Disclaimer: We don’t pretend to display him as a Hero. We don’t either support cheaters nor in RL crime. We want to present this interview based in a freedom-speech, also, we don’t encourage to players to play OT servers. This interview presents spoilers. Please if you don’t want spoil, refrain in reading it.
Credits to: Rohade Kahori, who provided of some questions.
Greetings Dennis! Thank you for accepting this interview! Would you please introducing yourself to my readers?
“Buenas dias”, I am Dennis aka Toor from the Netherlands. In real life I am a cloud systems engineer (DevOps). I have a gata, a perro and a lovely Spanish speaking girlfriend.
Haha nice that you have a Spanish gf! How sure you were of being succesful of getting access to cipsoft servers 10 years go?, it was just a shot in the dark or you had a good feeling of fooling them?
You’re right to the point, I like that. It was definitely a shot in the dark. It was around the period the .eu top level domain was brand new and I had registered cipsoft.eu for shit and giggles when I had the idea ‘what would happen if I ask their hosting company to change the e-mail address to a @cipsoft.eu one… ?’ and tried it out on a spur.
Did you know what happened to that guy that change that password? That you had mentioned him here.
It was pure luck, I guess. The right time, the right guy. I don’t know what happened to him, if anything. He asked questions to verify I was a Cipsoft employee, but they weren’t very hard. At the time I didn’t even know who the founders of Cipsoft were so when asked who the account owner was I opened up the Cipsoft website and started off with typing out their names
Based on the source code, how hard would be for Cipsoft you release a fifth profession?
I have never had access to the original source code of the game server, but from the reverse engineering I wouldn’t see technical limitations… just practical ones: Which skill would a fifth profession major in and how to balance that with the other vocations ? The current vocations have been more or less balanced out over the years Tibia has existed.
I see, however, options for a fist fighting profession
(By the way, fist fighting does have a use beside bragging rights. You can also block attacks with it when not wielding any object in either hand)
What do you think it will be cipsoft reaction right now when the code is finally open to the public?
The “code” (meaning binaries and pseudo scripts) have been long out in the open by people leaking it all over the place. It’s so antique that it’s deprecated.
If anything, I hope that it serves as a catalyst to cater to their oldschool fanbase. They’re really missing out on that niche now.
Tell us a little bit more about the sword of fury, you said you could get it, but no one had the code detailing the quest?
SPOILER AHEAD
The short version is the sword of fury is obtainable. I should warn that if you continue reading you will close a door that cannot ever again be opened… so stop reading here. The truth is that the sword of fury is for the humble, meaning that if you have the patience to endure the torture of Rookgaard you’re able to obtain it on the mainland. I have previously stated it was obtainable. I lied to keep people hoping, as hope is the last thing to die. I hope you’ve had a lot of fun fantasizing about it and trying to obtain it. The true value of the Sword of Fury is the adventure you live trying to solve its mystery.
How easy is to modify the assets with that code, did you think about it? Like a space version of tibia or something
Not _that_ hard, given you can change all the sprites. Teleports can be wormholes, characters can be ships. Interesting idea, Captain. Modifying in-game mechanics is a little bit harder, as you can’t easily hook functions inside a linux binary. You could hijack functions injecting code using a custom built library it uses.
A lot of people searched for ages about certain quests, in the end there was no basilisk, etc. Maybe Cipsoft created incomplete quests and never fixed them to create lore and exploration?
What do you think about it? What was the biggest secret you found back then? do you think there are secrets left and people will discover them now?
Some mysteries such as the Basilisk were inserted not for lore and exploration but for testing purposes and had the side effect of creating lore and wanderlust. The Basilisk tests different types of effects, for example. I think it’s realistic that not all quests are solvable. Sometimes something is just lore. It’ll keep people looking for clues and stumble upon other quests by accident.
The biggest secret I found back then was the ability to exchange life crystals for life rings. Life crystals were basically loot trash back then, so you could buy them for 50gp each easily.
I hope that Cipsoft finished some of the unfinished quests and worked on their dungeon secrets during the past 10 years.
