EasyUO.com

www.easyuo.com is now SSL capable...

ceo@easyuo.com (CEO) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:58:17 GMT

For those interested... If you happen to find yourself at a coffee shop or on a public network you can now access the website using a secure connection.

Simply use this url: https://www.easyuo.com/

And the website should be in secure mode for all the menus, inbox, etc...

(The first page sometimes give a mixed content warning, I'm still looking into that...)

OpenEUO

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:16:54 GMT

There's some new development going on in the OpenEUO forums. If you're a scripter or programmer, you might be interested in taking part in the discussions.

Hah! Got you!

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:42:20 GMT

My April Fool's joke this year was to make you believe there was no release. Hah! Got you! ^^

See two month's work in the OpenEUO forum... first release. I know it doesn't look like much but believe me, you don't want to know what's in there to make it all work. Very cleanly written though if I may say so myself ^^

I really do hope this'll get some movement into the whole OpenEUO business. Stay tuned, more info will follow soon...

OpenEUO

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:44:32 GMT

I'm sure many of you have given up hope and didn't even dare dream about it. But now it's finally OFFICIAL!
After one year of waiting, a first release of OpenEUO is scheduled for release tomorrow. Yay!

EUO goes open source! For real this time!

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:51:35 GMT

If you're interested, check out our new sub-forum dedicated to OpenEUO here:

http://www.easyuo.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=37

Stay Safe! Be Careful What You Run!

nullpass@gmail.com (seg) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:05:28 GMT

Greetings EasyUO Users,

We are seeing another rise in the distribution of 'fake scripts' designed to rob users of their items. We cannot stress enough how important it is to never accept scripts from other people through any means other than directly downloading them from this site, AND only those scripts which are in the Public Script Library (PSL).

Additionally you need to be aware that even scripts in the PSL can do things you might not want such as closing your favorite gumps or handling your items in a way you did not expect. Please take care when running ANY script for the first time. Whenever possible run them from a safe location (like your house) to be sure they work the way you expect before you use them in the wild. It benefits you to learn and understand the EasyUO language so that you have the tools needed to debug the scripts you use and (when needed) spot code which could cause you grief.

It is also important to note that the EasyUO language cannot get your account's password. Scripts can be written to do a lot of things, but the only way someone can get your password is if you give it to them (which you should never do). This goes for all shards, not just those you pay for. No staff member of any shard should ever require you to give up your password. EA/OSI has stated that they will never ask for your password and the same goes for freeshards. RunUO admins have access to the accounts database file and should never need you to give them your password.

Please be safe, be smart, and be careful!

Thank you.

Skill wait-time avoidance: Exploit

roadkill@easyuo.com (Roadkill) — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 06:25:19 GMT

Over there years, there have been numerous bugs discovered whereby you could avoid the intended skill-use wait times (the "cost" of that skill), by getting around the timer. Generally this involved finding an EA method that was poorly written and invoked it's OWN shorter timer, which would over-write the other running timer. One of the first was called the "pen trick". Since then there have been literally > 10 of these. The latest involve the virtues.

Because we missed a few threads/scripts that contained these exploits, I am posting this to re-iterate the forum policy:
1. avoiding intended wait-times at no cost is generally an exploit
2. You can not post scripts that make use of bugs or exploits here.
3. You can not DISCUSS exploits here--this post is already more detailed than we would normally allow.
4. This is not a MORAL stance--we don't care what your opinion is on cheating, exploits, arbitrary lines of going against the wishes of EA, etc... we do this for our own reasons. We think there is a difference in the IN-GAME RESULT between an automated player, and an automated exploit/bug using player. We know that if we allowed the forums to discuss/post such, the entire flavor of our forums would rapidly change into a kiddie-scam kind of place, and having seen the in game effects of 65,000 users running a new script, we know what would happen if we were a "clearing house" for exploits to the quality of the game for all.
5. If you're smart enough, and work hard enough learning EasyUO, you can probably do almost anything yourself, and you can write your own scripts and exploit to your hearts content privately at home... You CAN'T post about it here. I'm also not interested in what you do in your private bedroom, and won't allow THAT posted here either... you see the corollary?
6. There are many sites where you CAN discuss bugs/exploits, many euo folks also belong to other places and talk about stuff there. If you do, you'll agree that the maturity, longevity, flavor, and level of scripting found here is unmatched anywhere else. There is a reason for that, and we think it's worth enforcing an "arbitrary rule" to maintain it.

