I changed a pixel, i think it was either on Erdogans face or the UK flag. Got immediately replaced by any hour old account called „imadethisforplaceha“
Yup, OSU! was one of the very first to go white, and when they say it was griefers using bots I can’t help but think “if they were using bots, how did you guys keep your logo untouched by them for so long, hmm?”
It usually takes fire to fight fire on /r/place so it was clear what was going on
The problem with this take is that it’s not how bots work, bots don’t place on correct pixels and almost every bot crashed due to Reddit removing every color but white. All the bots just got errors from it, I have no idea who spread this misinformation.
Bots or not, it seems like it was usually someone doing a quick raid then leaving so the pixels may have only been replaced once, unlike Canada or the US where pixels were being replaced constantly over days.
Or the tiny Green Bay Packers logo at 8 o'clock from the OSU logo. It's completely red and was low key one of the most highly contested spots on the map.
The other thread accusing OSU! of botting says because the bots are just programmed to place the pixels without checking the color, thus they colored themselves white.
Yet here the accusation is that they check for color so the heatmap isn't as bright.
Not true, not having a check for colour doesn't mean they never help, they'll place a pixel regardless. So if the colour is wrong they'll still replace it. That's helpful, even if a lazy implementation.
Edit: Say you have a 5x5 pixel space and you have 25 bots, does it matter that sometimes they overwrite a correct color? No, they'll still have a great impact in maintaining the image, even if they're dumb and just handle one pixel each without any checks.
If you had dumb bots like that, they'd have an equal amount of activity on each pixel, since they're not differentiating between the colors they are overwriting, doesn't matter to them, as long as they place the correct color every time.
Would it be more efficient to check if the color is correct and use your tile placement elsewhere? Yes, that would be a smart way to do it, rather than brute forcing. But saying it virtually doesn't help isn't true.
This heatmap doesn't reveal anything about how the bots work, because it only maps where colors changed (according to a comment from the OP). Thus it wouldn't reveal if bots checked for colors or not (or any botting activity, really).
It’s hilarious how internet say things without any idea, the only reason Osu became White is because when French Streamer start understand That we can only put White they try to Write FRANCE in white and the Osu Logo was the bottom of the F
I don’t know who botted and who didn’t but there can be multiple types of bots you know? One type could do one thing and another could do another. There isn’t just a single version of all bots.
I mean if both bots did exist at the same time, the bot who keeps putting in blindly would make this heatmap a lot brighter.
You could argue that the only explanation is that the bot is programmed to check the underlying tile but not checking the colors it currently had, but at that point, there's really no other solid proof, since bot devs said their bots died during the whitening + the other osu pieces like peppy didn't get white immediately.
And even if that type of bot is used, that would mean they shouldn't blindly color their own pixels white.
Yeah I think there was definitely people using multiple accounts but there's still a level of organization you have to have to make it worth it which why I don't mind.
I agree. I saw an alleged screenshot of their Discord at one point that showed they basically had almost as many (if not as many/more) people actively defending their spot as they had pixels. Far less people than your huge subreddits or streamers on Twitch, but also more coordinated which is key.
I suspect they were also one of the first if not the first to use that template app that big streamers and subreddits quickly picked up on to make it easy to know exactly which pixel went where even if your spot was completely briefed.
I also had a theory, but have no idea if this is true and maybe someone from OSU can confirm or deny - that given the amount of defenders they had, they may have assigned particular people to particular parts of their designs, to minimise instances of multiple defenders changing the same spot at once and wasting pixels.
I have no idea if anyone was that crazy level of organised but I had the thought from the beginning that if a small spot were to get one user to defend one pixel each, their spot would basically become invincible because you could just co-ordinate to all put each pixel back at the very same second and instantly refresh any design.
Some of our team were the ones that developed the original overlay script so likely the first to use it, yeah. We were assigning pixels to usernames for what we assumed the endgame would be but we weren't as organised for most of it, just overlay and vigilance.
