Regarding the impact of the crashcode put into ConfigLib and the needed clarification and explanation of the code for layman understanding

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, greed23 said:

I understand that's not what it actually means, but the sentiment when people say he "obfuscated his code" is that he did something to make it really hard to find, far harder than it should be, and omitted it from public git

this is accurate

55 minutes ago, Banch said:

As someone who doesn't play on servers, this incident is the first I'm ever hearing of the cheat client this code was apparently in there to stop. It feels weird and unnecessary that I've had this "feature" in my singleplayer worlds the whole time...

An understandable position to have!

29 minutes ago, A_British_Lass said:

insane that he's not been banned from the mod db yet 

 

From what I've heard because so many mods rely on his (PMLib, ConfigLib to name the biggest two), banning him would effectively cripple the modding community. I'm sure Anego has something planned for him, but until something official is released, we can only speculate which is useless in this thread and in line with what got others sent to vacation island.

4 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

I think while the actions Maltiez took were morally understandable, in that they were attacking cheaters, the way they went about it was absolutely reprehensible, and a major breach in trust. It would be one thing if they were just a modder. People could simply make the choice to stop using their mods or not. However, the fact they are now an official developer at Anego, and this information was kept hidden, does damage the trust in the studio as a whole.

It'd debatable whether the responsibility of action fell in Maltiez's hands. If it did not, then his actions fell short of morally upright because he took matters into his own hands. I do not care for cheaters. They have no place in multiplayer games. Something must be done, but it must be done right and through the proper channels. Otherwise all we have is anarchy in the name of the greater good.

7 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

This is where my issue lies. Moderators chose to try and cover up the issue, instead of simply clear the air with facts. The only post I have seen from a moderator, or dev themselves, was Tyron saying he wasn't going to allow inflammatory titles, before locking and hiding posts. Which simply does not look good under any circumstances. It comes across as sweeping the issue under the rug, denying the problem.
If this was handled better by the mods and devs here, I don't think it would have been blown out of proportion quite as much.

As for Maltiez. I'm not sure. I don't think they would be so bold as to do something like this in an official update, but I don't feel as comfortable having them on the team now...

You're missing a LOT of context from the VS discord then. I won't get into all the details of it because I feel @icesharkk has done a good enough job summarizing it here. Plus we still don't know all the details, just what ShadowFox could tell us in her brief QA session on the Discord. However, the facts remain that damage was being done against the names of Maltiez and Anego by people who weren't in a position to do said damage. Any damage done to Maltiez should be done by Anego. Anego doesn't bear the blame for this because they simple were not given all the information until it was too late. Given how rabid things became, I think shutting down the discourse before it turned into a full-blown doxxing witchhunt was the right call.

As for Maltiez, he only ever was officially an advisor to the devs and only for the combat portion of the 1.23 update. I don't think he had access to the code. ShadowFox has already assured us that any code he does submit will go through rigorous review before it is allowed to be part of the game.

[-Glue-]

3 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

You're missing a LOT of context from the VS discord then. I won't get into all the details of it because I feel @icesharkk has done a good enough job summarizing it here. Plus we still don't know all the details, just what ShadowFox could tell us in her brief QA session on the Discord. However, the facts remain that damage was being done against the names of Maltiez and Anego by people who weren't in a position to do said damage. Any damage done to Maltiez should be done by Anego. Anego doesn't bear the blame for this because they simple were not given all the information until it was too late. Given how rabid things became, I think shutting down the discourse before it turned into a full-blown doxxing witchhunt was the right call.

As for Maltiez, he only ever was officially an advisor to the devs and only for the combat portion of the 1.23 update. I don't think he had access to the code. ShadowFox has already assured us that any code he does submit will go through rigorous review before it is allowed to be part of the game.

This is exactly why I think the first thing that should have been done was an official post about the issue. There is so much misinformation and bias being flung around, its hard to know exactly what is happening. All I do know, is hiding forum posts about the topic was the WORST thing that they could have done here. The intention of the action does not matter here. What matters is the communities perception of said action. In this case, it was perceived as hiding information and minimizing concern to save face. Because in most cases, thats how companies would handle something like this.
I'm not saying that IS what's happening, but its how people will see it under those actions. They need to appeal to the emotions that people are feeling. Trying to simply put out the flame will only be seen as an attack.

[Paruza]

It's a really rough situation for VS honestly.