Have a great day etc..
Roadkill

Our ISP is now an Amazon.com Affiliate Partner.

ceo@easyuo.com (CEO) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 06:39:48 GMT

If you plan on purchasing an advanced copy of the Ultima Online 9th Anniversary Collection DVD, do it here!

Our ISP has asked me to put a link on our website that allows people to shop on Amazon.com and help to defray some of the costs of the 3 servers they literally have donated and host for us for practically FREE for the last several years.

So please, if you have some Amazon.com shopping to do (hint: Christmas is a few months off!) come to Easyuo.com and click on the "shop Amazon.com" text link. Every purchase you make earns the ISP a small percentage in return as a referral fee.

I'm working on a graphic as well to make it stand out more, but till now use the text link.

.com (USA): http://astore.amazon.com/calwebinterns-20/
.UK affiliate: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/calwebinterne-21
.CA Affiliate: http://astore.amazon.ca/calwebinter0e-20
.DE Affiliate: http://astore.amazon.de/calwebinterns-21

Thanks!

Cheffe's official statement concerning EasyUO and PunkBuster

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:17:34 GMT

This is my official statement concerning EA's recent announcements about including PunkBuster to fight scripting.

To summarize it, I think they're using PB as a scare tactic, to annouce that they'll not tolerate EUO any further without needing a ban wave in which they'd lose customers.

Obviously, they've been able to detect EUO before and it's not hard to smuggle something into the client that detects EUO. I can't check every single patch for such things and even if I could I would miss something sooner or later.

So it's quite certain that they know exactly how many EUO users are out there, not just from the number of registered users on our boards but because they used some sort of detection in the past and logged everything. When they saw how many people were using scripts they knew they couldn't just ban everyone because of the financial repercussions. But they couldn't admit to being able to find EUO users either, because the other part of the community would demand that all "cheaters" get banned. And because they were understaffed anyway they probably ignored the problem for a while and let the GMs deal with it as best as they could.

Nowadays, with heaps of items and gold being sold on Ebay and the economy going downwards, they see that they have to do something. Not against the casual scripters, but against the few who abuse the system to farm billions of gold and items. We've seen all this happen before on scripting-friendly freeshards that had to ban EUO for that reason.

So EA had to find a way of telling people that they will be able to detect "cheaters" without admitting that they were able to do just that all along. And they're using the name of a renown company, a 3rd party, to achieve this.

It's quite a smart move, actually. First, you announce that you'll use PunkBuster to get the rumors started. Then you'll make a beta phase where you show the scripters that they can be detected without having to ban them (it's only testing after all). When the system goes active, even if the EUO developers manage to keep EasyUO hidden from PunkBuster for a while, most users will be too scared to use it anymore. And some of the few that still do could be banned as a deterrent.

Using PB also eliminates the problem of telling people they'll be spied upon. Some users already know PunkBuster and probably have it already on their system. So EA won't have to deal with privacy concerns either because they can refer to Even Balance.

Actually, PunkBuster can only find cheating tools that are known. It's designed to fight those tools used by "kiddies" to cheat in FPS games. So it does not actually attack the creation of cheating tools but their distribution process. If I were to make my own, completely different version of EUO, there would be no way how they could detect that because the PB system just doesn't work that way. But if a tool is distributed on the internet, they can grab it and create detection fingerprints.

Even if I were to devise some countermeasures, they could simply grab EUO again and try to find a way around that. Because PB is a client/server system, they can update their software anytime. We've seen all that happen with World of Warcraft and WoWSharp (www.wowsharp.net), a macroing system similar to EUO. The difference between UO and WoW is that Blizzard was a lot better prepared for all that because they came 8 years later than UO and had time to learn from the mistakes of others. They had a zero-tolerance ban policy from the start and were willing to fight in court for their right to scan users harddrives for 3rd party tools (and won).