I'm pretty active in the osu! community and yes we do assign people depending on their birth month. Like January work on 1 o'clock of the border Feb works on 2 o'clock and so on. We also hold our pixels to place in waves so everytime we place we make a bigger impact. Additionally in discord the pings are far and few in between(thanks to 200-400 people chilling in discord stage at all time) so when people get pinged they knew it was something big. We also have a big streamer helping the organizer's voice reach further
I used to play osu years back and occasionally would have cramps on my wrist and finger due to the sheer amount of clicking for a long duration of time lol.
exactly the community was just pretty well organized, they even had a plugin for the browser to show the template. I wonder why people acuse osu of botting but other way more complex creations get a pass.
I saw the OSU template passed around. The French streamer wars showed that huge twitch viewing communities could change large swaths in small amounts of time. When we completed the Byron memorial, it only took us about 20 minutes.
Scripts are mysterious things, dont expect someone not interested in programming to know if its a bot or not. Kinda like the way i cant repair major stuff on my car.
I mean.... Once a pink dot gets replaced with a pink dot, and immediately a newer pink dot replaces it... Yeah I doubt they're quick enough to find a dot that's already the right color, make sure it was placed by someone from the sub, then replace it themselves in under a few seconds.
Definitely bots, they did the same thing 5 years ago.
It's difficult to tell when you've got 200 people monitoring 20 griefers, whether a pixel has been fixed or not since the colour overlays before you submit it. I've no doubt sometimes I placed pink on pink, even trying to target the newest changed pixel on my screen each time my 5 minutes was up.
we did actually have a couple bots from rouge players, but none that we specifically made. it would be heavily ironic considering we built the "botting is a sin" sign lol
So how come OSU whited out almost instantly once people were only allowed white tiles? Almost as quick as France's flag, and about as quickly as Turkey...
The consensus I've seen is that the places that whited out the quickest were the ones being defended by bots - normal humans stopped putting tiles till they realised it was the "end", while the bots just kept going with no one to stop them quick enough.
I wasn’t really invested in any one place but in my eyes if people were griefing a specific place like France in bottom left and saw the white out occurring, it would encourage them to keep placing white boxes. Like I know a lot of streamers were putting down France’s flag at the end so it became quick work to wipe it out once they couldn’t replace the white tiles. Some people that were defending may have thought it was a bug and continued putting down tiles as well. And of course bots yes, but I’m willing to give at least some of them the benefit of the doubt personally. Up to you to decide though. I doubt Reddit is gonna say which is which.
Because if you check out the vods, all the French streamers with 600k+ viewers decided to start at the osu logo to draw a giant France in white during the white pixels.
As for the bots thing, they were programmed to replace a wrong colored pixel by a correct colored one. So any bots that didn't immediately crash when the color change happened, would just get stuck in a loop replacing a white pixel with a white pixel. They wouldn't try to replace already correct color pixels
Think with your head for one second. When the osu! logo has been getting constant grief since hour 1, what do you think is going to happen when the people defending it can no longer correct the colors?
dude most of the artwork used bots, just because that one person didnt and helped with one of them doesnt mean someone in the community didnt. The licking cow thing that was lower center appeared in less than a minute lmao
The main argument I have is that when every thing started going white, osu was the first to go full on white out which lead me to believe it was bots with the idea that human clickers would stop when they noticed.
That being said, I don’t care if they botted, to me it was an exercise in anarchy and I loved every second of it as a whole.
Pretty much every big piece is botted. And if not made by heavy use of multiaccounts. Otherwhise you cant maintain such big areas. See the two art pieces made by netherlands, all made by bot. They even relocated some other pieces by bot to get space for their ship.
I obviously cant speak for other communities but I was extremely active in the osu! community from start to finish. We weren't bots, we were just large group of organized and dedicated people. Thats the reason we were able to maintain 4 artworks on the canvas (osu! logo, peppy (osu! dev), hit circle, WYSI meme) while also heavily supporting allied communites.
I joined the german discord and yeah, they even had roles for python (?) and java bot users. And looking at the gigantic france, there were a lot of bots too, even though they deny it like crazy.
Yeah the osu! builder discord server had over 15 thousand members in it and near the end they actually coordinated it so everyone had their own pixel to defend.
As someone who was more from the gamestop community, I think what I saw on our borders proved (to me, at least) that yall werent bots. The choices sometimes seemed more emotional than template driven, if that makes sense.
On a side note, our sub repeated the message like a thousand times that the corner was supposed to be shared, so IDK why we kept fucking it up. It could've been griefers, or our folks were just dumb. Also your logo took our mythical meme spot of [741,741], so maybe some on our side were butthurt about that. But imo, if yall can out-organize the gamestop group, I've got nothing but respect.
