New Dawn - 9Dragons Private Server

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Originally Posted by ynf3hrn33l It's great that you strive for more transparency, but what guarantee is there for the community that the public logs are the actual and the only GM logs being generated?

They will be real time logs, meaning you can check if they are real based on usage on explicit events(that our staff will organise). If logs appear immediately after you are 100% sure the operational tool was used, then they will appear the same way if one of the staff members uses it illegally.

Even if we were to remove logs, we couldn't do it in an instant, meaning people can still see what happened.

If you're not at ease with my words, I suggest googling "web scrappers" and use one on our website, basically you can continuously refresh our page and fetch new GM logs and make your own database with them, so that if we were to remove them, you can pin point the log that is missing.

Btw log ids are in an increasing order generated by the GM tool, so if any log was removed it is kinda noticeable.

We will make public also the player accounts that our staff uses, the trades that happened and their Item Mall points.

This is quite an effort that we're putting forth in order to assure that :
1) the time investment you make in our server is worth it
2) donators have no suspicion that others might get items that are not available via IM, thus scaring them off
3) asure longevity of our service and reduce the need for discount events, meaning the same item you bought one year ago from IM will likely have the same value now.

Can't wait for it

This is actually amazing. I wish I could see Eclipse's discord chat right now ��

I wish you all the best with this server. This small list got me excited and I know there's lots to come.
Nice one, see you all in March.

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Originally Posted by xtJamie Let me ask something to those questioning the validity of the logs - why would we falsify them? The truth is always out there and the fallout from the lies wouldn't be worth the gain from lying about them.

So you're betting on community's trust. There's nothing wrong with that. I was just wondering how do you plan (or if you plan to) "validate", if that's even possible in this context, those logs.

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Originally Posted by xtJamie We're working hard on this server, we're working hard on the content and keeping up public support - tarnishing that over the sake of what is not worth it to us in the slightest. This is more than any current private server (I believe) have done to show as much level of transparency as possible - how many servers out there are willing to provide as much proof as we are going to offer?

The initiative to go transparent is respectable, no other server, in my experience, has done it to this degree(or to any degree, to be frank).

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Originally Posted by xtJamie The difference with our team, we won't plaster ourselves with GM tags and play the game on off accounts. We'll provide full disclosure of logs that will be publicly available and we'll do so in a way that would be almost impossible to falsify without making it blatantly obvious.

Could you provide more details with regards to this way of publishing logs?

I'm not accusing anyone of anything here and I also have no reason to believe that your team would falsify the logs for whatever gain. I'm simply trying to understand how/if this is a solid way to provide transparency.

I don't think the question was unreasonable. From my perspective, at least superficially, it would be really easy to filter out unwanted prints from those logs, but really hard to prove that the logs were not tampered with.

I'm eager to play on New Dawn, it sounds promising so far.

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Originally Posted by bog18dy They will be real time logs, meaning you can check if they are real based on usage on explicit events(that our staff will organise). If logs appear immediately after you are 100% sure the operational tool was used, then they will appear the same way if one of the staff members uses it illegally. Even if we were to remove logs, we couldn't do it in an instant, meaning people can still see what happened. If you're not at ease with my words, I suggest googling "web scrappers" and use one on our website, basically you can continuously refresh our page and fetch new GM logs and make your own database with them, so that if we were to remove them, you can pin point the log that is missing. Btw log ids are in an increasing order generated by the GM tool, so if any log was removed it is kinda noticeable. We will make public also the player accounts that our staff uses, the trades that happened and their Item Mall points. This is quite an effort that we're putting forth in order to assure that : 1) the time investment you make in our server is worth it 2) donators have no suspicion that others might get items that are not available via IM, thus scaring them off 3) asure longevity of our service and reduce the need for discount events, meaning the same item you bought one year ago from IM will likely have the same value now.

Thanks for shining light on this.
I don't think anyone is going to go full detective gadget on this matter and backup your logs and then match theirs with yours lol.
My concern wasn't about meddling with the logs after they were published, but with an altered way of generating them. I'm not familiar with the game's or tools' source code, so I might be bullshitting here, but I don't see impossible the scenario in which someone wanted to filter out transactions where a certain character is involved.

