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    Your Elvenar Team

A fellowship member found a site that gives tips on catering The Spire. Has anyone used this site?

Elyseflame

New Member
My question is about a site that is Jesse byu edu Spire Wizard (third party site). The title states it is Spire Diplomacy made simple. I don't want to post the link, but I was reviewing it with my malwarebytes software and it does have something suspicious attached to it. It seems to be a random generator that calculates goods and offers suggestions to help cater the spire successfully. I don't believe in anything being 100%, but I wanted to verify if this site is just a creation by a beta player? Is it considered a cheat (which I don't want to use) or is it just a site with a minor bad script with useful tips? One of our fellowship members discovered it the other day and I know they have the best intention, but I don't want to recommend something that is harmful. Any help appreciated and thanks.
 
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samidodamage

Buddy Fan Club member
I found the site. byu.edu is Brigham Young University. I don't know enough to know if it's safe. I also don't play on beta, so I don't know the player either. A lot of help I am, lol!
A player who is no longer playing the game does have a site with embedded youtube videos where he goes through all the Spire encounters for an early city (Ch4) and another set for an advanced chapter (Ch16). He also created a calculator, but Inno said that type of tool was considered cheating and he removed it. You can find his section on the Spire here:
MinMax Spire Tutorials
There are many sites created by players that are a wonderful source of information and tools. These include ElvenArchitect, ElvenStats, ElvenGems as well as some older sites that are no longer updated but have good info from early chapters like CrazyWizardInfo.
Since I fight the Spire, I'm no real help on the convincing part, but there's a video on ElvenGems that many FS members have said really helped them wrap their brain around the logic puzzle and how to solve it. Here's a link to that video:
Diplomacy in Spire
 

Grid Gypsy

Well-Known Member
BYU offers a BS in cybersecurity, their webspace had better be safe. :D

Seriously though, according to VirusTotal the site is clean. However, I'm not exactly sure how much the predictor is worth, especially when you're trying to lessen the impact on certain things, like supplies. I had better luck with my usual method (spread the goods out amongst the choices until everyone has turned most of them down, then add gold and supplies into the mix) than what the program wanted me to do.
 

Elyseflame

New Member
Thanks for all the information. The site is vulnerable, but I don't think it is a malicious site. I was going to say to
samidodamage that I am a fighter as well and rarely cater. We have a member that wanted to share the information and I wanted to check it so I could share my thoughts. I told the small group that was reviewing it they may want to post disclaimers, but the website is a probability calculator and can be used to help with catering. However the user is putting themselves at risk if the site is hijacked. I think the author didn't mean any harm and just wanted to share the program, but they may want to use a better website or contract someone to put firewalls in place. Most users can protect their own hardware and should always be wary of third party sites. Thanks everyone!
 

Huor

Guest
I've used it several times and it's just fine. Has some interesting suggestions that I wouldn't have tried. Some surprised me, some, not so much. lol. If it starts asking me for my social security number, I will move on.
 

Grid Gypsy

Well-Known Member
Tell that to the NSA and the White House, that aren't safe .....
I just went to YouTube and watched MinMax for like an hour....
after that I knew what I had to do....

Just because our government excels in BS... ;)
That's what they get for letting a bunch of really old guys who probably still carry pagers run the country while farming everything out to the lowest bidder. Even the military's financial websites have a regular history of expired certificates.
 

Darielle

Chef, Scroll-Keeper, and Buddy Fan Club Member
BYU offers a BS in cybersecurity, their webspace had better be safe. :D

Seriously though, according to VirusTotal the site is clean. However, I'm not exactly sure how much the predictor is worth, especially when you're trying to lessen the impact on certain things, like supplies. I had better luck with my usual method (spread the goods out amongst the choices until everyone has turned most of them down, then add gold and supplies into the mix) than what the program wanted me to do.
Spirits almost always want either gold or supplies; I always put them in my first guess, and I have good luck with it. But, to each his or her own. :)
 

Henroo

Oh Wise One
A player who is no longer playing the game does have a site with embedded youtube videos where he goes through all the Spire encounters for an early city (Ch4) and another set for an advanced chapter (Ch16). He also created a calculator, but Inno said that type of tool was considered cheating and he removed it. You can find his section on the Spire here:
MinMax Spire Tutorials
Minmax quit playing? I didn't know that.
 

