Players don't need to see a performance tradeoff, the tradeoff can be made purely on the financial side by the game developer (buy more hardware to distribute the added load of trusting the client less). Though I do agree that if your players don't care, there isn't a problem. I think there is a suggestion, though, that farming bots are causing a problem for normal players, and that is a purely game design issue, not a client server issue.
It doesn't get caught playing better, but perhaps just more persistently. A lot of these bots are just designed to play 24 hours a day for weeks to accumulate money/items/exp. If a human could put in the same amount of time, they would likely do better.
That pretty much all seemed to agree with what I expected. It definitely seems like with a little more work they could have dodged the warden. As long as Blizzard isn't willing to really lock down the users computer in a painful way, it will be hard to defeat bot writers.
Well, the closest I came was D2. But I couldn't convince people to take the steps necessary to really secure the server side, so there are a few problems there, and I could have but wasn't allowed to fix the gameplay issues that make client side bots an issue. Still, it came relatively close, and could have gotten there with only a relatively small amount of additional effort. WOW trusts the client too much (a tradeoff made to reduce server costs), but that's not a necessary part of the design.
For smaller scale evidence that this is possible, check out my game (java 5 required) in my sig (or journal if you disable sigs). Cheating to get high scores is impossible. A program could be designed that would help you, but that's an expected and encouraged portion of the game design.
It's unlikely I'll have a chance to do better than D2, as I'm now pretty much out of the industry except for toy projects in my spare time.
What I can barely understand is: how hard can this be to dodge?
Warden strategy: hash window titles. Defeated by randomizing the window title.
Warden strategy: hash running processes' file image. Defeated by modifying the executable during launch.
Seriously, assuming blizzard is unwilling to demand that all running processes be terminated before play, how can they possibly expect to beat the cheaters. Frankly, I don't understand why the cheaters don't just try about 10% harder, they'd be unbeatable.
While this is funny, the proper solution of course is to design a game in which client side cheating is impossible. While challenging, this is not at all impossible. Most of diablo 2's more serious problems were server side bugs. The only significant client side problems were loot/exp bots, a reflection of a design problem that we should have (and could have, but no one would listen to me) done better.
I think you got that backward: a cell phone detector can only count cell phones. For example, a bus with 18 people using cellphones on it is not 18 cars. A video camera, on the other hand, can tell you exactly how many cars are on the road, and what types and sizes, and their speeds.
Brightness values must be bounded above on non-infinite hardware, and the natural bound below is zero (which is in fact the lower bound used), negative brightnesses don't have a very meaningful physical interpretation.
It was both necessary and natural during the 24bit color era and earlier to assume that a maximum per component pixel (255 red, 255 green, 255 blue) corresponded to some non-infinite white value. Imagine instead that 255 was infinite brightness white. Then what value is 254:254:254? Is it 254/255ths of infinite brightness? Would 1:1:1 be 1/255th infinite?
Further, in terms of color matching and rendering for print, it is very helpful to have fixed reference values. That's why monitors typically come with preprogrammed color temperatures.
Oh sure. But it only impacts you if somebody enforces it. For example, Microsoft sold huge numbers of xboxes at a loss to try to gain market share in the console space, but has anybody gone to jail? Has Microsoft paid any fines?
This got moderated funny, but actually this is a common business tactic, sometimes referred to as flooding the market. The idea is: put all your competition out of business by running at a loss for a period of time, then jack up the price as a monopoly and recoup your investment.
As a hint, you might note that they just recently shut down blizzard north. Since blizzard north was responsible for the diablo series, it would be reasonable to expect that no new diablo title is forthcoming in the next couple of years.
I can't even agree with that. General flower information not related to buying them starts at link #8, and makes the first page of results (2 of 9 results are for generic flower information).
I don't know what he hoped to find with a 'flowers' search on google, but I found exactly what I'd hope: a bunch of ways to get flowers.
Likewise, Steven finds me links to information about various famous Stevens. I suppose he was hoping to find himself, but what he has to understand is that google is not (yet) particularly emphasizing personal search, and so what you find is links to the various more generally interesting Stevens.
