"Ghost Realm" discussion/PSA

#1

[split from https://www.realmeye.com/forum/t/is-a-legitimate-high-eff-fametrain-possible/47389]

for those of you unaware, deca seems to be cracking down on “fame exploiters”, and most people are interpreting this to mean fame trains in general. but there’s a much much more important part to the story that isn’t immediately obvious since deca and the closed testers have been avoiding talking about this until now. letting people know that we knew about the issue would have made dispensing bans more difficult. r4 has commented explaining the issue on reddit, but it seems many people still haven’t seen it.

anyone who’s been banned for “fame exploiting” was not banned just for using or benefitting from autoaim idler bots, or anything like that. some people discovered how to create and access a “ghost realm”, a realm that the server creates and runs like normal, but does not have an entrance portal in nexus. accessing these ghost realms could only be done with a special hacked client command (/goto ip or something like that). this means that these people could create a private realm to do whatever they wanted to do, so they set up super high efficiency fame trains (or should I say… Maximum Effeciency :sunglasses:) in these realms with idler bots and /follow bots and all that jazz. nearly fully automated fame farming with absurd rates all done completely privately in a place that should never be private. anyone who even went into those realms was 100% hacking, there is absolutely no defense against this because it was fully impossible for a legit player to access them at all. there is a ton of evidence against these guys, and the list of players to be banned has been checked, re-checked, extra-checked, and checked again to ensure all the names were correct (especially to avoid mixing up capital i and lowercase L). this also means that anyone who has been banned for “fame exploiting” in the recent ban wave was also 100% guilty of accessing those realms no matter how badly they protest.

idler bots and fame bots are still no good and need to go, but they are not the only reason why people are getting banned this time.

Is a legitimate high eff fametrain possible?
Is a legitimate high eff fametrain possible?
#2

first I have heard of a ghost realm. Its good that they are banning people that are using it.

#3

Is the maximum effeciency LH discord related, and/or do they do questionable things?

#4

Why doesn’t DECA take 2 minutes to tell us this? Why do they ban a ton of people and not explain the situation? I just found out about this when I checked reddit this morning and was outraged that DECA seemed to me to be banning people willy-nilly for fame training. And unlike the ice tomb fiasco a while ago, they don’t make money from staying silent; if anything, they lose money from people like me who found something huge to grab hold of to hate on DECA and justify the hatred I and others for them for other stuff. This morning I thought DECA was going to kill the game through their incompetent actions. Now, I fear they will kill it through losing our trust and not communicating with the community.

#5

They explained the situation, but in a comment on a thread somewhere rather than a sticky PSA.

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#6

I would think it’s to protect the Realm and players. If DECA or others give details too soon, before it is fixed, then normally well behaved players might be tempted to try it, causing more disruption and leading them to be caught up in the banning wave.

Not giving out details publicly stops it spreading further, and ensures those banned truly deserve it as they clearly got the info and the hacked client from an illegitimate source.

For how not to do it see the recent NexusPortal problem. That was relatively harmless but still highly annoying, disruptive and offensive (as people used it to get around the profanity filter), all because people were able and willing to discuss how to do it before it was fixed, so spreading it across all of the realms.

#7

I did see that after doing some searching in the morning. However, I thought it was talking about manipulating spawns with idlers using hacked clients. I had never heard of “ghost realms” before this, so I thought it was just a silly name given to realms where fame trains are. I guess after reading Xaklor’s message, I can understand the message a little more, but before I thought it was saying we knew we were in the wrong for being in a train with idlers using clients.

#8

If you say “this is an issue that’s happening right now. We can track everybody who goes into the ghost realms. Don’t do it or we ban you,” then you don’t get to complain or claim innocence if you get banned. The nexus portal thing was extremely public; if you saw the glitch you knew how it worked. With ghost realms, most players didn’t even know they were a thing. If you are going to bring light to the issue with a ban wave and all the uproar that will inevitably bring, you should explain the issue so your community doesn’t turn on you. If anything, clearly explaining the issue and how easy it is to track and threatening bans will decrease the number of people who participate in it.

