"Bnet is full of cheaters. WoW will be too!"

Kolle · 12-30-2005, 10:43 PM

I can't find any of the old threads (maybe a little too old), but maybe most of you will recall the threads about cheating and WoW. This went on on boards besides FoH as well.

The same thing came up over and over again: WoW was gonna be full of cheaters and Blizzard can't stop them since Bnet is so full of them. Likewise defenders of Blizzard would repeat the same things over and over such as, "mmorpgs are completely different from bnet. What you say is not possible because of A., B., and C."

I'll admit to being a person that thought WoW wouldn't have Bnet kind of problems. Maybe there would be a bug every now and then that people would exploit, but only for a day or two before it got patched. Anything else would be a minor bug that would have little impact on gameplay.

I was wrong.

If any of you have been keeping up with current events concerning WoW then you know cheating is happening now and has been going on for months and months. The same bugs or hacks are being abused and Blizzard appears to be completely helpless in stopping it. They've had numerous Tuesday downtimes to patch these things if they knew how. They could update the game at any other time if they were willing, yet the cheating persists.

I wasn't gonna bother bitching about this because I thought it would get fixed quickly and that would be the end of it. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention than it does, but it does get attention.

So what the fuck am I talking about? Teleporting. Pharmers/cheaters are abusing the hell out of this loophole in WoW, whatever it is. It's been going on for a long time now.

In case you haven't read about it or noticed it yourself, this is what's happening. Somehow or another players can teleport themselves across the world. I've witnessed several different classes doing this. It's also happening with newb characters all the way up.

For example what an alliance cheater will do is teleport himself to and from Tanaris and Feralas. They loot a hippo egg and turn it in at Tanaris for 1k-4k XP + items for each turn in (ally only quest). As you might can imagine they abuse this for rapid level gains. It's incredibly rampant on new servers where pharmers get a solid leap ahead for that level range. It also still occurs on regular servers as pharmers/cheaters level up characters for whatever reason. Maybe to sell them, I don't know.

I've personally witnessed this. You can go to either spot and watch. Go to the hippo eggs in Feralas. If you're horde, feel free to kill them. Then be amazed at how quickly they rez. You'll get bored eventually and they'll just keep cheating. Go stand in Tanaris and watch people show up at the egg machine and then vanish minutes later back to feralas. And before you mention it, no they aren't using warlocks.

Something else with teleporting I've also witnessed and been annoyed by personally is with mining. Somehow they are not only mining up to thorium with lvl 1-10 characters, but they are also smelting it and teleporting around. What you'll find is that lvl 1-10 characters are teleporting around from one high lvl zone to another. They mine all the nodes and then pop back somewhere safe to smelt it. They can even teleport under the ground to mine so that no mobs aggro them.

This was pissing me off in particular because most of my characters have Engineering. As you might can imagine it has sometimes been a complete pain the ass to get any mining done. I have access to two accounts so I've personally kept track of cheaters on both sides zipping around to different zones, meanwhile I can't seem to hardly find a damn thing to mine myself.

Oh but the aunction house has plenty of ore and stones to buy, that's for certain.

I can't go into great detail about other cheats because I'm not completely familiar with them. However we do know that companies like IGE and others have files of bugs and cheats for WoW that they hand out to their workers. They abuse the shit outa these things, like teleporting, and for some reasong Blizzard seems unable to stop them.

I wouldn't even bother posting this if it only started happening yesterday, but it's been going on for months at the least.

What the fuck is going on?

Angrier · 12-30-2005, 10:50 PM

Anyone who's played EQ can appreciate this: the pathing bugs. Chardok anyone? Not quite severe enough to where a mob stands in one spot not moving, but hunters soloing nameds because they run back and forth... no big deal?

Kolle · 12-30-2005, 10:52 PM

yeah EQ definately had its share

elrich · 12-30-2005, 10:55 PM

I skimmed enough to figure out which exploit you were talking about, and what your general stance was.

So, you feel that blizzard is incapable of dealing with the teleport exploit, etc?

Lemme explain some of what's behind the scenes here.

The teleport hack works by one of two methods. The first of which is memory space editing, the second of which is datastream editing. The reason that the hack exists is because of the level of trust between client and server. The server trusts the client when it comes to character position.

