Suggestion - White List for Trophies / Games?

[Waddlingdan]

I’ve know @ProfBambam55 has been working on this for a while now and nice to see it’s gonna start taking full affect.

 

I think that whitelisting should allow for a game to show on a person’s profile with the platinum and all but to avoid issues within the community this game shouldn’t count towards their leaderboard rank, so that people can earn the platinum for a game but without it affecting the leaderboard, but this should only apply to certain trophies dependent on the game.

 

What I mean by this is each game should have specific conditions to which it can count as a whitelist which is set by the community, and I’ll give you an example of this with GTA V on the PS3.

 

A whitelist for say GTA should apply that a person can earn the trophies ‘off the plane’ and ‘run like the wind’ in a hacked lobby as you’ve still got to have completed the requirements for ‘off the plane’ to even access a hacked lobby, and as for ‘run like the wind’ you still have to survive with the bounty on your head, it’s just the placement of the bounty upon you which is hacked, and considering that hackers are apart of the gta online community if Rockstar isn’t able to provide a means of accessing these features of the game then a hacker is an alternative means to do so. Don’t get me wrong though, as the whitelist would only apply to these trophies, but if someone where to earn both these trophies and all 3 level related trophies within an unrealistically short span of time then they should be flagged as they’ve earned the trophies illegitimately as legitimate means are still available to earn these trophies. So any autopopping of any other trophies aside from these would result in a flag and standard site rules would apply.

 

This solution would mean having to select which scenarios would apply for a whitelist but blatant cheating like seen in world at war would be flagged as it isn’t acceptable however earning every trophy in GTA V legitimately and then seeking a bounty in a public session to earn ‘run like the wind’ should just be whitelisted as players have to earn these trophies legitimately still and if you wanted to dispute whether say they had the trophy autopopped or actually survived with that bounty would be something which could be disputed for a whitelist.

 

As for Big Leages this is something we would have to discuss as it’s a little different from gta online where you can still complete the requirements for the trophies legitimately, but this method would mean people could show games which they’ve completed in accordance to a whitelist rules on their list without having to hide them but have these games not count towards their leaderboard progress. 

 

 

Edited July 23, 2018 by Waddlingdan

[MMDE]

1 hour ago, Sergen said:

 

That's been a big argument here, nobody is gonna play all these games that have modded lobbies and have an impossibly high advantage over the person below them on the leaderboards because it's so few games that it happens on and it's not going to affect more than a handful of games. 

 

That's shortsighted.

[Sergen]

1 minute ago, MMDE said:

 

That's shortsighted.

 

I'm just looking forward to when it happens on a PS4 game and the trophies sync straight away, I'd love to see someone who has been against white listing play one of those games. Currently it's only affecting COD, GTA and Warhawk which won't exactly help someone climb through the ranks at an impossible pace. Anyone who has access to those games has the opportunity to search for a lobby, find a modder by accident and that modder unlocks their trophies without any input from the user. Considering it can be done to anyone who plays those games, if someone is really upset about it then they have the opportunity to do the same thing and while people are going to say "well that's cheating", those same people still boost trophies and glitch them on other games and we know if someone found a single player exploit for the COD games that unlocked every trophy then we'd see a white list tomorrow. 

[dn-xx]

14 minutes ago, MMDE said:

 

That's shortsighted.

In the world where every game potentially has modded lobbies this would be shortsighted. Thats why everyone agrees that using own saves for autopop trophies considered as cheating. But we talking about 3 certain games. They won't give you a huge advantage on leaderboards.

[Waddlingdan]

The main argument I seem to see is “it opens the way for hackers to earn trophies illegitimately” and this “domino effect” that everyone is on about but like I said above if we only allow certain trophies in certain games within a specific order to be white listed, not allowed on the leaderboard, but they shouldn’t have to hide them either from their list but it’ll only show up on their profile.

 

This way as I stated above would mean that people couldn’t just autopop lots of trophies and any trophies which are earned through hacking which can still be earned legitimately should be flagged in the normal way, otherwise it should just be an option for a ‘white list appeal’ of sorts.

[MMDE]

I want to be able to give "white flags", basically, a game's trophies don't count on that player's profile and they don't appear on leaderboards for it either.

[Sergen]

14 minutes ago, MMDE said:

I want to be able to give "white flags", basically, a game's trophies don't count on that player's profile and they don't appear on leaderboards for it either.