Again, not accusing anyone of anything, just trying to understand.
Can't wait for the release :D

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Originally Posted by ynf3hrn33l So you're betting on community's trust. There's nothing wrong with that. I was just wondering how do you plan (or if you plan to) "validate", if that's even possible in this context, those logs. The initiative to go transparent is respectable, no other server, in my experience, has done it to this degree(or to any degree, to be frank). Could you provide more details with regards to this way of publishing logs? I'm not accusing anyone of anything here and I also have no reason to believe that your team would falsify the logs for whatever gain. I'm simply trying to understand how/if this is a solid way to provide transparency. I don't think the question was unreasonable. From my perspective, at least superficially, it would be really easy to filter out unwanted prints from those logs, but really hard to prove that the logs were not tampered with. I'm eager to play on New Dawn, it sounds promising so far. Thanks for shining light on this. I don't think anyone is going to go full detective gadget on this matter and backup your logs and then match theirs with yours lol. My concern wasn't about meddling with the logs after they were published, but with an altered way of generating them. I'm not familiar with the game's or tools' source code, so I might be bullshitting here, but I don't see impossible the scenario in which someone wanted to filter out transactions where a certain character is involved. Again, not accusing anyone of anything, just trying to understand. Can't wait for the release :D

Kinda hard to "filter out" logs, because, during pvp events, the rewards will be inserted into the inventory of the winner with the GM tool. This is the exact same way an item would be illegally given out by a staff member.

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Originally Posted by ynf3hrn33l So you're betting on community's trust. There's nothing wrong with that. I was just wondering how do you plan (or if you plan to) "validate", if that's even possible in this context, those logs. The initiative to go transparent is respectable, no other server, in my experience, has done it to this degree(or to any degree, to be frank). Could you provide more details with regards to this way of publishing logs? I'm not accusing anyone of anything here and I also have no reason to believe that your team would falsify the logs for whatever gain. I'm simply trying to understand how/if this is a solid way to provide transparency. I don't think the question was unreasonable. From my perspective, at least superficially, it would be really easy to filter out unwanted prints from those logs, but really hard to prove that the logs were not tampered with. I'm eager to play on New Dawn, it sounds promising so far. Thanks for shining light on this. I don't think anyone is going to go full detective gadget on this matter and backup your logs and then match theirs with yours lol. My concern wasn't about meddling with the logs after they were published, but with an altered way of generating them. I'm not familiar with the game's or tools' source code, so I might be bullshitting here, but I don't see impossible the scenario in which someone wanted to filter out transactions where a certain character is involved. Again, not accusing anyone of anything, just trying to understand. Can't wait for the release :D

I can understand your POV, and actually am grateful for that. You can't blindly trust anything in this world. It's not possible to get 100% of transparency. We can meddle with the code doing the logs, but - what's the point? You would be able to notice the "patterns" of logs that don't appear in the logs (like GM1 adding items). We will try to provide as many logs as possible.

If you have any idea how we can increase our transparency even more than that, feel free to either post here or PM me.

What are you going to do about cheaters? How are you gonna protect the client? How will you deal with scammers? How do you plan on keeping the community entertained (so that they won't leave your server after 3 days of grinding)?

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Originally Posted by adek1994 I can understand your POV, and actually am grateful for that. You can't blindly trust anything in this world. It's not possible to get 100% of transparency. We can meddle with the code doing the logs, but - what's the point? You would be able to notice the "patterns" of logs that don't appear in the logs (like GM1 adding items). We will try to provide as many logs as possible. If you have any idea how we can increase our transparency even more than that, feel free to either post here or PM me.

At the moment, I don't know how you can achieve more transparency. It seems to me that publishing logs is the only way. We'll see how this plays out.

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Originally Posted by annoyinglyUgly What are you going to do about cheaters? How are you gonna protect the client? How will you deal with scammers? How do you plan on keeping the community entertained (so that they won't leave your server after 3 days of grinding)?

As you know catching cheaters is an obvious 'cat and mouse' and whilst we'll certainly ban anyone caught cheating - we cannot entirely prevent them from rejoining the game (vpn circumvention for ip bans, hwid and mac address changing) would still allow someone to connect (if they know how)

So where would this leave us - we could restrict account access until admin approval but that is a painful process and without instant support, we would leave players in a lot of time waiting to join - not to mention someone could just lie about their information.

We've already got plenty of information on potential exploits and how we can go about preventing 'some' of them but as you probably know, there are more that will be undisclosed.

What we will do is keep a close eye on the community, pay attention to reports on players and investigate. You would be surprised the amount of information that could be pulled back to check in an investigate situation. I won't personally list out the exploits that are 'publicly' known because most of us are pretty aware of them.

We'll do our best to lock down the client without putting too many restrictions or causing complications for legitimately innocent players but again, it's a game of cat and mouse. Checksums do not work for security, RF tried that and it failed. Specific 'monitors' also failed pretty bad for many servers so we're just going to have to remain vigilante and keep an eye out.

