Stats Page - April Update

[i win 1096]

1 minute ago, John Winkle said:

I personally like this new stats idea. Everyone against it is just bitching to bitch. Be happy you can even see the stats, who cares if someone can see what runs you do, maybe its time you switch it up a bit. 

I mean, if they want to keep it cool. Just they should be prepared for people smarter than me to abuse the shit out of it.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Google 872]

58 minutes ago, Brennan said:

Can you make the height of the iframe bigger so we don't have to scroll within a scroll.

Or you can check inspect element check the iframe src and just take that link and open a new tab?

https://olympus-entertainment.com/olympus-stats/top.php

[Bow 787]

36 minutes ago, Aether said:

2. The individuals on the most wanted list probably won't be on the most wanted list for very long, and the jobs of Vigilantes just got a lot easier. So their population will likely go up.

This isn't even a problem?

You just open the wanted list and go through every player.

The wanted list is only updated once per day anyway.

[Dirty Scrubz 127]

23 minutes ago, Zahzi said:

 

@Jesse

@Aether is thinking exactly the same as I did when I first read this. My initial reaction was "woah. I can see what people are doing."

It may seem too cumbersome to or impossible to gain much important information from this, but using a few simple scripts the whole thing can be automated and aggregated to be useful.

I am going to list the process I would go through if I were to exploit this. Sure, ,you could do it manually, but why bother when you can automate it. I thought of this in the last few minutes since reading this, so it may be lacking in some details, but I'm just hoping to persuade you that these stats should be private per user.

1) Log into the server, or use someone who has.

2) Scrape view-source:https://steamcommunity.com/id/{{yourid}}/friends/players/  for the players currently on the server; this isn't too hard, in fact, I've done it in the past.

3a) Grab all the steam 64 ID from the urls if they don't have vanity URLS.

3b) Convert all vanity urls (eg https://steamcommunity.com/id/somewanker) to steam 64 ids (eg 76561198064919358) using something like https://steamid.eu/ with an api call like https://api.steamid.eu/request.php?api={KEY}&player={PLAYERNAME}&request_type=5&format=json

At this point, I have a list of steamids of everyone on my server. What can I do with that?

4) Scrape the stats page of each player for whatever data I am interested in. Yes, you have cloudflare, but it's still not difficult to get around that. The rate of query can also be slowed down enough that it won't be too noticeable if you're not looking specifically for it, and still have the desired information.

5) Store this in a database with timestamps, etc

6) Profit: You now have a database that contains who does what, when, and how much. If I wanted to hunt gang [X], or player Y, all I have to do is aggregate all the information I've gathered from them in some nice way and observe that Y often does Mushrooms in the morning and sells in large quantities. Maybe i'll go check mushroom now.

If you were to change this so that it only updated daily, it would be less effective, but still not insignificant at all.

Again, I think this information should definitely not be available to everyone. I love stats. I think it's really cool to be able to see these stats, but I think that seeing the stats for another gang, another player is too far. The aggregation of this data would be fine, and still show what you seem to be aiming for (public proof that one run isn't "dead"). Stats like lockpicking, or speedbombs are fine. The sell quantities are nt.

So why am I posting this if I think I could so easily exploit it and use it to my advantage? I have no doubt that I will not be the only person to think about doing this. Maybe not on a large scale, but even just individually checking players of interest has the potential to be a bit overpowered.

The method I outlined above is not the only possibility, it's just the first one that I thought of using techniques that I have in the past.

TLDR: This information should not all be public. It's pretty easy to create a few scripts/programs to aggregate this data and provide a stupid advantage. Please make it private to each user.

 

Yeah yeah but whats preventing X gang or Y player from simply changing what they run? Keep in mind the market also drops very fast when selling so they won't be doing one thing for too long. And they can mitigate any tracking by slowing updates to every 12-24 hours which would make aggregating all this data useless. 

[Spider 22]

4 minutes ago, Dirty Scrubz said:

 

Yeah yeah but whats preventing X gang or Y player from simply changing what they run? Keep in mind the market also drops very fast when selling so they won't be doing one thing for too long. And they can mitigate any tracking by slowing updates to every 12-24 hours which would make aggregating all this data useless. 

You actually might be dumber than a stack of rocks.

[i win 1096]

6 minutes ago, Dirty Scrubz said:

 

Yeah yeah but whats preventing X gang or Y player from simply changing what they run? Keep in mind the market also drops very fast when selling so they won't be doing one thing for too long. And they can mitigate any tracking by slowing updates to every 12-24 hours which would make aggregating all this data useless. 

Ok you don't get it, clearly. Players on Olympus are animals of habit, no matter how long this information is delayed by doesn't change the fact we can use it to accurately track where you're most likely going to be at any given time.
 

3 minutes ago, Aether said:

Steps to avoid detection.

1. Disband your gang, and remake it but don’t start any gang wars. Also keep your gang bank balance low enough to keep it off the main stat page.