It's absolutely not acceptable to be posting binaries on the moddb that do not reflect the published source. It's not acceptable to post things on moddb that take actions that are hard for users to understand or have nothing to do with the mods stated purpose. And, of course, it's not acceptable to knowingly post malicious content on moddb. All of this put together is absolutely grounds for an immediate lifetime ban.

I am no expert but some of this may cross into overtly illegal territory in some areas:

The United Kingdom: Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA)
https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/computer-misuse-act#:~:text=Section 3%3A Unauthorised Acts with intent to,will do one of the things set

The United States: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:18 section:1030 edition:prelim)#:~:text=(5)(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a,damage without authorization%2C to a protected computer%3B

The secret part of this is important. People thought they were downloading a ConfigLib, not an "anti-cheat". Practically speaking, is someone going to come after him for damages for any of this? No, this is small potatoes, but it is almost certainly illegal in many places.

This sort of thing has happened before in a lot of various ways, for various reasons. There was a case recently where intentionally buggy (effectively malicious in this context) code was submitted to the Linux kernel by some security researchers at the University of MN ostensibly to test the submission process, the whole school was banned from further contributions and an independent audit of everything they ever submitted to the kernel had to be conducted. Because when trust is broken... it's broken right? You don't know this is the only malicious thing he's ever done, he's demonstrated he's willing to behave in this way and now some people have to go over all his stuff with a very skeptical eye. There have been several cases of package maintainers taking similar actions in Linux repos, all banned. There have been various gaming modding authors doing various similar things, almost universally banned. There was a JS library author that published malicious code that destroyed data on computers that had geoip data pointing at Russia shortly after the war in Ukraine started. Totally understand that one honestly, but geoip isn't perfect and you bet people around the world forked that immediately.

The question of if you agree with any of these or not is far less relevant than the question of ongoing supply chain trust. Is Maltiez just an important special little snowflake that gets to violate the TOS while others don't? Will this behavior if left unpunished cause other potential "do-gooders" to do some good on your computer as well?

It's not *what* he did, it's that he did it in secret.

What makes this especially difficult is that it seems that some members of the VS team knew about it and did nothing. I don't care if he didn't violate *your* trust, it's *my* computer. 

Edited September 3 by Paruza

[Nossin]

Maltiez distributed a malware through VS's mod database to thousands of users with malicious intent to target a specific group with little concern for any victims caught in the crossfire.

Just because the malware itself was tame, does not downplay the huge liability issues this created for VS

If VS cannot follow their own policies and terms of service, then we deserve the shitstorm that comes after.

[321BoltsOfLightning]

I'm a little confused as to why some people are reacting as strongly as they are. Yes it wasn't something that should've been done, but it's not like it was harming people's computers. It's also already been removed as of quite a while ago. No real harm done, imo. I worry that people are running with misinformation and/or letting their emotions be overly played on by others. 

Thanks for the compilation of information. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

35 minutes ago, 321BoltsOfLightning said:

I'm a little confused as to why some people are reacting as strongly as they are. Yes it wasn't something that should've been done, but it's not like it was harming people's computers. It's also already been removed as of quite a while ago. No real harm done, imo. I worry that people are running with misinformation and/or letting their emotions be overly played on by others. 

Thanks for the compilation of information. 

As a software dev myself I can answer this.

First it's about trust. Maltiez is on the VS team, hired by Anego, to advise them on the combat update. When a company hires an individual and then the individual does something bone-headed while on the payroll, that person, being an extension of the company, actively harms that company by doing so. Maltiez lied by not communicating clearly what his code was doing, broke the ModDB TOS, and actively harmed people's gameplay by coding his widely-downloaded core library mods to have anti-cheat code in them that was falsely flagging mods that weren't being used for cheating. Maltiez broke that line of trust by his actions and while he is still employed by Anego, he is harming the line of trust that we have in the company to produce a good video game and deliver on their promises. If we cannot trust the employees, we cannot trust the company.

Second it's about the legality of what he did. Had he gotten approval from Anego via the proper channels instead of misconstruing what his code did either accidentally or deliberately and thus misleading the game devs about what it did, then his malware could be considered a feature. Many game companies have hidden malware in their code that breaks the game if you pirate it. It's very effective and hard to detect because the game still allows you to play somewhat but your experience will be harmed until you play a legit copy of the game. That said, Maltiez didn't get approval to do this. His code did not affect only the users of the cheat mod, it affected innocent bystanders. Two mod authors independently came to him because their legitimately obfuscated code was tripping his detection and breaking their mods. He whitelisted them and left the detector running for everyone else. At that point it stopped being a feature that misfired and became code he knew was hitting the wrong people and shipped anyway. That is not allowed and breaks a few laws concerning malware in different areas of the globe.

