Bear Sounds From .DAT + Polar Bear

Well first, after searching for a couple hours through the .DAT, I found the bear sound mp3s.

Now, after deleting the Guild Wars .DAT and starting off with a character in Spamdan
(to only load Nightfall, which has no bears) I do believe it would be possible to use a number of third party software to see if a polar bear would be dropped or not.

Unfortunately I do not have the time to devise such a method, so without further ado I give it to the community in the hopes someone will make something of it.

http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=cd5f6afd500cf3363edffc0d99bcfb87570 988bd3d443ec60e99aff6b039a497-1293669890

http://www.mediafire.com/?djbitmrv2hlqnn5
http://www.multiupload.com/3874SXUL82

There's at least one bear in Nightfall. How can you be certain that those assets are only for the miniature?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ursula_the_White

It's the same model as the miniature and the Jingle Bear.

Well after delving into the .DAT, I've come to the conclusion that miniatures share the same mp3s as their larger counterparts.

All of the bear mp3s are also grouped together, so I can only assume that one of those is shared by the polar bear.

The whole concept is thrown off by the number of people showing off their mini polar bears in dist.

cept of course that minis don't make sounds in outposts, so unless anet streams entire file sets to you unnecessarily, which this theory disagrees with, it shouldn't flaw the practice at all

Theres no way anyone could run a program at beginning of Strength of Snow and tell if mini would come from chest.

And besides, its much easier for them just to run multiple bots

If we assume that drops are predetermined, you could easily sniff out the bear audio clip without doing the run itself at all (simply entering).

Assuming that drops from chests are predetermined as soon as you enter a zone, which I have no reason to doubt, you'd only need to know a unique data string associated with the polar bear mini and set it as a filtre in a packet sniffer on your own connection, theoretically. As one of the easiest to determine through minimum effort would be the bear sounds (instead of having to convert the mesh data into something readable, then go through the veritable hundreds for the quest in question, not to mention the thousands of others you have to peruse to narrow the search down) it seems logical to start there.


EDIT: or yeah, what Varc said

Except that theres no reason to only send part of the data for an object and not the rest.

Either way packet sniffing would be easier and came up among me and some friends months ago with the possibility of using it in bogroots. We deemed it cheating though and left it at that.

I can see why you did leave it there, it's a bit of a grey area, but so far as I can see, it's akin to using texmod and cartography mod, you're not physically editting your chances of getting the drop, just increasing your awareness of there being one in the map. Heck, it should even flag a sniffed even if it's not going to drop for you, providing that loot distribution isn't predetermined, and player-instanced.

I'd just like to point out to banshark moderators, this is all purely speculative work, discussing possibilities, not intentions

Might be possible but you'd better hurry to figure it out as you'll still need a hell of a lot of rezones to find one.

Well if it were possible, I imagine you could at least do one run per minute, so
60 runs = 1 hour

That'd be versus roughly 10 runs an hour normally

well those 2 dudes a while back did the thing where they both entered at exact same time and got same corpse drops + locked chest drops, so i guess it theoretically someone could do that.

Im sure Anet would deem it a bannable offense, but i doubt they could 'catch' you anyway.

But why now with the Polar bear, what about all the other high reward chests and loots and stuff

Well... if the sniffer works only with GW, theres the POSSIBILITY that it's "grey" but if you guys are using something like er... Wireshark, let it fly. I use wireshark constantly when I'm playing or not playing to see whats going on from time to time. Packet sniffers would only get you banned if they returned modified packets to anet saying "hai this guyz using me ban him pl0x". I don't think Anet embedded a process monitor in GW.

Great concept though. Add more layers of security and run a packet sniffer in promiscuous mode from another PC.

Whats the harm?

Hehe, those famous last words! It just strikes me that there's so much could be done user side whilst playing with the dat file, and anet are very shady about what they think is or isn't good or bad. Don't get me wrong texmod is good, but why couldn't you introduce something along the lines of markers where a certain mob is patrolling? Would this be especially advantageous to a play in an unfair way to others? Would knowing what loot you're going to get out of a chest before you open be considered unfair? There's just not been a great deal of input from anet as to what is and isn't acceptable. Bots are of course a complete and obvious "No." from the beginning, but where can one draw the line between advantageous enough to be useful, and advantageous enough to make people feel like they need this 3rd party add on to succeed in a certain role? (Cartography Made Easy I'm looking at you!)

Darke

would wireshark even work with something like this. its sending their funky gw.dat code not vlc files so how would you even go about doing that

How do we know the drop isn't determined when the end chest is spawned? Theres quite a fewe theories here that will need to be considered first. I think someone would have to go no a run with an actual polar bear outcome to determine whether the method would work.

What if the sound that the bear makes only gets associated with the miniature when it is physically present in your inventory?

Or is it that the bear makes a sound when it drops from the chest as well, and when it is lying on the ground before you picking it up?

I think:

1. The drop is only determined upon the spawn of the chest
2. The polar bear noise is only heard or sent or w/e once in invetory or used, not just as a loot on the ground.

