It includes cheating and automation (Terms of Service, AFK Play). I will defer to Daybreak. To be simple, they could copy Drunder’s policies. Leadership can make a determination.
Ironically, last night I was running around on a few tasks to kill X things. I'm not sure how much I missed it by, but someone sent me a messaging asking about a specific tradeskill mat drop and I did initially miss it. I sent him a tell when I did see, probably within 10 mins or so, but also had some weird chat lag at the time. Game actions were still fine. Anyway, I did run into them but they were mid camping out and either also didn't see my replies or they hadn't gotten to him yet. I felt bad because a few minutes later I got both of what he was asking for to drop. I'm hoping to see them online tonight so I can give them if he still needs them. It's been mentioned that I should set up audio alerts for incoming tells. I think it's about time I finally bite the bullet and look that up. I'm surprised it's not built into the game by default at this point, unless it is but requires a UI reset to enable or something.
You only need to use "tells you" to make an audio trigger. Check you logs. It should say something like... Vumad tells you, "What's wrong dude, you yellow?!" I believe they don't use tells because automation checks for that. Seems it is acceptable to have false positives in the war against AFK play.
UI that specifically works for that server gets over that issue. You can literally remove that UI element and set UI requirements for that server similar to what you see when you try to use an outdated custom UI in the game currently. When you try to load the broken UI, you get a msg in chat that is red saying that the UI you are trying to load is not supported and it loads to the default UI. If that can be done, restricting a certain UI that does not have a UI element for Kronos for a specific should be possible.
Yeah, I know, and it's wrong to do. If you don't use a /t, /gu, /g, /rs or my class channel, I am not going to see it. Any use of any other channel almost guarantees a false positive (for me) because I don't pay attention to any other channels. Doesn't matter if I am playing single or boxing. I turned on time stamps after I realized I was answer questions in general 10-20 minutes after they occurred.
I play with people who use text to talk for /gu and /g and don't visually read any channels. I know this because I linked a parse in the group and they asked me not to do it again because it read the entire parse number by number. They don't read any chat and certainly are not seeing or hearing say with all the NPC pet and other spam. The way they are doing AFK checks has way too much risk of false positives.
I made a video using a rogue to watch after petitioning an automation crew. The GM took the form of a local monster and went invulnerable, changed the mob name, size etc. and the automation player just kept moving/casting automatically, never reacting to his own personal GM event outside of the script. Then the characters started disappearing from the game one by one, and I never noticed that player online again. They don't just use say/tells. You cannot miss it if you are anywhere near your screen.
Thats good to hear, my experience was many years ago. I am glad they improved on what was before awful approach.
As a programmer, rule #1: Never trust the client (UI). Most hacks don't even use a UI and are just directly injecting network traffic either into an app or even directly calling the server and not even using the client. Server just needs to check "did this Krono operation come from banish flagged user?" Sorry buddy, not happening! Of course you'd also update the UI appropriately for UX reasons.
This is a good mechanism but if it continues to get used will be easy to work around by detecting an invulnerable / infinite health NPC and then bouncing. Good for protecting against false positives though.
And you can track network traffic, everything is logged these days, just need to parse for indicators which they would already have since, ya know, they created Kronos. Anyone initializing a Krono on said server gets banned. For the financials alone surrounding Kronos, they are uniquely track-able( That might be an assumption on my part, but creating an in game currency that isn't track-able seems like a pretty bad idea).
Details not relevant to this conversation, but the entire Krono system appears to be completely separately maintained from general player item inventory within the game. It's also a cross-game currency so it would be externally managed in that regard, anyway. There are noticeable delays in any Krono actions as compared to anything else in the game, seemingly pointing to additional isolation and security around the system. Beyond where it can be used in games, I'm sure due to legal reasons it needs heavy additional monitoring and logging to main regulatory compliances (country-specific regulations, taxes etc.)