[MUD-Dev] Gearing up against GEAR

[Justin Rogers]

[Compliments of Sean Kelly]

> For spellcasting, there might be a slight advantage is using GEAR.
> As while spells take a fixed amount of time on the server, they
> are one-off events.  So in times of high lag it might pay to push
> through a couple spellcasting packets all at once.

Sean, you couldn't be any more wrong when making these terribly
incorrect comments.  AC pushes a lot of processing down on the
client because it is worthwhile to do so and takes load off of the
servers.  Something AC already has plenty of.  Built into the client
are animation timers.  Once an animation is up you may again cast a
spell or perform a combat action.  However, with Gear users are able
to cast multiple spells in the same time frame.  Up to 6 spells in
the time it normally takes to cast one, however they only appear to
do one animation to the rest of the individuals standing around, and
the server doesn't stop them from performing the action.

I can further back this up by saying that we've overcome many of the
fixes the devs have put into the game (god-mode, jump casting, jump
healing), by hex-editing these timings out of the code-base.  Again,
the server doesn't check, they expect the client to.

> I agree.  All I can see GEAR doing for AC is screwing up the
> framerate on the client side and flooding the server with extra
> packets on the server side.

Nope, it doesn't hurt the server that bad actually.  Some people
complain of lag when a Gear user is in the vicinity.  But for the
most part it just increases the abilities of the user who is using
Gear.  Its been the same for other games that user client side
timings (ala Half-Life after the net-code).  Maybe you should read
up a bit on the subjects your talking about before filling this list
with a load of incorrect information.

BTW - They are going to fix the Gear problem on the server side.
They can detect users who are sending a percentage of packets to the
server that is higher than should be allowed.  By doing this they
can force the zone to take action and ban the accounts.  The avid AC
players are guessing they'll institute this new feature right around
the next patch, but not necessarily in the patch.

Justin Rogers

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