I think its kinda like the zaishen chest. You cant enter Isle and know every possible drop you would get from the chest (because you already do), so each time the chest respawns, the loot from the chest is changed. When you enter Snowman lair I think all the grentch CC drops are determined, but you have to win the quest and have chest spawn before Chest loot is determined.

But maybe this could be applied to other situations. It would suck to try this on polar bear and never get Noise packet just cause its not sent anyway whether you could have gotten bear or not

... and you should be shot for openly announcing you are trying to get "enhanced rewards" from the game by means of circumventing the code, in a public forum, that liasons of the developer frequently read. lol...

noob.

Okay.. so you switch your area to lets say.. asia china in the account menue (so when kama is loaded there is very little chance of a polar)... you delete the .dat, you go into kamadan.

Then on the basis that anet doesn't stream you unneccessary data (which is probably true from the ammount of times you go into FoW for FoWsc and have extra files to load up?)

You go do your quest, the strength of snow. No polar drops right? Okay..
So you go in, no new files to be downloaded. Zone back to kama, go in again, no new files, repeat until there is a new one? for what you are talking about (from my understanding, I could be completely wrong here) is your saying that you dont think we're given the jingle bear (mini polar) noise data, unless their is one there. Well surely in your loading stream that is indicated by requirement to download a file or two?

~
So, if thats what your getting at.. and it works out, you wouldn't be using anything third party, circumventing any coding etc..You'd probably just waste alot of time redownloading everything.

It is merely a concept, these posts bare no intention to do so.

Given the fact that when you display a miniature that you haven't loaded for the day or maybe that you haven't seen in a little while, it takes some time to show up, I'm thinking that the polar bear script is activated the instant you click the chest. That's my guess, that the algorithm that gives you the chance of whatever items that come out is only ran when it needs to be. I don't think that end chest contents are pre-determined at all. Think of quest-driven pop-ups and chests that spawn...if they were already pre-determined upon loading, the chests would be there from the start, not later on when you fulfill the quest. A Good Deed is a good example of this...I've had chests pop up on the last wave that weren't there at the start. Completion chests of dungeons and this Strength of Snow quest also don't show up until the quest is completed, therefore are not pre-determined upon loading the map.

This whole discussion I suspect is moot.

The only way to truly see if this concept is true or false, is for multiple trials of unpacking and deleting the .dat at different spaces of time and for particular situations, to see if the files are there.

Yes because knowledge of how to do something is evil I tell you evil.


I have in the past admited to knowing where to get bots, how they work, and how to write my own if I felt like doing so. Yet all my in-game accounts have remained unbanned (with the exception of one I gave to my brother that he got banned for being an ass to people repetativly) Sooo... Next we have to look at the phrase "trying to get 'enhanced rewards'" no where does it say he is trying to do so rather saying he believes it is possible. Just like I know its possible to write a Snowball AT bot does that mean I have the intent to do so? Nope.


noob.

It's just exploiting a "tell" in the game... it maybe reduces the amount of farming for this piece of crap in half but it would still be a ridiculously hard to get drop. I wouldn't see it as cheating at all really.

Just bceause the chest doesn't appear until completion of the mission or quest, doesn't mean its contents wasn't determined on entry to the explorable area?

I imagine that every spawn and every chest loot, perhaps even every monster drop itself is predetermined when you enter an instance, it seems too much more practical than calculating on the fly, especially in a game where areas are already instanced. This pretty much means deciding on the game structure of arenanet before defining whether or not this is possible.

If this is possible, then ArenaNet finding out about it first (as they know their own game structure) and patching it before it is done (if they consider it cheating) is a good thing! Lol, noobs these days...

I think End chests that spawn upon completion have their loot determined when they spawn and not before.

Here's why......

When you enter an explorable, all the chest are set and each one contains exactly X number of items in it. X being the number of humans in your party. Notice when you open a chest, if it still contains more stuff for others then the chest graphic remains "closed" and clickable. However if you are the last human to open the chest, it changes to an open chest and is no longer auto-selectable.

If you enter an explorable with 2 humans and one of them leaves, the chests still contain 2 items. I've noticed this when clearing FoW with an alt account's heroes. I zone in with both accounts and then my alt leaves. All the chests i open remain selectable because they still contain loot for my alt that left.

There are also the bug a while back where if the chest contained 2 tomes, the first person to open it got both tomes. Another clue that loot is pre-determined in the chests.

However, for dungeons the countdown timer to leave doesn't start ticking until the last person opens the chest. If you have someone that has left your party on the final level of the dungeon, the chest doesn't have loot for them and starts the countdown. To me this implies that the chest is now empty and didn't spawn any loot for the ones that left.

Or it could be a completely different mechanic as they are a completely different style of chest? Note how its still selectable and all even if everyone who started the dungeon opens it?

