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Neocron Cheaters Get Unexpected Surprise
Thanks to Avault.com for pointing to a Neocron news posting warning users of the MMORPG against fake cheat programs. According to administrators of this PC cyberpunk MMO title, "Several third party programs containing keyloggers or other malicious spyware have shown up recently. Skill-Chart.sfx.exe was posted on the Newbie forum and has quickly been removed.
NeocronHook.exe claims to make you level faster and get more items and credits, but all it does is install a keylogger that sends its findings to an IRC channel." Those hoping to escape the levelling treadmill programmatically are, no doubt, very disappointed.
I have only one thing to say about those who downloaded these ersatz "cheats"...
Ha-ha! *points*
In all seriousness, aren't cheaters supposed to be extra paranoid, lest they be cheated themselves?
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
Write software all your life, get a computer science degree, become professional programmers and reverse engineer the game yourself, then make your own fucking cheats.
It works for me, and I don't have to assault my sense of decency by uttering "h3y j00 g0t n3 cr4ckz 4 3v3rkw3zt" in chat forums.
Does my bum look big in this?
Cheating? MMORPGs are usually just tedious repetative tasks. Most modern technology is centered around preventing humans from having to bother with tedious repetative tasks. I'd think programs that run the level treadmill would be the natural evolution of such games.
+xxx +"right-click to download"
I think that this is great....
If you are cheating and not using a firewall, you are a MORON. If you have cheats, there is no need for them to go out to the internet. That is why I use open source cheats, or I write my own.
I prefer to write my own, I get more functionality and I get what I want. For some MMORPGs, I was able to write a crafting program that did all of my mundane work for me. The program worked on a variable timer, so there was no real pattern to the automation. Since I never released the program on the net, the company had no reason to look at anything wrong in my leveling.
Johnkoerner.com
I have no problem cheating in single player games. Making it rain cars in Vice City is hilarious. People who cheat online are scum.
Astout firewall would stop these trojans from sending anything. Kerio pops up a requester everytime an unauthorised program tries to access the net. Scary the amount of programs that do try and phone home.
I discovered a trojan on my system recently, but I think it was inactive. I think it came in in a Vice City trainer. (The aforementioned raining cars:)) I could find nothing hooking into it with a trojan scan.
I discovered a trojan on my system; thank god it wasn't a used one.
But seriously, a lot of people feel safe with "personal firewalls" as part of their DSL routers. These often just do a 'pass out any keep state', allowing no connections initiated from the 'outside' to your internal network, but permitting everything outbound.
That being said, (a) it's yer own damn fault if you have nothing better to do than play a game that requires you to spend 8 months getting a decent character together, and (b) serves people right for cheating. As you said, online cheaters are turds.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
There has been a thread on the Neocron Forums about this. It surprises me that many people still have boxes that work - one guy today was bragging that he doesnt patch or use any form of firewall or anti virus on XP for 2 years and has had no problems.
Talk about lucky!
I've never understood why people need cheat programs for so many of these games. Why can't they just be happy and play the games as they were meant to be played? I can see the retort now: "It makes the game more fun." But if you need to do something like cheat in order to make the game fun, what's the point in playing it? Ah, well, I'm no psychologist. And then there are those that love to capitalize on a player's "need" to cheat. They make these malicious programs to trick players by offering them the means to cheat, but only providing themselves with an advantage. Cheating, as with any game, can only result in everybody getting hurt.
Proud member of RPG Knights, a forum about RPGs by RPGers for RPGers. www.invisionfree.com/forums/rpg_knight
of that Quake3 cheating prog, that would steal your Cdkey in the process.
Would it suprise you if the game companies themselves were doing this to discourage cheating in the MMORPGS? I've written cheats for FPS's before, and although I did put in a backdoor to disable the bot if I wanted to (so I wouldn't have to play against my own aimbot), I wouldn't ever put in malware because it ruins your rep. And yes, you do have a rep in the cheating community :P
-NoClanNeeded
A big reason I no longer play Counterstrike in the wild is because of the cheating. I have a bunch of guys I play it with that I know won't cheat and that's that. Don't play as much as I'd like, but if I get 0wned, I'd much rather know it was through skill than wonder if the guy behind the gun is an asshole running a wall hack.
I run Kerio Personal Firewall and have it set so that ANY software that tries to connect out, unless I've given it explicit permission in the past (and I ONLY permit stuff like WS-FTP, Mozilla etc...), it tells me and I can permit or deny. I even have Internet Explorer nuked so it can't connect to the net.
Anyone who cheats at an online game and in doing so effects other people (so wankers with wallhacks, people using maphacks on Warcraft etc..), I hope one of these trojans securely erases their hard drive so they can't get anything back.
. . . thousands of playa's were somehow surprised to discover that they had been infected with a virus after cheating on their wives.
Guys, when you do something you're not supposed to do, you get in trouble.
This is not a new concept.
This is not a surprise.
This is a natural consequence of getting involved with low-lifes and morons.
Don't do it.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
I'm a little surprised that it took an Adrenaline Vault article now to tell game users about something that's been going on for years.
I'm a coder for a MUD (yeah... old skool, sucka). Over the weekend we had some idiots in there who were asking if there were any cheats. I calmly explained to them that the last time there was a major cheat there was a player file wipe (pwipe). Of course they didn't seem to care... Once they realized I was an admin for the game they quickly changed their tune ("Cheats are no fun anyways") after defending their actions to other players who thought they sucked...
My point is non-existant... just that people who try to cheat at MMORPGs or other MMO games suck. Using a cheat in GTA:VC or THPS4 single player or something that doesn't affect an entire gaming community is up to you. But don't do it online.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I used Windows Macro Recorder (from Windows 3.11) to make a simple macro that attacked monsters, killed, them, and healed me. Left it running until I hit level 100.
Leveling in that MMORPG (and so many others) was no more than a menial time sink. The fact that a program could easily and unintelligently do it without one whit of input from me gave me very little incentive to waste time. There was no skill involved, no excitement, no fun: just XP >> Levels.
Computers are designed to automate menial tasks. I did just that ^_^ I encourage others to do the same. It lets you spend your time enjoying the "endgame" or whatever you call it, instead of mouth-breathing whilst you stare unblinking at a CRT clicking on monsters.
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