Maphacker banned

[Cullhaven]

There was a time when you virtually HAD TO use it for levelling in hardcore in public games in the main xp spots (can't remember name - Hills? Act V).

Absolute rubbish tbh. A sizeable group of us managed to play hc for years without ever having to resort to cheating, and personally I have the worst reactions of anyone I know! I still maintain that you had to be an idiot to get pk'd in DiabloII/LoD, I know that the 3or 4 times it happened to me, it was my own idiotic fault for not being careful/paranoid enough. I never understood the chicken hack thing - why play hard core if you cant take the deaths? You run a chicken hack - you might as well be playing wusscore.

Smurf, I always believed ( coz I was told it) that the entrance to durance 3 was always to the left of the waypoint

 

[darkswan]

Absolute rubbish tbh. A sizeable group of us managed to play hc for years without ever having to resort to cheating,

With a group *I* could have managed. I was I think a reasonably accomplished player.

I was in no clan at the time, and would normally just solo. However, I had to go into public games to level.

When PK'd to someone's keyboard macro I'd lose all my loot as well.

And the PKers invariably used hacked ITHs/White Rings too, so not even remotely the game as it was intended to be played. There comes a point where this is too much. There were some very nasty PK hacks about at the time.

Quite what MH is depends very much on what you enable/disable in the config file. Although I experimented with a few configs to see what it could actually do (and becoming apalled in the process) for main character play I used only chicken hack (auto eject on hostile), not life hack, map revealing or loot hiding. My monitor wasn't so hot and I did change yellow item colour to orange just so I could see them.

Its an emotive subject, and my thoughts on this (when I cared) are a matter of public record example AGD post . There are others around that time period, and I think you'll find I am pretty much against it.

But yes I considered that circumstances made me a cheat. I don't intend to let that happen again.

The whole upshot of this episode is that I shall not be buying any more games by Blizzard as they have been demonstrably unable/unwilling to tackle hack users by banning CD keys and fixing exploits quickly.

 

[Cullhaven]

Well, I always did most of my leveling in public games too, only really relied on people like Jane and Alan for phat lewts (invariably got killed RIGHT after getting some nice item from them and feeling very guilty) or smiting the end of act boss. I never considered myself an accomplished player, ever. Could usually spot a pk within a minute of entering a game or one coming in tho. Paranoia was always the most useful hc skill

 

[Epiphany]

Thanks Smurf. I read that, or similar. a while ago (damn handy though!)

You still playing at all?

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

I miss my PKK necro. *sniff* Nothing quite like spanking some kiddie with their duped perfect pk gear and hear them bitching about cheating. Highest accolade you can have.
I leveled up in public games, added spice to the game. Getting PKed by the hydra exploit a couple of days after getting full trang-ouls was a bit embarrassing though.

The whole upshot of this episode is that I shall not be buying any more games by Blizzard as they have been demonstrably unable/unwilling to tackle hack users by banning CD keys and fixing exploits quickly.

They're pretty on the ball with WoW, IMO. Obviously a basically free online game is going to have less support than one with a monthly fee which's played by a lot more people. Kudos to Blizz for continuing *any* support for D2.

 

[Rochdale]

Nothing quite like spanking some kiddie

I always suspected....

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

Busted. >.<

 

[darkswan]

They're pretty on the ball with WoW, IMO.

I couldn't comment as I've no experience. The hacks on D2 didn't appear at day one, and when they did Blizard were incredibly weak. I (thats me, just me) would have no faith of Blizzard being strong when you need them to be.

Obviously a basically free online game is going to have less support than one with a monthly fee which's played by a lot more people.

You'd think so. But your priorities and theirs aren't necessarily the same.
Did they EVER remove the ITHS, White Rings and other hacked items from the D2 realms? They were so incredibly common. Apart from a few hours down time, technically it was a no brainer. And yet they never did. It was a policy decision. Quite why you imagine paying a monthly fee alters this I don't know.