WoWSharp went down not because they couldn't devise cloaking measurements, but because each time the detection system got around that, Blizzard silently logged all users and banned them a week later. Which is exactly what EA couldn't do because there were already too many people using EasyUO.

The whole PB thing is only a scare tactic and it's also about shooting with cannons at sparrows. They don't need PunkBuster for detecting EasyUO which they can do themselves easily enough. In fact, I could come up with really simple code to detect EUO in say... 5 seconds. I mean it's ridiculous to assume EA wouldn't be able to detect something like EUO client-side.

PB is designed to react to small cheater tools. Those tools get released and used by a few hundred people and after about a week, when the PB guys get their hands on it, everyone who still uses it after that gets banned from those FPS games. The cheat tool creators release a new tool and the whole thing starts again.

With EasyUO, we have a whole scripting platform and over 1500 scripts which are used by over 50,000 people. Besides a few other tools, there isn't even anything else out there because there's just no point to create something that already exists and obviously performs so well because it's free, because there's a public script library (PSL) and forums for help. Even without anything like PB, if EA *REALLY* wanted to do something against a project on such a large scale as EUO then they easily could.

The main reason for EUO's success is because it was able to satisfy the need to automate some really boring tasks in UO while the developers did little to help you there. Even the zero-tolerance WoW has a built-in addon system which allows 3rd party code to run within WoW to simplify things for the users (and the whole thing is a great success. People love addons!). EA now finally recognizes the need for some changes to make some tasks in the game less boring but doesn't want to give you the whole thing because it would change the game and would probably be too expensive. They certainly don't want to invest too much money in a game that has seen its best days anyway.

So, where does that leave us after I've said all those things? Do we just give up? Hell no!

You've got a right to play the game in a way where you don't have to fear you'll get the carpal tunnel syndrome. If the developers can't come up with a satisfying solution then they'll have to accept that you'll use a 3rd party tool if that does the job.

Does the introduction of PunkBuster change anything? No, your account ID is probably already stored in some log or another for using EUO in the past. Guess what, so are 49,999 other account IDs and they didn't do anything about it... it's a third of the user base after all. This PB thing is only a marketing trick. It changes nothing. The question is how everyone is going to react. Will you say "Oh my, they can detect me now so I'll better stop". Or will you say "They have already detected me and many others. Why not just keep on using what I've used for the last 5 years?"

We could make the whole thing even more blatant. Why not use a special EUO version that is _designed_ to be detectable? Of cource, you wouldn't feel comfortable using something like that but in fact, it probably wouldn't make any difference. But it would force EA to admit that they didn't satisfy their customers' need to change the game towards less boring tasks and that they kept looking away for the past couple of years. Something like that would kill off the whole PB marketing trick right at the beginning.

Maybe you're asking yourself, if Cheffe knew EUO was detectable client-side in one way or another, why didn't he say anything? Because that would have created an unnecessary panic. We didn't see any ban waves for using EUO in the past so it was unlikely they'd do anything like that in the future. The only time you're at risk is if you do something stupid and a GM pays you a visit, in which case you're hosed anyway. After all, you knew the risks and lived with them. And you knew that many others were using EUO too and didn't get banned either.

In all those years, we've been trying to protect our users by not allowing any cheats/exploits to appear or be discussed on our website. We've kept EUO itself cheat-free and didn't include stuff that would be too dangerous. This was all done because we didn't want to "anger the dragon".

EasyUO itself isn't good or bad. It can be used for either. And that's the problem with it. EA is trying to get rid of it because the bad people are hiding in the mass of legitimate EUO users.

So, no matter how we react on EAs apparent new stance towards EasyUO, if they're really willing to go through with this against a third of their customers, then you'll probably see a few changes here.

