Earning Trophies on 3rd Party, Independently Revived PSN Game Servers

[FlyingDutchmen85]

56 minutes ago, Elvick_ said:

And no, that's not what I'm saying. Don't be obtuse. I'm saying that if you deny something just because of how it might affect the leaderboards, then you should probably argue against removing them entirely. Because there's always going to be problems with it. You can't just arbitrarily say that x is bad because it could affect leadeboards, but y is fine despite it also having the same potential of affecting leaderboards. That's hypocritical. Hold the same standards. That's my point.

 

I honestly don't see the hypocrisy that you name. The leaderboards don't allow custom software, how is a custom server different?

I agree with holding the same standards, but I don't understand the double standard you see in this.

[Leaderboards]

14 hours ago, WaddysWDS said:

@MMDE, shut up your mouth and go clean the list of Aliens Vs Predator, which are all hackers.

 

Savage

Poor MMDE she take so much abuse lol ;(

 

Edited March 15, 2018 by Super Sand Virginia

[Zolkovo]

3 hours ago, Elvick_ said:

The entire point of a leaderboard is to show legitimate rankings. If any are illegitimate... then do the math.

 

So what are you saying? We shouldn't care about the integrity of the leaderboards at this point?

 

Outside in the real world the purpose of the Criminal Justice System is to deliver justice for all, by convicting and punishing the guilty and helping them to stop offending, while protecting the innocent. Some of the guilty inevitably slip through so by your logic should we abandon the system since it isn't 100% effective? Should we blindly embrace new proposals because the current system isn't thorough anyway? Should we just let people do whatever they want without deliberating potentially harmful scenarios or changes to ToS because not all the guilty are caught?

 

If this is too extreme of an analogy let's use the European football leagues. Some clubs have extremely wealthy owners and others are backed by generous investors. In all major leagues and cups across Europe you rarely see any of the teams outside the richest 3 winning (Italy - Juventus; Spain - Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletico; Germany - Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund; France - PSG; Monaco; England - Chelsea, Man City, Man Utd). So should the leagues be scrapped because the outcome is so predictable? Is it fair that not every club is on equal footing? On PSNP people with a lot of disposable income clearly buy trophies and end up in the higher ranks. So if that's frowned upon, then by the same logic there's little point in other clubs even trying since the league leaderboards are not "entirely legitimate". I wouldn't be surprised if there's plenty of cleverly disguised performance enhancement scandals that are yet to be uncovered as well to get an unfair advantage.

 

We're talking about fair play here, and not everyone will have access to these ad-hoc servers as the host is free to decide how long the server will be running for, how many people can be connected, who can be connected etc etc. I'm sure this comes at a cost too, after all nothing in life is free. Most likely, the host is piggybacking off a company's servers and this has some pretty serious legal ramifications. In the end if this is an openly accepted concept, people may only have a very small window in which to play online and this may not even be publicly advertised. As only a select few even have the knowledge and resources (as well as the interest) to set up something like this initially, you are putting a lot of faith into them when they are not officially endorsed and you're not protected.

 

In layman's terms, there could be a situation where a 3rd party server was only up for a week and in that time only a couple of people met the requirements such as being available, having the game etc. Now because of such a short window and a potentially unadvertised opportunity, it'd be difficult to distinguish between CFW use and earning them "legit" on the custom server.

 

As someone mentioned already, if this were to be approved it would most definitely have to be addressed on a case by case basis. There are plenty of examples where having a private server will make certain trophies infinitely easier e.g. KZ2.

 

I do have a question for people with a bit more knowledge and expertise in this field (@MMDE?). If you were the host of a server, would you be able to freely alter and modify statistics? A lot, if not most games store online character data on the server side so where does this information go now? Sure it's probably encrypted but for popular games people eventually breakthrough (like they do with SP save file mods). This would affect so many trophies.

 

Tl;dr: If you don't care for the legitimacy of the leaderboards as you seem to imply then I don't really see why you're posting here. Because if you do this and risk a flag then so what right?

Edited March 15, 2018 by Zolkovo

[TheLakota]

5 minutes ago, FlyingDutchmen85 said:

The leaderboards don't allow custom software, how is a custom server different?

 

I'll bite. The rules are not properly defined as of now to encompass revitalized -- or emulation, if you will, so as to avoid another novella from @MMDE -- servers. Rather, the rules as I see them cover CFW.

