williams_482

It is odd that you are getting spawns there. I've never seen or heard of that happening before.

Thats a "swap into creative, break the spikes, swap back" situation if ever there was one. Mean.

Most people don't appreciate being implicitly compared to a 9 year old. People especially don't appreciate being told that you are dealing with their emotional responses using techniques that you also use to deal with your 9 year old. I wasn't involved in this part of the conversation, but I read that and immediately expected an unfavorable response. The pigeon comment is the same deal. Whatever the intent, it reads as if you are comparing the other person to a pigeon. That's pretty insulting. There's also a strong undercurrent of "your response is emotional, thus your conclusion is wrong" in those posts. All of our responses to this are based in emotional reactions to facts, and "this doesn't really bother me" is no more inherently right or wrong than "this feels really bad and makes me uncomfortable." I don't think you're trying to be dismissive and abrasive, but it does read that way.

Prior to the accelerated cooling times in the latest update, this was true. In 1.22 though I've noticed that I need to finish cooking copper with something hotter than brown coal just to make sure that it stays pourable long enough to fill 25 ingot moulds.

Obviously we don't agree on this topic and have argued several times, but I just want to say you seem like a very pleasant, thoughtful, and reasonable person.

Quicklime is the other one that's a pain to cook over a fire and doesn't give any vanilla alternatives. There are various mods out there that allow custom lime kiln structures, or cooking lime in a bloomery. I use one of the later and am happy with it. Hopefully something along those lines makes it into the base game soon.

Here's what's happening, over and over again in cycles: - Person #1 comes in here with an angry take about Maltiez that is based on misunderstanding a technical term, or simply factually incorrect information. - Some people in what we'll call group #2 respond to them, clarifying the misunderstanding or correcting the incorrect information. - Some other people in group #3 accuse the people in group #2 of making pointless pedantic arguments in Maltiez's favor. Most members of group #3 are well aware of the facts of the case, and have come to an informed judgement that they feel Maltiez should be fired. That's totally legitimate! This is a highly subjective thing and we can all agree on the facts and come to different conclusions, and there's plenty of argumentitive ground to be worked over that doesn't contest established facts. Person #1 does does not have all the facts! If they're going to come to an informed judgement themselves, they need to have those facts! It seems to me (from my inevitably biased perspective) that group #3 disagrees with this position, purely on the ground that person #1 already agrees with group #3, and they feel the important thing is not person #1 making an informed judgement, but person #1 continuing to agree with group #3. This is a complicated, technical issue and the facts are relevant. There is also a large subjective component and plenty of people are going to disagree on those grounds. Can we stick to informing people of those facts and arguing about the subjective aspects here?

How do you set up these networks?

The irony of this thread showing up when it did adds some delightful levity to this whole crazy kerfuffle. I am very grateful for it.

Presumed by who, on what evidence?

Short and sweet: - There is not and was not malware in the base game - A notable mod developer secretly placed code in some of their mods which would cause the game to crash if the player joined a multiplayer server while using certain other mods. That is the full extent of the malware you've heard about. - The mod the crash code was targeting was a notorious cheat mod, but it would also crash when using a few other legitimate mods. - After this mod developer put in that crash code but before anything was publicly known about it, they were hired to work on the game directly. - When this came to light, the mod developer behaved very poorly. - This modder had told other developers at Anego what they had done (unclear how clearly or completely), and Tyrone said in his statement that he and the other developers should have realized that there was a problem and taken action. - Anego has now taken actions to make sure this mod developer no longer has access to their mods and cannot put malware in them. This developer also does not have direct access to the base game code, and anything they do will be watched carefully. However, they have not been fired. - At this stage, most of the controversy is over if this mod developer should have been fired.

If this is true, then I agree he should be fired. If Anego believe that to be true, then I think less of them for not firing him. Is that true? I don't know. None of us really do, although I'm sure some have a better sense than others (and I fall squarely in the "others" category). This is well outside the realm of facts (which are pretty well established) and forward-looking risk assessments (which seem clean), and becomes a question of character judgement. I can't fault anyone for their own assessment there.