#9

They could have done that, yes. But they did not, they instead gave only a vague description, enough for those involved to understand, but not enough for those not involved to work it out.

I prefer they do it this way. I am curious about how hacks work – as a programmer I find many of the underlying issues interesting – but I quite understand that there are often good reasons not to reveal details. E.g. many of these hacks are related to each other, so revealing more details even after the exploit is fixed might help people find other similar exploits.

Duping is a good example. There have been many instances of this, obvious from the way they’ve impacted the economy. But DECA have never published details of how they work, as far as I know. We only have some idea from changes that have been made to stop duping, such as stopping trading after the Realm has closed, and having rarer items always drop in SB bags.

#10

It is possible to access a (type of) ghost realm on a prod client. For the record, I doubt anyone banned was legit and even if they were, they willingly became part of a boat train which should be ban-worthy.

From my own experience with event farming in usw2, a realm becomes “ghost” when it’s closed but for whatever reason its portal never respawns in nexus, preventing anyone (on prod client) from entering it. However, if you are in a dungeon when the realm goes to oryx, you can use the exit portal to rejoin the realm which is now ghost.

I don’t know if all ghost realms arise like this (in particular, the ghost realms abused by boaters) but at least for this type of ghost realm it is possible to access it on a prod client.

#11

I always end up in Nexus when I do this.

#12

For me, it’s 50/50. I did that during the Easter events to take advantage of the (at the time) empty realms, but all the times I tried, the realm reopened within five minutes if not instantly.

#13

That’s when the realm (is about to) permanently closed. In fact, for this case you can’t rejoin the realm even before it goes to oryx.

Ghost realms are different.

#14

max eff makes MCH look anti-hacks. like, actually anti-hacks, not just saying they’re anti-hacks and then not caring in practice.

r4 did, and the thread he commented on was given the “deca response” flair on reddit, and the comment was reposted by someone else which was also given the “deca response” flair on reddit. considering how long it’s taken them to comment on something that actually impacted normal play (like ice cave drops) I think they were pretty quick for once. it could still be better, and communication is still by far their major weakness though.

also for what it’s worth, that comment I wrote took a lot longer than 2 minutes to write.

not the same thing. I’ve experienced something similar but that’s just the nexus portal taking forever to respawn.

#15

I wonder if I ended up in some and didn’t realise then. That’s perfectly possible, I’m not observant.

#16

I think additionally, the incredible amount of misinformation being spread (that Xaklor has now refuted), is contributing to the confusion and feeling that Deca isn’t explaining the whole story.

The official Deca response states outright that people who were banned were in the ghost realms, and that they absolutely were using a modified client, which is exactly what Xaklor has said. I can understand some mistrust towards Deca due to situations like the Ice Tomb fiasco, but I think the community was a lot more confused yesterday (and potentially leading on into today, as well) because of cheaters calling Deca’s actions into question and claiming that many were falsely banned, as well as saying that you could enter ghost realms without hacking (which is not the case). It’s really hard to think of someone who could have potentially been banned or lost their hard work over the wrong reason, judging from the posts they’ve made, as being a liar, because if that genuinely did happen to us in anything, we’d want someone to believe us too. But I do believe Xaklor’s and Deca’s word, when unfortunately, actual cheaters do have a big motivation to lie so that they may be able to wriggle out of the situation they’ve gotten themselves into.

And that’s the lesser of the evils; meanwhile on Discord, I saw people actively trying to get others to believe that ghost realms don’t exist and that it’s a Deca coverup. Yeah…

edit: below my post in the rest of the thread now lies actual occurrences of cheaters trying to muddy the waters, predicted like clockwork

#17

Interesting. So is this another bug then? Deca better fix it before it gets abused in similar ways.

Also, how is a ghost realm created?

#18

what is a ghost realm, I have heard of it but never got the definition.

#19

basically you go into a realm then get its ip then you replace it with another one, leave then go back in and its a ghost realm

#21

It should really be common sense that what the guy in the video is doing is not even remotly close to “legit”