 

This is not CFW. 

 

If people want to shoot glitched bodies in a hacked RDR lobby or run debug mode on a Jak game to unlock trophies they otherwise wouldn't have earned legitimately, that's fine. But don't sit here on the same site and say using software to bring a game's online functionality back is cheating. THAT is hypocrisy. 

[DaivRules]

5 minutes ago, Zolkovo said:

 

So what are you saying? We shouldn't care about the integrity of the leaderboards at this point?

 

Outside in the real world the purpose of the Criminal Justice System is to deliver justice for all, by convicting and punishing the guilty and helping them to stop offending, while protecting the innocent. Some of the guilty inevitably slip through so by your logic we should abandon the system since it isn't 100% effective?

 

The flagging system here has roundly decided to not be like the US criminal justice system. The participants will only go so to compare it to major league sports rules. Those are the only comparisons that are legitimate in their eyes.

 

I happen to agree with Elvicks point that the Leaderboard is not flawless and shouldn’t be treated like it is. It also will never be flawless because it can’t. I think this attempt to squash the permission to consider these servers being legitimate for trophy time purposes is heavy handed and stems from denial that the Leaderboards here can, someday, be perfect. 

[MMDE]

20 minutes ago, TheLakota said:

 

I'll bite. The rules are not properly defined as of now to encompass revitalized -- or emulation, if you will, so as to avoid another novella from @MMDE -- servers. Rather, the rules as I see them cover CFW.

 

This is not CFW. 

 

If people want to shoot glitched bodies in a hacked RDR lobby or run debug mode on a Jak game to unlock trophies they otherwise wouldn't have earned legitimately, that's fine. But don't sit here on the same site and say using software to bring a game's online functionality back is cheating. THAT is hypocrisy. 

 

This is custom software that you run in your game... When I say it goes under the CFW rule, read it, and they are not exhaustive. 

 

 

^ This is what I refer to.

 

And using an in-game cheat code (the debug menu in Jak) has never been questionable at all. No idea why you even bring it up. I hope you realize that stuff is just about pressing the right buttons in the right order, and then you got access to it. Just an in-game feature people haven't known about before recently.

Edited March 15, 2018 by MMDE

[FlyingDutchmen85]

2 minutes ago, TheLakota said:

 

I'll bite. The rules are not properly defined as of now to encompass revitalized -- or emulation, if you will, so as to avoid another novella from @MMDE -- servers. Rather, the rules as I see them cover CFW.

 

This is not CFW. 

 

If people want to shoot glitched bodies in a hacked RDR lobby or run debug mode on a Jak game to unlock trophies they otherwise wouldn't have earned legitimately, that's fine. But don't sit here on the same site and say using software to bring a game's online functionality back is cheating. THAT is hypocrisy. 

 

I'm not saying that using a custom server to bring back a game's online functionality is cheating, not in the slightest. I'm saying it's uncontrolled and thus there is no way to judge the legitimacy of anything that is done on those servers. Since the legitimacy comes in question it can be flagged, I don't think that's hypocritical.

I do understand where you're coming from with other ways of earning trophies (like the debug modes you mention), and I agree it's a very gray area and fine line. I can understand where the line is currently drawn between in game exploits and external influence. Where the mentioned debug mode in Jak games falls just on one side and other things just on the other. Though I wouldn't personally use the debug mode, but that's a different discussion.

 

Also I don't think that bringing back a server for a game is a bad thing. I think it's great. Even achieving the trophies there is fine with me. But then comparing those trophies in a leaderboard becomes a different matter as you can't determine the legitimacy (not even the player him/herself).

[Van-Helsings]

Waiting on an official answer from mods right now before i start doing bulletstorm online trophies

[Ojama_Country]

This is a great thing which should absolutely be allowed. If we're going to be paranoid about BUT WHAT IF THE SERVERS ARE MODDED then you might as well apply that line of thinking to everything. After all, who can say if you earned ANY of your trophies, or if you just hacked them all and got creative with your timestamps? We might as well start demanding that people upload gameplay video of themselves unlocking every trophy they earn at that point. I'd rather have a way of earning previously unobtainable trophies - even with a small risk of a modded server or whatever - than having said trophies be permanently unavailable. This should absolutely be allowed, as it could breathe some fresh life into dead games, help people clean up some of their unobtainable plats, and generally provide a net gain to the community.