I visit the Tibia site now and then, but most of the news I see is about new outfits you can buy : (
What do you think about this on specefic?
I love this little island!
I believe it’s a remnant from a corpse thrown onto the island from back in the days when there was no map reset – nor a clean map to begin with. It might’ve been something that has been forgotten to clean up.
Do you think that now there will be a kind of open source Tibia alternative where groups of people will work in many versions of the game with awesome mods? Do you even had access to chat log from GMs, there were many rumors about corrupts GM, even CipSoft used that reason to eliminate them, did you find any related to that? Was a mistake to eliminate the GMs?
I know of atleast one good OpenTibia project that has the potential to compete against the real thing, a project by Ezzz @ censured (a site you can probably not reference) If that were to be open source I am positive there would be a great diversification of servers.
I’ve had many personal dealings with Gamemasters, and as you know they were just players with additional privileges. Some took them very seriously, few were rogue. From the chat logs I wouldn’t say GMs were likely to be corrupt. Maybe favouratism was more prominent in some GMs (e.g. processing only reports of friends and ignoring those of enemies of your friends).
I do think it was a mistake to abolish Gamemasters. To give you an example I think they abolished GMs around the time there was a bug where you could enter roofs you normally couldn’t get on.
At that moment, being a player that always played with his hands, I pushed three of my characters on a roof and trained for a month straight. Just because there would be no consequence. I came off the roof with a 100 clubbing skill at level 17 and a week later the character was level 100
So yes, abolishing GMs was a bad bad idea.
Do you do have a deep understanding of Tibia, what changes would you make to modern tibia to give it an edge in these times? Do you still play? how was playing after having the source code, was the challenge the same? Bots, as a coder what do you think, is there a solution?, what can be made?
Non-gameplay related I think Cipsoft missed an opportunity when they made any language on the public boards allowed. It alienated a lot of English speaking players given that they suddenly couldn’t understand the threads anymore and felt excluded, while most players have at least a rudimentary understanding of English.
When I was actively playing I could understand most written Portuguese and Spanish. But I don’t think it’s that easy for most players :p
For game play: I haven’t touched the game (other than logging in ~ 1x a year to say hi to an old friend) for about 5 to 6 years. So I’m unfamiliar with all the major changes. I would love to see skill being a factor again. For example, having to heal yourself by hand rather than hotkeys even though I was pretty mediocre at it.
Cipsoft has the right idea regarding bot detection. If you look at – for example – FairFight for Battlefield, I believe it works similarly it looks for client actions that are impossible or very improbable.
A rule engine that’s able to ban based on behavior. They should just hire expertise 🙂
“how was playing after having the source code, was the challenge the same?” I forgot to answer that the challenge was gone. It was spoiled for me 🙁
There are rumours that they will implement a gameguard 3rd party software in the tibia client 11, do you think that it’s a good idea, or hackers will simply tease this feature?
Is beholder language another made up stuff that people is trying to make sense of? Or theres hope of an actual language behind it?
If the software doesn’t run on the client machine then it’s a good thing. If the software runs on the client machine it’s hackable (like punkbuster) . So if they go with a team like. FairFight they’re doing the right thing. I haven’t come to definite conclusions yet about the Beholder language I think the answer is 42.
For example, the Beholder librarian says “It’s not Tibia, it’s one, silly” (something along those lines) Tibia = 20 + 9 + 2 + 9 + 1 = 41
42 (The answer to life, the universe and everything) – 41 = 1
So my hypothesis is that you don’t know what the answer means unless you know which question is being asked.
How do you see tibia in the future?
Being played solely within isolated communities of die hard fans. It’s obvious Cipsoft is monetizing the game as much as they can like squeezing a lemon. At some point in the future they’ll have to announce its end of life and move onto other ventures. I would be very surprised if they didn’t have something else up their sleeves already.
Maybe a pessimistic view of things, but eventually all things must die. Tibia is no exception.
Thank you Dennis for providing so many details and your thoughs!
Postado originalmente por Neal Caffrey
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