Uncategorized Take more initiative in dealing with unfair advantages gained through mods

Clincoin · Oct 15, 2022

In light of the recent enforcement that impacted players that used NotEnoughUpdates i thought it prudent to give my perspectives on what i think of an an issue: The Hypixel Skyblock team should take more initiative in dealing with unfair advantages gained through mods.

When a mod is so widely used in the skyblock community as NEU, granting features that other mods also grant it should be seen as a sign that the game itself is lacking features. There are two ways to manage this, and either should be pursued, but not what is currently being done.

Create your own officially approved of mods to enable the features you think should be allowed in the game, and ban other mods more aggressively. This way you can safely include advertisement for such mods in the Hub, and help more players gain the benefits of such mods. The most compelling cases for why this is the best option are:
1. Many players do not use mods, and as such they are missing out on features that enable other players to progress better and gain competitive advantages like having market prices listed upon item hover, scrollable tooltips, backpack viewing or lag reduction.
2. Greater creative freedom when developing the game. Quality of life features like the advanced view in bazaar could be made much more comprehensive and easy to read and access via a modded visualisation.

The other alternative is that you crack down on mods that give vast unfair advantages, not only in terms of gameplay mechanics, but any info that is not listed in the basegame should then not be listed elsewhere outside of where it would be in the basegame. This applies to prices on items in particular. I also think that is a much fairer phrasing than the current one. It took me a bit to understand what was meant by invisible entities.

I fully support the crackdown on NEU usage, but i think that should not be the end of it. The team now finds itself at a crossroads, and i hope it chooses the path which leads to further engagement and ease of play for the most people. And again, the creative freedom the Hypixel Team would gain from being able to make an official mod would be significant.

Cheers!

KaniasTokisaki · Oct 15, 2022

you are asking too much of hypixel they don't care about what you think or about cross over with mods, the only case which i've heard of hypixel interfering with qol mods is when they asked SBE creators to remove/disable a feature that was unfair advantage if i remember correctly they will not intervene any further

Clincoin · Oct 15, 2022

There are definitive limits to how well one can display infromation in the block game, i think i'm appealing to mutual interest when they can better express their intentions via mods. It's like the difference between painting with a good and bad brush.

KaniasTokisaki · Oct 15, 2022

yes but as i said you are expecting too much from hypixel they just don't care i doubt it's gonna be that hard for them to create a "badlion" "lunar" clients of their own they just don't do it because they don't care

I_Desire_Death · Oct 15, 2022

Clincoin said:
1. Many players do not use mods, and as such they are missing out on features that enable other players to progress better and gain competitive advantages like having market prices listed upon item hover, scrollable tooltips, backpack viewing or lag reduction.

These do not give competitive advantages, and there already is a blacklist.

Clincoin · Oct 16, 2022

KaniasTokisaki said:
yes but as i said you are expecting too much from hypixel they just don't care i doubt it's gonna be that hard for them to create a "badlion" "lunar" clients of their own they just don't do it because they don't care

They'd care if it made the game more popular, which i think it would because the playerbase would not be disenfranchised by the steep costs. It could also help curb the inflation.

I_Desire_Death said:
These do not give competitive advantages, and there already is a blacklist.

Seeing prices in trades more easily is an advantage, as a new player you have no gauge on what market prices are without opening browser and googling it. It has an impact.

I_Desire_Death · Oct 16, 2022

Clincoin said:
They'd care if it made the game more popular, which i think it would because the playerbase would not be disenfranchised by the steep costs. It could also help curb the inflation.

Seeing prices in trades more easily is an advantage, as a new player you have no gauge on what market prices are without opening browser and googling it. It has an impact.

you look up prices in the in-game auction house and bazaar

Clincoin · Oct 18, 2022

I_Desire_Death said:
you look up prices in the in-game auction house and bazaar

Steps with mod:
1. Hover the item

Steps without the mod:
1. Travel to hub
2. Walk to the auction house
3. Click on the auction dude
4. Click on the auction menu
5. Click on the search bar
6. Write in what you seek and search
7. Orient the price list from lowest to highest
8. Hover the item anyways.

Three steps less if u have booster cookie.
These are nowhere near the same amount of effort just to check a price.

You still have to go to, find item, select item, and hover its single sale to know its worth. If you're selling many you'd have to maybe even whip out the calculator.