 

Out of curiousity, if the admins decide to listen to common sense and allowed revived servers, would it be possible to set up similar servers for upload-based trophies? As in, the ones you find in games like Bad Company or Saints Row 3, where all you have to do is literally push a button to upload something to a now-dead server. I can't possibly see how something as simple as THAT would be a problem for the sacred leaderboards. Because i'd really like being able to finally get the plat in Instant Artist.

Edited March 15, 2018 by Dorroile

[TheLakota]

34 minutes ago, Van-Helsings said:

Waiting on an official answer from mods right now before i start doing bulletstorm online trophies

 

Don't so it if you care about your spot on the board. Do it if you don't give a shit. You will get flagged. 

[Intresseklubben]

Wonder if this would work for a game like Motorstorm Pacific Rift. I've been disappointed for a few years (not constantly lol) that I missed the chance to platinum that game.

[FlyingDutchmen85]

18 minutes ago, Dorroile said:

Out of curiousity, if the admins decide to listen to common sense and allowed revived servers, would it be possible to set up similar servers for upload-based trophies? As in, the ones you find in games like Bad Company or Saints Row 3, where all you have to do is literally push a button to upload something to a now-dead server. I can't possibly see how something as simple as THAT would be a problem for the sacred leaderboards. Because i'd really like being able to finally get the plat in Instant Artist.

Edited 7 minutes ago by Dorroile

 

For (hypothetical) cases like this @MMDE's suggestion of a case-by-case regulation would work. It could allow simpler server like these, without needing a blanket approval of everything else.

 

More on point of your question; I don't think admins here will be bringing up servers for games themselves. Whether or not servers like you mention would get brought back, is highly dependent whether there is somebody out there with the knowledge, means and motivation to do so. Since it would be very specific and limited in use, I don't know how likely that would be.

[sepheroithisgod]

Without a doubt, this is a great thing for everyone! I think the argument that people may cheat is absurd. People already cheat. It doesn't mean everyone should suffer. One of the games with unobtainable trophies for me is Resistance 2's 10,000 kills trophy. I would love the opportunity to go back and finish it, but it's not possible. I would certainly be a fan of these servers being restored by any means, as long as the trophies could be earned legitimately. If Sony gave players the feature to delete games off of their PSN account, this method would not be needed.

[pinkrobot_pb]

It probably all depends on how the online functionality was implemented if it is possible to make a replacement for the server. Replacing a dedicated server that handles everything itself will probably prove a lot more difficult than only providing the lookup service. But if it is indeed just the connection service, I really do not see how that could be abused by anyone to give them free trophies. I should look into this Bulletstorm thing some more though.

 

On a personal note, with "games as a service" just around the corner, every action that will manage to save some of our current games for later should be applauded. This is a part of our culture, and where you can still play the retro games from years gone by and enjoy all of it, with the ever growing online part this will mostly not be true for today's games. If you're a gaming enhusiast, please welcome this and try to fit it into what you value today. Because I would hate it if someone shot this kind of thing down just to preserve their own rarity on some online profile that will be forgotten in ten years time anyway.

[Zolkovo]

@DaivRules I was in the middle of updating that post. The leaderboards will never be perfectly clean and that's a simple fact anyone with more brain cells than a Jellyfish can comprehend. I'm not trying to suppress the motion, but rather scrutinise it further. People are very excited by this concept at surface level and I'm on board with that, but you really need to probe deeper and consider all angles before embracing it with open arms.

[TheLakota]

1 hour ago, MMDE said:

And using an in-game cheat code (the debug menu in Jak) has never been questionable at all. No idea why you even bring it up.

 

I mentioned it because it's cheesy as fuck and indicative of the ridiculous lengths to which people go to maintain "legitimacy."

[Ojama_Country]

Another thing that confuses me about the admin reasoning is the implication that this could apparently be a problem not only due to potential modded servers, but also due to requiring third-party software on a PC. But it's still allowed to, for example, use remote play on PC and then initiate a third-party AutoHotKey script to get the jumprope trophy in FFIX. In fact that could be even worse in terms of legitimacy, since it wouldn't even be possible to tell if it was earned legit or not - whereas for revived online servers, you would at least KNOW that they earned the trophy past the original shutdown date and thus obviously used a revived server. While a case by case basis could work, i think issuing some sort of blanket ban on online servers would be at best inconsistent with other rules, and at worst an affront to a community that seems fairly positive towards the idea.

