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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.
The lag wasn't the game going slowly, it was just everyone going faster then I was. Damn kids and their speed hacks... and makeout parties...
One of the complaints I heard frequently on various forums was people claiming that they'd "never play World of Warcraft because Blizzard games always get hacked and Blizzard never does anything about it." Hopefully this will convince them that Blizzard is indeed being proactive about preventing cheaters.
Unfortunately, I expect that instead they'll just take it as evidence that World of Warcraft is easily hacked and use that as a reason why they refuse to play.
But I'm glad Blizzard is announcing this, rather than the approach a certain other MMORPG took of saying "oh, there's nothing wrong, there are no bots anymore, we took care of them all" despite groups of players who seem not to mind doing the same thing repeatedly 24/7 and never respond when you try and talk with them...
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.
That would lead to fairly humorous role-playing:
...
"F4llenAng3l has entered the store. You may buy:
A ring - 54 GP
A Fire Arrow Quiver - 68 GP
F4llenAng3l has selected to buy a ring. Please type the text from the image below to complete the purchase, to ensure that you are not a script."
---
she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
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.