greed23

It's also the legality? Are you nuts? Where there's malice, there's criminality. Also, I'm sorry, but if you're saying a trusted party exploiting that trust to do something malicious to you isn't worse and deserving of your trust in the party being lost, you've got the self-preservation instinct of a hamburger.

There's a severe difference between an early access game crashing because the code is shoddy, and an early access game crashing because one of its devs abused the implicit trust they had as a prominent modder to inject malware. Trust is the issue. It's like if your car's tires went flat because you drove over a nail accidentally left on the road vs. your best friend sneaking into your garage every night because you gave them a key, and they let the air out of your tires; only to double down and say they were only trying to stop speeders and that they were sorry they got caught. Do you see where one really is a betray of trust, and the other is just universal randomness?

The abysmal response from Anego over the Configlib Malware situation has now done Irreparable harm to VS's reputation. The Reddit, Discord, and forums are going to naturally be filled with the more dedicated fanbase, and that fanbase overwhelmingly agree that Tyrone's response was, effectively, to do nothing and acknowledge none of the false positives or even that the program was indeed malware. If your most dedicated base feels that way, then how do the more casual players on the periphery react? I'll tell you: "Well, Vintage Story was fun while it lasted." Among my friends who casually play VS in phases every few months, the universal reaction to hearing about the malware situation and lack of actual action taken against it has been to completely write off Vintage Story. This stain will continue to spread and choke the growth of the game and its reputation. Your blueprint was clear; Project Zomboid, Starsector. How do you fumble this so badly?

I beg to differ. I don't think anyone (except the most serious Maltiez fan) is going to be upset if Maltiez is booted and Anego actually acknowledges that the software was malware, apologizes for praising the malware, and acknowledges that it negatively impacted innocent players and servers. If anything it will please the entire playerbase, because it'll mean something was actually done and now everyone can move on. As of now, they effectively took the stance of "The malware was very effective and protected servers. Here's some things that we're saying we're doing to maltiez but doesn't actually impact him any major way." Most of the anger right now is directed at the completely lackluster response from Anego, and rightly so; There's few faster ways to erode trust than to disregard the concerns of players and actively avoid saying or doing anything that would make them feel seen.

Well, I've never injected malware into a mod that got distributed to thousands of computers... nor have I ever proceeded to praise that malware's effectiveness and say that it only effected cheaters when it effected many innocent players and servers... so....

Doesn't help that he called everyone who was against AI being on the db "idiots" and that they make him "want to learn it to use it more" I'm sure there's a lot of overlap, but its kind of self inflicted since he just doesn't know how not to be an ass to people lol.

I don't know. I've been on the other end of PR before, granted for a much smaller development team and for a gamemode instead of an entire game, and there's an understanding that any team needs to have that, especially for security concerns, there's implicit trust that only goes one way. Honestly, despite the small impact and relatively harmless nature, a security breach of this nature from a dev is about as bad as it gets in terms of eroding trust and goodwill from the community. You have to expect it and you have to formulate a response that makes the community feel like they're actually being heard. Anything less than that, and you're adding fuel to a fire.

There's nothing "bad faith" about recognizing that Tyrone praised the malware that was installed unknowingly on thousands of systems, and that effected many innocent users, and that his response failed to acknowledge any of that. The thing is, people thought that, given a few days to formulate a response, Tyrone/Anego would put out an honest and fair assessment of the situation and a proper apology, with meaningful action. None of that happened. It's not bad faith, it's just the realistic response to fumbling the bag as hard as they did. Edit: Sorry I read your response after posting this. Still, I think coloring this as a particularly emotional response is kind of underselling the, frankly, sheer incompetence at every level of the Anego team when it comes to community outreach. The reaction, as I said, is something that should have been more than expected given the community grievances that were being aired even before the official response.

So, like, why were none of the false positives addressed on the official announcement? Why was the impact to regular users downplayed despite many, many people coming forward saying they were adversely affected by the malware? Why was the malware actively praised for succeeding in "protecting servers" when Maltiez can be seen stating that wasn't its in intent, and when it was actively causing the inability for many servers to operate normally? Why does the VS team refuse to acknowledge the malware as that, despite it fitting every common definition? Why have we not seen an updated response despite everyone asking these questions? Why is the reddit being actively censored just because there's an official response? This frustration will continue to simmer.

Beyond that, what's there even to advise about a combat overhaul? CO as a mod doesn't really fix any of VS's combat issues. Its just damage calculation and some different animations. The real issues with VS combat is enemy hitboxes and animations desync. Fix those, add right click to block, and then take some of the damage type modifiers and directional combat, and there, you've got a much better combat base than base game

"Use mods (that were created by the most prolific modder who is evidently trusted by the first party studio enough to be hired by them) at your own risk, people." Its like people defending Anego right now are intentionally ignoring the fact that this isn't some random modder. This was a dev, employed by Anego, putting malware in a mod for software he was working on. This wouldnt be at all a PR issue for Anego if they did the right thing and fully fired Maltiez. As of right now, they refuse to acknowledge the code meets the definition of malware and they've effectively done nothing but stop him from posting on the discord.

Guys, stop blowing this out of proportion! Please! Listen, I know an official Anego employee made malware for the game he's working on! And listen, I know he hid that malware from the GitHub! And listen, I know he hid the crash behind another mod in the crash logs! And listen, I know he doubled and tripled down on it! And listen, I know his code was running on thousands of computers because he's one of the most prolific modders of VS! And listen, I know at least a portion of those thousands of computers were unintentionally targeted by this dev-created, mod-hidden malware, but this is really just getting out of hand!

I think a lot of people are using obfuscated incorrectly, but mean "obscured" or "hidden". 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

Its really not helping that your discord moderators are banning people without issuing warnings for the rule breaks first and forcing the discussion to be pushed to a side thread labelled "off topic" about 20 channels down. It doesn't feel like conversations are being allowed to happen in any place of moderate visibility.

"I'm not seeing the issue... the next door neighbor put (a hidden) anti-criminal rocket launcher in the park (that he didnt tell anyone about). Maybe don't be a criminal while using the public park? Idk doesn't seem that hard a concept to follow" This presupposes that: 1. The neighbor only targets actual criminals 2. The rocket launcher never falsely blows up innocent people