If you are interested:
4 Likes
Doomers were right, alex was right, VincentADK based, whitekidney loses again. Huzzah!
Your posting career in this forum has been consistently douchey.
Everlook groupie watch out, can only reply with name calling instead of forming an argument to make themselves look respectable.
1 Like
Please donât leave the server! This is just 1 nail in the coffin, whitekidney can redeem himself for the 10th time! Heâs an honest hard working chinese bot farmer, please he needs to feed his children!!
Well pissrat, you will have the last laugh. Itâs a large dose of cope no doubt. A side of cognitive dissonance, and healthy amount of tunnel vision.
Gatekeepers, because if someone disagrees with you, itâs easier to hurl insults instead of responding to arguments.
But maybe you are a doomer? A doomer who was right xD
Argument about what? Server is fine, with or without Wall. Sorry if you cannot cope with that.
2 Likes
server is fine
lead dev leaves team and oustâs whitekidney
says 2/3 of pop is chinese
whitekidney restricted lead dev from having access to data logs (cus corruption, no other reason)
whitekidney says "I hope the scene eventually takes a stance against those who aim to spread misinformation and lies about people/projects and set stronger demands towards providing evidence.â
caught selling gold, dupes, boosts and leaving projects and blaming community for their demise
literally history repeating itself
server is fine
1 Like
and when folks log on they will continue to play, oblivious to the hysterics you are pandering on this seldom viewed forum. Nary a hiccup.
Howâs that K4 population? lol
1 Like
says 2/3 of pop is chinese
Not true. Unfounded claims. These are Walls subjective opinions and is not based off of empirical data.
whitekidney restricted lead dev from having access to data logs
Wall was given access to the information he needed. There are 5 individuals with access to all logs, with 3 of them having full access to the underlying systems (Bastion, SQL replication & backup server, the game host itself and all databases) - Both the GM Lead and next in command have access to databases, including logs. Wall was provided with the information he asked for (GM logs) when he asked for it. His previous request was a full database dump of all logs, consisting of roughly 30-40GB worth of data was denied as it contains much more information than what he needed to have access to.
So not at any point in time have I been the only one with access to critical systems. This is categorically false.
caught selling gold, dupes, boosts and leaving projects and blaming community for their demise
literally history repeating itself
This never happen, what are you referring to? I have never been âcaughtâ doing anything. If you are referring to my ownedcore posts, they are posted on a public forum for everyone to see. Thereâs no getting âcaughtâ here. The posts are also 10+ years old and refer to me selling gold and botting services on retail and has nothing to do with my work on private servers. If you are attempting to gaslight or flame, you should do yourself the favor of actually spending 1-2 minutes looking into the content as it is posted, you clearly did not and it gives off a bad impression. There is not a single shred of evidence of me misusing privileged access on any private server project I have been a part of. I left Hyjal before it even launched due to personal issues and conflicts with the staff. During LHâs time I took a few breaks here and there, but ultimately ended up returning to service seeing the project through.
7 Likes
OK, watched the video. I agree with some, disagree with some.
The only thing that perhaps will negatively affect gameplay experience imho, is the prevalence of bots and the unwillingness to smash them as they are witnessed. Bots and multiboxers are indeed a heck of a lot worse than they were in the first week. They are glaringly obvious and seeing them so blatantly in advanced level zones is demoralizing as hell from a honest player standpoint. Add the slew of goldselling chat bots, it is snowballing rather fast.
Perception matters, and the perception (before even seeing Wall leave) is that botting, MBing, and Goldselling are spinning out of control.
3 Likes
Greetings adventurers,
In most cases we do not issue statements regarding staff members comings and goings.
It is not unnatural for people to come and go as time goes by, people get burned out or find other interests, sometimes there are conflicts, most times not.
However, in under these circumstances I feel obligated to respond to some of the statements made by a previous developer that has now decided to leave the project
in a rather unusual way.
I am deeply saddened by the fact that Wall now has chosen to spread screenshots of internal systems, private conversations and some of players private information on his Discord.
This only further proves our point that this individual could not be trusted with elevated access to more systems as it is highly likely that additional private information
would likely have been dumped online as well as âretaliationâ. This is a gross violation of the respect not only to us, but for the players, our integrity and other values that we as a project holds dear.
In this post, I will be addressing some of Wallâs claims and present the facts and information as-is so that the community can make its own educated opinion
about the state of the project, why we make certain decisions and how we will work going forward.
Wall has also made some egregious and factually false claims in his 1 hour long video that he posted on his YouTube channel and I thought Iâd take the time to address a few of his complaints as well as clearing up a number of things.
