harmony destroys servers

[Sirius_White]

I guess I'll post my two cents to this topic as well. As a matter of fact, Harmony indeed is no product you should install and never think of again. It never was and it never will be. But this doesn't necessarily mean you need to figure out how to use this software on your own. Technical support is included in all licenses for a reason, and it is not limited to fixing bugs. Pretty much all of the problems mentioned here can be taken to the Harmony support as well, even if you're not the server owner (although it's obviously easier for us to deal with the staff directly). I've had TeamViewer support sessions with players from about 15 servers, if you provide more information than "omg something is wrong" we will be happy to assist you.

markaizer already mentioned some valid points, so I won't repeat all of his points.

I get d/c due to time gap etc at least once an hour on certain server only ... is that harmony?

Possibly. Harmony requires a monolithic system clock for speedhack detections. This is often not the case on cheap server hardware or virtual servers of any size. Many systems have a NTP cron running, which automatically fixes time glitches and corrects the system time. However, eAthena relies on 'gettimeofday()' for the internal timer system. Changing the system time while eAthena is running leads to the weirdest kinds of lag, including severe position lag.
As a possible workaround I added the configure setting '--enable-rdtsc' to eAthena. In many cases this solved not only time gap kicks, but also many position lags.

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?

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

Unless you get a message box and the game immediately closes afterwards this is not Harmony, at least not in its default configuration. Depending on what software was detected you can configure on the server how Harmony reacts to different detections. The common default setting is to log the incident and kick the player.
This may seem restrictive, but is a design decision. It's easier to find out how to disable a broken detection than to enable something that might not even exist. I guess out of five server admins one actually reads the configuration file before adding Harmony to his live server. I can either choose to enable speedhack detections by default and deal with the few people who're having problems with it, or I can silently disable everything and be blamed for not detecting speedhacks. I choose the first. All configuration settings can be changed on the fly and it's well documented how to modify the detection behavior. If players are having problems with time gap errors just disable the detection and contact the Harmony support. You will get a full explaination of the underlying problems, possible workarounds and instructions on how to apply them.
Most problems are not caused by bugs or racist default configurations, but by not configuring Harmony appropriately. There are customers who asked about every single setting or problem. They now know pretty much everything about the different config options and pitfalls and run Harmony without any problems. I am aware that this is not an ideal situation and am therefore currently in the process of creating more knowledge base articles, general usage guidelines and a customer forum to provide this knowledge to the entire customer base.

@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

No kernel layer. I've seen too many anti-cheat tools bluescreening my system, I don't want Harmony to be the next one. All checks are done inside the RO process, Harmony doesn't randomly interfere with other processes.

yeah, harmony just gobbles up more and more memory over time

Harmony was and is one of the reasons that why NeuRo's exe consumes over 4gb of memory after some hours on

It's impossible for the RO process to consume over 2gb of memory, I assume the 4gb are an exaggeration for the sake of argument. I once kept five different clients versions running on my PC for three days. The client did leak memory, but it was only about ~30MB per day (day being ~8-12 hours active usage). Out of all Harmony customers only two reported memory leak issues so far, one of them being NeuRO. The severe memory consumption seen on these servers seems to be somehow related to a combination of OS settings, specific exe versions and Harmony setups. There have been several minor updates addressing this problem though, the most recent one was published earlier today.

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

You can't get these effects through packet edits.

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?

$200, lifetime including support and updates.

$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 ...

Take a look at https://harmonize.it/faq#faq_11 please. AHK is not listed in the features section for a reason.

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.

100% agreed. Unfortunately this is not feasible for Harmony. I've tried enforcing hard skill-depending delays in the past, but this is way too server specific. You can't ship settings that just magically work on all server configurations.

LuminaRO, Exos-RO, and now Neu-RO

In ~March 2011 there was an awful bug which caused heavy server lag (debug code included in the production branch). LuminaRO just switched back to their old version, which afaik solved their problems with Harmony. The problem was fixed in early April and hasn't returned since.
ExosRO is a server I have never heard of, they got their license from a reseller. If the server indeed died because of Harmony they never felt the need to contact us about it.
NeuRO got some problems with Harmony, but it doesn't seem to me like Harmony was a deal breaker. Never had much contact with them besides actual tech questions though, the last inquriy was months ago.

What about sudden server side lag spike?

sometimes harmony even goes crazy and starts to do more checks then it can handle

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

There are no scheduled checks on the server that could consume significant CPU resources. It's unlikely that lag spikes are caused by Harmony. In fact 95% of the scheduled checks are like "did the client report everything we asked for?". The actual check routine is pretty minimal, a regular chat packet takes up more CPU time than any of the checks done by Harmony. I've seen people using query_sql in scripts and then running mysqldump during WoE, such setups are more often the source of lag spikes.
It is true, however, that eAmod seems to be causing trouble in some cases. The primary reason is that eAmod sometimes starts to send out literally millions of packets within seconds. Judging from the monitoring logs this is related to some battle system modification. Either way this is not to be taken as an excuse for not dealing with this problem. If lag problems emerge with the implementation of Harmony customers are eligible for hands-on analysis, possibly including fixes to third-party components and private Harmony tweaks. Just ten minutes ago I offered a customer to diagnose lag problems.