There isn't the easy fix of "then just don't trust the client!" because the less you trust the client, the more it becomes a dumb terminal, and this -greatly- increases not only the amount of data coming through the stream, but also becomes a huge detriment to how smooth the game plays. Which is to say, client trust level increases error correction for network lag and packet loss.

So how do you detect these things?

The most obvious is scanning the memory, which Blizzard now does. They have a tool which they can send program signatures to for it to scan for. The other obvious choice is sanity checks. Now, this is where I would say Blizzard is coming up short, either on proper implementation, or on human followup.

To explain, the sanity check should work like this as an example; every 15 seconds, the server checks to see how far your character has travelled, and if its been over 150% of movement speed, it checks to see if youve been mounted on a griff, or completed the quest in WS that boots you, hearthed, etc, and if not, flags the account for human check up.

If this was properly implemented, we wouldn't see teleport hackers continuing for very long.

Ah well.

Grimmlokk · 12-30-2005, 11:01 PM

Don't forget the good 'ol speed hacking. Was video of a guy on my server running around WSG doing it just recently. GM's said nothing they could do about it, dunno if anything ever happened to him.

Neppy · 12-30-2005, 11:32 PM

Speed hacking and teleporting are pretty rampant on my server, and blizzard seems unable to do jack about it. Called a Gm to watch a guy speed hack in WSG and he supposedly watched then told me he couldn't do anything, nice.

Client side movement is a necessity, but theres no reason for the server to trust someone moving 10 zones at a time except poor programming.

Saban · 12-30-2005, 11:49 PM

Pathing was always a problem in EQ. On my wizard twink in paladul caverns i used to run up walls and stuff to mess up mob pathing so i had more time to root and such. you get so used to poor pathing that you find yourself integrating it into all your strategies.

Bizantium · 12-31-2005, 12:09 AM

in Kata's Castlum ( spelling )

I use to quad kite 12-15 guards with infinite resources basically

/hug pathing

elrich · 12-31-2005, 12:11 AM

Well, then it wasn't quad kiting, now was it?

Kolle · 12-31-2005, 12:29 AM

I don't understand how they do it or how to stop them. It's not what I'm educated at and I don't particularly care to learn. It's not my type of job and probably never will be.

All I know is that it's been going on for a long time now. I'm just curious when Bliz is gonna be able to stop them, if ever. I guess it's just kinda demoralizing that cheaters can abuse something so blatantly for so long without being held accountable. Even if they get caught and banned it's easy to grab another account since they're making tons of cash off the game anyways. Then the cheating just continues since the bugs or whatever aren't fixed.

RiskyChris · 12-31-2005, 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elrich

the sanity check should work like this as an example; every 15 seconds, the server checks to see how far your character has travelled, and if its been over 150% of movement speed, it checks to see if youve been mounted on a griff, or completed the quest in WS that boots you, hearthed, etc, and if not, flags the account for human check up.

Been wondering why something like that hasn't been implemented a long... long time ago.

./pupu Blizzard

Renolin · 12-31-2005, 12:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elrich

Well, then it wasn't quad kiting, now was it?

Can it still be quad kiting if it's a multiple of four?

Samus Aran · 12-31-2005, 12:41 AM

I know the client architecture is full of holes and has been horribly hacked because the .pdb sort of got leaked back in Beta and as such there's pretty thorough documentation on the way shit works.

The question is.. why isn't Blizzard working on fixing these problems. It's obvious they're there

12-31-2005, 12:48 AM

Best and olny cheat I ever had the opportunity to utilize on Veeahan ...

1. Mage loads Air Pet
2. Summon Eyeball,
3. Dismiss Eyeball
4. Rinse and repeat for a single mage having unlimited pets.

Was owning lower Guk deadside with about 50+ air pets and then Raistlin popped into the slave camp area and asked WTF was going on, why so many pets?

We said the other mages are around the corner and he called bullshit on us.

Damn that was a fun night.

12-31-2005, 12:49 AM

The second biggest cheat I ever used was on Russ Taylors shitty coded ROM Diku Mud's.

Remember ... buy -1000000 potpies

Insta coins, cha-ching.