Wall as a developer
On numerous occasions, Wall attempted to fix several in-game bugs, some as many as 15 times before seemingly giving up and waiting for a proper vmangos fix by other developers.
While we always greatly appreciated Wallâs enthusiasm and dedication to the project, his inexperience and inability to properly test code before it was pushed to production also lead to unnecessary downtime and headaches for our playerbase.
This bug broke in-game announcements, anticheat announces and other server-wide announcement features, it was not patched until a independent developer properly fixed it a few days later
Untested code was one challenge, but the server didnât even compile on several occasions, which indicates that Wall never went through the effort of
setting up a local developer environment which is more similar to what we run in production (on live servers).
And while Wall has done some work tuning the database values of certain npcs and bosses, he has yet to provide an explanation of exactly what he changed and how he allegedly made things harder.
The initial agreement was that any modifications done to the default vmangos âworldâ database (Which contains information about NPCs health values, stats, loot, items etc) was supposed
to come as an additional migration, which is a SQL script that contains Everlook-modifications that we apply âon topâ of the vmangos database, Wall never delivered on this and only
sent us his âmaster scriptâ after leaving the project.
Instead, large database dumps were provided to us which makes traceability and auditing of the contents more challenging.
This is information that we requested from Wall at multiple occasions, but was never delievered, thus hindering any other developer from working on the project.
Wall also makes some factually false statements about how the client-side anticheat functions, such as clamining that you can bypass it entirely by renaming the executeable.
This is of course not possible and again speaks of Wallâs lack of understanding and inexperience with software in general.
Why was he âleadâ developer then?
I had a longer talk with Wall before we brought him onboard and he seemed like an individual with real and genuine passion for the game, which I still believe to this day. Make no mistake, what he has learned about private server development within such a short timeframe is great and I am sure that he will put his abilities to good use on other projects. However it was a mistake from the projects side putting such a great amount of trust in someone who clearly was not equipped to deal with a project of this magnitude. I had a lot of faith in Wall and decided to give him a chance, this has now come around to bite us in the ass, which is something I personally take responsibility for. In the end, itâs our playerbase that we have let down, as well as ourselves. We promise to do better.
The title is also largely irrelevant as Wall was the only developer for some time.
State of Mind
I would like to add that several members of the staff and players from the community contacted me on numerous occasions regarding some of Walls posts and paranoid behavior prior to our launch.
Some of the messages that were sent to me were almost too crazy to be true to begin with, but in hindsight Iâve seen that these are likely true statements, for example that
Wall has claimed that he previously has been hunted down and kidnapped by the FBI.
Unfortunately for us, this was something that only escalated rapidly post-release. This is a failure that I attribute only to myself as we saw warning signs early on, but did not act upon it until it was too late. Numerous developers that are related to the private server scene have also voiced their concerns to me via direct messages regarding his overly paranoid behavior during the past few weeks.
Unprofessional GM behavior
Wall was reprimanded by GM team members several times for his unprofessional behavior on his GM character.
He was found on numerous occasions to go visible to players without reason, often swearing and otherwise presenting a very unprofessional image of himself and our project,
This is also something that stretched to Discord communications with members of our community.
While anger and frustration sometimes takes over, none of us are perfect, Iâve said things to players I regret myself, but with Wall, this was a regular and often daily occurrence.
When Wall was approached with this criticism, he again blamed it on everyone else but himself and refused to change his behavior.
Why was some his bans reversed ?
There is a carefully developed process in place for banning accounts, this is to ensure that innocent people are not punished for something that they did not do.
However, Wall refused to follow this process and in many cases banned people without proper proof or documentation, making it impossible for anyone else on the staff to
verify that the bans are indeed legit. This is a hard requirement as we require a different individual than the one handing down the punishment to handle any potential ban appeal.
In other cases, no additional information was supplied with the ban, making it guesswork for the GMâs servicing the ban appeal figuring out why the user was banned in the first place:
Weâve got more examples of this, but this post is becoming rather lengthy already
Additionally, certain suspensions did not follow the punishment index that we have presented in our Terms of Use, such as permanent account closures for minor offenses.
It is important to the project that we treat all players equally, fairly and with respect.
Remember that these policies are in place to protect our players and they exist for good reasons.
Why wasnât Wall given access to more information (such as logs) ?##
Information is kept on a need-to-know basis, the Principle of Least Privilege is a principle that is the foundation of IT security in most organized companies.
This is to protect yourself from potential breaches and information leakage should there be any. To reiterate: This is common practice and nothing out of the ordinary.
