User blog:Fairingrey/May 6, 2015 Last Rites for Myself and a Final Message to This Community

I feel I've seen it all, really.

Opening
…sigh.

Let me start off by saying that I'm in a really weird mix of emotions. Flattered. Shocked. Annoyed. Even perhaps a bit saddened by what's happened due to this outbreak. A witch hunt. A flame war. Soliciting others. And you know what? I apologize. Part of this is my fault. Perhaps everything is. This is what this post is about today. 'Today, everything wraps up. This will be the last post I ever write for this wiki. The absolute final one. 最後のブログ.'

Last post perhaps I was a bit too inflammatory within the comments myself, but I'm just not perfect. I'm far from it. I see so many flaws within myself that I'm nowhere near what people make me out to be sometimes. People point fingers at me for "enabling" the witch hunt to go on, that because of my post people have suffered. It's not like I don't know what happens. I just don't know everything.

As it stands, I will still leave this game, the wiki, and its community. Numerous players have added me on LINE personally or mentioned within the comments on the previous post that they wanted me to stay and continue administrating the wiki here. I would love to, sadly, if I still had the passion that I did when I first made progress on this wiki. From that time where I didn't even know any extensive table markup yet. That passion, the feelings from that time, they've long since eroded away for me.

And yet I've learned so much from just putting all this work into a wiki, more than perhaps any experience administrating my own website would come out to be. Surely you don't learn all the things about HTML and CSS from just messing around on the wiki, but the fact is that anyone can do it with the effort. It takes knowledge and passion to design and maintain the UI of a site and its' pages, the policies drawn up to help maintain user coherence. It encompasses so much learning that I can't possibly put it into a single paragraph. But it's all possible to do, and it teaches you so much.

So I've never regretted the time I spent on the wiki, the hours I devoted myself to just learning when I could have been doing other things like, I don't know. Rerolling. Staring at the bazaar. Ranking in an event. I've only ever ranked three times, and that was last year: Crimcoli, Cobacoli, and Night of Miracles. Everything else I've gotten as gifts from players or bought myself. As a leader of a union that was founded half a year ago, I've seen many ranking players come and go, but I've never actually managed to rank again because of the effort I spent doing other things.

These will be my last rites for myself. My last few prayers as I move on from here, for where this game and this community is heading to.

The Flame War
The day I was writing that post I was rather emotionally charged, I admit that. And sometimes this seething disgust flew through my comments and the words I gave. And perhaps to a few many posts I responded too harshly. Quite frankly, I didn't expect my blog to receive that much attention - I'd just predict I'd see a few people to be thankful for what I did for the community while it lasted, and a few flame comments because I was making a few examples.

This knowledge isn't hidden, but it isn't exactly out in the open either. People know there are hackers now, and people know right now it's highly unlikely you get banned for it. You can test the speedhacks on a spare device you have whether it's on JP Ishtaria or EN Ishtaria. The point is, and as I said before in my last post, is that it just WORKS.

Like I said before, this stuff is common knowledge. In fact it's even wrong to call them "hackers" when they're just pathetic script kiddies that pull an app that someone's already developed for experimentation purposes and then use that to exploit whatever the hell they want. Yeah, so the problem is what then?

The problem is that it's ALLOWED to happen. Nobody in particular should be getting targeted except the hackers. Let's remember here that we're not talking about WHOLE UNIONS as another person has tried to posted, but PLAYERS. They know who they are. They know it's unfair. They know they have that much of a pathetic life to just cheat others on an online game where most everyone, really, is just in it for the fun.

And the fact is that the larger this flame war is, the higher this awareness grows. The higher that potential players are unlikely to play in the same fields where there are these toxic assholes at the very top of your ranking leaderboards, the people who cheat and lie about cheating so they get their fearful reputation as the kings and tyrants of this game. Who are we to stop them?

The one thing that destroys communities is toxicity. We're imploding on ourselves. It's an embarrassment to the upstanding community that remains past the drivel that fuels the drama in each corner of every discussion platform for this game, most in particular the LINE chatrooms everywhere.

Embarrassments for Our Players, Comedies for Them
The last post got so much reception there were a few users from other wikis that began to drop by and watch the terror unfold. Friends I knew in person would just laugh at the stuff I showed them regarding the community problems and they remarked to me that I was "internet famous". Yeah, sure.

And it's internet famous for perhaps a bunch of the wrong reasons. A lot of good users, as I'll say again, acknowledged my efforts on taking care of this wiki even though I myself don't think I really did all that much. But a post like the last one makes me infamous within the community makes me embarrassed to show my face anywhere.

