id take ban and jail history only into consideration for a general behavior impression, not the fact that they were actually banned or jailed

its important for me to know who i am working with, and not just having them getting their job done, theres more to it, even the reasoning for their behavior that resulted in a jail and ban may be understandable

rarely i am just being nice training some scrubs knowing that they wreck havoc, but i also know that people can learn, if dealt with correctly

a lot of people who i see online that are basically cursing all the time are still in the middle of growing up so its all understandable that its a big kindergarden that just needs time and patience and a healthy slap in their face (or 10-100)

the most common thing that is in the way of healthy interaction are the major differences in opinions and the lack of insight  

Posted by Relic

That's a poor excuse when, as me and Thallen have both said in the response you quoted and my response right after, that there have been plenty of people much more qualified than most of the GPs now who have applied/offered to help. The team seems to be relatively capable of screening people before they hire them, otherwise there would never be any new staff/GPs, but they seem to be screening on objectively wrong criteria.

Also, like Thallen said, some of these people have been willing to go without any sort of recognition of administrative benefits/powers whatsoever other than what's required to get rid of hackers that continue to crop up and cause problems for hours on end, despite the possibility of hacking being a known issue to admins and a known flaw in the game engine (for the past 19 years since the game was first released on PC). See the problem here? You have people willing to do the GPs job for them, since most of them can't/won't, without being given any power, but there's some sort of obscure, seemingly bad screening process in the way of that.

It's not just about being qualified. As stated before, account history, behavior/image in the community and behavior on the forums have to be accounted for.

Even if they hired people to deal specifically with hackers, the problem won't go away. As you said yourself the problem of hacking has been a constant issue since the conception of Graal itself, so it can't be completely stopped. And as for the flaw in the game engine (which may or may not exist), a GP would have no way to gain access to that so really their best bet is just IP banning known hackers since that is the best anyone can really do.

Posted by Thallen

Yes, and my point is that if we're going through this rigorous process and still hiring GPs that either go full-corrupt mode (rare cases) or do a poor job and/or get fired, how is that any better than "taking a chance" hiring someone who can clearly do a better job but doesn't fit whatever the set requirements are? The main requirement should be that you're capable of doing a good job…

You make it seem as if it's some massive risk to hire a GP, like you can't monitor them and ensure that they're doing their job correctly or undo the things they've done in some small period of time. Soren was allowed to go 2 weeks sharing his account with a player and abusing his powers before finally someone paid attention to me complaining about it on the forums and had him fired.

It's difficult to determine whether or not someone can "clearly do a better job" just based off of what they say on an application. The people who handle the application process have no way of truly determining if an applicant won't go rogue, as people often put what is called fluff on their applications in order to get hired (and this isn't just a Graal thing, it happens in the real world for college and job applications too). Requirements and certain standards are required because higher ups need people who they think are reliable and don't have much account history. Does account history tell the full story of how a person truly behaviors in the game? No. But it is a good indication of it, and sometimes it's all the higher-ups have.

Giving someone access to RC and the ban tools is a big risk because you are giving the player a lot of power. Yes there are ways to monitor an admin's activity but as you said sometimes certain things slip by. The Soren situation was the peak of that and since then they have been much stricter on what a player does when on their staff account.  

I have expiernced a lot of problems in this game that lead me to ask for help from admins. To be honest i rarely get help from admins no matter what the situation/question was.
Except few admins which are: dread,jarace,owl and sometimes milo. For my opnion the rest of the admins are useless when it comes to asnwering graal related questions/fixing serious issues.
Remember All the things i'm going to say in this post are only my opinions.
It feels like milo is a busy admin who dont always reply to your pms even if it was important. But i do think she is a helpful admin comparing to the rest.
Owl is a great admin that never ever ignores your pm, infact his answers are useful.
Dread is also a great admin who is capable of making wise decisions, but he seems like he is not willing to spend some time if it comes to a situation that requires you to investigate a lot.
Jarace is my favorite admin, he is willing to spend a lot of time reading/writting pms+investigating.

