hell my last post was pretty salty, and I like think of myself as pretty even keeled, so it just gets harder to have a productive discussion when people approach this topic in such a black and white way. 

     The fact that people have been making due with the official clients for years is completely irrelevant in the discission about the quality of the official clients. Nothing about the fact that people have been putting up with them for so long invalidates the myriad complaints people have about them, and saying "well i doesn't bother ME" or "Hey I put up with it" doesn't add anything to the discussion either. 

     A few things I'd like to see in an updated client, however it comes about is a custom, resizable play window (NOT just a small list of resolutions), and this is really an important one: a UI scaler. Let me make the containers bigger if I want, and scale the item sprites too if I want to. A lot of us have aging eyes, have mercy! The better performance of some clients would be nice to see in an official revamp, so would things like ui buttons for macros, counters, buff timers, durability trackers, drag to select healthbars, and something I'd really, really like to see, a true hybrid of EC and CC function, letting us mix and match features we like from the CC and EC freely, instead basically choosing one or the other. 

 I have enough experience with them to know why they've ruined pvp and the UO economy.

well, technically, the lack of enforcing the rules against them did... I'm sure there are features they have that I'm not familiar with, I do not use them regularly, if that's what you're getting at.

generally if I hear something from another player about a client/program, I'll test to verify (if it's something I don't already know is happening) and if it's something that might have an impact on other players I'd try to replicate it reliably and report it for fixing.

but suddenly (and nothing has even happened yet- that's the best part) everyone's coming out now, while the illegal clients are down It says a lot. it really does.  -reminds me of back in the day when the 'cheats' were so bad they made people using them noticeably worse at playing the game, went down for a day to a week or so after any 'mandatory patch'.   I hope they can reliable detect illegal clients, and start actually preventing logins.  or even banning players for using them.   I'd prefer the players be warned for it (even though I do believe 100% that they've known it was against the rules using them in the first place), but I've also been here quite some time.

-I'm not against higher res- and FPS (though it doesn't bother me personally, I play many games that need to be set to lower-res to look better).  I'm against almost everything else illegal clients offer, just so happens currently you don't get to choose one or the other.  the script portion of those clients take too much of the 'skill' out of pvp with many things able to be automated, and also able to perform tasks that legal programs cannot do, flood the game with bots even though some of the lesser 'programs' did so before O***n and S****th clients were around, just to lesser extents because they weren't quite as good with inferior macro recording/script systems, as well as their resources used.

  

I've used most of these clients (mostly) to replicate bugs/exploit that I've seen used by people i know have been using the clients for a long time. that people who used them for years wouldn't report most/any bug/exploit they could use against other players like pre-aos stun-punch & and a CC gen-chat crash, that wasn't possible using the official classic client or UOAssist+CC.

Victim_Of_Siege

Lord_Frodo said:

Victim_Of_Siege said:

Lord_Frodo said:

Kel said:

Lord_Frodo said:

@ Kel on the Graphics it has to be ALL CC Graphics, the worse are the monsters/animals/pets.  All CC Graphics need to be imported and just the CC Users would have no excuse not to switch over then it would be easy to tell the cheaters.

Absolutely! That's what I was trying to get at, but may not have been super clear. CC themed UI, tiles, walls, characters, mobs all of it. However, for those who DO like the EC look-and-feel they can use that as well within the same client.

We have been asking for that for YEARS  Graphic Switch EC / CC.  I do not care about the ZOOM, just disable it for CC but I do want the EC UI with the CC Graphics.

Agree 100%  But i have been using the EC so long now, I don't care about the graphics anymore. I play it purely for the ease of use, FPS and Macros.  

That is great but the graphic portion of the EC gives me headaches.  I use it in my house for sorting chests or placing a house but long term I can not plus I really hate the way they redrew most of the mobs.

It did to me as well in the beginning, but i set the FPS in settings to 120 and made a couple of other adjustments and it no longer does. Been good for years now, I was dead against using it before then, I was always complaining about the graphics but I wanted the ui and functiuonality of the EC. I just bit the bullet and uninstalled the CC and fiddled with the settings until it was good. I can play for hours and not get the slightest headache. Maybe, you can make some changes and fix it for you too. Oh, and @Petra_Fyde has said that the steps being out of sync cause issues for folks too, i don't know for sure on that as I never have the sound on anyway.

Lord_Nythrax

"I like bad graphics, I love changing my system resolution on account of one game and single digit framerates make me happy."

"Not me, I use the EC and after biting the bullet and fiddling with the settings the reported headaches and nausea don't even effect me!"

Yeah really making things sound great guys. Anyone who's not enthused about this software must just want to cheat.

DeadThing5

     I'm curious what the clients are enabling in this exploit/cheating space, and what scripting/cheating functionality they have that needs to be stripped. I bring this up because I think the clients themselves are devoid of cheat-level features, and I'm sure there's a common ground to be found feature wise. I'm not surprised to hear there's a handful of exploits that weren't possible in the official client, but that's fixable right? 

     Obviously I don't have any insight in to anyone else's mind, but I'm pretty sure the clients aren't even the problem in the cheating/exploit space. 

     As for making the EC "work"; yeah, tweaking setting and especially grabbing pinco's ui can make it tolerable, but that's not the point a lot of us are trying to make. The point is we should have better options. Maybe if the EC got any support whatsoever it could be crafted in to a decent client. Maybe there was a better way to spend the last 5 years than developing an shard, that while is a novel take on the UO status quo, only succeeds in making UO a poor version of other games out there that do everything NL is trying to do better. I want it to succeed, but I'm really unsure who it's supposed to be for. It seems to me that everything NL brings to the table is something that we play UO to avoid in the first place, but I digress.

     I'd like to see some work on the official clients before there's a war on (i believe) people mostly just trying to have a better experience playing UO than the team can deliver.