As I might have said in my last post, I prefer to be an enigmatic presence within the community because I like to keep myself away from drama and anything involving it, given my last experience in a mobage with Valkyrie Crusade. I ask no one to ever invite me to those kinds of things. Anyone can tell you, pretty much, that I almost never trade. Most of the units I have are gifts from all kinds of people that I know and don't know, that I'm awfully grateful for. I've rarely spent on this game, and I wouldn't have had these units without their efforts.

Some players were immature enough to make a bunch of trash accounts when you search for my in game name. Hey, let me tell you - I am so proud of your worthless efforts. If this is how you challenge people you hate in other games I wonder how pathetic you must be in all your other facets of life.

So again, let me remind this community. 'This isn't about us. This is about unfair practices, flaws within the game, and the vicious, vitriolic community that perpetuates this kind of anger and hate.' We could have went by any other name and it still would've had a meaning. It doesn't matter who I am, who Scrubs are, but it matters that people know about the stupid shit this terrible community at the upper echelon can reek of at times, where people perform blatant and dishonest hacking and try to act innocent.

I could care less about how much people dislike me, because for every person that dislikes me I'm sure there are 3 more that are grateful for what I did. Call me out for getting on my high horse, but some people are just stupid. The saddest part is that they can never realize that part about themselves.

We're Not Blaming Everyone
Let's get this clear. We are not blaming everyone. Like I said before -- this isn't about any union in particular. This is about players. If you're innocent, then great. But if you don't think it's wrong for them to hack and exploit the game while you're in the same union, you're about as wrong as they are. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Quoted from Martin Luther King Jr.

Frankly, I know that I had a huge part in this flame war but we're not blaming anyone other than hackers. People will be hateful on their own means. Negligence and injustice both bring about no change. As Henry David Thoreau details in Civil Disobedience, it is the responsibility of individuals to not work with evil to enforce what they believe is right in a system. Instead, make a sound and valid argument acknowledging the problems, and make people aware of it.

Reeko, the leader of Meowies, who I'm on somewhat friendly terms with, told me the person who tried to post another of those "butthurt" things made a mistake in judging that LeeEel was from my Union. The guy isn't, and we already talked about it and removed his post. You can read this thread if you wish at Thread:11743. I'm against defamation, and I'm glad some of these falsely accused unions are too. SourSolace, the leader of Heaven & Earth, had the courtesy to talk to me in the right way and correctly let me know that fishy stuff was going on when that blogpost went up. Again I will mention that content pages MUST follow the wikia site-wide policies and terms of use.

Scrubs quit as a union because at the end of the road we saw no recourse for this game. For us, it's truly hopeless. When we see nothing left in store for a game, our greatest action we can do is just leave it. We're a bunch of dedicated old players that can say to Silicon Studio "You aren't getting our service anymore". Because it's an insult to the players who spend and play this game that some people can just hack and cheat their way to victory and getting the units they want. How fair is that?

But definitely, pointing at the people that may be innocent is wrong. Which is why you have to collect evidence and detail the atrocities. What made you become suspicious? Why do you think they hack? As I said before, at Scrubs we were very skeptical during the first UvU some were hacking but it came to be the truth when we saw how blatantly obvious it was when our bases went down like a house of cards.

It's saddening. Absolutely saddening.

And Don't Solicit, Please
So Robijoe, one of my union members, decided to be a little bit gung ho and try to entice potential hackers to provide a legit video where he would toss out some money and a Fauna as the reward.

Yeah, look. It's WRONG. Solicitations of illicit business are against the Wikia's Terms of Use. DON'T DO IT HERE. It's absolutely immature and shows nothing to respect the efforts of the good people against the bad. I'm all for calling those suspicious players out, but not in that kind of way. I warned him about it and he said he won't do it again.

Truth be told? That small amount of money is nothing worth to the dignity you lose by letting others watch that stupid video. There was nothing of worth in it. In the end, the same player never showed who he was on his phone, and he defeated bases at a speed that was very normal and wouldn't come anywhere close to exceeding the point count asked for.

And Another Piece of Truth
So here's a purported formula that our union has already researched, and it's about as accurate as we could nail it. The formula is this. For every base a commander destroys, he gets a sum of around 2800 points in addition to the wave count. For every wave of enemies a commander defeats, you take the HP and divide it by 100, and that's how much points you get on every wave defeat.