The maphack issue whilst not exactly a red herring, was always brought up as an example of their anti-cheat hard-line, whilst doing absolutely NOTHING about the hacked items.

Kudos to Blizz for continuing *any* support for D2.

I'd hazard a guess it's a couple of interns hovering over a single PC by now.
It would be interesting to know what budget it comes out of. PR?

Guess I sound a bit bitter. It's a personal thing. Some people feel this way about cars or the mail. With me it's a gaming company. There you go. :-/

 

[Gottaa]

http://www.blizzhackers.com/

Blizz don't seem to be taking a soft line that I can see. And it will be interesting to see how GW handles such things as from my understanding they were the team who created bnet (could well be wrong), but then GW will be making money off the content updates that have a cost.

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

I somehow doubt that they had a "let people dupe and hack items" policy. Not knowing much about their system, I can't really comment, but I imagine it's fairly tricky to pick out which items are duped/hacked, especially when you consider the numbers they're dealing with.
While it'd be pretty simple to run a search for, say, weapons with damage above a theoretical max and delete them, I doubt they have the tools for that. They could develop them, but that's a lot of time and work.
Yeah, they have a small budget, and IIRC, something was said about only having a handful of people working on D2 fulltime, and that was back when I still played. However, when you consider the game's been running for what, 6 years, that's still impressive to me (can't think of any other games with professional support this long down the line).

Anyway yeah, not a perfect game, and not a perfect system, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of it, and respect Blizzard as a games company*.



*getting a little dubious with a lot of the old timers moving on, and the rumours about management and marketing taking over, but we'll see what happens

 

[darkswan]

http://www.blizzhackers.com/

Blizz don't seem to be taking a soft line that I can see.

Easy as it is to shut down one website (I had a run in with the Disney Corp recently completely innocently), its a start to be sure.

The Blizzhackers ran amok during D2. There were other hacker groups as well.

And it will be interesting to see how GW handles such things as from my understanding they were the team who created bnet (could well be wrong), but then GW will be making money off the content updates that have a cost.

There was a lot of tosh spoken about how the streaming technology would make hacks impossible.

The only problem so far has been bots farming.
Now I'm not sure this shouldn't be detectable. Once you have a bot you ought to be able to see what code it hooks into and change that code to have a look on the stack to see where its been called from. If from an unexpected location refuse to run.

There's not been much said about this that I've seen, but I'm not particularly impressed.

Since GW really isn't a game where you need the absolute best loot, the effects haven't been particularly damaging, so maybe they let it pass for now.

If we start seeing hacked items, or being able to break into other people's instances to grief, then they really will be tested. We will have to wait and see.

If they are not up to the task, I will drop the game like a sack of potatoes. Once you let things get bad, they get a lot worse very quickly.

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

Why would they want to shut that website down? The vast majority of Blizzhackers are scriptkiddies, and I doubt the ubarleet hackers post there, but it still helps Blizzard keep tabs on the "hacking scene" to some extent. Last time I flicked through it, most of the threads I saw when I last flicked through it went along the lines of

"OMGWTF look at this leet hax I made/found!!!1"
...2 days later...
"OMGWTF mi hax no werk nemore!!!11 >.<"

 

[Gottaa]

I'd assume from the text that it was mainly due to a team picking up the server projects again and hosting there own servers.

It's also a very positive action they are taking which will send a message to people.

 

[darkswan]

Why would they want to shut that website down? The vast majority of Blizzhackers are scriptkiddies, and I doubt the ubarleet hackers post there, but it still helps Blizzard keep tabs on the "hacking scene" to some extent. Last time I flicked through it, most of the threads I saw when I last flicked through it went along the lines of

"OMGWTF look at this leet hax I made/found!!!1"
...2 days later...
"OMGWTF mi hax no werk nemore!!!11 >.<"

Yes that one website on its own probably isn't that important. However, if people are running their own servers then that can represent a considerable dent to revenues. There are probably certain noises you have to make in public to allow a legal process to procede without hitches when it comes to a prosecution.