As a developer with development tasks, there should be no apparent or obvious reason for why they should be granted automatic access to the wealth of trade, chat, IP, account and character logs that we
possess, we must remind you that we have a responsibility to our players in order to protect your private information, be it account names, emails, IP addresses or other logs.
The lead GM and the assistant lead GM reviews GM command logs weekly at minimum, but in some occasions daily. This is a process that we have had in place since Lightâs Hope.
If there are any suspicions of GM misconduct, the logs are reviewed immediately and action taken if necessary.
While we did have some initial problems with replication due to errors from my side (pebkac) and some from errors related to the gameserver, at no point in time did
logs âstopâ working or being written to the database as Wall has claimed.
This only emphasizes the problems with Wallâs inexperience and lack of understanding of how SQL replication and other backend systems work.
At some point, Wall contacted numerous staff members internally and claimed that I was selling gold, that he had proof and that he needed urgent access to the logs database.
His paranoia and lack of understanding lead him to jump to rather severe conclusions, which he presented as facts to internal staff members in order to get full access to all player logs, which is about 40GB worth of logs as of today.
Had such a dump of information been leaked online, it would have been the end of Everlook and Walls latest actions posting screenshots of internal systems, revealing private information
has only validated our fears and suspicions that one day, it would backfire on us.
Iâd also like to note out that the one and only time Wall asked me directly for GM logs (after confronting him about his paranoid outburst to other members of staff) - he was given a copy of the GM logs, as requested.
Eventually, his behavior resulted in the entirety of the staff team immediately questioning his intentions and state of mind, as these are very grave allegations that came without any form of proof.
Shortly after this incident, it was decided that Wall was going to be removed from the project and allow other more competent developers take over.
A small glimpse into our DB infrastructure
We have different systems for accessing logs:
- The production server database.
- Our two SQL replication servers - one of which is controlled by a separate member of the team.
- Directly from the website.
A failure from the replication server could look like this:
Or this:
The first error means that replication between the secondary node and the primary gameserverâs SQL database has paused due to an error running a SQL query, when it pauses and throws an error we can choose to ignore the error and continue replicating, as if nothing happen.
There is absolutely no loss of logs as claimed by Wall, the gameserver will simply fail to insert this singular log line into the log database and continue on.
The script that runs the underlying checks and backups are my own, so myself and the Sysadmin team are well aware of the status of our own infrastructure.
Bans and waves
There has also been some false claims surrounding bots and how we handle bans.
Usually, we never make a comment about how we handle investigations and bans, however weâd like to clear up some misconceptions.
What are banwaves?
Banwaves are delayed bans. Under certain circumstances, we may or may not decide to delay taking action against an account for violating our rules.
The reason for this is very simple: Itâs way more effective. This is a well established practice which has been in place for many years and is actively used by anticheat providers and game developers across many popular games.
Most of our bot bans comes as a result of server-side investigations. We spend a significant amount of time analyzing large datasets of logs in order to properly follow up on accounts that are either immediately banned or scheduled for a banwave, which in some cases may be during the same day, the next day, or x amount of days into the future.
Wallâs approach to dealing with bots was lackluster and a half-effort at best. Weâve identified numerous people who were innocently banned because Wall did not go through the proper processes of actually validating that these people were in fact, bots. While he may have spent some time manually moving around in the game world in order to manually detect bots and ban them, this is a very time consuming and very inefficient approach. If this is the approach we wanted to take to combat bots, we would need an army of GMs constantly watching every single zone in the game. With limited time and resources available to the project as staff members also have other real-life obligations, we need to spend our time effectively on the best possible approach that will give us positive results mid and long term. We are not going to seek out short term wins if this negatively affects the server long term.
Most of the staff has 5+ years of experience running high-population servers and we have tried multiple strategies up throughout the years, we have a good idea what works and what does not. While the end result of this might give you the impression that some bots are not being dealt with immediately - you can be sure that actual investigative work is going on behind the scenes in order to determine the full scope of the offense, which in many cases also include gold laundering, botting for-profit or other illicit activities that carry graver consequences for the server outside of the initial botting offense itself.
Whatâs next?
As I have previously mentioned, Wallâs departure does not affect the project in any way. Preparations were already being made behind the scenes to phase him out of the project before he left anyways and our new lead developer Neto, which has much more experience with c++ and the emulator itself has taken over and is already pushing out new code and bug fixes.
3 Likes
Iâm sure at it comes as no surprise that none of us wanted to say anything that might have encouraged further unpredictable behavior. This specific message is related to us wanting to set up a jenkins pipeline to compile and test the server under proper conditions. Like vmangos already has in place.
Why would you limit the main person that is making the server what is from having total access?