Sadly, only if you can make it to a launch event. My nearest one is about 600 miles away. Granted, even with drive time, gas, and wear and tear on my car, it would still be cheaper than purchasing it.
That's why you use the word 'a' and not 'the'. It's perfectly natural that there be multiple once in a lifetime events, as long as they are in different classes.
My Dell 9300 laptop. I was surprised to find it ranked so high. Later on I'm going to free some disk space, I wonder if that will impact my ranking.
Processor Intel Pentium M 1862MHz Display Card NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go Memory 1024MB Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Free Disk Space 5.46GB Display Card Memory 256MB Display Driver Version 6.7.7.1 DirectX Version 9.0c Optical Drive CD/DVD Sound Card SigmaTel C-Major Audio
My System Performance Your system is among the top 13% of all systems scanned by the Game Advisor.
It might have been funny the first 10 times. Then it might have been funny the next 100 times as retro-chic. But by now it has just become dull. I'm more interested in seeing more innovative posts please mods.
The question is, how pissed off are you when you find out that your cd key has already been registered by someone who opened the box, took the cd key, and then re-shrinkwrapped it, and now you can't play. This happened to a lot of diablo II players who couldn't play multiplayer on battle net.
The problem is, the game publishers study this on a yearly basis.
Comparable games from comparable publishers from comparable design houses sell more units with cd copy protection on them.
Until customers get sufficiently fed up with cd copy protection to not buy the games at a rate greater than the prevented casual copying rate, you can expect to see this form of copy protection persist.
The thing is, while copy protection is a minor hassle for the legitimate user, it's not a serious enough one to prevent many sales. And, while it doesn't prevent any sufficiently technical user from copying the game, it does help to prevent the sort of casual copying where you just install the game and then hand the cd to a friend. The industry has studied the outcomes. Comparable games from companies with comparable reputations sell more units if they include copy protection. Until that statement is not factual, expect to see copy protection continue.
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The problem there is that such a server will serve to hone the hacks so that when they migrate to non-hack servers, they are that much more powerful.
Players don't need to see a performance tradeoff, the tradeoff can be made purely on the financial side by the game developer (buy more hardware to distribute the added load of trusting the client less). Though I do agree that if your players don't care, there isn't a problem. I think there is a suggestion, though, that farming bots are causing a problem for normal players, and that is a purely game design issue, not a client server issue.
It doesn't get caught playing better, but perhaps just more persistently. A lot of these bots are just designed to play 24 hours a day for weeks to accumulate money/items/exp. If a human could put in the same amount of time, they would likely do better.
That pretty much all seemed to agree with what I expected. It definitely seems like with a little more work they could have dodged the warden. As long as Blizzard isn't willing to really lock down the users computer in a painful way, it will be hard to defeat bot writers.
Well, the closest I came was D2. But I couldn't convince people to take the steps necessary to really secure the server side, so there are a few problems there, and I could have but wasn't allowed to fix the gameplay issues that make client side bots an issue. Still, it came relatively close, and could have gotten there with only a relatively small amount of additional effort. WOW trusts the client too much (a tradeoff made to reduce server costs), but that's not a necessary part of the design.
For smaller scale evidence that this is possible, check out my game (java 5 required) in my sig (or journal if you disable sigs). Cheating to get high scores is impossible. A program could be designed that would help you, but that's an expected and encouraged portion of the game design.
It's unlikely I'll have a chance to do better than D2, as I'm now pretty much out of the industry except for toy projects in my spare time.
What I can barely understand is: how hard can this be to dodge?
Warden strategy: hash window titles.
Defeated by randomizing the window title.
Warden strategy: hash running processes' file image.
Defeated by modifying the executable during launch.
Seriously, assuming blizzard is unwilling to demand that all running processes be terminated before play, how can they possibly expect to beat the cheaters. Frankly, I don't understand why the cheaters don't just try about 10% harder, they'd be unbeatable.
While this is funny, the proper solution of course is to design a game in which client side cheating is impossible. While challenging, this is not at all impossible. Most of diablo 2's more serious problems were server side bugs. The only significant client side problems were loot/exp bots, a reflection of a design problem that we should have (and could have, but no one would listen to me) done better.
