Jislan Veteran ++

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1 - 03-31-2004, 21:38 edit: december 5th, 04:

A few things have changed since I originally wrote this. First, Andrew has since released



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First let me get it out of the way: Tribes is dead, too little too late, who cares, just let it go.



Why am I writing this? Why do I care? I'm leaving for the airforce in five days and it's a possibility I may never play the game of tribes again come Monday. The 5150 servers are supposedly being switched to unreal tournament servers after the throwback tournament is complete. There's hardly any organized 10 on 10 competition left outside of the tournament. All signs point to the inevitable death of tribes. So again, why do I write this post? Because I've enjoyed the game of tribes for nearly five years and even though I may possibly be parting ways with it, I wish to see its continuation. I want to see it live on longer not only because there's a remote chance I might be able to play it on base, but because there are people just like me who've invested a lot of time in the game and don't wish to see it die yet. There are people like me who enjoy spending a couple hours a week casually playing on pubs. So if you are like me, read on.



CLIFF NOTES:



The first section of this post is a look at interpolation. I decided to write this section partly due to the fact that many vets coming back for the throwback tourney don't really seem to have any idea of what it is or understanding of how it came about. I also wrote it because there is still confusion as to whether it is a cheat or not and I wish to clear that up because it bugs me. :p The second section is somewhat of a plea for people to help correct the amount of happy mod cheating taking place, because I feel it is destroying the game more than anything else.



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I began playing tribes in december of 1998. I've played for three tribes that made it into the top 10 in the heyday of the OGL, including the Pissed Off Ewoks. In order to concentrate on my grades, work, and other rl stuff, I took a break from gaming in early 2001. I came back to tribes in October of 2002 and played for |Fallen on TWL. The game had not changed much since I left, other than old players were better and players whom I had never heard of were now good.



On January 24th, 2003, a thread made by Andrew was pointed out to myself and the rest of fallen by Snakes. Here's a snippet from his initial post:



http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/show...603605#3603605

Quote: Originally Posted by [meph]DooM! A while ago I found out about a couple neat T1 variables, $net::interpolatetime (default 64 and $net::predictforwardtime (default 0). I noticed that if you set $net::interpolatetime to 0, you would get less "fakies", not only for your disc, but also chain (rubber bullets), and possibly other weapons as well, although they are harder to notice fakies for...



http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/show...036983#6036983

Quote: Originally Posted by Fool Interpolate:



Tribes, like many first person shooters, has a setting where the game predicts player locations. In other words what you see on the screen is not actually where the player is located according to the server, but rather where your computer predicts the player is based on the information coming from the server. This allows you to have very fluid gameplay even if someone has a slow computer or connection.



Turning off this setting allows for much more accurate aiming, as you see exactly where the player is, but it tends to make player movement look shakey or jittery.



The advent of interpolation (or rather the advent of turning it off) not only changed pubs, it also had a profound impact in organized competition. According to andrew's



You cannot argue that tribes hasn't changed since Andrew's post, but is interpolation a cheat? I have always held the opinion that it is not. Here are a couple of arguments I support:



http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/show...208385#4208385

Quote: Originally Posted by R@ND0M Interpolation was CODED into Tribes, AND half-life, AND quake, sof, warcraft, and ANY other multiplayer game ever designed. It's called ' Prediction ', and without it, multiplayer games appear laggy as **** (remember Doom 2?). It's not hardcoded into games, because it was designed to be adjusted according to your ping...



...As for an Interpolation setting to use, The default is 64msInterpolation. And the "0" just minimizes that setting, Tribes stillhas a ****load of hard-coded prediction. It's virtually like FOV, in the aspect that the setting you use is ENTIRELY based on personal preference. Anybody remember the threads when the FOV command was discovered in Quake? Or when people called 120 FOV a cheat, because it allowed you to see more of the screen. It's as much as a cheat as changing your Field of Vision is, and LESS of a cheat than jump.cs is. http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/show...037074#6037074

Quote: Originally Posted by Fool ...Interpolation has nothing to do with the chaingun specifically. You aim more accurately with every weapon because the game itself is not telling you where people are. You're seeing the true location. That's the whole point. The reason the setting is there is because when the game was made, computers were not all capable of running it perfectly. Broadband wasn't as widespread. It was there to smooth it out, even if that meant faking locations.



Now there's little point to having it turned on. You don't need the game to predict it for you, your computer and connection are most likely fast enough to do it without any trouble... You aren't increasing your skill when you interpolate. You are justaiming correctly, as opposed to aiming incorrectly because your tribesis predicting incorrectly.



Interpolating is not a cheat, but it does show how unbalanced the chaingun is.



Is tribes different now? Definitely. Is it better? I don't know. One thing is certain, the game is infinitely faster with interpolate, and capping requires more skill, escorting, and faster routes than ever before. This leads to much enjoyment on good pubs and a lot of headaches and frustration on bad pubs (GO OFFENSE MORONS). Learn to adapt to it. The ever changing nature of tribes is part of its appeal.



