KekkusMaximus

I see this thread has been basically commandeered into irrelevance Well played

I agree, which is why I said that it is still fucked up and it shouldn't have been done regardless. Also I agree that it's not the only way to fight cheaters, as I have stated previously I believe the best (and honestly only) way to actually combat cheaters is to build stable communities with good admins that stay on top of things and do multiple backups a day.

Another thing that is necessary to understand The code that Maltiez used to supposedly mess with cheaters is written to work client side, not server side. If you make a standalone client-side anticheat mod that says "crashes your game if you cheat", guess who is not going to install it? That's right, cheaters. It's still fucked up and it should have never been done in the first place, but the method is coherent with what an anticheat does to make itself hard to detect and avoid by cheaters.

Found the alt account of Maltiez

From the Reddit post by Tyron: Specifying that major code changes get personally reviewed by Tyron, that none of the mods by Maltiez were planned to be integrated into the main game and that going forward Maltiez will continue to contribute to VintageStory but with oversight leads me to believe that Maltiez is indeed writing code for Anego at least as part of their duties within the company. Am I 100% sure? No. But to me that's the interpretation with the highest chance of actually being what is going on.

From what has transpired Maltiez is actually writing code for Anego regarding the 1.23 update. At least that's what I understand from Tyron saying that they will be kept under close observation about their contribution to the development of the update

This is literally the only real solution to issues like this. Backup the world, do it often enough and the most that you can lose from such an event is a server restart and a few minutes of gameplay. I'm going to be blunt, but I'd take this over injecting malware into the game 10/10 times. Also things like this are the reason why the server I have to play with my friends is self hosted, not advertised and whitelisted

There is not a single line in the Reddit post from Tyron that calls what Maltiez has done either "foolish", "wrong", or something similar. Tyron describes what Maltiez has done as essentially "taking matters into their own hands" and as a successful operation that protected the community without side effects because the code was purpose built to look only for the cheat mod and then crash the client that had it installed. These are all things that we know for sure to be untrue. Maltiez admitted to have written this code to mess with the cheat developers, not to protect the servers. Other mod authors like Pr0fesseur (the author of Caves and Caverns) exposed the code as the cause of several crashes from clients that did not have cheats installed because the code didn't look for specific files but instead it looked for broader factors like obfuscated code and acted on those, directly causing non malicious mods to be affected. When confronted about it Maltiez answered by saying that he basically did not care about other mods being affected as long as the cheat was too, later accusing the mod authors of being at fault because they published obfuscated code. Tyron does not even mention any of these, and by painting a distorted picture of what has actually happened is directly endorsing what Maltiez has done. EDIT, Addendum: The only "error" that Tyron says was made by Maltiez was forgetting to pull the code from one of the 3 affected mods. The only mistake that Tyron admits to have happened on Anego's side was to not actually check the code and then mishandling the PR issues that arose from the code being discovered a few days ago.

I don't blame Anego for what Maltiez has done, I blame them for how they decided to handle it, which is essentially to not handle it. True, Anego is not a AAA company, but that doesn't mean that they get special treatment when they do something wrong that was easily avoidable. The fact that other larger companies do worse things does not excuse Anego when they do something bad and right now they're doing something bad both for us as a community and themselves as developers. It really wasn't tho. Maltiez has not been banned, he "decided to depart the ModDB and Modding Discord" in accordance with Anego, that is not a ban, it's a half measure at best. Maltiez's contract with Anego has not been terminated, even if what they did was not only extremely wrong but also possibly illegal according to european law. We don't know if they are going to work with/for Anego after 1.23 goes out but I believe they will. This is not a worse case scenario, because Anego did not end up saying "Maltiez did nothing wrong" and some consequences have been enforced but it's certainly not a good ending either, I personally find these consequences (or lack thereof) rather disappointing.

This is probably one of the things that enrage me the most about this whole debacle. Maltiez justified their blatant disregard of both the community and the developers with the need to supposedly "protect game servers from cheaters" (even tho they themselves admitted of doing it more to mess with specific people rather than to protect the community at large) with something that is essentially incapable of actually doing that because it sets a delay between detection and repercussion, something that is reasonable to do in anticheats but that is fundamentally ineffective as an anti griefing measure since it leaves ample time to the cheater to do whatever they want with their cheats. As always community servers need to focus on the actual solution to this kind of issues, which is building a solid community that is self immunizing against problematic individuals. Maltiez essentially pushed malware down our throat because they thought they knew better and when it was made clear to them that what they did was having consequences outside of the intended scope, and not in a good way, their reaction was to feign superiority while throwing mod authors under the bus and calling the community toxic. And Anego chose to keep this person within their dev team. And somehow we should be fine with that? No thanks.