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!

That's... just not true. Harmony doesn't use or care about Lua at all. It doesn't delete anything either.


I subscribed to this topic, so I'll definitely read upcoming posts and gladly answer questions.

[Relics]

Interesting. It seems to me like people need to fiddle around with the server settings some more. Adjust optimally to what Harmony offers, and understanding the program then conclude further whether it is a bad thing or a good thing.

[Aurora™]

Working with Harmony, it has quite literally deleted the .lua files I had been using, so I'm not sure how it doesn't care about .lua files?

Without Harmony, the files remained untouched.

[Sirius_White]

I guarantee you there is no code in Harmony which deletes any files. Neither are any of the lua files accessed. When did this happen and on which server?

[Aurora™]

During my stay on Lumina, I had plenty of people who would complain about missing .lua file errors. If ever they re-installed with a fresh data folder, they'd have the same issues.

It very well could not have been Harmony as I'm sure it wouldn't pick and choose who to delete files for and who not to, plenty of people worked just fine with Harmony, but never have I seen that happen on any server that worked without Harmony.

[Aurora™]

These issues came before the new releases by kRO and before Ragray was rendered useless, and as I said, even with data folders that involved the missing .lua files, they were still erased.

[leokimah]

Take a look at https://harmonize.it/faq#faq_11 please. AHK is not listed in the features section for a reason.
100% agreed. Unfortunately this is not feasible for Harmony. I've tried enforcing hard skill-depending delays in the past, but this is way too server specific. You can't ship settings that just magically work on all server configurations.

Usually when someone says bypass that means to completely render the program useless. You can and always will be able to nodelay speedgear, wpe(who uses this anymore?) even with harmony enabled. Once more people figure this out the program is going to be in some serious trouble.

Also LOL at the last part. You don't need harmony to do that. Why rely on such a s*** program to begin with?

[Thoth]

Usually when someone says bypass that means to completely render the program useless. You can and always will be able to nodelay speedgear, wpe(who uses this anymore?) even with harmony enabled. Once more people figure this out the program is going to be in some serious trouble.

Who cares if people use ahk, what you really need to stop are those snipers who use Falcon Assault 5 times a second when they only have 150 atkspd. I really think that ALL skilldelays should be compared to atkspd and enforced serverside to prevent speedhacks. clientside stuff is always bypassable through some method or another. same for autopot- rather than ban users who post your woe vids, try to put some delay on potion spamming serverside. is there any reason this isnt in eathena already?
There seem to be some wpe related dupes and zenyhacks, that work if someone bothers to figure out howto get around the packet encryption. In any case, packet encryption should not be your last line of defense.

rumor has it that having kaite on someone makes harmony's anti-speedhack go nuts and lag everybody because of the wierd wave graphic. does this have any basis in truth?

when I used homunculus or mercenary AI in the past on lumina, harmony would think I was speedhacking and kick me from the server. has this been addressed? gravity has a pretty horrible implementation of AI, and it cannot really know if an attack succeeded or what its own skill/atkspd delays are (they are affected by bard songs). hell even the "IsMonster" command doesnt even work right, so to use it in pvp you gotta do some crazy workarounds. The only way for it to be effective is just send attack, move, and skill commands every cycle (about 140 ms delay between each cycle, or 7 times per second)

4gb of ram is not an exaggeration, although I did have 2-3 clients open. when all your ram is gone it starts to eat your page file until it runs out of space and eventually crashes something on your computer and itself. its quite annoying.

[LeaLea]

A lot of the dupes going around are actually either miscoding from the admin's side, missing the relevant checks, or eA mod. eA mod seems to be altering a lot of things it shouldn't. Any server running a cash shop where more than one item at once can be bought and eA mod should take a look at their code. (Feel free to PM me on this, I can get more details)

[leokimah]

Who cares if people use ahk, what you really need to stop are those snipers who use Falcon Assault 5 times a second when they only have 150 atkspd. I really think that ALL skilldelays should be compared to atkspd and enforced serverside to prevent speedhacks. clientside stuff is always bypassable through some method or another. same for autopot- rather than ban users who post your woe vids, try to put some delay on potion spamming serverside. is there any reason this isnt in eathena already?
There seem to be some wpe related dupes and zenyhacks, that work if someone bothers to figure out howto get around the packet encryption. In any case, packet encryption should not be your last line of defense.

rumor has it that having kaite on someone makes harmony's anti-speedhack go nuts and lag everybody because of the wierd wave graphic. does this have any basis in truth?

when I used homunculus or mercenary AI in the past on lumina, harmony would think I was speedhacking and kick me from the server. has this been addressed? gravity has a pretty horrible implementation of AI, and it cannot really know if an attack succeeded or what its own skill/atkspd delays are (they are affected by bard songs). hell even the "IsMonster" command doesnt even work right, so to use it in pvp you gotta do some crazy workarounds. The only way for it to be effective is just send attack, move, and skill commands every cycle (about 140 ms delay between each cycle, or 7 times per second)

4gb of ram is not an exaggeration, although I did have 2-3 clients open. when all your ram is gone it starts to eat your page file until it runs out of space and eventually crashes something on your computer and itself. its quite annoying.

