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Possible Virus/Possible False Positive In The Torrents
Mavrex
Member Posts: 17
First off, I'll villify myself by saying the only reason I jumped on this open beta chance was to see it free of charge and officially write it off for when my fiancee and I go into looking for a new game mode. I haven't been impressed with anything I've seen or read about the game, but it is a triple A title and if I hadn't tried to get into this beta I know we would have eventually wasted time and money on the game just to give it a try for five minutes.
Like a lot of people I got locked out of the "Open Beta" and while a lot of people are trying to say the open beta isn't a trial, the industry as a whole has come to build expectations of "Download our game and help stress our servers" when it comes to open betas. So after being locked out of the game due to 'congestion' and lack of beta keys, I finally managed to get a key today. Little did I know I was going to war with the worst mmo launcher I've ever had the displeasure of handling. This thing was a complete mess and like many complaints I read about recently, my install/patch/updater issues were of the "Are they serious? Square made this pile of...?" variety.
Looking around online there were a few 'tips' to fix this steaming pile of patcher, most of which suggested downloading the torrents yourself using uTorrent. I did this and while installing managed to end my experience with a virus that was quickly caught and eliminated. In the end though, after all the issues I've decided to just pretend I jumped into the beta and quit within five minutes due to the much talked about UI lag (as well as the art style which isn't really my thing either).
Disappointed with how this game is turning out since there was a time when I thought it -might- be able to hold my interest for at least a month or so, but the open beta has effectively chased me off for good. This post was mainly written to warn people about downloading those torrents though, just stick to the three day 'official' process assuming it doesn't crash or stop working multiple times like it did for me.
Comments
With a torrent program you can download the torrent from SE directly. No viruses there. Just so people know. It's definitely stupid and not optimal, but it's safe and fast. I wouldn't have downloaded the torrent from a third party location. o.o
Objectivity is delivered with a lack of personality made for the mainstream but never used for the mainstream.
I normally wouldn't either but the order of issues I ran into went like this:
1. Open beta, but not really. Had to wait on a key like a lot of others who were wanting to check it out when open beta was announced.
2. Registered with Square but couldn't log into the beta forum. I'm not sure what is causing this issue and it seems to still let you see the 'beta testers only' content even while not logged in if you knock a piece off the url. You can get the download from here even when you're not logged in and it will start the setup etc.
3. The installer spontaneously crashed a few times while 'preparing setup' early in. I updated my graphics drivers to fix this one. This one was my fault for not getting this done prior to starting up but to have the installer just crash instead of tell you whatt he issue is was a little strange coming from Square.
4. The torrent download is extremely slow, leaving you sitting stalled even with multiple available peers when you're using the main patcher. There's a first set of files you need to download just to get to downloading the current files as well. So it pulls the old "You're almost done! Finished! Okay, now the -real- download begins!"
5. When the patcher kept hanging up at 93% on the first set of files I went looking for help and this is where I realized Square really doesn't have the best web designers on their team. The registration process was a little convoluted but their support site is just terrible.
6. So looking around I found a lot of people having issues downloading had went to uTorrent to download the files themselves. The patcher supplies you with the meta files so all you need to do is locate them in your Final Fantasy folder and open them with uTorrent and you'll get them a little faster (the main game 4 gig file seemed to take a lot longer than the rest though).
7. Once I had them all downloaded manually I threw them into my Final Fantasy folder and installed. The installation process took about forty minutes. Pure brutalness. Then right at the end, 97% roughly, the virus was detected and expunged. The install continued to go so I let it go then it crashed out at 99%.
8. Reloading, I let the installer run and it took another forty-five minutes and then again at 99%, critical error. At this point I started to wonder if I had wandered into the "Customer Support tools" section of the beta process and Square was testing to see how well their csrs would handle the inevitable issues that come with every mmo. In all seriousness, I just decided at this point that the time spent on the frustrating process just wasn't worth the effort.
Too long, didn't read version:
It don't work.
i honestly think he is talking about the false positive it gives, security essentials detected FFXIV as a virus also even with the official .torrent
The file it listed was a DOS keygen type file. It wasn't what you would expect to be packed into the game files. I deleted it as soon as it popped and don't have the log on it so I can't list it specifically. While it's a little strange getting a virus off a torrent pulled using the official meta files I haven't read too much into it beside the gods trying to save me the frustration of logging in and finding I worked on this off and on all day for a game I'm likely going to shake my head at anyway
My only reason for posting here was to give a heads up to people frustrated with the slow as hell official tools who consider taking the alternative route.
Sounds like the experience sucked for you overall. I couldn't connect to ANY remote connections with the official patcher and therefore couldn't download anything. No problems when using uTorrent, though. Well, after I found the option to allow infinite peers rather than a maximum of 20. Didn't have to move any files, either.. found out where the official patcher downloads things and made uTorrent download it to there, too. So when uTorrent was done I just ran the patcher and it was done, too. Didn't have any speed problems installing, really, so those were the big hurdles.
