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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
Actually, it had something to do with fooling the game that you were on a griffin, when you weren't, speeding you up like 50x or something. I saw somebody link instructions to it on the forums (which I read because I am obsessed with the game, yet am unable to afford it.)
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I've always thought that this kind of hacking would not be a problem once internet technology gets suitably advanced. Once everyone has super fast internet connections, you wouldn't need to have the program stored on your own system where punks can work at hacking it. All you would do is buy an account, and then everytime you wanted to play, you would download a fresh copy of the program. You play for however you want, and then you log off, and the program is ereased off your computer (or maybe if you're afraid of having a remote computer deleting programs, it can stay on your hard drive). Then the next time you want to play, you download the program again, thus ensuring that you and everyone else is always playing with a non-hacked version of the program. Your character and his equipment would be stored on the server, so that couldn't be hacked either. So the elimination of punks is only a matter of time.
Speed hackers could be master ambushers. Rush in quickly, have all the ambushers attack one guy, run out, repeat. They'd be untouchable in PvP.
Has Blizzard taken a stand on these?
there's cash money to be made selling virtual stuff.
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Some years ago I was a law student. One class we played this group game whereby cheating (through lying to the group about what you were going to do, then doing something else) would let you win big. Nearly everyone in the class cheated. Some were very proud of the high scores they achieved in the game that way. No one else seemed to see it as a problem; they were disappointed they didn't figure out to cheat sooner.
I'm not sure what this says about our lawyers today. But I don't think it's good.
Ewen
PS: My score was negative. And I'm not a lawyer. Those two things are not completely unrelated.
And, yes, that is a cynical attitude. Please read about game theory, prisoners dilemma, etc.
(Dawkins' "The selfish gene" is really good. It'll change your view of the world.)
What I find problematic is when you are dishonest with people that trust you. That you have a "social contract" with and you know they will get very angry if they find out that you cheat. I.e. "real" betrayal.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
No, there wasn't any punishment for cheating.
But that was pretty much my point. Here you have a class of people that are supposedly going to be the next generation of highly trusted people (ie, lawyers taking care of people's property, money, etc). And they're cheating to get a few meaningless points in a trivial game. Because they can.
Perhaps it was too much to expect that no one in the class even saw a problem with people the public are supposed to trust just cheating because they can.
I've since adjusted my cynacism meter. It reads off-scale less frequently now.
Ewen
PS: I've read (and even own) Dawkin's "The selfish gene", and I'd recommend it too.
Sure, everything would be server-side if there were such things as unlimited bandwidth, unlimited processor resources, and zero-latency connections.
In reality, collision-detection and movement logic is better handled on the client side. Nobody wants a 150ms delay between when they push the "forward" key and when they start to move. And the computational cost of doing terrain collision on the server for 5000+ players is prohibitive.
The only thing that Blizzard can do is monitor for data anomolies, such as position updates that are an impossible distance apart for the given time interval. And that is probably how they are catching speed hackers.
Yes, the DATA RESOURCES are streamed from the server. The game is still rendered on your client, and your keystrokes are still handled locally. The only major architectural difference between Second Life and WoW is that one comes on CDs ahead of time, and one gets downloaded in the background.
When I was a kid, I honestly didn't see -any- moral problem with cheating. To me it was just part of the game, and as long as you won and didn't get caught, you won, and getting caught was just another form of losing, and since if you wanted to cheat it meant you were likely to lose, it seemed to make no difference.
I think my perspective changed when I realized that losing well had social benefits.
I suppose a realization like that is much harder to make online.
I'm sure most of the cheaters would rationalize that it doesn't even apply at all, but knowing the kinds of friends I've made through mutually respectful play vs the kinds of people you see on their cheater forums I'd say the social rewards for not cheating are substaintially better online as well.
1) Every server is PvP. The "PvE" servers are just consentual instead of automatic.
2) Speedhack means that someone can beat you to every single important monster/chest/whatever.
3) Customers want a button they can click to win the game. Should Blizzard provide it?
I would care. Hacking in online games is not only stupid (it destroys the challenge of the game), but it ruins the experience for other players. A person has to have a certain degree of asshole-ness to do something like that.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.