 

The thing people don't need is another icon next to the P or H symbol, so I kind of think when a game is white-listed but not counted towards their stats, the icon should be next to the game and maybe the letter "W" could be there, like a region tag but rather to tag that it was white-listed on their profile. This is too ambitious to think about but it would be a better option than hiding the game and nobody would really blame the person. Currently if someone hides more than 50 trophies, a lot of people are assuming the person hacked trophies regardless of what happened on their profile. 

Edited July 23, 2018 by Sergen

[ars]

 

12 hours ago, Sergen said:

 

That's been a big argument here, nobody is gonna play all these games that have modded lobbies and have an impossibly high advantage over the person below them on the leaderboards because it's so few games that it happens on and it's not going to affect more than a handful of games.

 

10 hours ago, MMDE said:

 

That's shortsighted.

 

No it's not. It has been almost a decade since trophies were introduced. Out of roughly six thousand game releases during that time the amount of games with modded lobbies amount to around five. Since PSNP is just happy to ignore RDR modded lobbies it might as well do a couple more. After all, the games are not going to adapt to PSNP. It's PSNP that has to adapt to the games.

 

Which, granted, it has done too with the Vita region exploit etc.. lately, so no arguments there

[MMDE]

1 minute ago, ars said:

 

 

 

No it's not. It has been almost a decade since trophies were introduced. Out of roughly six thousand game releases during that time the amount of games with modded lobbies amount to around five. Since PSNP is just happy to ignore RDR modded lobbies it might as well do a couple more. After all, the games are not going to adapt to PSNP. It's PSNP that has to adapt to the games.

 

Which, granted, it has done too with the Vita region exploit etc.. lately, so no arguments there

 

No, you'd be encouraging it, so it truly is. And it sets a precedence for similar situations.

[ars]

1 hour ago, MMDE said:

 

No, you'd be encouraging it, so it truly is. And it sets a precedence for similar situations.

 

Nope, RDR set the precedence and I see you're still not cracking down on it. In the meanwhile I don't know what'd get encouraged. Playing games as they are without fear of getting a reprimand from a website with dubious ethics? Playing games as they are and simply not be on the leaderboard for the specific game and poof this all just went away? You've said it yourself people who are inclined to cheat do it often enough to get properly flagged on some of the roughly five thousand nine hundred and ninety-five other games.

[MMDE]

1 minute ago, ars said:

 

Nope, RDR set the precedence and I see you're still not cracking down on it. In the meanwhile I don't know what'd get encouraged.

 

I've asked many times if I should do that, and people always say no... It can't work retroactively though. It has unfortunately set a precedence, but I'm not going to go into that bs one more time. This thread is about the idea of white listing.

 

10 minutes ago, ars said:

Playing games as they are without fear of getting a reprimand from a website with dubious ethics?

 

Who has dubious ethics?  The point is that the trophies has been earned through hacking.

 

10 minutes ago, ars said:

Playing games as they are and simply not be on the leaderboard for the specific game and poof this all just went away?

 

Are they playing games as they are though? I can't recall seeing any mod menu available in WaW or BO2? Seems like someone installed mods to me. What goes away? The cheating? The cheated trophies? I don't think the trophies should count on their profile or the game's leaderboard.

 

15 minutes ago, ars said:

You've said it yourself people who are inclined to cheat do it often enough to get properly flagged on some of the roughly five thousand nine hundred and ninety-five other games.

 

What I've said is that about half of them do this. Quite a lot of them actually only play CoD too. I don't see you reporting anyone, so unless you want to do that work, then please don't expect me to do it either.

[tlal_q8_22]

Yes 

Edited July 24, 2018 by tlal_q8_22

[ars]

9 hours ago, MMDE said:

I've asked many times if I should do that, and people always say no... It can't work retroactively though. It has unfortunately set a precedence, but I'm not going to go into that bs one more time. This thread is about the idea of white listing.

 

 

Who has dubious ethics?  The point is that the trophies has been earned through hacking.

 

 

Are they playing games as they are though? I can't recall seeing any mod menu available in WaW or BO2? Seems like someone installed mods to me. What goes away? The cheating? The cheated trophies? I don't think the trophies should count on their profile or the game's leaderboard.

 

 

What I've said is that about half of them do this. Quite a lot of them actually only play CoD too. I don't see you reporting anyone, so unless you want to do that work, then please don't expect me to do it either.

 

Yeah that's the thing. People are saying "no don't dish out strikes because it's stupid" on RDR. Otherwise they can't play online without fear of some sort of an insane punishment scheme on behalf of PSNP, because they will hit a lobby affected by the mod worm sooner or later. They're saying no on this very topic for the exact same reason.