I think you got that backward: a cell phone detector can only count cell phones. For example, a bus with 18 people using cellphones on it is not 18 cars. A video camera, on the other hand, can tell you exactly how many cars are on the road, and what types and sizes, and their speeds.
Brightness values must be bounded above on non-infinite hardware, and the natural bound below is zero (which is in fact the lower bound used), negative brightnesses don't have a very meaningful physical interpretation.
It was both necessary and natural during the 24bit color era and earlier to assume that a maximum per component pixel (255 red, 255 green, 255 blue) corresponded to some non-infinite white value. Imagine instead that 255 was infinite brightness white. Then what value is 254:254:254? Is it 254/255ths of infinite brightness? Would 1:1:1 be 1/255th infinite?
Further, in terms of color matching and rendering for print, it is very helpful to have fixed reference values. That's why monitors typically come with preprogrammed color temperatures.
Oh sure. But it only impacts you if somebody enforces it. For example, Microsoft sold huge numbers of xboxes at a loss to try to gain market share in the console space, but has anybody gone to jail? Has Microsoft paid any fines?
This got moderated funny, but actually this is a common business tactic, sometimes referred to as flooding the market. The idea is: put all your competition out of business by running at a loss for a period of time, then jack up the price as a monopoly and recoup your investment.
And whatever castaway is doing, they got most of the key people really.
http://www.castawayentertainment.com/about.html
As a hint, you might note that they just recently shut down blizzard north. Since blizzard north was responsible for the diablo series, it would be reasonable to expect that no new diablo title is forthcoming in the next couple of years.
java.io.Console is just a package. It doesn't require the compiler to handle anything differently, hence not a language change.
I can't even agree with that. General flower information not related to buying them starts at link #8, and makes the first page of results (2 of 9 results are for generic flower information).
I don't know what he hoped to find with a 'flowers' search on google, but I found exactly what I'd hope: a bunch of ways to get flowers.
Likewise, Steven finds me links to information about various famous Stevens. I suppose he was hoping to find himself, but what he has to understand is that google is not (yet) particularly emphasizing personal search, and so what you find is links to the various more generally interesting Stevens.
Sadly, only if you can make it to a launch event. My nearest one is about 600 miles away. Granted, even with drive time, gas, and wear and tear on my car, it would still be cheaper than purchasing it.
That's why you use the word 'a' and not 'the'. It's perfectly natural that there be multiple once in a lifetime events, as long as they are in different classes.
My Dell 9300 laptop. I was surprised to find it ranked so high. Later on I'm going to free some disk space, I wonder if that will impact my ranking.
Processor Intel Pentium M 1862MHz
Display Card NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go
Memory 1024MB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP
Free Disk Space 5.46GB
Display Card Memory 256MB
Display Driver Version 6.7.7.1
DirectX Version 9.0c
Optical Drive CD/DVD
Sound Card SigmaTel C-Major Audio
My System Performance
Your system is among the top 13% of all systems scanned by the Game Advisor.
It might have been funny the first 10 times. Then it might have been funny the next 100 times as retro-chic. But by now it has just become dull. I'm more interested in seeing more innovative posts please mods.
That's funny. I had forgotten civ3 had painful pollution. I wrote a mod for myself that was just the standard game with the pollution turned off.
The question is, how pissed off are you when you find out that your cd key has already been registered by someone who opened the box, took the cd key, and then re-shrinkwrapped it, and now you can't play. This happened to a lot of diablo II players who couldn't play multiplayer on battle net.
The problem is, the game publishers study this on a yearly basis.
Comparable games from comparable publishers from comparable design houses sell more units with cd copy protection on them.
Until customers get sufficiently fed up with cd copy protection to not buy the games at a rate greater than the prevented casual copying rate, you can expect to see this form of copy protection persist.
The thing is, while copy protection is a minor hassle for the legitimate user, it's not a serious enough one to prevent many sales. And, while it doesn't prevent any sufficiently technical user from copying the game, it does help to prevent the sort of casual copying where you just install the game and then hand the cd to a friend. The industry has studied the outcomes. Comparable games from companies with comparable reputations sell more units if they include copy protection. Until that statement is not factual, expect to see copy protection continue.
... or rather than the shelf, you could give your cd and the patch to a friend and then ... oh.