This is explained very well in the post.
Are you now secretly planning to âphase outâ the Community Manager who would have ".kick"ed his âcompetitionâ, or as you put it - âChinese botsâ, if it were possible, for ingame advantages?
1 Like
So while a developer who had players on his own PTR testing the future Everlook server, this person has obtained well over 100IPâs already; the statement made that this person is a potential liability to the security of the communities personal information is almost asinine, Wall has a lot of close contacts with players who looked forward to a true vanilla experience, I myself speak to Wall regularly and from what I have obtained personally I do not see Wall as a depraved character out to seek the ill-welfare of the community; I do not see this person as someone who has ulterior motives against the server he helped build for fans of vanilla to play on, it was designed with the idea of capsuling WoW before TBC released in its truest form.
1 Like
Iâd just like to interject for a moment. What youâre referring to as ineptitude, is in fact, an inability to do my job, or as Iâve recently taken to calling it, shady behavior. Everlook is not a finished system unto itself, but rather another fork of a partially functioning VMaNGOS system made useful by Brotalnia, cmangos developers, and vital contributors comprising a full emulation project as defined by server developers.
Itâs a bit funny how the most time WK has spent on Everlook has been the past 3 days, running a smear campaign against me. So Iâd like to address his post, point-by-point:
On numerous occasions, Wall attempted to fix several in-game bugs, some as many as 15 times before seemingly giving up and waiting for a proper vmangos fix by other developers.
He says that it often took me 15 attempts to fix a bug. Yes - thatâs often how it is. Every time I would fix triage, players would find a new way to break it. The event is scripted for CMaNGOS and backported into VMaNGOS, which has different functions and variables called. There are some issues with backporting code from a different project. And unfortunately, since we donât have any production server running (as I have requested for quite some time), the only way for me to test content is on my own computer. Which means that, for example, if the triage NPC only breaks due to a specific classesâ ability or unit_field_flags then it may slip past in testing.
This bug broke in-game announcements, anticheat announces and other server-wide announcement features, it was not patched until a independent developer properly fixed it a few days later.
As for the SendWorldText; That was the last update I was in the process of working on before deciding the leave the project, and it was pushed in an unfinished state. 4 commits are listed, because they each include parts of the fix progressively. Iâll often reset the head and run it all as one commit at the end, but this was at the end of my tenure so I hadnât bothered.
Untested code was one challenge, but the server didnât even compile on several occasions, which indicates that Wall never went through the effort of
setting up a local developer environment which is more similar to what we run in production (on live servers).
This is true. I did not take time out of my day to install dual-booted Ubuntu and recompile all my code for a meme Linux OS that WK insists on using, against the advice of all the developers. When the project opened, both Gummy and I asked multiple times to use Windows for better crash analysis and debugging; Although Linux is powerful, it does not have the same support or features that a proprietary OS like Windows offers, which is why you rarely find any corporation or business using Linux. Ironically enough, the person who wrote that commit which failed to build was Namreeb - the same guy who fixed the SendWorldText that he talks about. So the argument he is making applies to both of us, and I doubt heâd try to smear Namreeb (who is a professional programmer with infinitely greater skill than I). The build failed because the anticheat modules used types and functions which are not compatible with Linux, and Namreeb was forced to re-write the anticheat to be compatible with a lesser system.
And while Wall has done some work tuning the database values of certain npcs and bosses, he has yet to provide an explanation of exactly what he changed and how he allegedly made things harder.
The initial agreement was that any modifications done to the default vmangos âworldâ database (Which contains information about NPCs health values, stats, loot, items etc) was supposed
to come as an additional migration, which is a SQL script that contains Everlook-modifications that we apply âon topâ of the vmangos database, Wall never delivered on this and only
sent us his âmaster scriptâ after leaving the project.
It was known from the beginning on how mob values were converted; I took the highest values from either classic or LH and used them for Everlook. Here is the macro used - you need to have VMaNGOS database and LH database on your SQL server, and then simply run this script:
UPDATE
mangos.creature_classlevelstats T1, mangos2.creature_classlevelstats T2
SET
T1.melee_damage = T2.melee_damage
WHERE
T1.class & T1.level = T2.class & T2.level && T1.melee_damage < T2.melee_damage;
Do that for each stat block you wish to compare and update (such as armor, health, mana, etc).
I would like to add that several members of the staff and players from the community contacted me on numerous occasions regarding some of Walls posts and paranoid behavior prior to our launch.
Some of the messages that were sent to me were almost too crazy to be true to begin with, but in hindsight Iâve seen that these are likely true statements, for example that
Wall has claimed that he previously has been hunted down and kidnapped by the FBI.
