Allods Online Forum

whats wrong? getting this the 1st time after playing for 10 years. must be the new patch that broke something

server has ended the connection because of "safety components"...

EDIT: Happens after 10 seconds to 1 minute... just disconnects me out of nowhere


EDIT 2: tried resetting my userconfig, global config, tried running as admin, does not help. game runs normal for like 1 minute and suddenly disconnects with that message

EDIT 3: even if i just login and while being in character selection, after short time it disconnects

UPDATE: i had a little chat about this with a friend who could not help me with my problem but at least had a clue on what is wrong. so allods installs some questionable software on your computer now, including a service called "mracsvc", puts an .exe in your system32 folder which is run by this service and even a goddamn DRIVER into your "drivers" folder in system, called "mracdrv1.sys".

it now periodically connects to "allods.mrac.my.games" to transmit encrypted data from your computer with God knows what inside
for some reason this does not work on my machine, i do not have this service, neither the other files. i only have "mracinstall.exe" inside my allods folder but it does nothing


now with reading the privacy policy this is becoming really suspicious


https://documentation.my.games/terms/mygames_privacy
see 3.5

so not only would i really appreciate help in fixing how broken things now are but i would also welcome an explaination on whats up with installing a driver in the system and taking screenshots of my screen

EDIT: Fixed it myself, look at last post

I dont use discord, wrote a ticket for now, hope they can help. (ticket ID ZYJ-280-30554)

its frustrating to get disconnected every few seconds and makes things unplayable, this update really was the opposite of an improvement


also the statement in the privacy policy about this new "feature" where it says it takes screenshots of your computer is quite unappealing, to speak moderately

Quoted from "Aionwen"

wait a moment, to be clear about this, if i do NOT minimize the gamewindow and just tab to browser you will screenshot evrything?!?

thats how i understand it. also, what about window mode?
further, what about 2-screen setup? screenshots usually show boths screens in this case
i am really looking forward to a explaination on this

Quoted from "Astafieva"

I am not an expert or staff, but as far as I know, such programs work on an application basis. For example, fraps. Open a game and run Fraps. They just take a screenshot of the game, regardless of fullscreen mode or windowed mode. When the game is in the tab, they only take a black screen image. Similar applications are also available for screens shared by twitch broadcasters.



Otherwise, it would be spyware, not anticheat software. At this point we are talking about Mail.ru Group, not a 3rd class amateur personal software developer. No need to worry.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail.ru_Group

while i really hope you are right and can perfectly follow your argumentation, sadly, there are some caveats that need to be adressed

- allods is a game where pretty much every action is serversided. you can alter client values with programs like cheatengine but the server wont accept these values so except for pranking a friend sitting next to you this is irrelevant
- allods is further a game, where these things that are considered "cheating" in other games like auto-target, ESP, chams, wallhacks and player-lists are officially available as addons
- automation of attacking happens via hardware-macros which is a normal function of keyboards and cant get prevented every generally first and seconds is just a more comfortable way of facerolling
- this leaves only ONE SINGLE way of questionable user-behavior which is automated playing; basically these players running in KOE, targeting EVERYTHING and farming mobs - they get a bit of gold but honestly, noone cares and they are rather amusing for the other faction as they make good targets for PVP (with banner of war)
so there is no way to actually CHEAT in a game like allods - by design. this is excellent and makes everyone happy
so there is NO reason at all to EVER take screenshots of the players clients for allods online. everything done is logged on the server anyway. as MRAC is used on multiple games, maybe they use it to detect those who use wallhacks or chams in shootergames. but again, i dont know.

now regarding "anticheat software" and "big companies":
anticheatsoftware needs to check for aimbot.exe, needs to find signatures of wallhack.dll and tries to prevent debuggers from accessing the gameprocess because thats what people do to learn on how to code their cheats
this is, depending on how you see things, already an invasion of privacy - after all its none of the games business what kind of programs i run on MY machine

of course, ultimately, all of that is futile as dedicated people ALWAYS find a way to do these things so it is just making it a little harder.
again - this is why i LOVE the way allods has handeled these things, by making all functions accessible through the addon-api and making everything else serversided - no cheating there

i have read about multiple cases where so-called anitcheat-software behaved like actual spyware. this topic is somewhat a blind spot for many as these programs are intended to run silently in the background, often without users even noticing
if you want to go down this rabbithole see for yourself. its far too much to cover this in this post. https://www.google.com/search?q=anti+cheat+spyware

worst case i PERSONALLY witnessed was an "anticheat" program for a chinese shootergame from 2009 i played a lot / still play which read all of your opened processes' names and even the titles of your open windows.

the company the game belongs to is tencent

for reference: revenue of mail.ru is $1.39 billion in 2020 (see https://corp.imgsmail.ru/media/files/mai…pifrsfy2020.pdf )
revenue of tencent is $ 73.56 billion in 2020 (see https://static.[url]www.tencent.com/uplo…d30d55b259f.pdf[/url] )

being a guy that loves to combine hobby and work, i was often playing games while working. having an excellent special type of protection software on my machine at work (host intrusion prevention, this is working behavior based protection so even zero-day exploits will be recognized - the downside is you need a deeper understanding on the way programs operate, otherwise you will get lost in all the alters you get - this kind of software does not know whats good and bad, you have to know whats acceptable and what is not https://www.google.at/search?q=host intrusion prevention system) i was pretty shocked when i leared about what their anticheat wanted to do. i did not bother as you could just block all the things their anticheat wanted to check. this included full memory scans and installing a system-level driver to be able to do that.

their intention was to collect evidence on players having opened cheating-website in their browser. considering how some websites display a title like "welcome John Smith" and others display things like "Hardcore fetish pornography whatever" this makes it easy to gather meaningfull sensitive and private data of people.

it ended with confronting the representatives on the forum about this topic and how this goes too far with a hint this being clearly illegal no matter what their TOS say as is violating the users privacy in a similar way to installing a camera on the toilet. the result was they removed the "get_window_title" function within a few hours and refused to further elaborate this topic locking the tread with "we have removed the questioned funtion".

now of course you can be pretty sure the multi-million COMPANY or its CEO does not give a fck about what people do and their creditcard-numbers but if one of the guys working for this company wants to, he can collect all of this data without them even noticing. this clearly is inacceptablenow for those who actually get scared by all of this talk: i have no idea what the program allods uses no actually does. thats why i at first just want to pose my question here, along wit hthte hope of being able to play normally again without disconnects. if you are technically not able or willing to reverse engineer their software, the best option is to have SEPARARTE machine for onlinegames - if there is NO personal data, spying is futile

concerning the disconnects:

ended up fixing it myself in exasperation by reverse engineering of gamecenter.exe
poor design lead to this problem

without going into details, incase someone else has this problem, disable "disable automatic update of root certificates" temporary, run allods once

mrac-service runs as intended then preventing allods online from closing the connection and thus disconnecting

still would love to get an official response regarding the matter of taking screenshots of the players screens

Update 21-10-21

Had a conversation with a moderator - he asked about this matter and was assured the screenshot-functionality is disabled for our game
by observing the behavior / network-traffic i could also not find any hints on submitting screenshots so far - although this is not 100% reliable information ofc as it just a single obseration of a single player

getting a moderator to check on this matter is likely the best to get here
if one wants a more detailed answer there is still the option to contact gamesupport on this matter

screenshots might be used for shootergames where they try to gt proof if players use wallhacks, chams or whatever, as it is not an overlay but actually rendered ingame it is visible on the screenshots then
mail.ru has some of these too and they also use the mrac-program
of course this is also inacceptable (as generally every invasion of privacy) but at least it wont affect us here it seems