[Elvick_]

1 hour ago, Zolkovo said:

So what are you saying? We shouldn't care about the integrity of the leaderboards at this point?

Literally already addressed this, so I didn't bother to read your comment as you clearly did not read mine. Have a nice day.

[Zolkovo]

7 minutes ago, Elvick_ said:

Literally already addressed this, so I didn't bother to read your comment as you clearly did not read mine. Have a nice day.

 

I literally quoted your last post . There's plenty of things I've raised you haven't addressed.

[joskeabzu]

Since this topic is quite long I didn't bothered to read every post there was.

 

I guess some people are over exaggerating about this "MP revive of certain game(s)" For one Gamespy is more of a middleware to enable matchmaking as well as providing servers for games which can be dedicated servers(which require the servertools of said game) or games that use P2P which is hosted by the device you play on, PS3/PS4/etc.

It's highly unlikely that these "P2P revived MP games" are going to be changed compared to when they were up. Which I don't think it changed anything by the looks of it.

Still I highly doubt that this would work for games that actually require the "dedicated server tools", unless you have those of course but it's highly unlikely that devs/pub will release it. But I don't think that it's doable to revive those games, without extended knowledge or without the source code/tools to do so..

 

Maybe you should elaborate the answer to the question whether or not this "gamespy server" is a hack and what it defines as considered cheating. I guess the people who made the tools could easily tell what is happening and what it exactly is doing, which could answer the question whether or not it will change the game in anyway or not.. I believe it does not, but then again they could if they wanted too but staying true to the game should be its purpose.

 

On a side note I'd like to add:
I guess most people here don't know the golden times when games like Quake, Unreal Tournament (1999 - 2004), Return to castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault, Tribes, Day of Defeat, CoD 1 through 4 etc were highly popular. All these games had one thing in common you could set up your very own multiplayer server or have the ability to set up your own MP online server on a real server instead of your local PC. All for free.. Plus the fact that you could make your own maps or mod the game to make a complete new game like a Battlefield 1942 mod that changed the entire game into a modern war game instead of a WW2 game.

 

But nowadays no servertools or modtools except for a few games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim on PC have some of the greatest mods as well as others I may have forgotten.

Edited March 15, 2018 by joskeabzu

[B1rvine]

1 hour ago, Zolkovo said:

 

I do have a question for people with a bit more knowledge and expertise in this field (@MMDE?). If you were the host of a server, would you be able to freely alter and modify statistics? A lot, if not most games store online character data on the server side so where does this information go now? Sure it's probably encrypted but people eventually breakthrough. This would affect so many trophies.

 

 

Depending on the size and scope of their project, absolutely yes.

 

I didn’t quote you on the whole post, but you also summed up my short posts amazingly.

[ProfBambam55]

ok...let's forget about the "what ifs" and ridiculous extrapolation and analogies for a sec here...the case by case stuff is nonsense since there is only one case here to discuss at this point in time...just look at this... 

it's f**king amazing...if this guy gets flagged then I would consider our site to be a little odd in terms of how leaderboards are policed...even if the server is private and only this person can earn the trophies, it's incredible what they have achieved...hats off to their dedication...they deserve every trophy they earn imo...

 

and yes, of course they need a pc to run their server, that's kind of how servers work...that doesn't automatically make it cfw cheating as far as I'm concerned...they are totally playing and earning trophies within the boundaries of the game...unbelievable...

Edited March 15, 2018 by ProfBambam55

[Zolkovo]

3 minutes ago, ProfBambam55 said:

ok...let's forget about the "what ifs" and ridiculous extrapolation for a sec here...the case by case stuff is nonsense since there is only one case here to discuss at this point in time...just look at this...

 

The whole point of this thread is to explore all avenues and eventualities. What's the point of a discussion if people are just looking for a one-sided endorsement?

[ProfBambam55]

Just now, Zolkovo said:

 

The whole point of this thread is to explore all avenues and eventualities. What's the point of a discussion if people are just looking for a one-sided endorsement?

nah, it's just paranoid extrapolation...look at the current situation...it's pretty awesome...there are no avenues to explore...the above vids speak for themselves... 

[Helyx]

So, what's the deal here? Can I finally go finish the online DLC trophies for Bulletstorm?

 

Give us a damn straight answer so I can move on with my life.