You can not influence hard delays in anyway at all. Meaning someone using nodelay + speedgear + ahk with 0 ping will not be able to reduce the time of a skill that has for an example a 1 second hard delay. Falcon Assault literally has no animation delay and when combo'd with Minstrel songs can be incredibly spamable with low base aspd. Most WoE snipers aim for about 187+ aspd so i don't get where you came up with such an insane low number? Unless your talking about arrow shower which is 100x worse than falcon assault if they are using nodelay or speedgear.

Putting any sort of delay on potions would severely nerf any frontline class and paladins. Autopot isn't a problem it's what keeps people in gvg's thus making them last longer. People don't want short GvG's.

AHK = todays meta without it people would probably still be running some 2008 FE builds. Usually 99% when servers allow ahk they are allowing autopot. How can you allow ahk and expect people to not autopot? LOL.

When i was actively playing most dupes (item generations) were from sgl injections. I remember people running around with valkyrie shields with 2 slots and orleans gloves with 2-4 slots on chronosRO3. Massive amounts of Zenny were probably from some exploit from something simple as buying mastelas with BG medals and selling them to a npc.

Kaite has always caused a form of lag even before harmony was popular on servers.

As i said in a post earlier. Time gaps seem to be based off ping. The last server i played i had under 5ms and i would get time gaps when i would throw about 50 bombs a second (exaggeration).

RO has a big problem with consuming more and more ram over time. I do not necessarily think that is a harmony issue.

[Thoth]

perhaps the falcon assault thing was a misunderstanding on my part, as I was under the impression you could speedhack any skill you wanted. but such perceptions can arise from the fact that things like arrow shower and ganbantein do not have hard delays in eathena by default when they should. and spamming AV / Sonicblow several times a second is just rediculous.

AHK = todays meta without it people would probably still be running some 2008 FE builds. Usually 99% when servers allow ahk they are allowing autopot. How can you allow ahk and expect people to not autopot? LOL.

you arent gonna stop people from using romedic or ahk. if a server owner is foolish enough to have a policy against ahk and autopotting (and there are such servers), they should instead consider changing the rate people can use healing items to more human levels. using ahk I was able to pot just under 7 times per second on the RMS test server.

[Triper]

@Sirius_White: I was being serious, it was even a bit over 4gb. Got that during the 2-3 months that I played there. Windows would even display a warn about that and to close the program[NeuRO.exe] to free it because he couldn't do it. A ignore of it would end in a need of manually shut-down the pc and turn it on afterwards to be able to use it again.
It was the first time I ever got it after some servers played where harmony and eAmod were a normal thing[even if they're not much they still are some].

It may not be a harmony problem at 100% but in the end is some conflict around Harmony, the ro.exe used and eAmod which ends in being a bit of the problem being harmony because without eAmod and harmony ro doesn't consume nothing crazy when compared to them together in this server[of course there is also the admin sucks view].

[yC]

Nice to see many new posts in this discussion.

While Sirius_White is brought here, I'd also like to question about the pricing.

$200, lifetime including support and updates.

That is not a small price to pay for a starting server.  Is there any reasonable refund terms or 30 day money back policies if the buyer cannot configure Harmony to the way they wanted or found the product isn't what they expected it to be?

If not, isn't there a huge risk to take when paying down this amount of money for an unknown product?  Is there a trial period or trial package to let potential buyer know what they are getting?

Seeing many servers just die within 1-3 months and the money got to waste like that.  I would think a monthly charge of $10~20 is more reasonable.  A lifetime price model does not fit the current RO "business" model at all.

Is the license resell-able or transferable?  What can someone get out of their lifetime license after they no longer host a RO server?  A lifetime license for software products like IPB are resell-able and transferable.


If some of the answers to my questions are no, make them as my suggestions. 

[Agnus Dei]

Another thread that kills this game more by the minute =)

[Triper]

I don't know but real experience with stuff > just plain theory and chit-chat.
You talk like people talking here have 0 experience with harmony just because you've bought it but the new kids you talk about know how to evade, bypass, render harmony useless and play the game as they want with AHK, ROMedic, grf edits, addition of new grfs to the ini and use more third party tools.
You may talk whatever you want but when people[not one person but more, a lot more] see stuff happen, you can't just refuse to accept it.