Now, let's discuss the real problem in tribes



There is a cheat that possesses the ability to ruin pubs and unbalance matches. It's easily accessible and very simple to use... and no, it's not interpolation. It's a program named happymod, developed by happy, formerly of the tribe NuTz. In addition to happymod, he made the infamous happyflag and I believe he and another member of NuTz made an autobeacon script for mortar spamming as well. I don't know exactly when happymod was released, but it's been around for a while in tribes 1 and is also present in tribes 2. It's nothing new, but I find it surprising how many people either don't know what it idoes and/or realize how prevalent it is in tribes.



Happymod does two things: Turns off fog

Enables every enemy to have a visible red triangle and health meter above them no matter where they are on the map (through hills, buildings, etc)

A demo of happymod in action



Happymod grants a huge advantage to the player who's using it. The two most important attributes a tribes player can possess are intelligence and awareness. Happymod basically negates the need to be aware because the player is literally omniscient to every other player's location, movement, and health status. Defensive players using happymod have the upper hand over offensive players. They can see cappers coming from any angle, height, or speed and when chasing the capper, they always know his position. Happymod also greatly helps with chaining and sniping, because you always have a target to fire at and it's easier to predict player movements when they have a nice big red triangle over them at all times.



Like I said before, happymod has been around for a while, but it hasn't been noticeably abused by a large number of tribes players (at least noticed by me) until LT came out. LT in effect aggravated the use of happymod because there are no sensors in LT and everyone spawns with an energy pack, so this actually gives an advantage to cappers. To compensate for this, defensive players have been using happymod to give themselves the leg-up again.



There rarely is a pub I play on these days where I don't suspect at least one person on the enemy defense of happymod'ing. It's EXTREMELY frustrating when it doesn't matter what angle or speed you approach the flag from, one person always knows where and when you're coming and mine discs you at the exact time you touch the flag, even if he can't "see" you coming (read: standing on the opposite side of the base on DX... standing at the flag tower on RD on the opposite side of the pillar thing so that there's no possible way for him to know you're coming, etc...). I'm not being paranoid about it either, I've played the game long enough that I know I can tell the difference between what is actual skill and what is happymod.



I don't know how technically feasible a punkbuster of sorts for tribes would be, and I doubt anyone has the gumption to spend the time to make one even if it is feasible. So my solution so far has been to publicly out everyone I see cheating. Ask anyone who knows me, I accuse a lot of people. Only two people have been caught of happymod'ing that I know of so far (TSI and Carnova), but there are a lot more and frankly I think most of the active tribes players know it, but choose to ignore the problem. If you guys want to keep tribes alive longer, it is my suggestion that players need to out the cheaters publicly on servers and/or gather evidence and post it on TW ala what redspider did by demoing carnova. Tribes is one of the few FPS around where there's a close knit community to monitor the integrity of other players. Reputation is important here. That's one of the reasons why cheating has been relatively sparse up to this point compared to other games, imo. Let's try to be proactive before happymod becomes any more of a nuisance than it already is.



btw, if anyone has any further suggestions on how to help keep tribes alive, feel free to discuss. :p