Third his attitude around the whole thing was lacking. He acted as if he had the right to make the decision to combat the cheat mod himself. His anti-cheat was targeted, and poorly at that, against a single known cheat mod. When eventually caught he was flippant, and even blamed the person who caught him out for ruining his work. He dismissed accusations with "Oh well, it worked so I'm happy." as if that solved the problem of the code existing in the first place and then when pressed, he relented and removed the code or so he claimed. He only removed it from a few editions that contained it, not all of them. ModDB moderators had to go through his released and pull many versions themselves. 

So not only did he lie to the VS team, he lied to us, broke laws, and acted like we were the problem, not him.

That is not the kind of dev you want on your team.

Edited September 3 by Teh Pizza Lady
rewording a few things to be precise in what I mean

[Trace]

Just got word of all this, and decided to uninstall VS.  If this dev team is going to circle the wagons over this extremely shady behavior, well, it's been fun but my free time is short and my backlog of games is long.  I'll seek my entertainment elsewhere from more reputable sources.

[Paruza]

"Many game companies have hidden malware in their code that breaks the game if you pirate it."
Depends what you mean specifically by "hidden". Games that have invasive anticheat definitely are very clear about what general capabilities it has, and you are agreeing to that when you install the game, accept the ToS, etc. The intent is not at all hidden. One could debate about the details, and there's plenty to be said about how problematic kernel level anti-cheat is, but those are different topics.

"Yes it wasn't something that should've been done, but it's not like it was harming people's computers."
He did significant actual harm here. The core issue is one of trust. He abused his standing in the community to install malicious software without disclosing that functionality. It's harmed VS's reputation, this is going to turn people away from the game, it's going to create a press shitstorm. He demonstrated his willingness to behave in this way, so you can't trust anything he claims about the rest of his code. So now people are going to have to comb through all of this and verify if he is in fact telling the truth now. The amount of time he's ultimately costing people picking up the pieces from this is going to be huge.

Aside from that, the people affected would definitely disproportionately not even be the intended targets. A tiny percentage of people play VS play on public servers. The VAST majority play either solo, or on private servers with some few friends. That's not an environment where hacking is a relevant point of discussion. I don't know the details on what circumstances would cause crashes and D/C's however I can say I've run a private server myself for my own use and used xray mods to learn how prospecting works and various other things. Nothing wrong with that, do you think I would want to be dealing with that bs? Do you think the developer that ultimately had to dig into his code to fix the problem it was causing wanted to be spending his time on that?

I could go on. They really need to make an example of him, I don't care what mods he made, we can move on without him.

Edited September 3 by Paruza

[Dilan Rona]

I'm going to continue playing Vintage Story. I still trust the devs, and will wait for proper feedback. As far as Maltiez and his mods, I removed them from my modlist, and will not be installing them again. Mods that rely on config lib and imgui unfortunately had to be removed as well, due to their dependency on config lib and imgui.

 

[Compressed12Times]

58 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

First it's about trust. Maltiez is on the VS team, hired by Anego, to advise them on the combat update. When a company hires an individual and then the individual does something bone-headed while on the payroll, that person, being an extension of the company, actively harms that company by doing so. Maltiez lied by not communicating clearly what his code was doing, broke the ModDB TOS, and actively harmed people's gameplay by coding his widely-downloaded core library mods to have anti-cheat code in them that was falsely flagging mods that weren't being used for cheating. Maltiez broke that line of trust by his actions and while he is still employed by Anego, he is harming the line of trust that we have in the company to produce a good video game and deliver on their promises. If we cannot trust the employees, we cannot trust the company.

Second it's about the legality of what he did. Had he gotten approval from Anego via the proper channels instead of misconstruing what his code did either accidentally or deliberately and thus misleading the game devs about what it did, then his malware could be considered a feature. Many game companies have hidden malware in their code that breaks the game if you pirate it. It's very effective and hard to detect because the game still allows you to play somewhat but your experience will be harmed until you play a legit copy of the game. That said, Maltiez didn't get approval to do this. His code did not affect only the users of the cheat mod, it affected innocent bystanders. Two mod authors independently came to him because their legitimately obfuscated code was tripping his detection and breaking their mods. He whitelisted them and left the detector running for everyone else. At that point it stopped being a feature that misfired and became code he knew was hitting the wrong people and shipped anyway. That is not allowed and breaks a few laws concerning malware in different areas of the globe.