The language seems a bit weak but may be explained by this document.

Like I said, its a start, and moving in the right direction.

 

[Chick]

Bliz are being a bit pro-active about their WoW Hack tracing.

http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general-en&t=459249&p=1&tmp=1#post459249

 

[darkswan]

Bliz are being a bit pro-active about their WoW Hack tracing.

http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general-en&t=459249&p=1&tmp=1#post459249

I've had a cursory look at that thread and am already glad I didn't buy WoW.
Msg #36 mentions dupe hacks.

The process scanning possibilities were done to death in alt.games.diablo over 2 years ago. I'm not a PC person but processes can have any name afaicr.

Of course the operating system is majorly at fault. The only processor I ever got low down and dirty with that could also run a version of windows was the 386DX. That processor was perfectly capable of giving separate processes their own protected segment. If it called outside that an exception occured. Hence no hack could hook into your program.
(Not that this was a problem in our environment, and the OS I used in question was VRTX.)

The fact that Blizzard can look at other processes tells me this still isn't used by Windows. Honestly!

Even so, Blizzard now are unfortunately reaping the rewards of being soft in the past. Well I'd like to wish them all the luck in the world, I guess.

And apologies for sounding like a cracked record :-/

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

Ah, hadn't actually read that website, was thinking of another site with a similar name (basically a leet dewd hax0r forum).

Reminds me of a similar thing with D2 emulation servers, which were also shut down by Blizzard. If Blizzard was feeling particularly community-spirited, they could provide a service to check accounts and avoid the issue of pirated game clients. Was more of an issue in D2 with the proliferation of duping etc, and the fairly common desire to restart on a clean server.

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

And hrm... didn't Blizzard get into trouble a while back for scanning client PCs for info with Starcraft? Got a slap on the wrist, and told not to do it again. Punkbuster etc. are somewhat different, since you choose to run them, and afaik, there's a lot more information on what exactly they do.
Anyway, can't remember exactly what happened with SC, and I'm not all that hot on privacy laws (does clicking Yes to a programs' ToA automatically give the creators of the program the right to do whatever they want to your PC via that program?), so I'll stop waffling.

 

[Rowan]

There was a time when you virtually HAD TO use it for levelling in hardcore in public games in the main xp spots (can't remember name - Hills? Act V).

At one point there was a hack where u could go hostile outside of town. MH could be configured to exit you properly from the game (far safer than F4) as soon as someone went hostile.

You could also disable certain boss death animations which destroyed your frame rate and which the PKers could invoke before going hostile.

Losing hardcore characters to cheat PKers gets old pretty quick. I was NOT happy at virtually being forced to use MH for this purpose.

There were loads of features you had to turn OFF in the config file if u wanted to play legit apart from one or two countermeasures. I suspect most people didn't bother. And you could also seriously disadvantage your team-mates loot-wise with certain options. (e.g. hide all dropped loot except gold bows) if u really wanted

It was an eye-opening but very disappointing experience to have come into contact with MH. It convinced me I didn't want to play ANY more games where non-consensual PvP was involved.

I don't know the state of the game now, but was seriously unimpressed with Blizzard's motivation towards preventing griefing. I seriously suspected that griefers were an equally valued gaming demographic.

Bull sh1t
We managed to play in public games, snr even got to 99 several times and though he was pked twice, both times he dropped his guard.
Don't come the "you had to cheat to survive" that's trying to justify cheating to we who managed without.

I've read enough of this type of post in the last week on the Blizzard boards.
NOTHING makes you cheat except your own weakness.
Oh and this line

There were loads of features you had to turn OFF in the config file if u wanted to play legit

belongs in the IQ thread the only way to play legit is not to use it, nothing you say makes it OK to cheat, I don't care if you did it blindfold after downloading it.
YOU CHEAT!

 

[McHoff H. McChrist]

A goose!