Mushroomancer

To be fair to moderation, who did get perhaps overzealous, the 'tone' of this entire event started and remained relatively uncharitable and vitriolic from the start. Everything said, no matter how reasonable, has been picked apart for the worst possible interpretations that could be pulled from it, and added as fuel onto a very intense fire that sprung up overnight. Like a pit kiln buried in a peat bog. While I do think a response on the forums would be appropriate, I don't personally believe that a response somewhere like the devlog is necessary for Anego, who clearly wants to maintain that space as a point of discussion for progress and development news. I think it also, in part, comes from a belief that this isn't as big a deal as it's been made of. Their assessment of the damage does not 'justify' a sweeping response. My only issue with that potential logic is that the community reaction alone DOES justify that level of clear communication and transparency. Admittedly, it could also be that the discord is more irreverent and fast moving, and this can all be moved on from there much faster. Personally, I am content with Anego's response and Maltiez's punishment, though I do wish they would communicate to the entire community engaged in this discussion and not just the discord where it was at its briefest and most intense. (Although I do believe a Reddit post was made.)

Brass, personally, but bismuth bronze gets a close mention for second place. Meteoric Iron is a natural choice because as a limited resource, it's perfect for something like lanterns that don't have durability. Generally if I really feel like flexing, gold/Silver/Electrum is a way to go, considering you get to double down on their use for bright lanterns and show off how much money-element you have at your fingertips.

My only real complaint about Toolsmith is that more advanced handles aren't as sturdy and still require binding to be fully 'Toolsmithed', while in reality, most traditional hand tools are just a head and a handle. Maybe some rivets. You will always benefit from a binding which isn't always true of reality. It also adds tinkering and reforging, but I haven't explored those systems in depth enough to recommend, but they do seem quite interesting.

Although it doesn't do this, exactly, the Toolsmith mod has a system that allows you to join a handle, binding and toolhead into a new tool, and gives each their own durability. It does so in the hands, still, but assuming inventory management is fine, it doesn't require a crafting grid for actual tool assembly. It also adds a sharpening mechanic I am a little more mixed on, but functions quite well for its intended purpose. Overall I find it tends to make tools, especially metal tools later on, last longer and it serves as a good point of immersion.

I was going to say, I was having some serious hangs and snags and after uninstalling the Farseer mod it worked much better. Which was strange and unfortunate because my earlier tests an update or two ago on Farseer ran fine.

In regards to whether or not the code hides other malicious features, they can read his code and know exactly what it did after it's been poured over for a week now. It wasn't particularly sophisticated, really, and was essentially a parcel loaded in two parts: one to identify and crash with a manufactured incompatibility, and one to misdirect the source of the crash to obfuscate the code causing that incompatibility. The three points of contention regarding the code are 1.) The code was not disclosed to users who installed it onto their system. 2.) The code's means of identification allowed it to target unintended mods as bycatch primarily because Maltiez seemed to be under the impression other mods would not obfuscate (technical term this time) code when publishing to an open-source database as it means something could be hidden inside that can't be reviewed by the community. And 3.) The code did not match the easy-to-read open-source repository file meant to communicate the actual things that the mod was doing, instead being sideloded onto the Mod DB to, again, delay the discovery of what was causing the initial incompatibility. These last two are the more severe breaches, in my opinion. The second, because it was somewhat sloppy even if no meaningful alternative was available. And the third because it's where the actual deception is occurring. It IS what someone looking to smuggle more harmful code into a mod could do if they so choose to bypass the community's open-source security. It's also a security issue that most community driven modding spaces have, unfortunately. It is also somewhat a testament that Maltiez was not attempting to do something more malicious, because if he were, he would have done it well before this point of discovery considering how long the 'crash code' was active. What Anego knew about the situation before it blew up is still somewhat unclear, it seems like the most likely scenario is that when they tapped Maltiez for assistant development, he confessed/boasted to creating anti-cheat.The issue is that they did not actually look into the vehicle and methods that the anti-cheat employed, choosing to have faith in Maltiez, rightly or wrongly. You could argue that was their primary failure to do due diligence, as the DB is hosted on their official site. How they've responded after seems to be based on their personal assessment of the damage done and the risk of more or worse damage happening in the future (which, to be clear, is kind of the standard that most legal systems use when deciding judgement in these kinds of cases, as well.) If you don't trust them, I would say the best action you can take is to request a refund and move on to other games, especially if after ten years this has so fully eroded your faith in them that you have no hope they can steer things back in the right direction. I'm not saying 'if you don't like it leave', just that it's the best option as far as personal comfort and sense of safety. Edited for language clarity and further context.

If it's any consolation I don't think what you were doing was vigilantism. You were putting the onus of action in the hands of an authority rather than taking justice into your own hands. I don't think that anything islikely to come from it, just because as potential cybercrimes go this seems to have been relatively small fish in a sea of very terrible actors and considering how legal systems tend to move, it's very possible that the 'negligible' harm (in a statistical sense, I know people wasted time, but I suspect that's the kind of thing that a criminal court would push toward civil avenues if at all) is justification enough to just close the book on it by a legal authority.

