You can call it paranoid, but I know that where I'm from, this is getting close to being illegal (like into the gray area), so it's my responsibility to do some research to make sure what I'm doing is legal before doing it or else I'm breaking the law. I really don't want to break the law, that's important to me.
Maybe you all would do it differently, that's fine, go ahead. I actually was hoping to see what this thing looked like for myself because maybe it's awesome. I'm not saying it isn't. But at the same time, I'm not going to download an executable/patch from the internet made my some guy I've never met before (in person) and run it on my computer when I have reason to believe I might be breaking a law, no matter how small the percentage is.
Many people take computer security/legality too lightly, but as someone who works in that industry, I take it very seriously. You can call me paranoid but I know what I'm talking about here and being on the safe side is important to me. I never said you all shouldn't use it (despite being misquoted in the OP as having said that -- BTW I'm not mad about that, I actually found that really funny), I just said make sure to do your research before downloading and running an executable/patch from the internet on your computer. I don't understand why this advice is being criticized, everyone should always do that anyways.
I don't know what modifications to the file he made, I don't know that it doesn't mess with the client/server interactions. I could find out but I'm not going to buy a license to IDA and poke around and see what he did nor can I really take his word for it and just hope that holds up as a legal defense. I also don't know if these particular modifications are going to be any good once the next version of MF Dominion is released, maybe he'll have to patch that one separately, who knows?
Big thumbs up from me - having a problem and deciding to actually do something about it.
I'm going to say this the nicest way I can: F.DS as a whole has done a really awful job of explaining to MF what they want out of MF's client. SCSN's post that he links is a great example of this. The fact that his request hasn't been implemented in five months does not mean they will never do it; nobody here knows how hard that is to do, and their product is still in beta. We still have Goko to play on. This fix will probably only work for one version of a beta piece of software that nobody will be using two weeks from now. I'm not saying there isn't value in this (that's why I suggested that someone make a video of this and show it to Jeff) but let's not misrepresent what's happening here: aside from that video, the only value in this would come from SCSN having to potentially do more RE and release a different patch for every single version of MF Dominion that ever comes out. Maybe some day this patch will just stop working altogether. I don't know the details of this but I'd be surprised to hear otherwise.
On the other hand, I made a video a while back about the animation delay, sent it to some people at MF, and wasn't a total jerkbag. This most recent version of the software shows actual improvement as a direct result of that. This improvement, without any additional work from me, will be in every future version of MF Dominion, and the people who actually develop this thing understand the feedback, why it's important, and have now incorporated it into their design. It's, like, good software engineering practice instead of a hack. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's an improvement and they're still developing the software. I don't think this thing is perfect either (maybe it is, I haven't tried it). Since then I've exchanged several PMs with people at MF, helped them with a few other things, and I'd like to think that if there's something I can share with them that represents what people here care about, maybe I can help bring that to MF's attention in a way that they can understand and use, since this forum in general doesn't have a good track record of that.
If this is well-received by the community here, then I'd love to use this experience and my contact with them to translate this into something constructive that they can use. A video of this thing along with maybe an explanation of what exactly about it is desirable would go a long way.