 

Joining a public lobby isn't hacking. PSNP allows anything from sending malicious emails for Vita in order to do a region swap (which de facto is hacking) but not this. It's not that I'd particularly want to see PSNP cracking down on every "impossible" trophy, but I wouldn't mind it if it helps you keep your damn head straight and be consistent for once in your lifetime. Now everything goes, unless you accidentally play CoD and GTA in public because then you get a slap on the wrist.

 

That's PSNP and you telling other people what and how to play. You have no business of doing that. Your sole business is presenting the leaderboards in the way you want. And if you can't be consistent on that part, then it must not come as a surprise when people badmouth this site as toxic trash, targeting people based on the games they play.

 

WaW and BO2 have a mod menu. You need but do a very simple Google search to remind yourself. You need to throw that cheaters hacking PR routine out the window since no one who's followed this for awhile is buying it anymore. This is not about gamers playing games and not their problem no matter how much PSNP would like to have it that way. This is about PSNP failing at their service model and handling it with proper measures is their problem. So go and handle it.

[HellMoodCole]

deleted

Edited April 8 by HellMoodCole

[ars]

1 hour ago, BigBossImBeamer said:

 

Not even if it's intended? So any cheater who does not cheat himself is no cheater?

You're right. Joining a public lobby isn't hacking. But hacked trophies are hacked trophies. They must never be part of the leaderboard. That's exactly what the white list is for. But you're asking for legitimating illegitimate trophies.

 

As I said in the above post, you're telling everyone not to play a game just in case someone might take an advantage of a whopping two trophies. I can't begin to tell you how irrelevant that is when there are ten thousand trophy sets out there. You have all the other sets to catch people who are in the habbit of force popping their trophies.

 

RDR online trophies are done in a hacked environment by definition. So are Vita trophies that are done through the region swap. So is savescumming because you are externally altering the environment the game runs in. As I (also) said in the above post, you need to stop using the cheating hackers crusade mumbo jumbo when your real purpose is discrimination by choice in games.

 

I wouldn't care if what you suggest was true - that PSNP actually ran a zero tolerance scheme where every impossible trophy was rejected including the aforementioned, and hey, whatever the OS database bugs brought in during the first year of PS4 launch. But boy do I have news for you: on the contrary PSNP runs a high tolerance scheme where they've been just happy to allow pretty much every borderline scenario, which are all very much part of the leaderboard whether you like it or not. And I'm just happy PSNP supports people playing games of their free choice in whatever way they want or the state the games are. Except if anyone goes and joins a public lobby in CoD or GTA, of course, which is the issue here.

[HellMoodCole]

deleted

Edited April 8 by HellMoodCole

[ars]

It shouldn't matter anyway, because the current discussion is about preventing an insane punishment scene, leaving people's personal trophy lists intact, and simply not having the list apply for the game or world specific leaderboards.

 

You've fallen into a semantics trap with your hacking slogans because your claims are completely untrue. RDR is de facto active hacking and constantly so, I guess you think otherwise because you don't even know how it works. So is doing the Vita trick, personally sending malicious emails to your Vita. That is to say many trophies become possible or impossible based on the software state, which I guess is something only people who dabble with computers can comprehend fully.

 

What I'm guessing you want to say is you don't want impossible trophies on the leaderboard. I repeat there are aplenty impossible trophies on the leaderboard. If you're against that, then you should be against everything we've mentioned here. You want to spam your vocabulary of illegitimate feel free, but please at least try to be consistent while doing it.

Personally I couldn't care less about obsessing over getting a stupid leaderboard appear the equivalent of Mother Theresa (news: it never will). I'm just happy with how it is right now. I only care about the punishment scheme.

[HellMoodCole]

deleted

Edited April 8 by HellMoodCole

[ars]

It's not the RDR servers "once" got hacked, long story short it's a simple zombie interaction mod that goes on to bug every NPC in the free roam. The unintentional side effect is that the mod infects the lobby instance and every user in it, and once any one of them joins another lobby instance, they carry the infection with them and infect the new instance too. And every user in it, and the cycle repeats.

 

In principle that's an active ongoing hack you're spreading without your knowledge, and you can argue there are no "legitimate" RP trophies earned on RDR since 2014 just as much you could argue it about CoD and GTA. To counter you could just as well argue that Activision and R* not patching the CoD and GTA side makes it "official" too, which goes hand-in-hand with my point that it is the current state of the games and as such, people should not be punished for what is casually playing them. You argued you can't know if people purposely joined a mod lobby in CoD/GTA, but you can't know if people purposely joined an RDR infected lobby either.

 

Which brings the question do you really want to punish anyone who touches these games just for the off scenario they might be trophy hackers, or would you simply accept there are ten thousand other sets you can immediately go through and spot the actual hackers without dishing out collateral damage.