You weren't being empathetic. You called people with a lot of posts on the forums sycophantic addicts and implied that anyone who had a lot of posts was one of these people. You implied that the only people ardently defending Anego were overly parasocially invested and would make up any excuse not to criticize a game that had become 'part of their identity.' Despite the fact that at least two high-involvement posters have been highly critical of Anego's response in this thread and I, although fond of VS, was not active in the forums until very recently despite having shifted over to a more defensive stance. The reality is that most of the people active on the forums in this particular topic are probably the most invested in it, yes, but to pretend that it's only high posters defending and low poster casual players criticizing is ridiculous. There is no clear polarized archetype of who is and isn't a defender or critic in this situation. Most of the people who don't care about this, are mildly upset about this or are moderately on Anego's side/content with the response will never post on the forums. Ever. Because that's just the nature of the forums. I had to reread your post a few times to get any sense of empathy out of it and all I see is a bad faith 'call out' of people who 'can't imagine their future without VS'. I understand being disatisfied with Anego's response, and the situation. I understand being so upset you feel you need to move on from VS. What I don't understand is pretending that you are the only one who has a genuine perspective on this and everyone else is either a plant or an addict jonesing for the Crafting Survival fix.

I do think there was enough nuance to some of the threads for them to have stayed split, but I also think that keeping that firestorm form spreading out across the entire board was the goal and it certainly was doing that. Unfortunately that kind of means that more technical discussion has been merged with the emotionally charged 'debate' here. Though if I recall, it was already leaking into that thread at a slower pace, too.

While I agree with a lot of folks that pickaxes and hammers are the ideal, I always get a particular glee out of finding scythes. I hate cutting grass by knife, and so a single scythe can make roofing an early game home or gathering grass for pit kilns so much more bearable.

This is an especially odd take. If the logic is that Maltiez is on the dev team and so the dev team can't be trusted, singleplayer isn't trustworthy, either. If the logic is that mods can't be trusted because they're inherently carrying a risk just in how they function, then that makes sense, but isn't tied to this controversy except that the controversy would make you aware of that fact and the fact it extends to mods in EVERY game. But by that logic vanilla Multiplayer is still fine.

You can kind of hear it burning and smouldering, the problem is it isn't very obvious how different that is from the sound of your firewood just burning up and it isn't totally obvious immediately when the lighting happens, so I think I agree that something more intuitive in addition to the text confirmation is ideal. Something that you can reflexively know means it's time to close up the fire and walk away. A sparking sound probably isn't best, maybe a flare up, that kind of 'fwush' of air you get when a fire really catches.

I think something like this could be interesting in an anthropological sense. Dressing in and as animals in religious ceremony or war practice has been a facet of a lot of human cultures as far back as we can know in history. I do think, unfortunately, that in a limited capacity it will be seen as something of a modern anachronism just because of the common perceptions of those things. A lot of people will have digested media tropes and seen things like the Bear armor and be fine with it, but given the way that wearing tails and ears is commonly depicted in social spaces and media in modernity, they're going to carry some of that bias into seeing it within the game.

It's a shame, really. To have so little faith in the game they all loved so much after a decade.

I will keep this in mind the next time my architect friend throws me into the lime pits.

Someone came into this thread with the statement they reported them to the authorities of Latvia. Someone else was having manic breakdowns about potential criminal liability. Early on, especially, there was a lot of waxing philosophical about potential prison sentences and legal consequences. About group actions and best practices in reporting. I'm very glad to hear your anecdote for the... third or fourth time?

Oh yeah. We definitely don't have any internal universe or drew our own conclusions on this .We are definitely just here as paid actors astroturfing our opinions. We are all NPCs next to your wise and masterful first-person perspective. Forgive us for ever questioning you, the main character.

You literally came into this thread with your first or second post on the forum, ever, being smugly declaring you were 'reporting them to the authorities.' I feel it's a little hypocritical to back off and say you're just concerned about your own system's safety now. Grow up. You and everyone like you are assuming what Maltiez's potential motives are and are acting like a person cannot internally justify something and draw the line somewhere for themself. Why stop at this low-damage, low-collateral approach when he still had free reign over his code? Why not push something more aggressive and harmful when he still had the change? You act as though it's inevitable now that he will be shoving worms into Vintage Story. You have a perspective of human morality equivalent to a children's cartoon villain. If Tyron had a 'whatever no biggie stance' there would be no consequences at all for Maltiez. They wouldn't have declared that they were going to be particularly careful with Maltiez's code. They wouldn't have bothered to ban him from the community database and community interaction. "They just did that to placate the community." Anything they do is to placate the community. If they fired him tomorrow without anymore information coming out, it would be to placate the community, not because they were taking a principled stance. You have had zero trust and faith in this dev, before the situation unfolded, or you're being performative with your outrage for your own vindication. If you're really that concerned, then getting rid of Maltiez will never make you trust Anego. If you think this is the case, how do you know it wasn't just Anego firing Maltiez to get the controversy to go away? What if they're letting worse things slide behind the scenes cause they just don't care? Your own conclusions indicate you cannot ever trust Anego again, and if that's the case, get the refund they offered. Unfortunately on the mark of 'only on the Discord', that seems to be a disappointing standard for a lot of things. Discord is where they have the majority of traffic, and it's what a lot of companies and communities now use in the place of forums in general. Considering they have forums, albeit a lot less active than their Discord, seeing something here would be ideal- But the information also immediately made its way here, anyway. I would rather they publish their official statements here, but it's possible they want to reserve the news threads here for specifically content and development related information.