The fire is out. The dev team know that, and the chunk of the community that's been paying attention and understands the technical side of this knows that. There is no longer a fire, and the person who set the fire is not in a position where they can set more fires. The problem is that because they haven't been, well, fired, not everyone actually believes that. The dev team are a group of programmers who know a lot more about how to make a video game than how to best quiet an angry mob. From a cold blooded business first perspective they are surely making a mistake in retaining him, because the angry mob wants heads to roll and can make quite a lot of noise until that happens. In short, they are unwilling to sacrifice a person who they know personally, who made a mistake they are surely not pleased with, but who they judge to be a useful contributor to the game that everyone at Anego cares an awful lot about, on the whims of an angry mob who know far less about the details of this situation than they do.

All of this is true. It was a bad plan! Because I can understand the motives and it *almost* worked out I may come across as defending it, but I am not. I wouldn't have recommended it, and I certainly wouldn't encourage anyone to try it again.

Yes, but engaging in a back and forth "I block you, you circumvent me, repeat" battle with a modder who is making money off their cheat mod doesn't really accomplish anything. It's just a commitment to spend unending unpaid hours to make sure that the cheat mod *sometimes* doesn't work. Simply obfuscating code is a pretty minor roadblock for a human committed to figuring out how it works (AI tools make this even easier), but it does make it almost impossible for a conventional program to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate mod code. Maltiez's crash code did, for a time, completely shut that mod down. The mod author didn't know what the problem was, where it came from, or how to solve it because they didn't know where to look (If this had been a dedicated anti-cheat mod, it would be the obvious place to start) and the crash code very deliberately pointed them in misleading directions. Evidently they spent enough time trying and failing to diagnose the problem that they gave up, which is exactly what Maltiez was going for.

This keeps being said. It sounds nice, but it's not really accurate. First off, to be completely clear, the correct thing for Maltiez to do was nothing. Do not to attempt to engage in vigilante justice. He did it anyway, and it worked, before spiraling into this clusterfuck several months later. A useful lesson in why this was a bad idea, because even the "success" turned disastrous because of an entirely unsurprising human error. However, given that Maltiez was foolishly committed to taking down this cheat mod, trying to create a separate mod specifically for that purpose would not have worked. Maltiez's solution was effective only because it was secret and well hidden in very popular mods. A server mod which openly claims to target this cheat mod would have been quickly identified and trivially circumvented by the cheat mod author. Likewise, a detection method more precise than checking how much code was obfuscated wasn't technically possible either: It's really difficult to programmatically determine what this cheat mod was doing in blocks of obfuscated code, doubly so because the cheat mod author was perfectly willing and able to make adjustments whenever someone did figure out how to target it. This is the environment we live in. As nice as it would be to claim there was a better way to achieve the same ends, there really wasn't. The same openness and modability that contributes to Vintage Story's success also makes it incredibly difficult to combat undesirable mods through purely technical means. There's a reason Anego didn't do anything more involved than ban the mod maker and ask them to stop. The next plausible step for them to consider was probably legal action, which is risky enough that it may not have been worth it. So was Maltiez wrong to do this? Absolutely. Could they have accomplished the same thing through less underhanded means? No, probably not.

Apologies if this is an impertinent question, but how has this hurt you or interfered with your ability to hang out with your friends? So much of this talk is about optics mostly for lack of anything else to go over. The only unresolved aspect at this stage is Vintage Story's reputation: there is no longer any malware in play, that malware had an extremely limited and difficult to identify impact on legitimate users, and there is no danger of more malware coming from this developer via mods or Vintage Story itself.

I'm guessing this is the video being referenced? To be honest, I'm reasonably impressed that this is the video that seems to have gained traction. It's still a reaction video and misses some details (such as the very vague reference to "mods that it didn't like", or anything about the timeline of the malware happened and when Maltiez began working for Anego), but you are right that it isn't overtly sensationalized in any way. Well done. I do note, though, that this post went up on September 2. The situation had been public for at most a day and a half when it was posted, probably less (although Youtube is not so kind as to provide a posting time). Firing someone less than a day and a half after people on the internet got angry about something relatively complex might have been the optimal move purely from a business perspective, but wow, it's a big decision to make that fast, and if you don't have all the answers already, taking premature action has serious risks too. Now we're two days later, and this is still the most readily available video on the topic. How much difference would firing this guy today, or yesterday, have actually made to videos that were already out and gaining traction? That's a serious question, because I'm sure there are PR people out there with real training who could give a reasonable answer.