WK can keep claiming Iâm crazy and trying to gaslight, but Iâll happily speak openly about everything and anything. Iâm not one to hide things - I believe in total transparency. And anyone who was in Wallcraft discord during April of this year already knows the story; I was incarcerated this year after witnessing a protection racket being carried out. A homeless man attempt to break into a building which I was parked outside of while in New York, before attempting to carjack me. I was subsequently arrested and charged for defending myself, despite multiple witnesses telling the responding officers that I was an innocent bystander. As it turns out, he was a confidential law informant who was being paid to vandalize a local venue which wasnât paying protection money, and I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was held in jail for approximately 2 hours, before being brought in front of a judge who charged me with felony possession of a handgun (of which I legally owned in my home state of NC). Upon being released, three gentlemen who were high-profile businessmen, lawyers and politicians were waiting outside the courthouse for me. I was told to get in a car with them, where they took me to a mansion which they were running a political campaign from. I was then forced to work for the NYS Democrat party for 4 months, handling paperwork for a congressional election. After the election, my charges were completely dropped - because thatâs how the game is played in America. Find someone useful, blackmail them and get them to do your bidding. I still wait for the day where one of them shows up at my front door, telling me that they have another job for me to do. I pray they never do.
If Christian wants to bring up my personal life, I should kindly remind him that he inadvertantly doxed himself when using his personal google drive account to download database updates from me. I would think that heâd be smarter than that.
Numerous developers that are related to the private server scene have also voiced their concerns to me via direct messages regarding his overly paranoid behavior during the past few weeks.
I have a collection of screenshots from staff which they had sent, showing that whitekidney had spent the last two weeks telling people on staff that I was âunhingedâ in an attempt to discredit me. Everyone seemed shocked to hear that from him, and we all know what it is. The moment I began prying into auditing being done on GM command usage logs, he started telling everyone that I was crazy and dangerous.
There is a carefully developed process in place for banning accounts, this is to ensure that innocent people are not punished for something that they did not do.
Yes, much time is wasted banning mass bot farms when we have to file paperwork for each ban. Itâs a terrible waste of time, but these people donât mind wasting time. Which is why theyâve spent the past 3 days trying to assassinate my character instead of banning bots or goldspammers in chat. Also, the picture he posts is very clear; B = bot. We are yelled at for posting any âcritical informationâ directly in the ban, so I just abbreviate things by letter (b = bot, gs = goldspam, etc).
As a developer with development tasks, there should be no apparent or obvious reason for why they should be granted automatic access to the wealth of trade, chat, IP, account and character logs that we
possess, we must remind you that we have a responsibility to our players in order to protect your private information, be it account names, emails, IP addresses or other logs.
Iâve never requested access to anything besides the World Database, which is a carbon copy of what I develop locally, and to the logs_player table which contains no information other than IP - which I can see using ingame commands already. There is no sensitive information on that table besides that. What that table does contain, however, is every command used in-game by GMs.
At some point, Wall contacted numerous staff members internally and claimed that I was selling gold, that he had proof and that he needed urgent access to the logs database.
I messaged a few staff members with concerns over the logs_player table backups failing. At this point, I was growing concerned over what I thought may be corruption.
Iâd also like to note out that the one and only time Wall asked me directly for GM logs (after confronting him about his paranoid outburst to other members of staff) - he was given a copy of the GM logs, as requested.
I asked BullyMully for a copy of logs_player, and he happily began transferring it for upload. WK showed up 3 hours later and canceled the upload, told Bully not to give me that information, and then disappeared for a day. After that, he DMed me and I confronted him directly about it. He tried to gaslight me for 30 minutes saying that he thinks Iâm unhinged and that my accusations of shady behavior are unfounded. I asked for the logs_player table to audit, and he gave it to me - almost one week later. I donât know why it took a week to get me that table, or what the delay possibly could have been. But at that point, I didnât care to even speculate as I knew I was done working with these people. I still havenât even bothered to open it because I automatically assume itâs been edited by him.
Really though, I donât understand what this is all about. I said what I needed to say in the video so that people could have closure as to why I left, and moved on to Wallcraft. Iâve been chillin out there with a few dozen people for the past 3 days, without a care or concern in the world. The most relaxed Iâve been in months. Meanwhile, the amount of damage control and panicking I see coming from over here is really confounding. Why not just focus on fixing the issues I raised in my video instead of wasting time attacking me. Not very professional at all.
2 Likes
https://i.imgur.com/frSaPVV.jpg reminder to anyone that still trusts anything coming out of this persons mouth