Third his attitude around the whole thing was lacking. He acted as if he had the right to make the decision to combat the cheat mod himself. His anti-cheat was targeted, and poorly at that, against a single known cheat mod. When eventually caught he was flippant, and even blamed the person who caught him out for ruining his work. He dismissed accusations with "Oh well, it worked so I'm happy." as if that solved the problem of the code existing in the first place and then when pressed, he relented and removed the code or so he claimed. He only removed it from a few editions that contained it, not all of them. ModDB moderators had to go through his released and pull many versions themselves. 

So not only did he lie to the VS team, he lied to us, broke laws, and acted like we were the problem, not him.

That is not the kind of dev you want on your team.

My exact feelings about this whole shmuck, you couldn't encapsulate it better.

There definitively need to be more repercussions other than pulling some releases of configlib though.

[Elias Ainsworth]

not touching the game nor suggesting it to others until this loser is removed from the company, i expect a video to be posted on the VS YT channel discussing what happened and a fully transparent detail on what happened with him after he was removed, the team needs to do their job and be open with the community who was affected by this

[Elias Ainsworth]

44 minutes ago, Dilan Rona said:

I'm going to continue playing Vintage Story. I still trust the devs, and will wait for proper feedback. As far as Maltiez and his mods, I removed them from my modlist, and will not be installing them again. Mods that rely on config lib and imgui unfortunately had to be removed as well, due to their dependency on config lib and imgui.

 

thats an annoying part, so many ppl trusted this losers mods that they built theirs off of it and i feel so bad for them bc they are gonna have to go back through and re-code them, bc nobody is going to use this losers mods anymore 

[lizardsprint]

56 minutes ago, Trace said:

Just got word of all this, and decided to uninstall VS.  If this dev team is going to circle the wagons over this extremely shady behavior, well, it's been fun but my free time is short and my backlog of games is long.  I'll seek my entertainment elsewhere from more reputable sources.

Same. I've bought so many copies of the game for people, too, which is sad. I ran a server for all those friends, but have decided to shut it down tonight after learning of this, will warn all of them and others, and uninstall the game myself.

Sure, in terms of malware, what's currently known is rather tame in the grand scheme of things, compared to actual malware that scans for personal documents, cryptocurrency wallet keys, etc., but what else is there that we can't see, especially in builds of VS itself given he works at the company?
Their downplaying, odd choice of wording ("we trust all his other code does exactly what he says it does" especially after already knowing about the malicious code), and backpedaling/contradictions is all very shady, and I just don't want to deal with that broken trust or have their code running on my systems. I have plenty of other games from much more professional developers in my library.

[Vratislav]

As I have written in next thread, I am waiting for solid official response oriented particularly on the future approach to mods and code review. 

Until then, just some comment on forums moderation and approach to community. I have some experience with such situations from the other side, from a NGO with team about 20 people, that is, I assume similar size as the studio. Guilty or not, to react to such public backlash properly is not easy if you are not trained for it and if you have not prepared procedures for this beforehands. Even experienced moderators and Tyron himeslf may make mistakes if there is not clear guidance. That's why I am not angry much, as what I see from the studio's people reactions, there is no bad intent, they are just desperately trying to keep situation under control, when missing proper tools or guidance. This is also not against community, do not take it like way to fool you people. Good damage control approach must be set up with the fanbase and its trust in mind, otherwise it is not good.

Rules of communication in crisis are in fact, quite simple: There must be clear, what exactly to communicate. The main message must be "we are making steps that we announce as soon as they will be prepared or implemented." . All channels must communicate the same message or be silent until the message is specified. There must be somebody, who is in charge on communication, who coordinates all communication, formulates answers for the most serious concerns, and prepares factual reactions to mininfomration - and who is ready to do it full time in such situation, so the role cannot be joined, e.g. with team leader, who has own problems. If you have no such structure prepared before the crisis hits... God help you.

And this is the reason I cannot be angry much for clumsy way of handling the forums now. Just pity that the collateral damage is getting larger.