The locked chest (I.e. any chest requiring a key not specifically locked ones as in the hm chests) way of doing things have been around forever. They may have just coded the dungeon chests differently when they were introduced to compare the number of players in the map currently to the number of times the chest has been opened. Rather then comparing the number of times the chest has been opened to the number of people who zoned in.

That's possible under certain mechanics such as streamed play, but that's more suited to non-instanced games, where the server does a lot more of the work compared to Guild Wars, where the client does most of the legwork, on a one to one server to client basis.

If I'm right, and there's a fair chance either way I'll admit, this is very roughly what happens:

• User Zones
• User's Client sends a Request to Server for the Instance's spawn information etc
• Server does the math, drawing up the results of the drop chances, selecting where monsters will spawn if they have possible multiple spawn locations, working out which priests will give you their respective faction blessing etc and sends it back to the Client along with a Checklist
• The Client receives this data, reads through the Checklist to make sure it has everything it needs.
• If the Client finds it doesn't have all the required data, it'll request the needed files and download them.
• The Client then constructs the Instance with all the necessary data.

I believe the Zaishen chest may function differently, perhaps under a separate mechanic like the one used in PvP, where only the map and objects within it are predetermined, and so it functions more as a server controlled player than a standard chest.

I can appreciate that it would be possible for all chests, loot and mob behaviour and spawns to function this way, but I'd say it's unfeasible at best to have the servers do all of that on top of maintaining outposts and PvP. All those mobs, chests, loot, AI, all that, for everyone all the time? That'd be a severe amount of work on a large scale such as GW.

It strikes me as the best method is to stream all the necessary data the once, at the beginning, which could be the one main difference network wise between WoW and Guild Wars; WoW seems to use streamed play due to lack of instances, worldwide PvP mechanics etc; and that is why WoW costs on a monthly or bimonthly basis.

The idea is here, not to enhance your chances of getting a drop by modifying or circumventing code, simply to allow you to see more information more quickly, saving you having to wade through mobs only to receive very little reward for your efforts. Slaver's Exile I'm lookin' at you!

The method here would be to analyze all data received on entry to an instance, filter out of that data a certain piece of it, if it is there, and then flag it for the User to recognize. Theoretically, as I discussed with my friend Varc, this could not only be used to predict what loot there is in a map but potentially, you could build an extra-large mini-map complete with where mobs have spawned, or even, with a little bit of help and a bit of reworking from anet, make something along the lines of that nifty friends map tool they're developing for iPads in GW2. The tactical advantages to the spawn map on a point of view of planning certain mobs you'd maybe like to avoid, working out the best way to a certain point on the map with the most fighting possible, or even just helping a friend that got disconnected find your party again are rather large.

I understand as a whole that maybe this could shift the balance of the game unfavourably, but with input from anet, through complexity of setup of such an add-on (which in my general experience tends to stave off the mobs), or maybe down to general consensus of such an add-on removing the fun from the game (again, Cartography Made Easy, I'm looking at you!) this could be kept in check.

Keep also in mind that as we draw closer to GW2, people are expressing time and again their dissent at having to grind certain titles to up their HoM points. Maybe something like this could alleviate those stresses and dissents, making Guild Wars less of a grindfest towards the higher end of titles.

Sorry for the wall of text, and any spelling mistakes, my English isn't at it's best this early in the morning,

Darke

Yeah, now that i look at it, i think End could be correct about the coding. The normal explorable chests have been around since 2005 and were coded a specific way. The spawning end chests are more recent and could have been coded by a completely different developer and coded in a different way.

The key question is whether or not the chest contents are sent to the client when you enter a zone with an end chest or when the chest actually spawns. I still tend to think that the client only receives this data when it spawns but that's a question I suppose the packet sniffer experts here would need to answer.

This sounds about right to me. Going a little deeper into the gray area here, if the necessary assets are to be downloaded because the zone already sent you a setup with a lucky drop, the information for the entire instance would be stored in your RAM wouldn't it? I wonder if someone very, very fluent in hacking their own RAM data would be able to sniff the GW process in RAM and read it's stored data, lol. And detect whether or not that item has been stored because it will drop....

I'd say the only stable way to do that would be to do... something.... to the client. I dislike the prospect of having to *mumble mumble* my actual running GW client itself; I'm all too conscientious that that would probably involve reverse engineering the client which is against the ToS rather clearly, so I can't really experiment to see if that is possible.

I'd say theoretically yes it is possible, but I had reservations about decompressing the dat file until reading on the wiki this had already been done in the search for information on unimplemented content, let alone *mumble mumble* the client.

It's been a constant battle between curiosity and ToS confines so far I enjoy GW too much to put my account in absolute danger such as *mumble mumble*.... for the sake of examining what drops i'd get in certain areas, but my general being nosy refuses to allow me to walk away without having a liiiiiittle peek behind the scenes and maybe make something to help the general public over the christmas period. Shame that wintersday is about to end with this being fruitless, but it's good to hear that at least a few people of the guru community have ideas to bounce on this vein of thought,

Darke