The big question for them at this stage, and every proceeding stage after they had established the facts and taken a moment to think about it, is this: Does firing this guy actually change the story in a meaningful way? Or is it really just an extra detail thrown in under the "Vintage Story Developer did MALWARE!!!!" headline which won't change the tone or takeaway of videos crafted primarily to be sensationalist clickbait? Call my cynical, but in this media environment I don't think the reality or the follow through matters much at all relative to first impressions, and no <1K subscriber channel is suddenly getting 50K views by being nuanced and reasonable.

My guess is that the current requirements for chiseled blocks to count as sealing a room were put in as a temporary "good enough" solution that makes some logical sense, doesn't have much performance cost, and was easy to implement. I would expect it to be improved eventually, but it will probably be quite a while before someone either decides it's a priority, or finds an easy way to improve it while working on something else.

This whole thing sucks, for very human, embarrassingly predictable reasons. The devs made the classic PR blunder of choosing empathy for a person they personally know and judge to be a useful contributor, along with practical steps to prevent them from doing anything like this again, over sating the bloodlust of an angry mob. You can just see the naive programmer logic here: we made sure this person won't do this again (in ways we tried to explain but can't directly demonstrate at this time), we're still doing our best to improve this game you all love, why are you all still mad at us? A huge corporation would not typically make this mistake, because 1) they have expensive PR people on staff to handle this kind of thing, 2) huge corporations are big enough that the decision makers are generally not personally aquatinted with the accused (when they are, these mistakes are far more likely), and 3) they are usually far more concerned with perception and short term sales than with the long term quality of their product. It seems pretty clear that the folks here who understand software development do not see Maltiez's reduced role as a plausible vector for new malware in either the base game or any of his existing mods. Those who still want him gone are speaking on moral or general policy grounds, which is fair enough and an unsurprising theater for reasonable people to disagree. We don't know exactly why Anego doesn't want to cut Maltiez out completely, but it's probably some combination of familiarity with the project and valuing his perspective on design questions totally unrelated to vigilante malware injection. There's also a huge group of people in here who don't understand the technical aspect of this (because it's bloody difficult to differentiate expertise in an unfamiliar field from confident idiocy, especially with emotions running high as they are now) and want this guy gone because they think there is still a credible danger of Maltiez secretly infecting their computer. There is not, but the misconception is understandable. Finally, we have people who are just angry. There are a lot more of them on Reddit than on these boards. Some of them are fans who feel betrayed and aren't worried about the details, some of them are just along for the ride because joining in with the mob and yelling about the failings of others is a pleasant distraction from the complicated problems of daily life. Nothing short of immediate, unambiguous, and complete separation from Maltiez was going to satisfy, and if that happened then that vitriol wouldn't even be gone, just focussed on Maltiez the individual villain. Which is worse, because it increases the small but believable danger of real wackos taking extreme steps against him. I'm not exactly overflowing with sympathy toward Maltiez myself right now, as he did make some dumb choices and has come across as a real asshole. Although, I can't help but wonder how the rest of us would come across if unexpectedly berated by hundreds for a questionable choice in our own pasts. I am feeling very sympathetic towards Tyrone and the rest of Anego, who were suddenly thrown into this whole thing and forced to make a very public decision which had no definitive right answer, and carries with it a terrifying range of unlikely but very serious dangers. The whole thing sucks.

Can we refrain from using ableist slurs here?

Sorry to ask the stupid question, but are you using a knife to harvest the corpses of the animals you kill? If yes, have you tried disabling your mods, starting a new test world, and checking if you can harvest meat from animals there?

I'm not convinced you know what some of the words in your edit actually mean.

We know exactly what the malware in question did to the computers of people who downloaded it. We know what code was snuck in secretly, how it worked, when it triggered, and the effects it caused. It caused difficult to trace crashes for players who entered a multiplayer game while running mods which fit a specific, known, overly inclusive criteria. That's it. The situation is not good, but there is no imminent danger to anyone's computer, and no need for fearmongering about imagined threats.