But some situations cannot be fixed using pms in-game. And no i'm not talking about ban appeals. I'm not sure why we (players) never get a reply from toonslab after sending tickets. Which makes me wonder the reason for this? In one of the issues i had admins were un-able to fix an issue and asked me to contact toonslab. I jave sent one ticket that is well-detailed then waited few days. Then sent another one. After that, i have asked my friebds to send tickets for me too And non of them got a reply. (This was just an example, a lot of people told me that they never got a reply from toonslab.
I mean how are u going to fix a situation without contacting this player??

Few month ago one of my towering guilds got hacked twice. First time it got disbanded at +800 hours i have made everything possible tgat i could do trying to get the hours back but after a week owl replied to me with "i'm sorry i do not have such a power to guve hours back, if we have to give the hours back, we will have to do it to the rest" something like that.Second time at 200 hours but dread was able to get it back after few days of the incident.
This was just an example that i needed to use to show the effects that not replying to tickets could do.

I do agree that the gp team needs people that are expiernced in specific things such as towering or sparring.  

Posted by CM

It's not just about being qualified. As stated before, account history, behavior/image in the community and behavior on the forums have to be accounted for.

Even if they hired people to deal specifically with hackers, the problem won't go away. (1) As you said yourself the problem of hacking has been a constant issue since the conception of Graal itself, so it can't be completely stopped. And as for the flaw in the game engine (which may or may not exist) (2), a GP would have no way to gain access to that so really their best bet is just IP banning known hackers since that is the best anyone can really do.



It's difficult to determine whether or not someone can "clearly do a better job" just based off of what they say on an application. (3) The people who handle the application process have no way of truly determining if an applicant won't go rogue, as people often put what is called fluff on their applications in order to get hired (and this isn't just a Graal thing, it happens in the real world for college and job applications too). Requirements and certain standards are required because higher ups need people who they think are reliable and don't have much account history. Does account history tell the full story of how a person truly behaviors in the game? No. But it is a good indication of it, and sometimes it's all the higher-ups have.

Giving someone access to RC and the ban tools is a big risk because you are giving the player a lot of power. (4) Yes there are ways to monitor an admin's activity but as you said sometimes certain things slip by. The Soren situation was the peak of that and since then they have been much stricter on what a player does when on their staff account.

Bolded and marked the points I want to respond to with numbers:

1) No, but it will get significantly better. Do you really think there won't be a decrease in the number of hackers in spar arena if there's a dedicated sparrer (who can be trusted to be mature and objective of course) sitting in the room 10/12 hours a day like many dedicated sparrers do now? The GPs simply can't/won't respond quickly to hackers currently, so obviously players will be affected less by hackers if hackers are banned within a few minutes instead of a few hours. Seriously, there have been times where hackers have streaked for an hour or more. Myself and friends have had little games where we go into the ring and toy with the hacker because they're often so bad they can't win even with hacks. This shows that the GP response is so slow they have time to requeue in a queue with 5+ people and spar again MULTIPLE TIMES. Now apply this same concept to other forms of PvP (such as having dedicated, trusted, objective PKers keeping an eye on towers) and you have a game that has significantly less noticeable hacking.

2) Lol, don't kid yourself or anyone else, there's an objective, significant flaw in the engine that there's been a solution to for years: NEVER TRUST THE CLIENT. Movement, collision, sword attributes (the small freeze, etc) are all clientsided - meaning much of the game logic takes place on the client and the client is trusted to tell the server truthfully what happened (lol). HELL even the client who's being hit is trusted to tell the server whether they were actually hit. Why do you think there's so much hacking? It's because Graal is one of the few popular multiplayer games in existence where [certain script kiddy software which I removed the name of to prevent causing you issues] is considered a valid and incredibly easy approach to 'hacking'. That's a BIG problem. Granted, the game was made in 1998, but there's no excuse for the client/server engine not having been updated to fix or at least mitigate this years ago.

3) I agree with you totally on this point. However there's also an obvious point where you have to look at an application and say "this guy looks good but why does he spell every second word wrong" or "hmm, this guy claims to be a business student in university and this other guy we're considering is a 16 year old working at McDonalds part time to pay for his Pokemon cards" and that's the point where you ask them to elaborate. Often, if that's done, you can tell within 5 minutes or a couple simple questions, whether the person is full of **** or not. There's a reason employers conduct interviews and don't just hire people based on applications/resumes.