[poe]-jislan aka j. sparrow A few things have changed since I originally wrote this. First, Andrew has since released Last Hope , which for the most part has eliminated the cheating that was once rampant in what was left of T1. But since everyone has decided to once again flood the servers because of the Legends movie, I thought I'd refresh everyone's memories of what to look out for, especially those who haven't played in a long time. I don't know if people are interpolating or not anymore (nor do I care) but I know for a fact that there are a few people using a work-around of happy mod.--First let me get it out of the way: Tribes is dead, too little too late, who cares, just let it go.Why am I writing this? Why do I care? I'm leaving for the airforce in five days and it's a possibility I may never play the game of tribes again come Monday. The 5150 servers are supposedly being switched to unreal tournament servers after the throwback tournament is complete. There's hardly any organized 10 on 10 competition left outside of the tournament. All signs point to the inevitable death of tribes. So again, why do I write this post? Because I've enjoyed the game of tribes for nearly five years and even though I may possibly be parting ways with it, I wish to see its continuation. I want to see it live on longer not only because there's a remote chance I might be able to play it on base, but because there are people just like me who've invested a lot of time in the game and don't wish to see it die yet. There are people like me who enjoy spending a couple hours a week casually playing on pubs. So if you are like me, read on.The first section of this post is a look at interpolation. I decided to write this section partly due to the fact that many vets coming back for the throwback tourney don't really seem to have any idea of what it is or understanding of how it came about. I also wrote it because there is still confusion as to whether it is a cheat or not and I wish to clear that up because it bugs me. :p The second section is somewhat of a plea for people to help correct the amount of happy mod cheating taking place, because I feel it is destroying the game more than anything else.--I began playing tribes in december of 1998. I've played for three tribes that made it into the top 10 in the heyday of the OGL, including the Pissed Off Ewoks. In order to concentrate on my grades, work, and other rl stuff, I took a break from gaming in early 2001. I came back to tribes in October of 2002 and played for |Fallen on TWL. The game had not changed much since I left, other than old players were better and players whom I had never heard of were now good.On January 24th, 2003, a thread made by Andrew was pointed out to myself and the rest of fallen by Snakes. Here's a snippet from his initial post:What is interpolation exactly? Fool explain it in laymen's terms:I tried out this new tweak and noticed an immediate improvement in the efficiency of my chaingun. I was never much of a chainer, so while my accuracy with the gun was improved, I wasn't exactly whoring people. However, lecatpuke, already an accomplished chainer (remember kZ anyone?), began just destroying everything in sight with his chain on pubs and claimed he could whore anyone from full health to nothing from any angle in under three seconds... and did. That's when I realized just how much this new "discovery" was going to change tribes. Within a week or two of Andrew's post, you had players like sarcastick and nazgul - two players in particular that I NEVER saw chain much if at all before - suddenly running around pubs getting 40 chain kills per map. Everyone and their brother was now trying to be a chainwhore.The advent of interpolation (or rather the advent of turning it off) not only changed pubs, it also had a profound impact in organized competition. According to andrew's t1 stats website , 57 of the top 100 chaingun performances in match/scrim play occurred AFTER his post about interpolation on January 24th, 2003. That post was made FOUR YEARS after the game was released. Now, Andrew's website doesn't contain the statistics of every single match/scrim ever played, but it's an extremely good benchmark for our purposes. One interesting thing I noted: of the 43 cg performances that took place prior to andrew's post, 19 of them (meaning 42% of those 43 performances) were by Jaymz, who had actually known about and tweaked his interpolation settings (although I have no idea what the time frame was when he did or to what degree he tweaked his settings).You cannot argue that tribes hasn't changed since Andrew's post, but is interpolation a cheat? I have always held the opinion that it is not. Here are a couple of arguments I support:Interpolation is nothing but another intentionally customizable feature of the tribes engine. Playing with interpolation on these days is the equivalent of still playing tribes with your network settings set for modem instead of T1 or greater. You're just squandering the capability of your bandwidth.Is tribes different now? Definitely. Is it better? I don't know. One thing is certain, the game is infinitely faster with interpolate, and capping requires more skill, escorting, and faster routes than ever before. This leads to much enjoyment on good pubs and a lot of headaches and frustration on bad pubs (GO OFFENSE MORONS).Learn to adapt to it. The ever changing nature of tribes is part of its appeal.Now, let's discuss the real problem in tribesThere is a cheat that possesses the ability to ruin pubs and unbalance matches. It's easily accessible and very simple to use... and no, it's not interpolation. It's a program named happymod, developed by happy, formerly of the tribe NuTz. In addition to happymod, he made the infamous happyflag and I believe he and another member of NuTz made an autobeacon script for mortar spamming as well. I don't know exactly when happymod was released, but it's been around for a while in tribes 1 and is also present in tribes 2. It's nothing new, but I find it surprising how many people either don't know what it idoes and/or realize how prevalent it is in tribes.Happymod does two things:Happymod grants a huge advantage to the player who's using it. The two most important attributes a tribes player can possess are intelligence and awareness. Happymod basically negates the need to be aware because the player is literally omniscient to every other player's location, movement, and health status. Defensive players using happymod have the upper hand over offensive players. They can see cappers coming from any angle, height, or speed and when chasing the capper, they always know his position. Happymod also greatly helps with chaining and sniping, because you always have a target to fire at and it's easier to predict player movements when they have a nice big red triangle over them at all times.Like I said before, happymod has been around for a while, but it hasn't been noticeably abused by a large number of tribes players (at least noticed by me) until LT came out. LT in effect aggravated the use of happymod because there are no sensors in LT and everyone spawns with an energy pack, so this actually gives an advantage to cappers. To compensate for this, defensive players have been using happymod to give themselves the leg-up again.There rarely is a pub I play on these days where I don't suspect at least one person on the enemy defense of happymod'ing. It's EXTREMELY frustrating when it doesn't matter what angle or speed you approach the flag from, one person always knows where and when you're coming and mine discs you at the exact time you touch the flag, even if he can't "see" you coming (read: standing on the opposite side of the base on DX... standing at the flag tower on RD on the opposite side of the pillar thing so that there's no possible way for him to know you're coming, etc...). I'm not being paranoid about it either, I've played the game long enough that I know I can tell the difference between what is actual skill and what is happymod.I don't know how technically feasible a punkbuster of sorts for tribes would be, and I doubt anyone has the gumption to spend the time to make one even if it is feasible. So my solution so far has been to publicly out everyone I see cheating. Ask anyone who knows me, I accuse a lot of people.Only two people have been caught of happymod'ing that I know of so far (TSI and Carnova), but there are a lot more and frankly I think most of the active tribes players know it, but choose to ignore the problem. If you guys want to keep tribes alive longer, it is my suggestion that players need to out the cheaters publicly on servers and/or gather evidence and post it on TW ala what redspider did by demoing carnova. Tribes is one of the few FPS around where there's a close knit community to monitor the integrity of other players. Reputation is important here. That's one of the reasons why cheating has been relatively sparse up to this point compared to other games, imo. Let's try to be proactive before happymod becomes any more of a nuisance than it already is.btw, if anyone has any further suggestions on how to help keep tribes alive, feel free to discuss. :p