12-30-2005, 10:43 PM	#1 (permalink)
Kolle Registered User Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 4,879 -25 Internets	"Bnet is full of cheaters. WoW will be too!" I can't find any of the old threads (maybe a little too old), but maybe most of you will recall the threads about cheating and WoW. This went on on boards besides FoH as well. The same thing came up over and over again: WoW was gonna be full of cheaters and Blizzard can't stop them since Bnet is so full of them. Likewise defenders of Blizzard would repeat the same things over and over such as, "mmorpgs are completely different from bnet. What you say is not possible because of A., B., and C." I'll admit to being a person that thought WoW wouldn't have Bnet kind of problems. Maybe there would be a bug every now and then that people would exploit, but only for a day or two before it got patched. Anything else would be a minor bug that would have little impact on gameplay. I was wrong. If any of you have been keeping up with current events concerning WoW then you know cheating is happening now and has been going on for months and months. The same bugs or hacks are being abused and Blizzard appears to be completely helpless in stopping it. They've had numerous Tuesday downtimes to patch these things if they knew how. They could update the game at any other time if they were willing, yet the cheating persists. I wasn't gonna bother bitching about this because I thought it would get fixed quickly and that would be the end of it. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention than it does, but it does get attention. So what the fuck am I talking about? Teleporting. Pharmers/cheaters are abusing the hell out of this loophole in WoW, whatever it is. It's been going on for a long time now. In case you haven't read about it or noticed it yourself, this is what's happening. Somehow or another players can teleport themselves across the world. I've witnessed several different classes doing this. It's also happening with newb characters all the way up. For example what an alliance cheater will do is teleport himself to and from Tanaris and Feralas. They loot a hippo egg and turn it in at Tanaris for 1k-4k XP + items for each turn in (ally only quest). As you might can imagine they abuse this for rapid level gains. It's incredibly rampant on new servers where pharmers get a solid leap ahead for that level range. It also still occurs on regular servers as pharmers/cheaters level up characters for whatever reason. Maybe to sell them, I don't know. I've personally witnessed this. You can go to either spot and watch. Go to the hippo eggs in Feralas. If you're horde, feel free to kill them. Then be amazed at how quickly they rez. You'll get bored eventually and they'll just keep cheating. Go stand in Tanaris and watch people show up at the egg machine and then vanish minutes later back to feralas. And before you mention it, no they aren't using warlocks. Something else with teleporting I've also witnessed and been annoyed by personally is with mining. Somehow they are not only mining up to thorium with lvl 1-10 characters, but they are also smelting it and teleporting around. What you'll find is that lvl 1-10 characters are teleporting around from one high lvl zone to another. They mine all the nodes and then pop back somewhere safe to smelt it. They can even teleport under the ground to mine so that no mobs aggro them. This was pissing me off in particular because most of my characters have Engineering. As you might can imagine it has sometimes been a complete pain the ass to get any mining done. I have access to two accounts so I've personally kept track of cheaters on both sides zipping around to different zones, meanwhile I can't seem to hardly find a damn thing to mine myself. Oh but the aunction house has plenty of ore and stones to buy, that's for certain. I can't go into great detail about other cheats because I'm not completely familiar with them. However we do know that companies like IGE and others have files of bugs and cheats for WoW that they hand out to their workers. They abuse the shit outa these things, like teleporting, and for some reasong Blizzard seems unable to stop them. I wouldn't even bother posting this if it only started happening yesterday, but it's been going on for months at the least. What the fuck is going on?

12-30-2005, 11:01 PM	#5 (permalink)
Grimmlokk Unlicensed Vaginoplasty Surgeon Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 3,458 +12 Internets	Don't forget the good 'ol speed hacking. Was video of a guy on my server running around WSG doing it just recently. GM's said nothing they could do about it, dunno if anything ever happened to him. __________________ "The eyes are the groin of the face"

12-30-2005, 11:49 PM	#7 (permalink)
Saban Registered User Join Date: Dec 2003 Posts: 1,962 +16 Internets	Pathing was always a problem in EQ. On my wizard twink in paladul caverns i used to run up walls and stuff to mess up mob pathing so i had more time to root and such. you get so used to poor pathing that you find yourself integrating it into all your strategies. __________________ ] Saban - Paladin, Dark Iron Keelhaul - Everquest, FV Server.

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12-30-2005, 10:50 PM	#2 (permalink)
Angrier Banned Join Date: May 2002 Location: Your mom's house Posts: 758 +0 Internets	Anyone who's played EQ can appreciate this: the pathing bugs. Chardok anyone? Not quite severe enough to where a mob stands in one spot not moving, but hunters soloing nameds because they run back and forth... no big deal?