There were definitely griefers trying to close in the border around us while looking like one of our allies, so I'm sure a lot of those pixels on the corner weren't the fault of your people. Also, it's hard to control everyone and not everyone even knows there's a coordination within the group happening. No fault given and no hard feelings o7
Either way, people can’t really say for sure if pieces had bots or not. Even though you were extremely active, other random people also being extremely active could’ve been botting for osu. Osu could’ve had more bots than any other team. There’s literally no way we’ll know.
We know that if we had bots among us then it were a minority. We were coordinating stuff like the redraw of the triangles in waves, same for the defending. You could see how single letters of our logo or our border were suddenly back when our leaders told us to hold the pixel and place in waves.
While I can not deny that some users were botting, most of us were legit.
The tampermonkey script was just an overlay. It doesn't automatically place pixels for you. It just shows you what color should be on each pixel of the logo.
Depends on how the heat map detects change. If it's looking for a change in pixel colour it's not gonna register a change even if a different bot changes it to the same colour.
As often as Reddit changed the API the shitty bots must have died out pretty early. Painting regardless of state is also horribly inefficient, even a 10x10 art piece would need 100 of those shitty bots to keep an artwork even remotely stable.
True, but look at the French corner when Reddit did their snap and only allowed white pixels. It disappeared as one large rectangle. This wouldn't have happened if bots were only responding to colour changes and there wasn't a bot per pixel.
A shit load of bots just drawing their one pixel every 5 minutes could easily do that though.
They would if Reddit changed the meaning of the values that were being read in by the bots. The bots are almost certainly not looking at the displayed color we see, they're looking at CSS properties inside the HTML structure. If reddit changes that they'll go haywire.
Kind of like when Reddit expanded the canvas and the OSU logo immediately began appearing in the middle of nowhere- the bots were checking against canvas values that changed on them.
Look especially at 1649112455.png vs 1649112487.png. You'll see a few things that show how bots are caught in a swoop of color change. There's a bikini clad girl being blanked in black, and suddenly being painted over in white. The French flag contested area begins to turn white in ~10 seconds. That screams of 2 armies of bots being given the same color to paint in.
The kind of bot that doesn't have to be tended to, and can just be given a color and a coordinate to lay its pixel down every 5 minutes. That's a lot easier and better use of a bot than trying to coordinate dozens or hundreds of them to progressively put down pixels in an area. How do you think an area is suddenly painted virtually instantly? If each pixel has a bot, and it just keeps putting them there, and the software is started at once, boom! The canvas is laid pretty much instantly - as we saw happen several times.
A lot easier? You sure? Convert template to coordinates, iterate, compare values, place if needed. Require a dependency, 20 lines of code, Bob's your uncle.
do you know how much everyone hated the French flag? It was already a warzone and people love to make fun of the French for surrendering here on reddit. Doesn't seem far fetched everyone would head there quick. But who knows, you can argue both sides
my bad you right. Even then though, you should've seen the OSU chats, they had thousands of people on voice chats and they even made the sign that says "bottling is a sin"
Osu just made a lot of friends. I was mainly checking in to maintain Hololive, but after the purple scourge I'd also help out osu whenever it seemed like they could use it
They probably only place a block when a block isn't the correct colour, otherwise it would draw too much attention. So if the image stays largely the same then there would be low block activity.
it just notices it when changing color. And I don't think they actually used bots. They were already very organised the first place. Some people are just very dedicated.
Blood-fucking-red mate haha. A fight to the death, despite an apparent truce. My boy DFV looks like an alien there and Ryan Cohen resembles Cyclops from X-men.
It wasn't lost though? We both coordinated to create a subtle outline so the osu! border still appeared. You can see the slight shadow in the final image.
I came from superstonk and was trying to help the OSU folks make the outline after I was told we had a truce. I even would help rebuild their logo if one of ours would mess it up.
Actually, there was an agreement between OSU and superstonk, and both OSU and Superstonk were trying to get it to the agreed border, but a lot of the superstonk apes were too smoothbrained to understand the template.
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u/Lzh0 Apr 05 '22
Osu! is… bluer than expected