In terms of the content - firstly we're not going to let you just throw yourself at cap level in a weeks time and then be forced to grind out repetitive item sets in order to stay relevant and we think our 'concept' alone will give players an incentive to stick around. We'll do our best to provide unique and well scripted custom content but as you personally know, there is some untapped potential left in the files but not enough for an entirely new game - that will come during 1.0

So in short? We'll monitor the game closely, we'll take reports seriously and investigate them accordingly, we'll do our best to secure the client and we'll do our absolute best to keep events that are entertaining, find a balance for both pve/pvp players and find ways to implement content that isn't the typical "Zeroburner server setup and botched server executables thrown in".

That work for you?

Just make another DLL again that disables GameGuard and pops-up edited window pretending it's their custom HackShield manipulating us no one can hack. It worked fine.

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Originally Posted by NokiaTegla Just make another DLL again that disables GameGuard and pops-up edited window pretending it's their custom HackShield manipulating us no one can hack. It worked fine.

Hey, that was actually a fix for windows 10, it was our best effort at that moment.

Now we'll take a totally different route.

As you can see Gameguard is totally useless, as we have proven on eclipse where we literally 1 shot mobs, teleported from 1 end to the map to another.

This time we'll try to protect SCR_BASE and VR_ENV even better.

We'll still likely use that DLL for the win10 patch, we'll see.

I'm glad this was pointed out as we have the opportunity to address this issue in comparison with other privates and even officials who lack security.

P.S. I'm glad to see you're hating us Zozo, I'm sure the community will give a great deal of importance to you, because you contributed a lot, keep it up !

I just wanna say I genuinely appreciate all the effort you're putting into this server and hope everything goes smoothly with your developement from now on. Best of luck guys. Love ya. May new dawn heal the wound rf has left on the players

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Originally Posted by xtJamie As you know catching cheaters is an obvious 'cat and mouse' and whilst we'll certainly ban anyone caught cheating - we cannot entirely prevent them from rejoining the game (vpn circumvention for ip bans, hwid and mac address changing) would still allow someone to connect (if they know how) So where would this leave us - we could restrict account access until admin approval but that is a painful process and without instant support, we would leave players in a lot of time waiting to join - not to mention someone could just lie about their information. We've already got plenty of information on potential exploits and how we can go about preventing 'some' of them but as you probably know, there are more that will be undisclosed. What we will do is keep a close eye on the community, pay attention to reports on players and investigate. You would be surprised the amount of information that could be pulled back to check in an investigate situation. I won't personally list out the exploits that are 'publicly' known because most of us are pretty aware of them. We'll do our best to lock down the client without putting too many restrictions or causing complications for legitimately innocent players but again, it's a game of cat and mouse. Checksums do not work for security, RF tried that and it failed. Specific 'monitors' also failed pretty bad for many servers so we're just going to have to remain vigilante and keep an eye out. In terms of the content - firstly we're not going to let you just throw yourself at cap level in a weeks time and then be forced to grind out repetitive item sets in order to stay relevant and we think our 'concept' alone will give players an incentive to stick around. We'll do our best to provide unique and well scripted custom content but as you personally know, there is some untapped potential left in the files but not enough for an entirely new game - that will come during 1.0 So in short? We'll monitor the game closely, we'll take reports seriously and investigate them accordingly, we'll do our best to secure the client and we'll do our absolute best to keep events that are entertaining, find a balance for both pve/pvp players and find ways to implement content that isn't the typical "Zeroburner server setup and botched server executables thrown in". That work for you?

Alrighty. We'll put that to the test. We'll see how good your client security really is.

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Originally Posted by annoyinglyUgly Alrighty. We'll put that to the test. We'll see how good your client security really is.

Instead of immediately banning anyone caught cheating, we're looking at introducing bug bounty hunting so providing the player goes down the correct route and finds a major exploit and makes us aware - that player will be rewarded.

This is still just an idea though.

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Originally Posted by madmerlin3009 I did say this before about 1 shot mobs and teleport. I never had time to hand out the new client, which include the security concepts in the following points stated below . The client has been on my pc for some months now. As for security, it was the client that offered the security to protect such files as vr_environment and scr_base. Lets not forget, Protecting ones visual effects in visualeffect.xes. Also the rendering methods on the .xrs files. This is what has been done to the new client i am releasing:- 1..Any file in the 9dragons install folder and its sub folders can now be encrypted using a .py script, which takes a list of files, with their subpaths from an input file and encrypts the data, which then is stored in another file. The ninedragons.exe will then know which files to decrypt before loading to memory. 2..The launcher no longer reads from ND1 folder from the server IP address, to check for client version which ofc data is allocated in the ndreg.xrg file.Ofc the ndreg.xrg file is encrypted as well. so even if you download and install the client, then overwrite the ndlauncher and ninedragon.exe it will fail to even read the server version number from the non existant folder. So good luck with all that :D

We're in the call with Bogdy and all we did was a simultaneous laugh.