harmony destroys servers

[Thoth]

servers buy this thing called harmony to stop cheats. sounds good right? I mean, even the way it randomly causes other programs to crash when left on too long shouldnt be that bad if it does what it says!

but when woe gets too big, woe gets LAGGY. I mean really laggy. maybe it just can't handle all those people. woe becomes unplayable, guilds start leaving, etc etc. server dies.
you can blame people who bypass harmony and use nodelay and all that, but the fact of the matter is harmony destroys servers. seen it happen 3 times (LuminaRO, Exos-RO, and now Neu-RO).

...and it makes me sad...

[yC]

Okay couple questions.

I hate it when the ro client exe takes more resource than i am running my own bare-bone test server on the same computer.  It make no sense.  Is it harmony or something else?

I get d/c due to time gap etc at least once an hour on certain server only ... is that harmony?  (while my friend on skype with me did not get any and we are geographically close, internet is fine I see no reason for the server to kick me out like that)

I get third party software detected or similar message then get d/c on certain server only ... is that harmony?

What about sudden server side lag spike?

[Chemical Crush]

I also played on several servers with Harmony.

On one of them I got dc'd about two or three times due to a 'time gap'  But its not like I was lagging or anything?  I also got a third party issue but it was due to something in one of the game files or some mess, something we had to delete.

I ended up quitting a week or so after starting cause only a few people were experiencing the d/cing issue.  :/  I don't know if its harmony but other people who lived close to me, kinda, weren't having the issue.  But I was.  -Shrugs-


I don't mind harmony so much, there were a few other servers I played with it that I didn't have the d/cing issue.  And its not like I use ANY third party programs, Since i'm not all super hyped up about WoE or anything * I have no idea if any third party programs or extra 'addons' are ideal for WoE *.

So yeah

[JermZ]

All I could say would be, oh the irony.

Might want to get the developer's take on this.

[Aurora™]

Harmony is a piece of crap. Plain and simple.

If you can manage to get it to work on your server, then kudo points to you. I've been on at least three servers who've used it, and all it did was cause crashes, clash with WoE, and for those who used anything from eAmod, it clashed with that as well. I would honestly prefer to use hack shield over Harmony, any day, as all Harmony has proven to be is a waste of space and never have I had any players tell me that they appreciated having it.

Why does it clash with everything? RO now runs off of .lua files along with the .lub files. You know what else uses .lua files? Harmony! Harmony confuses the two different types of .lua files and causes crashes, I've seen it delete some of the RO .lua files and also tries to read some of them.

So, if anyone's planning on using it, don't. ESPECIALLY not if you're going to be using eAmod as well.

[Triper]

Okay couple questions.

I hate it when the ro client exe takes more resource than i am running my own bare-bone test server on the same computer.  It make no sense.  Is it harmony or something else?

YES but is also fault on the exe because harmony is bad with certain exes but admins ignore that fact because you only see that happen after some hours...

I get d/c due to time gap etc at least once an hour on certain server only ... is that harmony?  (while my friend on skype with me did not get any and we are geographically close, internet is fine I see no reason for the server to kick me out like that)

It's in some cases from my own and friends experience. It seems that some people's net is affected a lot by this because harmony sometimes go nuts and start to interpret some software/net programs to have net that people use as a third party and starts to block, bad thing is that the block is made to the net and not to any program at all and ro ends in a crazy loop and you get a time gap thx to that.

I get third party software detected or similar message then get d/c on certain server only ... is that harmony?

If that server has it, 99.9% chances are that it's.

What about sudden server side lag spike?

Harmony doing player checks lol The problem is that the way it does uses a lot of cpu resources and then the server lags thx to that, sometimes harmony even goes crazy and starts to do more checks then it can handle at same time making it impossible to play.

@Aurora™: There is still some servers that have good "nerd" admins that can put harmony working fine but they are like near 0 since you've to do a bit trial and error tests with exes and hex edits and stuff because harmony is like racist with lots of stuff and lacks some code optimization/better code here and there.
I've seen at least 3 servers with harmony that you don't lag at all, it works as intended and even one of the admins admitted that it hated harmony because when he would do an update to the exe to implement something new he had to loose quite some hours just doing tests to achieve a proper configuration that harmony wouldn't go coconuts but still it was the best to him to use.

[markaizer]

I've using harmony for like a year or so.
Never had complains that can't be solved or problems that will make me say that it is a crap.

d/cing issue
 1. Time gap thingy, and 2. Disconnected after getting the the map server.