Player9999

Member
BYU offers a BS in cybersecurity, their webspace had better be safe. :D
Too often that's not a realistic assumption, given how scam sites like Facebook sell paid placement system space to nefarious ad networks, that in turn sell to malware scammers (primary source of those fake BSOD screen hijack "ads"), plus themselves defraud users and government info viewers, among others, with over 300 secretive domains and deceptive info harvesting and sales to third parties. Now if only we could block those, Google/Doubleclick, Equifax, the Infernal Racketeering Scheme, major retailers and medical systems, among others who've caused major data breaches or by design violate users' privacy deceptively....

In this case Jesse V was hired as BYU faculty in 2019, and teaches Python and a couple other "Digital Humanities" dept courses. I'd assume they'd generally fire staff who distributed malware outside closed ecosystems for IT security courses. OTOH, their former IT head perpetrated felony perjury with impunity in testimony related to Congress and ACLU v Reno 1, where he claimed BYU because of its oppressive student rules never distributes porn. Any senior IT person should know every entity with a high level net peering status is contractually obligated to route whatever hits their systems, and the nature of net traffic is that BYU is routing lots of Mormon-proscribed bits.

Of note too is how a junior CompSci faculty with a deer in the headlights photo on his department bio/contact page, has a dead end un-indexed gamer support tool, mainly promoted by his Reddit presence. Not that anyone could or would ever notice?

I may have mentioned this before, but Discord is where lots of gamers hang out, and where they have some major bad system design issues that enable abuses by malware bots. They distribute original files for smaller document and image "previews", and not server generated previews. That allows pushing malware into Discord cache directories in hex sequence cryptic file names stripped of extensions, and not just if a user clicks to actively download. Discord has issued press releases about how rapidly they take down bad actors, but that meant 3-6 weeks for several I reported before they killed nefarious accounts, and far longer when unreported, according to an investigation and report by a security researcher and tech journal that got over 5,000 removed, and found evidence of over 12,000 including some already snuffed. Those risks can be limited by the Elvenar AM's operating servers there, by tight join or new account limit configs, and permissions on graphic posts, out of group mail, and speed restrictions.
 

Player9999

Member
Min has been gone awhile. No updates on the site. I do hope Min is ok in RL.
Any idea why he disappeared?

He seemed like one of the insane players in a good way.... for us at least. Bright and tech aware enough to ask the right questions to sort out game functions and variation patterns, but crazy enough to take on projects with way more workload than a "game"....
 

Dzesyi9

Member
Hello! I am the creator of the Spire Wizard. I am not a beta player, it's just the Spire Wizard is in beta as I'm trying to improve it (I just made it a couple weeks ago and have been fixing things as people tell me about problems).

It's a real tool that I made to help me play the spire better, and I can vouch for it and its 380 (and growing users) that it does help! There isn't any malware on the site. I don't ask you to make an account. I don't ask you to download anything. I simply want to help people negotiate better in the spire. It helps me to get up to the laboratory without any trouble. Let me know if you have any more questions about it.
 
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Elyseflame

New Member
Hello! I am the creator of the Spire Wizard. I am not a beta player, it's just the Spire Wizard is in beta as I'm trying to improve it (I just made it a couple weeks ago and have been fixing things as people tell me about problems).

It's a real tool that I made to help me play the spire better, and I can vouch for it and its 380 (and growing users) that it does help! There isn't any malware on the site. I don't ask you to make an account. I don't ask you to download anything. I simply want to help people negotiate better in the spire. It helps me to get up to the laboratory without any trouble. Let me know if you have any more questions about it.
Thanks for letting me know you're the creator. I did review the site last week and didn't see any malware. I did note something vulnerable about the program, but it wasn't a big issue. I was just curious about the site and shared my findings with members of the fellowship. I fight in the Spire, but a couple of the players who cater did find the tool helpful. At this time I don't have any questions and thanks again.
 

Enevhar Aldarion

Oh Wise One
Any idea why he disappeared?

He seemed like one of the insane players in a good way.... for us at least. Bright and tech aware enough to ask the right questions to sort out game functions and variation patterns, but crazy enough to take on projects with way more workload than a "game"....

He seemed to be posting less and less on the forums towards the end of last year and then just stopped making any posts earlier this year. The forum info shows his last login was April 4. He did not play the game under that name, though, so he may still be playing his cities and just not doing anything else. Between the slow drop off of forum posts, and him not liking the newest chapters, he may have simply quit.
 
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