Don't underestimate laziness and low executive function. People with ADDs would rarely check a price if they had to do 8 steps to get there. An added benefit of having price on hover is that you can follow the price development of an item passively by making mental notes every time you use the item. Very useful!

Elmarimo · Oct 18, 2022

Clincoin said:
In light of the recent enforcement that impacted players that used NotEnoughUpdates i thought it prudent to give my perspectives on what i think of an an issue: The Hypixel Skyblock team should take more initiative in dealing with unfair advantages gained through mods.

When a mod is so widely used in the skyblock community as NEU, granting features that other mods also grant it should be seen as a sign that the game itself is lacking features. There are two ways to manage this, and either should be pursued, but not what is currently being done.

Create your own officially approved of mods to enable the features you think should be allowed in the game, and ban other mods more aggressively. This way you can safely include advertisement for such mods in the Hub, and help more players gain the benefits of such mods. The most compelling cases for why this is the best option are:
1. Many players do not use mods, and as such they are missing out on features that enable other players to progress better and gain competitive advantages like having market prices listed upon item hover, scrollable tooltips, backpack viewing or lag reduction.
2. Greater creative freedom when developing the game. Quality of life features like the advanced view in bazaar could be made much more comprehensive and easy to read and access via a modded visualisation.

The other alternative is that you crack down on mods that give vast unfair advantages, not only in terms of gameplay mechanics, but any info that is not listed in the basegame should then not be listed elsewhere outside of where it would be in the basegame. This applies to prices on items in particular. I also think that is a much fairer phrasing than the current one. It took me a bit to understand what was meant by invisible entities.

I fully support the crackdown on NEU usage, but i think that should not be the end of it. The team now finds itself at a crossroads, and i hope it chooses the path which leads to further engagement and ease of play for the most people. And again, the creative freedom the Hypixel Team would gain from being able to make an official mod would be significant.

Cheers!

I'm just posting this answer from an Hypixel dev here because obviously there is a misunderstanding going on since NEU isn't a problem at all, people just assumed it was somehow when in reality it was just a small mistake from the devs of NEU that was easily fixed :

TheMGRF said:
To provide a bit of the dev perspective here, there are two mods we were aware of causing this issue namely, NEU (NotEnoughUpdates) and Skytils.
NEU has since fixed the issue on the latest beta builds in their Discord and you should update to avoid being kicked.
Skytils as far as I know still has yet to fix the issue, but you can toggle off their middle click GUIs setting.

Middle Clicking
It is worth noting that whilst the Skytils setting name contains "middle click", this is not an issue with middle clicking itself. You will find that on a vanilla client you cannot be kicked for middle clicking.

What went wrong?
Both of these mods use a feature to make your normal right clicks "act" like a middle click in that when clicking on an item in a GUI, it will not temporarily pick up the item due to ping delay. This feature is a great visual addition, however, until recently, both mods were implementing this incorrectly and thus flagging the kicking system.

The Fix
The fix is super simple. Both mods were directly sending the window (container) click packet to the server. This meant any client side checks Minecraft has were being skipped, which has its own pros and cons but meant that the values being sent to the server could be whatever they wanted.

You can see the current code here on Skytils GitHub but provided they fix it I will also leave an example below of the fix using Forge 1.8.

// Before
mc.playerController.windowClick(chest.windowId, event.slotId, 2, 0, mc.thePlayer)

// After
mc.playerController.windowClick(chest.windowId, event.slotId, 2, 3, mc.thePlayer)

Diagnosis
You can see in the above code block that the only change was swapping the second number from a "0" to a "3".
If you refer to the protocol standard found here, you can see container clicks expect very specific numbers into their "button" and "mode" fields. Skytils' current implementation is trying to provide an invalid left/right click where as when using the mode 3 field the server is expecting the only valid option; mode 2, button 3, resulting in a middle click.

Conclusion
For the mod developers, this is a super easy mistake to make and is only visible upon diving into the protocol spec, IDEs won't flag this and when just sending packets theres no client validation. We're very pleased that NEU moved so quickly to adopt the fix and hope other mods will follow suit soon.
For the players, we apologise about the kicks but it is a necessary evil. The issue mentioned here has been around for a while but we only recently dove into it and started preventing it. This isn't Hypixel trying move the blame to mods or their authors, but rather help them to fix the issue.

Thank you for reading and I apologise for getting rather technical, but hopefully this process has helped some of you understand the decisions behind this choice and the simple fixes for it.

Remember folks, always update your mods.