I'm not saying you have to interview every applicant or even all the ones you're considering, but take the ones that look really qualified but might be full of **** and PM them stating that you have read their application and had a few small questions. You'll be able to sort the garbage from the ones who are telling the truth relatively easily. Tossing out a qualified, well written application because the person might be using "fluff" is nonsensical.

4) That's such an obvious point you can't even use it as an argument. The fact is, despite screening, you guys have had objective issues in your hiring process and really haven't done much to prevent these problems. At the risk of sounding like educators in the US, as a worst case approach, you could implement and warn applicants about a no tolerance policy: If you get hired and screw around/break rules/break admin protocol on your staff account AT ALL, you will be fired and your player account banned. I don't think that's unreasonable. People, especially the young teenagers, that you hire should be held accountable and well aware of what will happen if they break the trust that you're placing in them by introducing them to the admin team. What I described is just one quick, shotgun solution to these issues that will allow you to take more calculated risks and build a stronger admin team while still keeping things relatively safe from abuse. There's many other much better solutions, which I've seen used on Graal when I was younger volunteering as an admin myself, and also when working real world jobs. Professionalism is a real thing. Your problem is not an entirely unsolved one. Do some research and suggest/implement some better screening/risk management for admins and potential hires.  

Clearly there's an issue when just about every active, non-staff player in the thread agrees? I just think the whole selection process has a lot of unnecessary barriers that are keeping helpful and qualified people out of a position, and then staff say "we work with what we've got" when the reality is that the process is apparently heavily skewed towards GPs who are "presentable" rather than ones who are experienced and effective.

I don't even know what that means anyway. Are some of these GPs presentable? We don't even know who they are… Is it their forum reputation that puts them ahead of others? Well, the majority of them don't post on the forums so their reputations are non-existent. How is that a plus?

Just my two cents.  

Posted by Relic

Bolded and marked the points I want to respond to with numbers:

1) No, but it will get significantly better. Do you really think there won't be a decrease in the number of hackers in spar arena if there's a dedicated sparrer (who can be trusted to be mature and objective of course) sitting in the room 10/12 hours a day like many dedicated sparrers do now? The GPs simply can't/won't respond quickly to hackers currently, so obviously players will be affected less by hackers if hackers are banned within a few minutes instead of a few hours. Seriously, there have been times where hackers have streaked for an hour or more. Myself and friends have had little games where we go into the ring and toy with the hacker because they're often so bad they can't win even with hacks. This shows that the GP response is so slow they have time to requeue in a queue with 5+ people and spar again MULTIPLE TIMES. Now apply this same concept to other forms of PvP (such as having dedicated, trusted, objective PKers keeping an eye on towers) and you have a game that has significantly less noticeable hacking.

Honestly, I don't think it will go down as much as you think. Maybe a little, but people who hack don't expect to get away with it. There are many ways to avoid IP bans, which is typically what these players like to do. If a hacker is reported and nothing happens, it doesn't mean the admin doesn't care or is incompetent, it just means that nobody is on. You may say "well if we have players dedicated to monitoring these rooms then this will be fixed!" which, while that is true, hiring players to be GPs that focus on more than just one aspect of the game would theoretically fix the problem as well.

Posted by Relic

2) Lol, don't kid yourself or anyone else, there's an objective, significant flaw in the engine that there's been a solution to for years: NEVER TRUST THE CLIENT. Movement, collision, sword attributes (the small freeze, etc) are all clientsided - meaning much of the game logic takes place on the client and the client is trusted to tell the server truthfully what happened (lol). HELL even the client who's being hit is trusted to tell the server whether they were actually hit. Why do you think there's so much hacking? It's because Graal is one of the few popular multiplayer games in existence where [certain script kiddy software which I removed the name of to prevent causing you issues] is considered a valid and incredibly easy approach to 'hacking'. That's a BIG problem. Granted, the game was made in 1998, but there's no excuse for the client/server engine not having been updated to fix or at least mitigate this years ago.

Okay, perhaps you're right. But again, there's nothing a GP can do about this

Posted by Relic

3) I agree with you totally on this point. However there's also an obvious point where you have to look at an application and say "this guy looks good but why does he spell every second word wrong" or "hmm, this guy claims to be a business student in university and this other guy we're considering is a 16 year old working at McDonalds part time to pay for his Pokemon cards" and that's the point where you ask them to elaborate. Often, if that's done, you can tell within 5 minutes or a couple simple questions, whether the person is full of **** or not. There's a reason employers conduct interviews and don't just hire people based on applications/resumes.