#1 happens mostly when ppl lost the connection with the server, and most cases because of lag. Harmony detects it as Speedhack(when you lag) xD. That's not much difference with getting Disconnected from server message when you lost connectivity with a server.
The other reason is when who ever in charge of configuring the harmony, didn't configure the setting right where harmony counts how many packets you've sent to the server & if it too much that normal, you will get kicked out. Different servers have different settings eg. 195 aspd or some servers has no delay on skills etc. They need to customize this setting, accordingly.

#2 This was the autoban feature, I don't get it much but for some reason some lag issues are being detected as memory modification. So if your connection with the server sucks that bad, you will often get blocked by harmony xD. But there is an option to disable this setting, but that will lessen your overall security. This autoban feature also blocks ppl who tries to by pass harmony. Thinking of this, I think maybe a suggestion for harmony to add an additional setting where in it won't block certain detection will be enough. That or better detection i guess? if possible.

even the way it randomly causes other programs to crash when left on too long shouldnt be that bad if it does what it says!

Never encountered this nor someone report about this.

Usually all crashes that happened to my server was not harmony related, Harmony even help us find whats causing it with its better crash logging thingy, which atm is bug and harmony said they will fix it.

when woe gets too big, woe gets LAGGY. I mean really laggy. maybe it just can't handle all those people. woe becomes unplayable, guilds start leaving, etc etc. server dies.

Harmony probably needs more network usage than without harmony since it reads the packets sent by players to see if there is any cheat programs being used(but not really sure about that).

But never really think harmony causes the lag, when a lot of ppl are clashing you have to DL all of their data, their movement, skills etc(more than normal if the server has no delay setting or some speed up the players setting). At the same time you are also uploading your packets to the server.
In our server, we made a program that tests the player's connection, this way we'll be able to diagnose where a certain lag came from. The program will ping and trace route the server & other good hosting company IPs, to see the difference as part of the diagnosis.
As the player sends results, nothing about Harmony causes the lag shows up. Mostly high ping, route s having network problems, DDOS attacks(happens a lot on different hosting companies lately).

ESPECIALLY not if you're going to be using eAmod as well.

I'm not really sure if Harmony supports eAmod, never used eAmod.
I had the chance to use it before, but that time it was out dated.
Maybe it does, because LuminaRO used harmoyn with eAmod. But, I think if you install eAmod you'll normally have issues with other custom codes with or without harmony. Everyone knows what happens when installation was not that complete or successful.
But anyway, Harmony is open for bug reports, usually I send them reports even if I just feel that it could be harmony related, and even if its not they answer me with a solution to fix it as long as I give the gdb crash logs.

What about sudden server side lag spike?

Either harmony was configured incorrectly or its not harmony at all, like if the server network or specs was perfectly fine. Then maybe an autobackup script that uses a lot of resources, if you run one every 1hr that will surely do server side lag every 1hr xD no matter how good or bad your connection is xD
Also, when Admins checks logs hardcore, it uses up a lot of resources from less than 10% cpu to more than 70% or so(as monitored on Intel Xeon Processor). And that would cause server lag as well.
Usually when I do check logs, I tell ppl "oops sorry i was checking something xD"

[yC]

Oh forgot the main question.  How much is this thing?  I heard it is easily more than a month's hosting rent for most starting server.  It charge by monthly?

Why would a starting server get harmony anyway when they should try to maximize player count or player friendliness (from the server side).  It is something only medium/large server should consider using if cheating might be a problem ... if I have to think who buys it.  Still I see newly started servers claim to have it with pride.

So i am seeing it is a product only for those that know what they are doing.   Normal people buy it without thinking of configuring it will end up kill the server with it.  Even you spend time on it, the end result might not be desirable.  Shouldn't harmony try to make their product easier to use and general less crap by default?

[Eurydice]

It's like $200 (lifetime) from what I've heard from my previous admin.

it is a product only for those that know what they are doing

This is true, the first time we installed it on the previous server I played, it just screwed up everything. Since the players won't listen to the instructions too. Well it really works, tried to use WPE/RPE and now, AHK and failed. But constant disconnection and time stamp lags (plus it was a high rate server with -100% delay, a lot of players were affected, kicking them off the game), killed half of that server's population.

[Judgement]

Doubt NeuRO died because of harmony...didn't see much complain about it anyways.