2. Dispose of your gang tags, and change your IGN as frequently as you believe is nessasary. 

Yeah it's a bit silly that this is essentially the only way to avoid what we're coming up with, and even then, it's not reliable at all once we start scraping steam IDs that are currently on the server and looking them up that way.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Mr Majestic

[Iloveanime_astral 156]

People / gangs out to rob check everything anyways. Also not hard to figure out who does what runs after a bit of time on the server, and sold materials could be stolen. Time to change things up if you're so concerned about your usual runs being robbed.

[Zahzi 3015]

1 minute ago, Dirty Scrubz said:

Yeah yeah but whats preventing X gang or Y player from simply changing what they run? Keep in mind the market also drops very fast when selling so they won't be doing one thing for too long. And they can mitigate any tracking by slowing updates to every 12-24 hours which would make aggregating all this data useless

This might be true for some random player Y, but if they are well set up to do a run (houses/gangshed/etc) they will probably stick to that. Many large gangs have a lot of houses for the same thing.

the availability of data external from the game should not influence what runs I do.

I'm not saying that this is a perfect system, it doesn't give ESP, but it gives enough information to be useful.

As I mentioned in my post, slowing it down is an improvement over live data (which is what we have currently as far as I can tell), however, it's still easy to see trends with 12-24 hr old data. If the amount of mushrooms that player X sells is consistently going up, I know damn well that they like mushrooms.

[Spider 22]

You guys do realize that certain gangs do certain runs, they buy houses specifically for that run. Its not like we are going to go do a plat run after doing weed runs for months. Fkin career cops.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Spider

[i win 1096]

Just now, Zahzi said:

the availability of data external from the game should not influence what runs I do.

Nailed it.

[Zahzi 3015]

5 minutes ago, AstralC said:

People / gangs out to rob check everything anyways. Also not hard to figure out who does what runs after a bit of time on the server, and sold materials could be stolen. Time to change things up if you're so concerned about your usual runs being robbed.

As someone who does almost nothing other than robbing, yes, you do figure out who does what. But you have to actually physically observe someone doing a run, and remember that in some form.

This would allow me to have a much larger and more accurate idea of what EVERYBODY is doing in an automated way.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Zahzi
clarity

[gaz 522]

8 hours ago, Aether said:

 

Yep

[Spider 22]

9 minutes ago, Aether said:

Or just migrate to other Olympus servers to make your money and return back to your home one to conduct gang activities.

Yeah, let me go buy a 10mil+ house on another server that I wont even play on, fantastic.

[Bow 787]

Okay, now your individual stats will only update once per week.

[Google 872]

8 minutes ago, Bow said:

Okay, now your individual stats will only update once per week.

NOOO DUDE my god why do people cry about such little things... I loved the instant updates. RIP

[Bow 787]

16 minutes ago, Google said:

NOOO DUDE my god why do people cry about such little things... I loved the instant updates. RIP

I liked it too

[i win 1096]

26 minutes ago, Bow said:

Okay, now your individual stats will only update once per week.

Cool, glad you guys could see where we were coming from. A part of me is at least a little sad we couldn't spend the next few days writing something to abuse this new information, but at least you guys found a decent compromise to slow us down. Thanks!

[raykazi 180]

3 hours ago, Mr Majestic said:

Jesse, you realise we can get the majority of that other information simply by parsing some HTML on Gametracker and steam profiles right?

As for everything Aether has said, he's thinking about it exactly like we are in DB right now. We've done very similar things in other games that have the same sort of information available as an API. I think you're either too trusting or ignorant to the fact Olympus players are essentially psychopaths that will do anything for an advantage.

It's fantastic that admins would have access to these tools and information, anything that helps you guys admin is always a bonus.

I understand a lot of work and time has already gone into displaying information and releasing this publicly.

Shhh Maj im already writing OTv3

[Grandma Gary 10477]

1 hour ago, Bow said:

I liked it too

Would it actually be possible to allow people to opt out?  Would be worth doing for the 4 special snowflakes who don't want people to know they never leave Kavala ;D

RIGHT?!

[Bow 787]

Just now, Grandma Gary said:

Would it actually be possible to allow people to opt out?  Would be worth doing for the 4 special snowflakes who don't want people to know they never leave Kavala ;D

RIGHT?!

Thought about it, but would require an in-game option to toggle it unless you want to make a new ticket subject for it?  

[Zahzi 3015]

7 minutes ago, Grandma Gary said:

Would it actually be possible to allow people to opt out?  Would be worth doing for the 4 special snowflakes who don't want people to know they never leave Kavala ;D

RIGHT?!

+1

[darn fool 232]

On 4/11/2018 at 6:31 PM, Bow said:

 

 

More spying data (players)

Did you know, we spy on what you do? Cool well unlike Facebook you can't opt-out of it, we're gonna know how many bombs you planted and how much meth you sold and there is nothing you can do about it.

 

 

 

Or how much heroin you stuffed into a hunter cough 

[ProxY 110]

Can we get it pushed every 24 hours instead? A week is a long time to wait for something that could be live etc?

[Bow 787]

Start a poll so you can all come to some kind of agreement. Otherwise I'm gonna leave it at 1 week.

[Dobbs 62]

i like the new background image when loading in very nice