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Blizzard Bans Speed Hackers from WoW
Voodoo Extreme has the world that Blizzard has already banned several accounts for Speed Hacking, a type of cheat that allows a character to move far faster than it should. From the article: "Those individuals who were caught using the speed hack have been banned from the game and have had their accounts closed. We must stress once again that we are opposed to hacking and cheating of any kind and are dedicated to maintaining a fair environment in our games." Adios, punks
Generally speed hacks work by sending packets in such a way as to simulate periods of extreme latency between the client and the server. This leads to a bit of a bad fork for Blizzard...The two most likely ways that they banned people were checking for constant extreme latency (which could occur) in which case they may have banned people who were not cheating, or they tested for programs running on the user's machine, which is a slippery road towards privacy invasion.
Several people used FRAPS to record people that were using SpeedHacks in the game. So they were not banning people who had not visibly evidenced this behavior several times and been reported by users.
And they were not faking a Gryphon flight while on the ground, they were faking lag to the client making the server lag-o-port them great distances. This is using a method posted on the BlizzHackers website forums.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Yeah, speed hackers are impossible to kill. If they get in trouble, they run, and you'll never catch them.
blizzard opposed to cheating? haha
anyone remember playing diablo online?
Yes, but I don't recall paying $15/month so that Blizzard could afford a permanent live support staff to continuously update the game, "police" the game world, etc.
Oh, and Diablo 1 was peer-to-peer wrt character info, WoW is client-server, and you do understand the difference? That in peer-to-peer the user has their character info stored locally so it is inherently hackable while client-server stores character info on the company server.
Mounts come in at level 40 - and there's a hell a lot of walking to do before then. That said, after your first 10 levels or so, you don't need to walk much. Griffins (or Horde equivelant) cost next to nothing after you've hit level 12 or 14. Then there's the Deeprun Tram for free between Stormwind and Ironforge, and I think the Horde has a Zeppelin? Many classes also get their own transport abilities - Druids and Shaman get a travel form, Mages get a teleport, Hunters get Aspect of the Cheetah, etc. Plus you've got Warlocks who, with two other people to help them, can summon another player from anywhere else in the game. Oh, and don't forget your hearthstone you can use once every hour. Although mounts are a high-level bonus, there are plenty of travel alternatives from very early on.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Simple: Proactive = actively searching for these things.
Reactive = banning people after they've been reported.
My understanding is that Blizzard is actively looking for cheaters - taking the proactive approach, as opposed making other players report them, which is the reactive approach.
It depends on how you define 'taken a stand'. There is a known bot that will fish for a player. They have disabled the high level fishing areas to prevent a flood of high level items from these bots. Presumably they are working on either a sure-fire way of detecting the bot from someone who's fishing and doesn't feel like responding to people talking to him, or they are reworking how fishing works to break the bot and make it harder to use.
So they've identified the problem, and taken immediate action to limit the damage it can do. Since they aren't about to just remove fishing, they are definitely working on ways to identify people doing it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they've already been banning bots; the problem is they would generally have to watch a character for 36 hours straight to be reasonably certain it's not a single person.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I seem to remember watching some guy in the full Red Mage gear (the job-specific gear) speeding around Qufim. So, no, it wasn't just a thief.
Of course, Square-Enix never did anything about people cheating that I ever found out about. Instead they just told everyone that any problem they asked about had been "taken care of" without providing any additional information.
I much prefer Blizzard to Square-Enix, mainly because Blizzard will actually communicate with its players. Square-Enix just kind of sits in their ivory tower and never condecends to discuss problems with the plebes playing the game.