This is a very belated response, but those markers were placed where towns or other locations of note were intended to be. Many of those spots were moved for various reasons, but that is why they were placed. They left them in as long as they did because some players enjoyed finding them.

Aachey:So... Welcome to the Developer's Q&A!
Ronasi:  You are very wise. ^ ^
Talad:  the release was not the best time for this meeting, I understand people still downloading
Aachey:This is an OOC meeting where you can find out what the Dev team is doing behind the scenes, and ask any questions you might have.
Aachey:If you have any questions, please step up to the lecterns in front of the stage. If not, I'll give a quick rundown on what's been happening.
Aachey:Ronasi?
Ronasi:  Hi there. Will it be possible for each alt to have personal shortcuts in the near future?
Talad:  definitely possible
Ronasi:  I think I had at least a few hundred per alt before.
Talad:  you can still swap them manually if you want
Ronasi:  That is great news.
Talad:  its one file, you can rename and restart the game, but an automatic way will be better
Ronasi:  Just for the magic spells alone that would take quite a while. :-) They there are skill short cuts... armor changes. etc.
Talad:  Im thinking what is the best setup
Ronasi:  *There are...Used to have different languages for greeting all the races too.\
Talad:  like in some cases you want to share the same shortcuts between some characters
Aachey:I know some players have three digits. I had quite a few myself. Sharing a shortcut list also means I can't put anything on there that might give away my identity if accidentally triggered if I log on as a player.
Talad:  other times you want to have specific ones
Ronasi:  Legacy was spot on with personalization. Appreciate any help you can do.
Ronasi:  So true Aachey :-D
Talad:  can probably have a default file macros.sav
Talad:  like today
Talad:  and then a macros_aachey.sav
Talad:  the game can check if that one exists, if not it uses the default
Talad:  should not be too hard to do
Talad:  so if you create a new char, at least you have the base ones
Talad:  Dev meeting in progress!
Aachey:So, if I go in reverse chronological order, just today Talad made it possible for text in the ingame help channel gets posted to its own channel in discord!
Aachey:Which Talad just demonstrated.
Ronasi:  I saw that. Awesome idea!
Aachey:I had that copied and ready to go, and when the help tab lit up I pasted it in.
Aachey:I think he did that entire process today, which seems amazingly quick to me.
Ronasi:  You and me both
Talad:  yes I did, for one time things were easy
Aachey:See, I worry that you might be jinxing things when you say that...
Talad:  originally I wanted to bi-directional communication
Talad:  so you could type in discord and get the message here in game
Talad:  but that seems to be way more complex
Talad:  as Unreal is not made for that
Aachey:And I worry it might be vulnerable to bots. Just spam, but it would be frustrating.
Talad:  on the other hand I like the way it is now, so you can call outside people to join in game
Talad:  to spam they have to spam in game here (and we can ban) or they have to know the unique key
Talad:  which is very long password like string
Talad:  the current system could report number of players
Aachey:I was thinking of a bot in the discord channel, if communication went both ways.
Talad:  or players joining/leaving
Gonger:This is very good progress for newbie help. But we still should point them towards the Discord channel.
Talad:  or players defeating a big creature
Talad:  "Gonger just defeated One-Claw!"
Talad:  I will think to how else we can use this functionality
>Ronasi smiles at Talad
Thosor:  "there is a sale on rat hides, only ten minutes to buy!'
Ronasi:  So useful ^ ^
Talad:  "an RP events starts in 30 minutes"
Aachey:That could have been very useful in Legacy. We could have put a trigger at the bottom of that well in Amdeneir that people could get into but not back out, letting people knoe that someone was stuck there. We'd hav eto call it the Lassie trigger.
Ronasi:  You rescued me twice from below the city. ^ ^
Aachey:Ahhh, that well was fun.
Aachey:It's still possible to get under Amdeneir, I think, though it probably requires a glitch now.
Ronasi:  I just fell through the street.
Talad:  did you guys change the camera lag setting?
Talad:  zero is pretty brutal
>Talad begins to dance.
Ronasi:  Just changed it slightly
Thosor:  I put it in middle
Aachey:So, from the list of fixes, Talad's fixed teh Nolthrir models. They should look normal now.
Ronasi:  great!
Aachey:Both the Dryken Plane and the Labyrinth section you go to after that have been updated.
Aachey:The Dryken Plane itself should be easier to understand for new players.
Aachey:It might be worth running through the Labyrinth section once, just to see what it's like.
Aachey:Oh! And factions scores were recalculated. I know at least one faction wasn't showing anything. Applied Knowledge?
Talad:  maybe worth hearing Xiosia speak
Aachey:Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. All voiced?
Ronasi:  OH.. Xiosia speaks now?
Talad:  it is voiced
Ronasi:  cool!
Talad:  you will have to create a new player and go through the labyrinths there
Talad:  About faction scores I need to doublecheck, as I think something still wrong. But I have a way to recalculate the all based on the quests you completed
Talad:  so we can redo it at any time and fix it
Talad:  factions will become more and more important in the future
Aachey:Can factions be checked in quest scripting? They're on the skills window, but I don't know if they can be checked the same way.
Aachey:One quest I'm writing was going to check faction, but I changed it to check completion of various quests instead. It works better now, as specific NPCs can be mentioned.
Talad:  yes, those are supported as prerequisites for the quest, and also as conditions for each quest step
Aachey:Ah, good!
Aachey:The first place I wanted to use that is for a Welcome to the Observatory quest.
Ronasi:  I've noticed as quest rewards, two lines of text saying the same thing for improved faction too.
Thosor:  I must snooze, or my porq will overcookm
Ronasi:  See you another time, Thosor
Thosor:  Thanks for all the work.
>Thosor appears to have fallen asleep!
Aachey:Anyone else have anything to add?
Ronasi:  For example, Zak and a Box +faction with The 13 Wards is listed twice.
Aachey:Hmm. That's worth checking.
Aachey:I'll make a dummy character and see if the faction actually adjusts twice, or if it's a display error.
Gonger:Getting late for me, and I will need all my strength for next weekend's system migration...
Gonger:Thanks for the new release! See you around!
Ronasi:  Good luck with that Gonger. Patience 
Aachey:In that case, I'll do the teleport if you'll all step outside.

