I’m getting some really good questions so far, and digging around for solid answers to them has been really insightful and wonderful.

I’m hoping to make the final post of the series sometime on Thursday, if not Friday, with cameos from several people more knowledgable than myself on their respective topics.

Again, if there’s anything, anything at all that you or anyone wants to ask me regarding the recent events so it can be publicly answered. send me an (optionally anonymous) tumblr ask.

If you want it to be private, or you’re unfamiliar with how that works, note that I cannot privately reply to anonymous asks. Also, if you don’t have an account and just want to say something to me without it being published, just go ahead and mention that you want to keep it private.

Thanks again!

This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

• Introduction. What’s all this about?
• Part 1: The History – A Timeline. Take a walk down memory lane from 2012 to today.
• Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo. The technical details of how and why these mods work.
• Part 3: What Can Be Done? ⬅ You’re here!
• Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

May 1st, the first scheduled protest day, has come and gone, and EME doesn’t seem to have done much of anything with this subject matter, so it’s time for the last bit.

First we’ll take a look at what has already been done in the past and present to address these issues, then I’ll discuss alternatives.

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This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

• Introduction. What’s all this about?
• Part 1: The History – A Timeline. Take a walk down memory lane from 2012 to today.
• Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo ⬅ You’re here!
• Part 3: What Can Be Done?. What do we know, and how should we address it?
• Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

Last time we talked about what happened and when, but now we’re going to get into the how. How do DPS meters and tera-proxy work? How even do the skill prediction and other things work? I’ll be answering that in this installment.

First, a disclaimer. This post analyzes in detail the alteration of game behavior. Many places will consider this “discussion of cheats, hacks, or exploits”. If you want to post a link to this post anywhere, make sure it follows any submission rules there about this sort of topic.

If it’s so sensitive and controversial, why am I still posting it? Because I would argue this post has nothing new to offer to anyone with malicious intentions. Remember, TERA has been out for 5 whole years already, and there’s plenty of underground communities dedicated to illicit activities. Plus, the recent storm has only brought even more attention to tera-proxy. The proxy, along with ShinraMeter, CasualMeter, and Alkahest, are all open source. Everyone can look at the code, and anyone with the technical knowledge and ability to do bad things would have already figured out what we’re doing by now.

So, again. I’ll be doing my best to explain everything with the expectation that you, the reader, have minimal knowledge of these sorts of systems. For developers, this may be a total slog and you probably already knew all of this anyway. For anyone else, bear with me, and if there’s anything confusing, please let me know what could use some clarification and I’ll be happy to edit it in.

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This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

• Introduction. What’s all this about?
• Part 1: The History – A Timeline ⬅ You’re here!
• Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo. The technical details of how and why these mods work.
• Part 3: What Can Be Done?. What do we know, and how should we address it?
• Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

This post is pretty much just going to be a timeline of major events leading up to the big things that are being talked about right now. If you’re pretty new to the game, or you just want to take a trip down memory lane, let’s travel back to middle of 2012 and trace our steps back to where we are now.

Read more »

The fires are still raging, and plenty of people have stated plenty of thoughts in plenty of places. It just so happens that I’m not at home today and I have nothing else to do, so now it’s my turn to dump words.

For those unaware, EME has banned me for my work with the proxy. Bernkastel was also banned and did a writeup (see justpaste.it or the original PDF download) with their thoughts on the situation, and I myself don’t have much to add there. So, instead of writing yet another wall of text to explain why I agree or disagree with things for reasons everyone’s heard hundreds of times by now, I’m going to write something different.

This is going to be a series of posts describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we’ve been doing. I am writing this for a general audience, so if you’re a casual passerby who just wants to know exactly how things work and why they came to be, this series is for you. I’ll be doing my best to introduce topics and concepts in a way that even “halp how do i computer” should be able to follow along.

There’s a lot of misinformation being spread around, largely because people just don’t know what’s really going on beyond a few technical buzzwords. And I don’t expect them to know, either. So this series is for the people that care to know and want to become a little more educated on the topics involved.

I will not be trying to make any arguments about right or wrong. I’m not here to ruin anyone’s reputation. I simply want to share facts and share information that may not be so easy to casually Google, and put it all into one convenient place for anyone interested in finding out more about this whole drama stuff. As with everything written, you’ll be reading things through my own filters and biases, but I will attempt to remain as neutral as I can. Feel free to send me messages with questions, corrections, or suggestions because I’ll happy to entertain any discourse on this subject.

However, do note that each part will be very, very, very detailed. If you’re not down to read 2,000 word novellas, now’s the time to back out.

This series will be published over the next few days (I’d like to do one a day) and is currently planned to be divided into these sections:

• Introduction ⬅ You’re here!
• Part 1: The History – A Timeline. Take a walk down memory lane from 2012 to today.
• Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo. The technical details of how and why these mods work.
• Part 3: What Can Be Done?. What do we know, and how should we address it?
• Conclusion (not yet published). Obligatory closing thoughts.

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

Next ➡️ Part 1: The History – A Timeline

Hello again! It’s been too long.

I’ve been mostly quiet here but things are still progressing—by quite a bit, actually. Most of it is unfortunately invisible to everyone who just wants to use mod things, but with the help of a few people whose assistance I am very thankful for, we’ve built up a pretty solid base. And also set up a Discord.

And a website. And I updated all my documentation. https://meishuu.github.io/tera-proxy/

If you already had some old version, there’s a prepackaged build which you can just download, unzip, and then grab your old tera-proxy/bin/node_modules folder and move it over. (You might also need to move servers.json and other files, depending on what you might have had to change.)

Up next is… a lot of things:

• Make a better configuration system so it’s easier for people to set things up correctly for their region / server.
• Arborean Apparel is still coming! I’ve been testing a pre-alpha, but most things seem to be working and there’s a few more I’d like to add before an actual public alpha or beta release.
• GUI, plus autoupdater, so no more having to mess with downloading and unzipping and moving things every update. Will also auto-update mods from GitHub.

Probably silence again up until the dungeon patch. If you want to get in touch, definitely try Discord.

Until then! 💉

Or: How a Bunch of Drama Happened and an Alt Gmail Got Hacked in Record Time.

This is the story of how MT and Moongourd went from 0 to 100 in a day. This is a cautionary tale about securing your email accounts. And most of all, this is a story about taking things way too seriously.

This is going to be a very lengthy post giving a chronological account of my experiences, with an update at the end detailing my plans moving forward. Grab some popcorn and strap yourself in for some entertaining drama, because this is gonna take a while.

The story is under the cut, but if all you wanna know is what’s going on with me and my stuff, just skip to the very last section.

Here we go.

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