Yeah. It's actually not a bad idea to go back and clean up your mod folders for servers you don't play after a while because they will sit there and take up space as a result, but I'd say it's still a better solution than having to juggle third party launchers and modpacks like Minecraft.

Probably so there aren't twenty threads and a single megathread can be a means of providing a space for discussion and venting on the topic. It keeps the discussion board from turning into "Maltiez, Maltiez, Maltiez, Fishing!, Maltiez, Mod recommendations, Maltiez, Maltiez, Maltiez."

Unfortunately from what I can tell Rivers with the river mods that exist now don't really create their own micro-ecosystems along their banks, and just kind of cut through the biomes they generate in. It would be very nice to see floodplains and riverbanks and estuaries/deltas, but I think with the current biome-scale and world generation, it would take rather extensive modding to accomplish. That is to say, I just don't know if it's possible with the available tools to get this desired result.

Many of the community's 'other concerns' are based on the least charitable possible interpretation of events, but my main concern is the conflation of the 'Malware' that Maltiez produced and the common perception of 'Malware' at large. This was not ransomware, it was not data theft, it wasn't bricking systems. People - and you in this very response - are behaving as though Maltiez is going to start smuggling in worse and worse code into the core of Vintage Story when there is no evidence of that and the community's assumptions on his motives are - well, assumptions. Admittedly based on a somewhat prickly and stand-offish personality and individual, but still assumptions. You act as though what Maltiez has done is a spiritual corruption that proves he is going to continue doing more evil acts that tempt every programmer who sets fingers to code. If I agree on anything it's that we need some kind of further communication from Anego on the matter because at the moment it seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation of everything said and done up to this point has calcified. Though I'm not sure there's anything they could say to deescalate the situation at this point, it very much seems as though that uncharitable is going to continue. 'Trust is broken' and what not. Though given the uncharitability, I suspect that trust prior to this event is being very overstated.

To be clear: What the code did was functionally manufacture an incompatibility between itself and a mod used for malicious actions on community servers. This was done without that code being revealed, and done in a way that was not specific enough to the 'Griefing Mod'. Other mods were hit as bycatch and it took time to figure out what was causing the issue. The 'malware' did not do any damage to the hardware or stored data of any 'victims'. Maltiez said he wasn't doing this to protect servers, but did not claim at all that it wasn't to benefit the community. These are two different things. This framing implies that the goal was a proactive instead of reactive defense, to discourage the development of the 'Cheats' instead of protect servers from them reactively. The community's reaction to the discovery was immediate and vitriolic causing moderators to crack down overzealously on what they saw as an outrage spreading to places it was disruptive. Naturally the community reacts to this with further vitriol and offense at what is perceived as rug sweeping and censorship. Tyron's framing in the official statement implies that Anego sees this less as an issue of programming ethics and more an issue of lacking transparency and poor communication. The above is the most gracious possible interpretation I have come to for this entire chain of events. This is an entirely valid interpretation of how things unfolded and, in my opinion, is enough for Anego to justify staying their current course of action. The primary issues of fault in this interpretation are that 1.) Maltiez was not more vigilant about affecting other mods and 2.) concealing this feature from the community inherently makes it a deceptive act. 3.) Anego being informed of the feature in some capacity and not further investigating was a lapse of judgement or maybe an excess of trust in the belief that Maltiez had responsibly implemented this feature. I just don't see those issues as justifying the sheer level of backlash.

I think you're correct. I think there were only 14 or 15 pages of responses. Consolidation is probably for the best. Not that the forums are especially busy in this day and age, but it does keep things clean.

Besides the points already made by the others about the flawed nature of a reddit poll of all things, the poll is mostly venting, a lot like these threads. Anego does not run on mob rule. While such a thing might influence their decision making, it shouldn't be considered any kind of binding referendum by the community even if it was 99.99% voting in favor of burning the whole project to the ground. Anego has and should have full control of who it invites onto its team, and retains on that team. We don't have to agree with it. The only vote we get is whether to continue supporting the product they provide or not. We can discuss it, try to convince each other, wax philosophical about the nature of broken trust and the severity of offense, but we are not a jury. We are the players of a product still in very active development.