I'm not saying you have to interview every applicant or even all the ones you're considering, but take the ones that look really qualified but might be full of **** and PM them stating that you have read their application and had a few small questions. You'll be able to sort the garbage from the ones who are telling the truth relatively easily. Tossing out a qualified, well written application because the person might be using "fluff" is nonsensical.

The higher ups always speak with the applicant first before giving them any sort of access to RC.

Posted by Relic

4) That's such an obvious point you can't even use it as an argument. The fact is, despite screening, you guys have had objective issues in your hiring process and really haven't done much to prevent these problems. At the risk of sounding like educators in the US, as a worst case approach, you could implement and warn applicants about a no tolerance policy: If you get hired and screw around/break rules/break admin protocol on your staff account AT ALL, you will be fired and your player account banned. I don't think that's unreasonable. People, especially the young teenagers, that you hire should be held accountable and well aware of what will happen if they break the trust that you're placing in them by introducing them to the admin team. What I described is just one quick, shotgun solution to these issues that will allow you to take more calculated risks and build a stronger admin team while still keeping things relatively safe from abuse. There's many other much better solutions, which I've seen used on Graal when I was younger volunteering as an admin myself, and also when working real world jobs. Professionalism is a real thing. Your problem is not an entirely unsolved one. Do some research and suggest/implement some better screening/risk management for admins and potential hires.

This is made aware to every GP during the training process. Strict enforcement of the rules is constantly going on, which is why the higher ups are constantly checking newer GPs' account activity and things like that.  

Posted by CM

Honestly, I don't think it will go down as much as you think. Maybe a little, but people who hack don't expect to get away with it. There are many ways to avoid IP bans, which is typically what these players like to do. If a hacker is reported and nothing happens, it doesn't mean the admin doesn't care or is incompetent, it just means that nobody is on. You may say "well if we have players dedicated to monitoring these rooms then this will be fixed!" which, while that is true, hiring players to be GPs that focus on more than just one aspect of the game would theoretically fix the problem as well.

Most of the hackers I see are people, who almost certainly have no knowledge, who downloaded [aforementioned software] and looked up a tutorial on how to do basic memory editing and 'game hacking'. If anyone who knew what they were doing cared to look, there would likely be a lot more significant exploits than what you can do with [the software]. This was proven by somebody who I won't name fairly recently who ended up permabanned over it if I was told right. I've only seen a small handful of hackers take the time to change IP through one of a million different methods and come back over and over because most can't or don't care enough to actually do it.

You're touching on the exact solution to the problem that I stated. Hire trustworthy people (with or without significant rights) who spend most of their time in PvP heavy areas. Hiring people who hang out in front of burger refuge all day isn't going to fix rampant hacking problems in the arena/towers so do something that will. It sounds like both of us agree on what you guys should be doing.

Posted by CM

Okay, perhaps you're right. But again, there's nothing a GP can do about this

No, but it raises an important point. One that it seems much of the staff team besides fp4 and Dusty haven't realized. Yes there's engine limitations because the engine hasn't been updated since god knows when. I can't recall a recent situation where fp4 and Dusty haven't managed to do SOMETHING to mitigate a problem despite this. And arguably, PR related issues should be easier to solve than code related issues because you're working with people who you have the rights and tools to deal with, not with a restricted API where in most cases something is either simply possible or it isn't. You guys know there's a hole, so you can take measures to plug the hole. If your ship is sinking you don't say "we can't do anything about this because the architect put the hole there", you plug it and bail out the water.

Posted by CM

The higher ups always speak with the applicant first before giving them any sort of access to RC.

Posted by CM

This is made aware to every GP during the training process. Strict enforcement of the rules is constantly going on, which is why the higher ups are constantly checking newer GPs' account activity and things like that.

Well that's good, but these two points now raise a very big concern: if you're taking these approaches, then why are unqualified, abusive admins still slipping through in such large numbers? I agree you'll never catch them all, or things will happen because someone had a bad day and overreacted, or whatever. But there's been a constant, on-going discussion about these problems that most players agree with for how many years now?  