 

Unfortunately the leaderboards aren't clean and will never be, they're full of save imported and hacked trophies where the user was smart enough to make it look legit enough to not get caught. I can appreciate the reality and as such it doesn't bother me at all these games, in their current state, simply make impossible trophies possible while no smart hacker would invite attention like that. What you're only going to catch are the script kiddies, and they will be caught regardless we give leeway in this case because slapping a save on your console is pretty damn obvious.

 

But I'm not going to sway you over your ideals any more you're going to sway me over mine, was just saying. It's just another borderline scenario and I'd rather see all of them grudgingly accepted, or none at all. Otherwise it's not consistent and you have a case on PSNP targeting people based on franchise.

[Sergen]

1 hour ago, BigBossImBeamer said:

I agree with you, RDR and the Vita trick are grey areas. I don't like both of them, but I can't argue against it by logical reasons. I wouldn't use the Vita trick just because I don't want to expose myself to the risk of getting a ban from Sony.

It is right that the RDR servers once got hacked, but now they became a "official" part of the game by not removing it by Rockstar. You can exploit it with no active hacking. I would never do this, but I can't blame someone who does, especially after the decision was made that this is okay by the cheating rules.

 

With RDR, it's also a unique scenario with the fact that this website's published trophy guide includes the method that requires the infected lobbies as the best way to get to level 50. The guide is one of the most popular when it comes to number of user favourites and has been viewed over 23,000 times, I'm sure due to the promotion from this website's trophy guide a lot of people used that glitch, which also includes myself. Now while level 50 was easier, being in infected lobbies destroys many other parts of the game, such as gang hideouts and public death-match games and so on, people become invisible in the lobbies you play in and it takes a lot of retries until everyone is clean again. I see that the best method before an infected lobby suggests it took 8 hours of grinding to get to level 50 and I can say for damn sure I spent over 8 hours longer than I expected due to the broken multiplayer and not knowing a fix aside from rebooting the game many times. I always say that it basically promotes PSNProfiles as an unreliable source for trophy guides if something that has always been in the published guide ends up getting people flagged, considering this is the most influential website in regards to leaderboards. Because nobody was being flagged for this, there's nothing to white-list, but with the games that have modded lobbies such as Black Ops II, WaW and GTA V, too many people were flagged for PSNProfiles to decide to backtrack and unflag everyone and instead of unflagging those people I feel that their option is to instead keep it how it is to not over-complicate things for the flagging team. I see GTA V get unflagged regularly now, because when the level trophies auto-unlock they permanently affect stats for the game unless the person specifically requests Rockstar to reset the stats, but avoiding playing a game for days to wait for Rockstar to fix it is far too unreasonable when a modder can just apply the same hack a few minutes after. Although not intended, seeing a big H on a profile and indicating hidden trophies is somewhat embarrassing for a person to have to do, especially if they were a completionist, so if their flag was a white-list that didn't count towards their leaderboard rank it wouldn't really put the person to shame unless some really toxic people scrutinise their profile. 

Edited July 25, 2018 by Sergen

[HellMoodCole]

deleted

Edited April 8 by HellMoodCole

[ars]

The Vita trick is the only case where you actually hack your own system. None of the other cases involve any sort of proactive hacking on your part. This isn't about legitimizing anything because PSNP already set a precedent recommending joining modded lobbies with RDR. Ergo, PSNP is just happy to feature borderline cases on the leaderboards as said multiple times.

[MMDE]

34 minutes ago, ars said:

The Vita trick is the only case where you actually hack your own system. None of the other cases involve any sort of proactive hacking on your part. This isn't about legitimizing anything because PSNP already set a precedent recommending joining modded lobbies with RDR. Ergo, PSNP is just happy to feature borderline cases on the leaderboards as said multiple times.

 

In RDR you don't need to join moded lobbies. It's just to join the public and it's already gone to shit.

[ars]

Read above. They're all modded lobbies.

[Waddlingdan]

I’ve alqays chosen to do trophies legitimately even when you could boost them instead. It’s something I do, but a lot of others don’t. 

 

Point is community self impeding rules such as “don’t touch this and that” and not having a whitelist system really kills the experience for people, so if a person wants to play these games and get some unobtainable trophies then have them whitelist them, that way you’ll only see it if you go onto their profile - after all everyones to their own.

 

Point is when is the arguing gonna stop over this and we’ll see the feature implemented, because all these pressures and rules can really kill the experience of trophy hunting as people over think these things and can’t enjoy certain games.