It takes about 40 seconds tops to wipe out a weakly guarded base, as someone has calculated on their device. You can try it yourself too -- record yourself trying to defeat the easiest 3 or 4 stage battles with the strongest multi team you have, and you'll come to realize that it can't happen any faster than that, not unless you speedhack.

I don't need to elaborate any more on this than I already have said. It doesn't take a genius to do arithmetic. And I'm also honestly sick of the whole "Just because you think it's impossible doesn't mean it's impossible". Yeah, sadly we're not meta-physicists. Even if you literally fed dead bases to an enemy, it's still pretty flipping impossible to get that much.

The blatant hacking is just out there in the open for people to see. I believe we're only doing things right, by showing proof.

Other Problems
There are even more problems than the ones I'm mentioning, believe me, but this is one of the more or less shocking ones.

Hacking Unreleased Units In Free
Yeah, news travels fast, doesn't it? Apparently, this is an even bigger problem than the one about speedhackers. It's now shown to be possible to hack units into your game.

How? I don't really know. Not many people do. Maybe it's by a packet editor with knowledge of what's being sent over the data stream when you connect to the game. One thing that's for sure is that it's now possible, and it definitely shouldn't have been a dev. Why a dev would test their units on the official server instead of a test server baffles me to smithereens.

There's a player named Yoi, apparently, that those screenshots were taken from, and if you check his account he's still hanging onto a spare Avi+1. It may or may not be there anymore as you check this post.

Decompiling the APK
I did some peeking around due to the advice that someone mentioned here and I came to find that the APK comes with... very little protection. The base code is just presented in front of you as is. Surely it's decompiled source code, but it's written with a lack of care since you can really just explore it as you please. No  files in sight. Just.

Technically, it's against Silicon Studio's Terms of Service in this game to attempt to reverse engineer the game or modify it in any sort of way (as it's a rather serious offense) so I shouldn't even be mentioning this here. But the fact is that you can, given you know how to. I won't explicitly mention the directions to do it, but if you're unfamiliar with dev2jar and apktool, then there are some tools online that massively narrow down the work you have to do, even if you're not an Android developer or any sort of computer science student or software developer. I'll just drop by this resource and mention nothing further. Decompiling the APK shouldn't be illegal per se but just know that you're jumping into risky territory if you choose to do anything rash past that.

In short, the security is just really, REALLY poor on the application. Spend enough time trying to figure out how it works and you could basically be a covert moneymaker. Though this is only the APK, and doesn't tell you about the programs running on their servers. However, as I said to someone in the comments in my last post, the lack of good server checks makes it laughable... since, well, we already now have a said example of someone who's successfully done it.

So yeah, this game is literally a single-player game if you just know how to tinker with it correctly. Isn't that nice to know? Let's just hope that I'm wrong and it's just a dev playing risky, but you never really know. I'd assume it'd be against company policy to risk all that just to play with a few unreleased QTπ's.

Outside of Ishtaria
We've talked about a lot of problems. Some risque, and others stupid.

Site Usage
People have pinned a lot of crap on me for being preferential to some comments but not others but that's not the truth. The truth is that anything that's off-topic or violates the site-wide policy will be taken down. I hold no preferences upon judgment, and I'd easily as much give my union member shit as much as I'd give it to some random anon if they both did the same thing. Solicitation, slandering and false accusations? Enough grounds for myself and Rynsk to WHAM a toxic user.

Look, I'm not this site's fucking babysitter.

Like I said time and time again, and as a few users are too stupid to notice, when we mentioned "2v1 speedhackers" we meant to team up on speedhackers to try to defeat them faster by ganging up on them 2 on 1. To accuse us of that is just being retarded when we lost by such a large margin is funny. See that image way back up there with Ad Nauseam getting completely pulverized into the ground? Yeah that's not a fucking joke. Apparently one of their users were smart enough to allow that to leak.

You're not completely anonymous as a wiki user on the wiki. If you knew this, great. Uninformed? Now you know. Your IP can be seen by others if you don't make an account, and if you choose to log out of your account and reattempt trying to edit or comment you get autoblocked. If you're not wiki-savvy, you can view the blocklist here to see the list of blocked users and also the comments they contributed in the delete log here.

Regarding Contacting Me Personally
You know, I say this meticulously, but some things are in my control and others aren't. When I provided my LINE on my personal wiki profile, it was because I would allow people to contact me for PERSONAL reasons, as it was mentioned when I linked the damn thing. Personal meaning anything that pertains to just myself. You can stretch out the meaning a bit, but most of the time when anyone ever contacts me, it's either for friendship matters or it's about telling me something that requires my urgent attention.