[Angius]

Since this seems to be the closest thing to a megathread, lemme crosspost my mod provenance suggestion. tl;dr: there are ways to guarantee that the mod files uploaded to the moddb have been built from the exact specific code in a public repository.

One of the reasons the whole ConfigLib conundrum feels so malicious, is that the "anticheat" code did not exist in the public repository. This time it was something somewhat benign, yes, but what's stopping someone from uploading a zipbomb? Some sort of provenance system is, IMHO, necessary.

[wutamidoing]

Just ban them and their mods from the mod website and fire them. No point in tainting your game over someone like them. 

[VANTABlack2000]

2 hours ago, Vratislav said:

As I have written in next thread, I am waiting for solid official response oriented particularly on the future approach to mods and code review. 

Until then, just some comment on forums moderation and approach to community. I have some experience with such situations from the other side, from a NGO with team about 20 people, that is, I assume similar size as the studio. Guilty or not, to react to such public backlash properly is not easy if you are not trained for it and if you have not prepared procedures for this beforehands. Even experienced moderators and Tyron himeslf may make mistakes if there is not clear guidance. That's why I am not angry much, as what I see from the studio's people reactions, there is no bad intent, they are just desperately trying to keep situation under control, when missing proper tools or guidance. This is also not against community, do not take it like way to fool you people. Good damage control approach must be set up with the fanbase and its trust in mind, otherwise it is not good.

Rules of communication in crisis are in fact, quite simple: There must be clear, what exactly to communicate. The main message must be "we are making steps that we announce as soon as they will be prepared or implemented." . All channels must communicate the same message or be silent until the message is specified. There must be somebody, who is in charge on communication, who coordinates all communication, formulates answers for the most serious concerns, and prepares factual reactions to mininfomration - and who is ready to do it full time in such situation, so the role cannot be joined, e.g. with team leader, who has own problems. If you have no such structure prepared before the crisis hits... God help you.

And this is the reason I cannot be angry much for clumsy way of handling the forums now. Just pity that the collateral damage is getting larger.

The more I see things go on with this drama the more it feels like things were just done clumsily not maliciously. There are some bad screenshots of certain people on the Discord, but at least on the forums I think it's been just trying to get things in control before making a proper response and trying to figure things out.

Though I think a big part of the problem is that many announcements were made on the Discord, but not here, so it seems like you have to be on the Discord to get information which IMO isn't a good choice because Discord is starting to lose users for shoving Nitro and Ads everywhere. If the Forums was the main way to get information on VS over the Discord then things would have been a lot more open IMO since the forums ARE Vintage Story it isn't owned by someone else if that makes sense.

I am not going to do anything rash like requesting a refund right now and am just going to wait and see if they issue a response here.

[Dilan Rona]

10 minutes ago, VANTABlack2000 said:

Discord is starting to lose users for shoving Nitro and Ads everywhere

Or like their mass ban hammer purge of a lot of users for the "crime" of wrong think. Lots of people never got their accounts back after it was stolen and deleted by Discord T&S. Announcements need to be on the forum, where they belong.

And I agree, this whole situation could have been handled better, instead of just banning people off the vs discord, and sweeping the matter under the rug.

Edited September 3 by Dilan Rona

[Lukas Marty]

Just wanted to post, that the whole situation is blown way out of proportion. Some angry kids are absolutely nuts

[Dilan Rona]

It has blown out of proportion. Lets hope things settle down now.

[Rainbow Fresh]

Such is the way of the internet, things will always be taken too far on all sides. I, for one, am very angry and in favor of a stern resolution. But that doesn't mean I have to go post it 200 times in a row under every other person's reply. Some people do not follow this reasoning.

[Vesk Aida]

I have been a fan of Maltiez's Vintage Story mods for many years: he is an excellent modder with a high standard for quality content along with him being a Vintage Story team-member makes this betrayal shocking. This is case is far more severe than that of a similar case of malicious code inserted into mods for the game "Star Sector", the "Lost Forest" mod feuding with the "RJW" in Rimworld, or others.