Of course, I'd much more like the idea to work with EA in order to fight the problem of farm bots or even to integrate EUO into UO or make it UO Pro or something. But I haven't been approached in the past. And since they kept looking away, I just did the same. So EA, if you're up to it, get back to me and we'll see if we can find a better solution.

Otherwise, if worst comes to worst, I might decide to make EasyUO open source to give EA users a chance to cook up their own EUO versions. Of course, I would continue to manage and support EUO and maybe play a little hide and seek with this oh so powerful PunkBuster. In the end, it really only matters if EA is willing to ban thousands of people and lose a lot of money in the process.

As in the past, we encourage all EA users to take a look at our freeshard server Alexandria or at any of the other high quality servers out there. In case you want to completely turn your back on Ultima Online, I can really recommend World of Warcraft, which is already played by about 50 times as many users as UO has. It looks really nice graphics-wise and comes with an integrated addon system (not really full macro support like EUO has but hey, you can't have everything). Most tasks in WoW aren't nearly as boring as some in UO are, the economy is healthy and casual gaming is possible up to some point. They're even offering free 10-day trial accounts here: http://teaser.wow-europe.com. So if you haven't already checked out WoW you may want to do so now.

Other than that there isn't much to say This is my opinion and how I see things. You're free to post your comments below. Also don't hesitate to let the Stratics guys know about this, too.

Cheffe
Developer of EasyUO

Punkbuster

nullpass@gmail.com (seg) — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:27:35 GMT

Stop posting new threads about PunkBuster and Ultima Online. We will address it after it has been published. There is no reason to speculate or feed the rumor-mill.
New threads will be deleted on sight.
If you absolutely MUST talk about it use the existing thread in Off Topic.
Thank you.

New version

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:45:36 GMT

Congratulations, in case you came here to ask whether the problem about crashing UO clients has been resolved yet, the answer is YESSSSS! You've miraculously managed to overlook the fact that a new version has been up for over a week.

Forums are back.

ceo@easyuo.com (CEO) — Mon, 22 May 2006 03:51:35 GMT

I'm sure many of you have noticed it was down most of the weekend. I've spent way to much time on this nonsense and lost pretty much the whole weekend moving and restoring things. I hope the people that found the exploit in the auction php code had a good laugh though! I see that site has been pretty much wiped out, bummer, I have no sympathy for them though.

I can't say for sure it's 100% fixed, I don't know enough php and alot of mods have been installed that are no longer kept up. Oh well, I'll just keep restoring from backups now that I've got alot of practice on that. lol

Please post any board issues/borked stuff here.

Known Issues/To Do List

Remove Auction Mod - DONE (GOOD RIDDANCE)
Attachments - DONE
remove unused/unnecassary mods - work in progress
Wiki Website - DONE
View posts from the last 7 days - Fixed
View top posts from the last 7 days(currently works the same as "view top posts")- Fixed
Spell Check
Can't rate scripts after download - Fixed
Item DB lookup by Janus no longer works- Fixed
Many various issues related to global_register now off!

Update for Client 5.0.2

cheffe@easyuo.com (Cheffe) — Sun, 07 May 2006 18:01:46 GMT

EasyUO has been updated for the latest client. After two days of testing, there still seem to be a few problems with client crashes, maybe caused by EUO or maybe client errors. Furthermore, Event Macro 26 and 27 (used for targeting monsters etc) don't work, yet. Since a few more patches may come out soon, I've decided to simply publish the updated version even though many of you may get problems.

Please do not post all over the boards about it. We already know that some scripts don't work at the moment.

Inactive Users Removed.

ceo@easyuo.com (CEO) — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:15:06 GMT

The removal of inactive users is complete and the user count more accurately reflects our EUO population. Remember, to keep your account from being removed at a later time, you need to login regularly.

Removing inactive users is now part of our routine maintance.

Thank you,

EUO Staff

Forums rolled back.

ceo@easyuo.com (CEO) — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 05:13:55 GMT

Due to a board problem this afternoon with a delete process that removed accounts not intended, I've rolled back the forums to a backup I did before it started. We'll try the delete again tommorrow.

All the missing accounts should be restored.

Thanks.