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.

Comments

Re:Speaking as someone who despises cheating onlin

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Speaking as someone who despises cheating onlin

[johnkoer]

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.

Re:Speaking as someone who despises cheating onlin

[fuzzybunny]

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.

Why Cheat?

[Neo Bahamut]

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.

Re:...Speaking as a Neocron player...

[Cecil]

It's just a matter of being careful. Well, patching has to be done. But firewall or anti-virus? No, just be careful. I've had anti-virus installed for 2 years, it's never had a hit. Never hit anything before that either.

It really disturbs me how many people just blindly stick 'products' on their computer to make it 'safe'. Safety is something you only get by being careful and taking care of your computer. Software can help, but it has to start with knowledge.