xXRathlosXx

Thanks for the reply. That was much-needed clarification. The more I read, the more nonsensical this topic becomes. Playing on these servers will not affect anyone who does not care about being on the leaderboards. Yet, people continue to belabor whatever point it is they have. I'll preface this by saying that I – as a former staff member – came from a gaming community with between 1.5 million and 2 million members. Concurrent users at the site's peak were around 20,000. The daily number of users at the peak was just shy of 100,000. Site traffic was high, and a large percentage of the user base was active. We also had a subscription-based membership and took in donations. G-Fuel reached out and offered us a partnership and provided us with coupon codes exclusive to members who subscribed. Despite the size and relative success, we still took suggestions. A single person owned that site as well. We never perceived suggestions from the community as mutiny. The question you must ask is whether or not PSNP is a community or a quasi-governing body. Regardless of the answer you decide on, both still take suggestions from their participants. I should also note that the gaming community I came from collapsed and had a schism from terrible business decisions and no longer exist.

I am new to this community, and as a result, I am unaware of the many facets of this site. My use is limited to guides, viewing trophy lists for games, and looking at specific metrics on my profile that I find interesting. Am I amiss for wondering what significance the leaderboards play for the average (average as in those who are not here for their leaderboard placement) end-user? Does anyone outside a small minority utilize the leaderboards? If the integrity of the leaderboards is of utmost importance, would it not make sense to allow users the option to opt-out? Forgive me for being curt. I reckon being new here has allowed me an opportunity to see things from an outside perspective. A lot of these issues can be resolved through minor quality-of-life implementations.

Allow me to provide context for the discussion. Concerning the open-source nature of these servers, most of those revived games are client hosted. The game files are local, and each connected player could be the potential lobby host. Essentially, their (specifically these revival communities) server stack – SCE-RT Medius SDK (the official network engine SDK used by developers) – exists as a means to provide an alternate route to match players; it mimics the official network. The only way for something to go awry is if one of the connected players, who happens to be the host, runs unsigned code. This happened in older titles such as World at War, Modern Warfare 2, and many others. Understandably, there will be hesitancy for games that are server hosted – many of which were not during that time – as there may be variables that can affect end-user experience. It should be noted that the backend these projects rely on is actually open-source and readily available on GitHub. I believe you would have to make necessary changes – respective to that specific title – to what is currently available to allow other games to work, which requires reversing whatever the target game is. But the SDK is there. My mindset tends to trend towards an old saying, "smoke 'em if you got 'em." If it is currently available, let people do as they please. Sounds archaic and comes off as a free-for-all, but it beats the alternative. Possibiliter ergo probabiliter.

I reckon I might as well partake.

Forgive me for bumping this post, but as far as I know PSN account security should not be an issue. Most -- if not all -- of these third party game server hosts do not and cannot communicate directly with any of the necessary PlayStation Network APIs. Even if Sony did open up access to those APIs it would be very limited in scope and require third party developers to obtain a security token. My best guess is that they more than likely forego any form of account authentication as a result. If they do collect any data it still would not be anything that could compromise account logins since PSN handles that through an X-I-5-Ticket. If anything these providers just act as an intermediary between several peers allowing them to connect with one another. Trophy requirements are wholly client sided and cannot be changed remotely or locally. That is why people had to decrypt specific client sided files and edit hex values to indicate to other local game files -- and subsequently PSN via synching -- that trophies were unlocked whether or not the requirements were met. Obviously it was more in depth than that since people had to also figure out unix time, the corresponding offset for timestamps, the file structure in general, and even then the PS3 did not handle unix time like you would expect unix time to be handled. That obviously does not address other methods like people modifying local game files and executables to execute scripts to either meet certain requirements or to just outright auto-pop trophies. As for gatekeeping trophies I can potentially see that being the only issue. But you have to evaluate whether or not these third party servers were even created to explicitly obtain trophies or to provide end users access to games that they paid for and want to play instead reminiscing of a time long gone . We will all have differing opinions on the veracity of these third parties and unfortunately there is no litmus test that indicates one way or the other. Going forward we are definitely going to see this question posited more often as people continue to develop solutions to game servers being shutdown. Suffice to say however, people will just need to respect the rules as they are going forward unless a more nuanced discussion is had on how to address both open-source and closed-source projects.