Even Windows has an integrated MD5 (or SHA for the matter) tool, it's just hidden inside a multi-tool binary: certutil.
Usage: certutil -hashfile <file> MD5
Where "MD5" is the algorithm to use (it uses SHA1 by default, so don't forget to append that). "<file>" is the full path name of the file to be checked.

Example:
certutil -hashfile "e:\PSUnreal-Windows-0.7.36.zip" MD5

It doesn't seem to be able to check against a supplied sum, so you have to compare the output manually. For anything other than maliciously modified files, looking at the first and last three bytes suffices and speeds things up a lot. To effectively combat maliciousness you really can't use MD5 in the first place, SHA256 would be minimum (better SHA512) because MD5 is prone to collision attacks.
Also, you would have to provide the checksum via a different method / website than the corresponding file, because if an attacker can modify the webpage to change the provided binary or the link to it, then it's trivial to modify the checksum to match that.

Still running just fine on Devuan Ceres with Plasma Desktop on integrated graphics of AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U. Devuan Ceres follows Debian Sid aka Unstable. But openSUSE Tumbleweed might still be more current at least in some areas.

Greetings Gonger, greetings everyone.

I thought about this for a while after the discussion in last dev Q&A.

I also chose to come online several times in the evenings, CEST time zone, for several hours and typed "/who" command frequently. However I did not find any new player online during that times. Of course this not representative in any way, however I am not sure whether we loose as many newbies at the moment as you fear. Of course loosing just one new player or a few new players is bad given the current state of affairs. During these challenging times however I find it difficult to be online every evening just to see whether a new player logs in. I find myself needing a lot of time to recover from the sheer insanity happening in our world today. I believe this is headed into a good direction considering all what is happening and the meaning behind it, but at times this is not easy to see.

Some ideas I had about helping new players along:

1) Hint newbies at the GM events on Saturday in a prominent place and also to the market on Sundays. Cause there are at least some long time players online during that time. I am sure Uadjet would be fine for us all taking some time to help a new player along during the event. For me the GM events are rewarding experiences of game play and role play within the game. My hope would be that this could be similar for new players. Also it is a great opportunity for chars and players to make friendship with one another and maybe make an appointment for playing together during the week.

2) Maybe additionally it would be an option to agree on a time for newbies each week. A time were long time players can agree on aiming to be online each week. Maybe an hour before the event or an hour before the market. Or between market and dev q&a - that would be nice, cause at the market things tend to be quite quiet anyway these times and there is plenty of opportunity to help a new player along. And of course Gova has everything in store a new player could ever want and if not Damola can help along. - Damola looking at her immense collection of glyphs and all the other stuff she collected. - At least those are times I could make often enough. Thing is, I cannot afford to look out for new players 24/7, I simply cannot and do not want to afford this, but during certain times, that would be doable for me.

3) Make it possible for chars of long time players to enter the tutorial area to directly help there. This could be locked by a quest that can only be accessed after a reasonable amount of other quests completed or a reasonable amount of time in the game or a combination there of. I really would like that. Not telling a new player everything straight away and thus spoil the fun, but maybe Damola could give a hint in the labyrinth or the tutorial every now and then. I can do a wish report about this if not already done.

4) I wondered whether to make Dryken plane, Labyrinth and tutorial area easier than they are now. However I also see the value of some effort to be made to enter the game as a new player. Why? What PlaneShift needs are players who engage on a regular base for a longer time. If someone is not willing to make some effort, then that someone may not be genuinely interested in playing the game anyway. Of course this is a difficult balance. Even someone who would be genuinely interested could loose motivation in case they face a frustrating obstacle during early game play. I played through the tutorial once with a new char and it was pretty much straight forward for me. Except for me not understanding that the new char did not yet do everything required to talk to the last NPC in there in order to leave the tutorial area. My issue was that the last NPC did not say anything at all before the quest requirements were met. Also part of the issue was that I did not get how to enter the second tower with the mage in the basement initially. I was running around with the new char back and forth until I eventually recognized what part was still missing and how to arrive the place to complete it. I'd prefer that NPC giving a hint on what is still missing. But aside from that I found the labyrinth and tutorial area reasonable enough. I may open a bug report about last NPC giving a hint, but I forgot the name of that confident Klyros NPC already.

Does any of these ideas make sense to you? What other ideas do you have?