Clincoin · Oct 18, 2022

That went completely unnoticed by me. I still think it is an issue that such gameplay enabling features as found in these mods go unnoticed by a large portion of the playerbase, and i still think some form of in game acknowledgement of mods or the introduction of an official mod would be beneficial for the overall state of the game.

From a player safety perspective i think it's somewhat odd for a dev to view a beta version of a mod to be an updated version and encourage users to update to it (implicitly). I'll probably be refraining from downloading it again until there has been an official release.
If we create the expectation that any new release of software is safe we set a dangerous precedent that can allow for exploitation further down the road. An official mod by the skyblock team would allow for more people to work on the same mod with a coordinated development direction and intention, allowing more frequent updates and wider distribution.
Running the risk of losing reputation if they include exploiuts would ideally make their mod a safer version compared to third party mods.

Elmarimo · Oct 18, 2022

Clincoin said:
That went completely unnoticed by me. I still think it is an issue that such gameplay enabling features as found in these mods go unnoticed by a large portion of the playerbase, and i still think some form of in game acknowledgement of mods or the introduction of an official mod would be beneficial for the overall state of the game.

From a player safety perspective i think it's somewhat odd for a dev to view a beta version of a mod to be an updated version and encourage users to update to it (implicitly). I'll probably be refraining from downloading it again until there has been an official release.
If we create the expectation that any new release of software is safe we set a dangerous precedent that can allow for exploitation further down the road. An official mod by the skyblock team would allow for more people to work on the same mod with a coordinated development direction and intention, allowing more frequent updates and wider distribution.
Running the risk of losing reputation if they include exploiuts would ideally make their mod a safer version compared to third party mods.

Hypixel has an history of being mods developers by themselves so it's normal that they encourage the use of mods if these aren't giving obvious gameplay advantage like for example the mod playing for you (like macroing). Otherwise hypixel devs don't really want to do something "official", it's better to not force people to use mods if they don't want to and to let other people do the mods as long as these follow the rules. If a mod don't follow the rules then it will get blacklisted, simple.

As for the feature that went "unnoticed" it's the middle click and it just happen that NEU and stykils implemented it with a little flaw even though it's a vanilla feature, nothing too crazy but since it's widely used it caused a lot of problems.

Elmarimo · Oct 18, 2022

Clincoin said:
That went completely unnoticed by me. I still think it is an issue that such gameplay enabling features as found in these mods go unnoticed by a large portion of the playerbase, and i still think some form of in game acknowledgement of mods or the introduction of an official mod would be beneficial for the overall state of the game.

From a player safety perspective i think it's somewhat odd for a dev to view a beta version of a mod to be an updated version and encourage users to update to it (implicitly). I'll probably be refraining from downloading it again until there has been an official release.
If we create the expectation that any new release of software is safe we set a dangerous precedent that can allow for exploitation further down the road. An official mod by the skyblock team would allow for more people to work on the same mod with a coordinated development direction and intention, allowing more frequent updates and wider distribution.
Running the risk of losing reputation if they include exploiuts would ideally make their mod a safer version compared to third party mods.

Here's two posts where the admins talk a little more in detail about their position regarding mods if you are interested (from last year) :

Update to Disallowed Modifications - QoL Modifications

NOTICE: We have posted some clarifications in this thread: https://hypixel.net/threads/regarding-the-recent-announcement-with-mods-in-skyblock.4045481/ Hello everyone! It's recently come to our attention that many modifications have been altering vanilla Minecraft behavior in order to provide...

hypixel.net

Regarding the recent announcement with Mods in SkyBlock

Hey Guys I thought I'd give a quick notice regarding the recent announcement. I'm seeing a lot of people across multiple communities freaking out that we are killing mods in SkyBlock. Perhaps our wording wasn't clear enough or perhaps there isn't really a way to word it in a way that won't...

hypixel.net

So as you can see there was already a crackdown in the past, no real need to go further.

Uncategorized Take more initiative in dealing with unfair advantages gained through mods

Clincoin

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KaniasTokisaki

Active Member

Clincoin

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KaniasTokisaki

Active Member

I_Desire_Death

Active Member

Clincoin

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I_Desire_Death

Active Member

Clincoin

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Elmarimo

Dedicated Member

Clincoin

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Elmarimo

Dedicated Member

Elmarimo

Dedicated Member

Update to Disallowed Modifications - QoL Modifications

Regarding the recent announcement with Mods in SkyBlock

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