Honestly in beta it probably isn't worth trying. I really wanted to play a real MMO -RPG- and it looks like FFXIV could be that, but right now the main quest stops and no other quests are available.
Objectivity is delivered with a lack of personality made for the mainstream but never used for the mainstream.
I uploaded about 65gigs worth of the intial 4.whatever gig file. Nto sure how you are actually getting a virus though.
Yeah I call B.S on the virus
The so called virus you are talking about is a known false positive. A good number of antiviruses are reporting it. But the thing is that its not a virus and is just a false postive. It's also the reason why you crashed right before the install finished, because a key file was missing and caused it to crash.
I had the same issue the first time around but after looking at the file in question, it was nothing more then just a false positive by my antivirus software. Let it go through the second time and had no problems. Even did a full virus scan and nothing was detected afterwards.
Also just to let you know.. As long as you are connected to atleast 1 person that is connected to the official tracker its very very hard to get infected with a virus. While it is possible to do so its not a easy task as utorrent and most other torrent programs do hash checks for bad bits of data. Anytime a odd chunk of data appears that should not be there, its tossed out and re-downloaded from another source.
I'd call bs on the virus myself if someone was repeating the experience to me, though likely not for the sake of drawing an argument. The fact the virus was packed into the torrents downloaded using the meta files as points of reference really isn't something I would consider likely myself but seeing as I just happened to have a virus caught during the install process with nothing else running on the machine, it just seems a little too coincidental.
As for the game, I played a little Final Fantasy 11, the art style chased me off. I still feel Final Fantasy 7 was one of the best linear roleplaying games ever produced and I was thinking this game might actually manage to turn me from unimpressed skeptic to part-time fan. This whole process was just too messed up though and in the end all I got for it was a virus
Edit in response to Thomas, second person to list this as a false positive:
In the event that it was a 'false positive', this would just add another step to the list above if I had chosen to continue with the setup process. I've personally jumped ship and if others have been getting this result from their antivirus then if nothing else this thread will hopefully help people struggling with the process realize the file isn't malicious.
I'm done with fighting to get into the game but if anyone thinks of it, posting the name of the file that gets picked up during the process may help also since there are a lot of people who will immediately shut down anything that is detected as a virus. The whole process is just a cluster-censored though, I'm not sure who made the decision to utilize this method for distribution but I hope they get someone else in charge for release. This process just isn't a good way to go about business in the mmo realm considering you'll already have a slew of other launch issues if history tells the story. This may be an open beta, but when you see these kinds of poor tools you start to get a bad feeling for what else was designed in bizarro land.
Id like to read your thread but that blue font on the black/grey background is just making my eyes bleed.
Quotations Those Who make peaceful resolutions impossible, make violent resolutions inevitable. John F. Kennedy
Life... is the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come - Lester Freeman
Lie to no one. If there 's somebody close to you, you'll ruin it with a lie. If they're a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta lie to them? - Willy Nelson
Well I can say I had the same experience as you when I tried to install. And that was with Microsoft Security Essentials. The first time around I had it clean / remove the file and it crashed at the end of installing.
I looked at the file and did another install, got the same error message and then let it through. Did a full virus scan and didn't find anything. Just to be safe tried a different virus software and didnt find anything. Haven't seen any hits on my firewall yet, so I haven't been too worried about it.
Did you download the official torrents they give you the torrent files for in the game folder? If not, then you kinda opened yourself up to viruses.
Never download torrents from sites/trackers you don't know or recognize.
You've played FFXI, you should know that even with this crappy launcher, it's still about ten billion times better than PlayOnline. Hated PlayOnline... *shudder*
I was much more forgiving in those days. I had played and loved Everquest and was more than ready for something fresh. PlayOnline did suck, but it did manage to get the game running. This mess seems to be a test from Square "Just how bad do you want to try our game for free?" Cue evil laughter.
I had the same experience with the false positive and it was with MSSE too. The thing is that I get a false positive every once in a while but never actually get a virus even if i disable MSSE so i've learned to deal with it. I disable MSSE before installing any software from a trusted source than turn it back on afterwards. If I could say that i've gotten viruses at all while doing this procedure, i'd not post, but since i've done it a few times and have been lucky i'm sure it's just a false positive. Not to mention that a lot of software requests you to disable any A/V that is running so I do so for a few minutes until the software is installed. Works for me.
Torrents have md5 checksums of the file contents. This simply means that if someone goes and change the file contents the torrent doesn't match then.
Even if you didn't used torrents to download the .patch files, when you launched the patcher (which is a torrent client by itself) it still checks its torrents - the 100% officially obtained ones on the "metainfo" directories - against the .patch files you manually placed on the "patch" directories.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."