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Malicious Player-Made DPS Meters


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One thing I commonly see while gaming is how common these seemingly harmless player-made programs are used for malicious acts.

Below is not an exhaustive list:

  • DPS meters are used to provide disinformation to change public opinions about players. It can provide the wrong measurement if whoever wrote the program seeks to alter the measurements of certain players to change public opinion about them to cause positive or negative actions to be taken against them by other players. Another way this can be used to provide disinformation is if the measurements are uploaded to a database and the data is altered by the users of the program or the data is altered by administrators of the database. These disinformation methods can be used for any variable such as damage per second measurements and animation speed measurements.
  • DPS meters are used to provide administrators with exclusive extra features such as giving them information about characters they normally wouldn't know in game or in-real time. It can provide information so that administrators that use the program are given information outside the scope they would know in game to evade strong players, follow players, or attack weakened players.

Surprisingly, most of the time, no one notices these things. I advise you not use these programs, as most of the time there is some ulterior motive to players writing these programs for the community and they have ulterior functions for the person who wrote the program. I advise you not to let your guard down, especially in this our community with many players who aggressively exploit everything - talking about both the NA and EU player base.

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It's weird how all of you are cool with timestamping every moment of everything you or people near you have ever done in the game, including those who didn't consent, and having it show in search engines. Oh, and installing a program that literally has control over your network traffic, along with a closed-source program that gets blocked by SmartScreen. This thing is a security and privacy nightmare. I just assume the entire community is computer illiterate. I think the Sith Lord is right for once.

It's also absurd that the anti-cheat allows sniffing the game's packets and cracking its packet encryption, the initial step in hacking. Why was this program allowed to exist.

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13 hours ago, Locke said:

It's weird how all of you are cool with timestamping every moment of everything you or people near you have ever done in the game, including those who didn't consent, and having it show in search engines. Oh, and installing a program that literally has control over your network traffic, along with a closed-source program that gets blocked by SmartScreen. This thing is a security and privacy nightmare. I just assume the entire community is computer illiterate. I think [he] is right for once.

It's also absurd that the anti-cheat allows sniffing the game's packets and cracking its packet encryption, the initial step in hacking. Why was this program allowed to exist.

Yes, that would be against terms of service. It is also against terms of service for these programs to give players advantages past the intended limits of the game. Even just crowd gathering information of nearby players from users of these programs to one person or more in real time enables the possibility of such information being used for gaining an advantage past the intended limits of the game and thus should be against terms of service.

Edited by Edict
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They could allow for ingame addons, like WoW, for dps meter if they bothered to care and this would have made the need for any 3rd party scam programs obsolete.

I wanted to try it one time and saw it required me to open the meter before I would login my char so that was a red flag for me and I never used it in my life.

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19 hours ago, Arhangelos said:

They could allow for ingame addons, like WoW, for dps meter if they bothered to care and this would have made the need for any 3rd party scam programs obsolete.

I wanted to try it one time and saw it required me to open the meter before I would login my char so that was a red flag for me and I never used it in my life.

I wasn't really talking about password stealing. I was more-so talking to how these programs can be used to cheat by the ones who wrote the program or their "friends", or spread disinformation. Less obvious stuff.

Edited by Edict
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On 1/16/2023 at 7:03 AM, Arhangelos said:

it required me to open the meter before I would login my char

Yeah, it's actually for cracking the game's encryption. The moment you log in is when it sends a key to decrypt further packets. I guess it's been known by the hacking community since Lineage. They reused the same code. It's pretty wild how much they don't care.

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