Posted by Relic

Most of the hackers I see are people, who almost certainly have no knowledge, who downloaded [aforementioned software] and looked up a tutorial on how to do basic memory editing and 'game hacking'. If anyone who knew what they were doing cared to look, there would likely be a lot more significant exploits than what you can do with [the software]. This was proven by somebody who I won't name fairly recently who ended up permabanned over it if I was told right. I've only seen a small handful of hackers take the time to change IP through one of a million different methods and come back over and over because most can't or don't care enough to actually do it.

Posted by Relic

You're touching on the exact solution to the problem that I stated. Hire trustworthy people (with or without significant rights) who spend most of their time in PvP heavy areas. Hiring people who hang out in front of burger refuge all day isn't going to fix rampant hacking problems in the arena/towers so do something that will. It sounds like both of us agree on what you guys should be doing.

I don't mean to offend anyone, but it doesn't take a master chef to know when something is burnt. In other words, hiring people to stand around in the spar arena all day and ban/warn like, two or three people every couple hours or so isn't a good usage of their time because honestly, it is easy to tell when someone is hacking. They may as well be actual GPs. A GP could do the same thing while making dozens of other bans/warns and respond to all of the other reports that are happening. And then at that point, it circles back to if they are qualified or not.

The problem would be fixed if there were more qualified GPs, because that means more GPs can be online at certain times of the day, which means reports will be answered faster. Situations where a hacking is hacking for over an hour or so are unfortunate cases, but the only reasons nothing happened is because, more than likely, a GP wasn't online to deal with it.

Posted by Relic

No, but it raises an important point. One that it seems much of the staff team besides fp4 and Dusty haven't realized. Yes there's engine limitations because the engine hasn't been updated since god knows when. I can't recall a recent situation where fp4 and Dusty haven't managed to do SOMETHING to mitigate a problem despite this. And arguably, PR related issues should be easier to solve than code related issues because you're working with people who you have the rights and tools to deal with, not with a restricted API where in most cases something is either simply possible or it isn't.

This is something to discuss with Dusty or another developer and even though you won't be telling them something they don't already know.

Posted by Relic

Well that's good, but these two points now raise a very big concern: if you're taking these approaches, then why are unqualified, abusive admins still slipping through in such large numbers? I agree you'll never catch them all, or things will happen because someone had a bad day and overreacted, or whatever. But there's been a constant, on-going discussion about these problems that most players agree with for how many years now?

Again, we cannot look into a person's brain and see their true intentions. People lie, people exaggerate, and people will say things to get hired. There is no possible way to tell if somebody will go rogue in the future.

As for "corrupt admins", I can't really think of anyone who has abused their powers in the past couple of years (except Soren but that was almost three years ago I think).  

"People who will ban speed hackers won't reduce the number of speed hackers on iClassic"

http://p.fod4.com/p/media/5c597eb60b/uF9MjJo3QIaijySXC4iL_Confused%20Christian%20Bale.gif (Unsupported image host)

Nobody is saying the sole purpose of experienced players as GP is to do NOTHING but sit around the spar arena all day, it's just nice that they'll be around there as well to patrol a very non-patrolled area of the game lately.  

dam professionalism is my trigger  

Posted by CM

I don't mean to offend anyone, but it doesn't take a master chef to know when something is burnt. In other words, hiring people to stand around in the spar arena all day and ban/warn like, two or three people every couple hours or so isn't a good usage of their time because honestly, it is easy to tell when someone is hacking. They may as well be actual GPs. A GP could do the same thing while making dozens of other bans/warns and respond to all of the other reports that are happening. And then at that point, it circles back to if they are qualified or not.

The problem would be fixed if there were more qualified GPs, because that means more GPs can be online at certain times of the day, which means reports will be answered faster. Situations where a hacking is hacking for over an hour or so are unfortunate cases, but the only reasons nothing happened is because, more than likely, a GP wasn't online to deal with it.

Well then hire them as GPs. It's already been stated that there've been many responsible, qualified, mature people in the sparring community who were all ignored, except Fulgore.

edit: Also David's point is correct, require the current GPs to spend a few minutes here and there in the arena just patrolling, rather than responding to a report.

Posted by CM

This is something to discuss with Dusty or another developer and even though you won't be telling them something they don't already know.