12-30-2005, 10:52 PM	#3 (permalink)
Kolle Registered User Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 4,879 -25 Internets	yeah EQ definately had its share

12-30-2005, 10:55 PM	#4 (permalink)
elrich Jackass Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 944 -2 Internets	I skimmed enough to figure out which exploit you were talking about, and what your general stance was. So, you feel that blizzard is incapable of dealing with the teleport exploit, etc? Lemme explain some of what's behind the scenes here. The teleport hack works by one of two methods. The first of which is memory space editing, the second of which is datastream editing. The reason that the hack exists is because of the level of trust between client and server. The server trusts the client when it comes to character position. There isn't the easy fix of "then just don't trust the client!" because the less you trust the client, the more it becomes a dumb terminal, and this -greatly- increases not only the amount of data coming through the stream, but also becomes a huge detriment to how smooth the game plays. Which is to say, client trust level increases error correction for network lag and packet loss. So how do you detect these things? The most obvious is scanning the memory, which Blizzard now does. They have a tool which they can send program signatures to for it to scan for. The other obvious choice is sanity checks. Now, this is where I would say Blizzard is coming up short, either on proper implementation, or on human followup. To explain, the sanity check should work like this as an example; every 15 seconds, the server checks to see how far your character has travelled, and if its been over 150% of movement speed, it checks to see if youve been mounted on a griff, or completed the quest in WS that boots you, hearthed, etc, and if not, flags the account for human check up. If this was properly implemented, we wouldn't see teleport hackers continuing for very long. Ah well.

12-30-2005, 11:32 PM	#6 (permalink)
Neppy Registered User Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 239 +0 Internets	Speed hacking and teleporting are pretty rampant on my server, and blizzard seems unable to do jack about it. Called a Gm to watch a guy speed hack in WSG and he supposedly watched then told me he couldn't do anything, nice. Client side movement is a necessity, but theres no reason for the server to trust someone moving 10 zones at a time except poor programming.

12-31-2005, 12:09 AM	#8 (permalink)
Bizantium Banned Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 741 +0 Internets	in Kata's Castlum ( spelling ) I use to quad kite 12-15 guards with infinite resources basically /hug pathing

12-31-2005, 12:11 AM	#9 (permalink)
elrich Jackass Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 944 -2 Internets	Well, then it wasn't quad kiting, now was it?

12-31-2005, 12:29 AM	#10 (permalink)
Kolle Registered User Join Date: Sep 2002 Posts: 4,879 -25 Internets	I don't understand how they do it or how to stop them. It's not what I'm educated at and I don't particularly care to learn. It's not my type of job and probably never will be. All I know is that it's been going on for a long time now. I'm just curious when Bliz is gonna be able to stop them, if ever. I guess it's just kinda demoralizing that cheaters can abuse something so blatantly for so long without being held accountable. Even if they get caught and banned it's easy to grab another account since they're making tons of cash off the game anyways. Then the cheating just continues since the bugs or whatever aren't fixed.

12-31-2005, 12:41 AM	#13 (permalink)
Samus Aran Sons of the Storm Heal Bitch Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 771 +1 Internets	I know the client architecture is full of holes and has been horribly hacked because the .pdb sort of got leaked back in Beta and as such there's pretty thorough documentation on the way shit works. The question is.. why isn't Blizzard working on fixing these problems. It's obvious they're there

12-31-2005, 12:48 AM	#14 (permalink)
Bonzai Posts: n/a	Best and olny cheat I ever had the opportunity to utilize on Veeahan ... 1. Mage loads Air Pet 2. Summon Eyeball, 3. Dismiss Eyeball 4. Rinse and repeat for a single mage having unlimited pets. Was owning lower Guk deadside with about 50+ air pets and then Raistlin popped into the slave camp area and asked WTF was going on, why so many pets? We said the other mages are around the corner and he called bullshit on us. Damn that was a fun night.

12-31-2005, 12:49 AM	#15 (permalink)
Bonzai Posts: n/a	The second biggest cheat I ever used was on Russ Taylors shitty coded ROM Diku Mud's. Remember ... buy -1000000 potpies Insta coins, cha-ching.