I already invalidated the previous QR code so that people don't attempt to contact me for reasons I don't appreciate being personally contacted about, things I don't want to hear. I usually have my phone with me, but I'm not on my computer all the time, as nerdy as I am. So I hope people understand what I'm saying.

Which is why if you want to tell me something wiki or game related, you post it on my message wall or on the comments section below (which is disabled now, reasons aforementioned). I don't talk in LINE groups, so don't bother trying to find me there.

You don't contact me over a personal platform for wiki or game related reasons. You keep that on the wiki. Apparently, said detractor said it was to "avoid drama" but if there's nothing to be ashamed about, then there's nothing to be afraid about. And it's even about a matter that I can't do anything about. I'm not twisting these words.

Person in Question
You can read the full sum of encumbering text here about some user who tried to contact me about a "witch hunt".

Honestly? People can call me names and try to defile me but I'm honestly a very blunt and crude person with my solid opinions. I'm just that kind of player and that kind of admin. I find it immature to do something like that, and perhaps it was a little wrong to call it harassment, but let's say that I don't take well to "you lumping everyone together is wrong and hurtful" because I know that. And I'm not doing that.

Look here. It's not US doing a witch hunt. As I have said multiple, and multiple, and multiple upon multiple times before, we're only here to just show the proof against hackers. If some people get caught in the crossfire due to the ridiculous amount of awareness there is, it can't be helped. But contacting me about an impersonal matter is not how you deal with crap like that. Because why? Because...

I'm not perpetuating the witch hunt. Neither are my union members, as far as I know. They're just staying quiet. God forbid I do, because I'm also kinda tired of the accusations going on, not just including the ones against myself or my union. It's just the sad truth, that I can't do crap about the things people may or may not be doing rightly. I just underestimated the influence I had when I wrote my last post, and because of it, things just happened to explode massively.

Closing
I'm honestly really tired from writing all of this. I don't enjoy writing essays either but I feel like my last few duties just had to be finished. And this was coming from me as a player that cares (cared?) about the game and community and an admin that really wanted to see this wiki succeed.

Truth be told, I've never been a major part of such a major debacle as the one going on right now. I still perhaps feel a little terrified about what's going to happen. But the one thing I really hope that happens is for things to change, for the better for this game and for the community.

'This will be the last time I'm saying this, but again, this is the truth. I am leaving Age of Ishtaria for good.' Even if things do change, I wish to set an example -- that if Silicon Studio wants to keep treating their playerbase like this, much worse than any other mobage company I've ever seen, then they don't deserve my or my union's patronage anymore. We're just going to be moving on to something better than this game.

The one thing that's still apparently at the top of our list is Million Chain, but other than that most of us will just take it easy and catch up on things we've been missing. If you want to check out Million Chain, feel free to, but you must know how to access the JP play store or JP iTunes. For me, I personally want to catch up on Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1 and also finish up Valkyria Chronicles, and perhaps I'll get a PS4 or something with the savings I might make off from my account.

It's been a really rocky ride. I've been so appreciative of the people that have given me all the support and help on my message wall and over LINE, that what I did had meaning here in this community and for this wiki, even if not everyone loved me about it. It takes more work than people expect to handle this since sometimes you spend time thinking about how things might be laid out and you have to understand that you might be only doing this because no one else will.

As a result, I haven't really chosen who becomes the next main admin yet because there isn't really anyone I feel that would be suitable for the task yet. Although kimlasca warrior, I guess, could come as close to the main admin as a main admin could be. Just the fact is that 2 of the current admins you see on this wiki will pretty much cease to stick around for this game.

Now, about happier things. I don't want to wrap this up feeling like crap, so let's try to talk about happier things.

Someone recently thanked me about the wiki and remembered I had a birthday coming up! Yeah, I turn 21 on the 14th. Going to be finally legally able to drink in the US of A. Hooray, I can legally get drunk. Seriously appreciate the attention to detail, aha. I've compiled all the thankful comments I've gotten into a pastebin so that I won't forget the things that people have said to me, as I'm super thankful to everything I've received since working on this wiki. I'll miss you guys.

Anyways, that's enough talk from me. Again, I will be leaving completely on the 8th. That means Thursday night will be the last time anyone gets to talk to me about Ishtaria-related things and then that's that. I'm uninstalling this game from my phone after I distribute everything I want to distribute and just say goodbye altogether.

As warmly as I can say this, best of wishes to all you guys trying and getting them QTs. I'll miss you good people. Seriously. Live and let live!