PR related issues aren't something to discuss with Dusty, fp4 or another developer. PR related issues are partially the responsibility of Xor but moreso the responsibility of the admins assigned to PR tasks, in this case the GP team. I only used the comment about fp4 and Dusty and the code to give you a parallel example to how somebody can still work and make positive change within a restrictive environment.

Posted by CM

Again, we cannot look into a person's brain and see their true intentions. People lie, people exaggerate, and people will say things to get hired. There is no possible way to tell if somebody will go rogue in the future.

As for "corrupt admins", I can't really think of anyone who has abused their powers in the past couple of years (except Soren but that was almost three years ago I think).

I'm still agreeing with this point as I said last time, but my point is and has been that there's methods to mitigating/preventing these exact problems, some of which you're already employing. If there's still problems maybe you need to change the way you employ them or try some different approaches.  

Posted by CM

As for "corrupt admins", I can't really think of anyone who has abused their powers in the past couple of years (except Soren but that was almost three years ago I think).

iClassic stopped being transparent with who's currently staff, for some reason, so it's anyone's guess when someone is hired or fired and for what. I don't see why that was ever removed from the Information Kiosk.

Soren was during when MDR towered, which was June of 2015, so not even two years ago. He's actually been unbanned for months too (if not over a year?), which is very confusing. If staff don't consider someone abusing their powers and sharing their staff account for weeks as grounds for a permanent ban, I'm not sure what it is.  

Lol @ the people ITT claiming there's some sort of super high standard for hiring GPs. I got hired as a stupid 15 year-old noob with less than 2k hours of play time simply because I had never been banned and managed to BS my entire application very effectively.

I wouldn't have hired me.  

Posted by Relic

Well then hire them as GPs. It's already been stated that there've been many responsible, qualified, mature people in the sparring community who were all ignored, except Fulgore.

edit: Also David's point is correct, require the current GPs to spend a few minutes here and there in the arena just patrolling, rather than responding to a report.

Again, it goes back to the question of "Are the qualified? Do they have account history? What is there "image" like in the community? Do they have a forum presence?" You can't hire someone just because they would "make good GPs in theory".

While there are times where GPs can patrol areas, usually there's always a bunch of reports coming in that there isn't much time, so usually they won't visit the spar arena unless there is a report there.

PR related issues aren't something to discuss with Dusty, fp4 or another developer. PR related issues are partially the responsibility of Xor but moreso the responsibility of the admins assigned to PR tasks, in this case the GP team. I only used the comment about fp4 and Dusty and the code to give you a parallel example to how somebody can still work and make positive change within a restrictive environment.

Once again, GPs don't have any sort of involvement with the game engine or how it can be fixed. Since there is no point in talking about that I'll stop talking about this topic since the only people who have any sort of control over that are the developers themselves.

I'm still agreeing with this point as I said last time, but my point is and has been that there's methods to mitigating/preventing these exact problems, some of which you're already employing. If there's still problems maybe you need to change the way you employ them or try some different approaches.

No system is perfect. They will all have flaws. If you have a suggestion for how the system can be improved I'm sure the GPs would like to hear it.

Posted by David

"People who will ban speed hackers won't reduce the number of speed hackers on iClassic"

As ridiculous as it sounds, it's true. Yes maybe a few here and there will stop, but a majority of these hackers know what they are doing, and thus know how to get around these bans. It's impossible to stop them all.

Posted by Meteor

Lol @ the people ITT claiming there's some sort of super high standard for hiring GPs. I got hired as a stupid 15 year-old noob with less than 2k hours of play time simply because I had never been banned and managed to BS my entire application very effectively.

I wouldn't have hired me.

A prime example of how far BSing an application will get you. Yes he got hired, but look where he is now. :x  

CM... it is ridiculous as it sounds, though. What is your answer to stop them? Stop banning them? Let them spar in the streak room to 4,000 spars because "banning them won't stop them from just doing it again anyways"? What are you saying exactly? That banning hackers isn't an effective way to deal with them? Then what is? Shutting down iClassic?

It's extremely easy to spectate spar arenas, towers, pyrat bay (and more) then continually ban people who are hacking. If they change their IP then they usually come on within the next 10 minutes or so. For an experienced player like Kosiris (for example) spotting that kind of thing is extremely easy and if he is constantly active in those areas (which he is), then it's even easier!