[Triper]

People complained it's just that people got used to it a bit because BG/WoE was fun at the begin there and so most of people got over it lol
Harmony was and is one of the reasons that why NeuRo's exe consumes over 4gb of memory after some hours on. I never got that in ANY but ANY game/server that I played before. Max i get is 1gb on a mmo heavy in graphics that I play with a friend sometimes. Heck, not even my test server with 9 clients that I opened once to check what was the max atk possible with all the game buffs used that much memory in total.
People get excuses and some even say that is the vista and the 2gb prob when it isn't lol
The proof is that on a well configured harmony server I was able to log 10 clients to get a guild pic since lots of members were on and some felt bad that others weren't on to be on the pic too. With 1h+ of the 10 clients on, since I had access to their accounts, I never passed from 1gb in total and the only bad thing I was having was lag because 1 client was lag free and all the others were having like a massive lag when someone used a skill lol I was able to use mozilla, msn while doing that too and on vista and on my crap lappy with 2gb ram.
But at NeuRO with the same pc and net I couldn't have more then 2 clients on for 4h before I had to refresh the clients.

It is a product only for those that know what they are doing.

Seems that it's the true.

[Thoth]

yeah, harmony just gobbles up more and more memory over time, until your computer runs out. then it will start making other programs crash, often itself along with it. I'm still running windoze XP btw. I also got this effect on other servers, although it may have been less serious it would eventually crash firefox.

I can personally confirm that harmony doesn't really stop ahk, its attempts to scan every doggamn program on your computer can be blocked by any intermediate computer user. I've heard rumors of people doing speedhacks with harmony as well. and the CoT guild was banned on neu-ro for somehow getting the effects of assumptio and ghostring scrolls ?packet edits?

[ragnazorg]

I'm using harmony in my server and yes I can say that it got issues sometimes but if you know how to deal with it you won't have issues with it.

1. Time Gap Issues - I applied my fix for this so my players wont complain about this. Honestly I don't see anyone having this issues anymore.

2. Disconnection issues - Sometimes when your server clock is not in sync it disconnects people. That's the latest issue we got, do install NTP if you're using linux system.

3. Lag spikes - I noticed when my server time is not in sync it usually causes this because harmony got checks and all of that with regards to timers.

4. For the ram and cpu usage I have my desktop check to see if its harmony eating it or not.

With more than 10 programs running, Skype, msn, ym, photoshop, thunderbird, xenserver, notepad++, google chrome with 12 tabs on, firefox with 5 tabs on, etc.




With more than 10 programs running, Skype, msn, ym, photoshop, thunderbird, xenserver, notepad++, google chrome with 12 tabs on, firefox with 5 tabs on, etc. + RO.






Now its up to you how to fix it and configure it.


I'm using windows 7, 64 bit and while I do this check I also have my windows xp mode open.

and the CoT guild was banned on neu-ro for somehow getting the effects of assumptio and ghostring scrolls ?packet edits?

Harmony logs is enabled by default, you can ask the admin to check the harmony logs if those people really did use packet edits and such.

[Relics]

@Ragnazorg (or anyone who knows some more about harmony), there are shields like xtrap in commercial games that have system ring 0 privilege. What about harmony? It seems to block AKH (a 3rd party program mostly used for macro'ing) what's it doing to detect that. Does harmony act like a rootkit that can scan beyond his own memory? (which requires the ring 0 privilege) or does it just use signature based software recognition

[leokimah]

$200 for a program that takes me about 3 minutes to completely bypass? You are getting ripped off pretty bad here.
You can still ahk with this program either way all you really have to do is change a specific area of your spam scripts and it works fine. Not going to go into detail about bypassing, but i will let you know that once you figure it out you will kick yourself on how simple it is.

As for it ruining servers. I can't necessarily say i agree with that statement. I've woe'd on servers like malevolentRO and extreme-RO (servers that people heavily cried about lag on) virtually lagless and error free except for the random time gaps which me and an admin figured out the issue in the end anyways. It was more of a ping issue if anything. I kinda want to say people with lower end PC's will have a higher chance of receiving said lag and error problems.

Honestly if your are really wanting people to stop using ahk and grf edits like nodelay. Invest some time into setting client side delays on abused skills like arrow shower and land protector for an example. You can't bypass hard delays. Now this isn't an easy task and doesn't mean you go and give crap 1 second delays. If you do that then say goodbye to your woe community. Only server i have played that has done this successfully is gwRO which is no doubt the best woe server i've played on.