1. It is completely inexcusable to include malware (deliberate crash code) in software you are transmitting to other users who are not both aware of and consenting. The fact that Maltiez freely admits to this in Discord and commit notes is shocking.
   1. This is not 'white hat' code, e.g. crashing the Vintage Story program if it detects an infinite loop, memory leak, or similar serious problem with functionality. Protecting the user from harm.
   2. This is not 'grey hat' code, e.g. 'defensively' crashing a program to stop hackers from accessing a server. Causing harm for justifiable reasons, e.g. 'ends justify the means', or in legally/morally vague ways.
   3. This is clearly 'black hat' code, since it is undocumented, obfuscated, and can operate on legitimate paying Vintage Story customer's devices simply because of their modding choices, let alone any bugs which may have caused the malware to fire inappropriately. Causing harm deliberately and consciously, for harm's sake. Yes, this malware merely causes 'a hard crash', so it is not particularly severe outside of disrupting the Vintage Story application, but either is it excusable..
2. To deliberately add this code to multiple versions of a mod shows a clear pattern of intent that this was intended behavior.
3. To hide the existence of this crashcode (not documenting it) shows clear understanding that this behavior is unethical and 'needs' to be hidden.
4. Obfuscating the code shows further proof this author knew their behavior was unethical. Edit: Does not appear any of the mod's code was obfuscated.
5. The fact Maltiez defended his actions shows a clear lack of repentance and level his commitment to this behavior.
6. That Maltiez described his intent to add further code which would have harvested and/or transmitted client-side data, despite his inability to implement such a feature, shows a clear violation of user's privacy and trust, as well as potentially violating laws. Edit: This was merely discussed, with no proof it was ever developed or implemented. Though given the lack of transparency about this crash code, perhaps that should be taken with healthy skepticism.

Furthermore

1. It is particularly frustrating to see so much sustained and juvenile behavior from the official Vintage Story server's Discord Moderators. Harassing and insulting users who are acting reasonably and are understandably upset about this situation is inexcusable; including telling users to stop discussing this malware situation in a thread dedicated 'to' that mod, accusing them of being "off-topic", etc. Frankly, these moderators should resign, be fired, or be re-trained to a much higher standard. Very unprofessional and completely tone-deaf to the situation and seriousness, for the sake of 'internet moderator' "I'm an important person on the internet" bawking.
2. It is also painful seeing users in the Vintage Story official Discord server defending Maltiez's actions, especially antagonizing, trolling, and harassing other users. I understand some of these users may not have the technical understanding or context of what happened here, or are acting merely out of emotion for a beloved mod author, but this behavior is completely out of touch and shows serious ignorance to what has transpired and should be condemned. It upsets me that most of these conversations are still present in the Discord server, and there seems to be no moderation action taken against them.

In Conclusion

The Vintage Story community deserves a clear and direct response from Tyron once the team has decided upon a course of action.

I feel strongly that:

• All of Maltiez's mods should be removed from the official Vintage Story website, if only temporarily pending manual code review. But until then the risk and severity of this case is too high for an author who so deliberately hide crash code from his own userbase over such a long period of time.
• All of Maltiez's contributions to vanilla Vintage Story should require a manual code review. Anything less would seriously undermine the community's trust in that product.

 

Edited September 3 by Vesk Aida

[Zaldaryon]

6 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Maltiez is on the VS team, hired by Anego, to advise them on the combat update.

Just an fyi, while it's what people think, there is no proof he was hired to touch the combat system. afaik I've read in the public Discord, it's not about combat at all.

[Rainbow Fresh]

29 minutes ago, Vesk Aida said:

The fact that Maltiez described his intent to add further code which harvested/transmitted client-side data, despite his inability to implement such a feature, shows a clear violation of user's privacy and trust, as well as potentially violating laws.

Source? I re-read this entire supposed "ground truth mega thread" and didn't find any mention of this yet.

 

31 minutes ago, Vesk Aida said:

To obfuscate the code shows an even further level of malice, and further deliberate intent of unethical behavior.

It wasn't obfuscated, just hidden, which is your previous point.

[VANTABlack2000]

47 minutes ago, Zaldaryon said:

Just an fyi, while it's what people think, there is no proof he was hired to touch the combat system. afaik I've read in the public Discord, it's not about combat at all.

Sorry if this is out of touch or something, but is it possible Maltiez is advising on stuff for the update, but not specifically the combat system? Though tbh I am assuming the "Combat Update" is the next major update, but it's been a while since I have seen specific names to a VS update just some seen some stuff that is supposed to be added. No need to answer if that is private Anego information too I should add.

I tend to pay close attention to wording, so I noticed they said "Combat Update" not "Combat System" though with how often I have seen that said I wouldn't be surprised if others said "Combat System"

Also thanks for coming in and fact checking some things.