TenTonHammer: Everquest Hacking

[Shiftin]

That is a straw man and factually incorrect. The number of people in TR and TMO that were banned as a % of the total number of bans is far lower than the percentage of the active server population those guilds make up on a day to day basis.

[Zereh]

Originally Posted by Shiftin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That is a straw man and factually incorrect. The number of people in TR and TMO that were banned as a % of the total number of bans is far lower than the percentage of the active server population those guilds make up on a day to day basis.

TR had raid / guild leaders banned, TMO did not; comparing the two is disingenuous at best. This goes way beyond a straight numbers game.

The people caught cheating who happened to be tagged TMO are no longer guilded with us. If you want to impress, throw some facts at us about how your guild chose to deal with your cheaters.

[Silentone]

Originally Posted by Zereh [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The people caught cheating who happened to be tagged TMO are no longer guilded with us. If you want to impress, throw some facts at us about how your guild chose to deal with your cheaters.

By powerleveling them to max and tagging them of course.

[Shiftin]

Originally Posted by Zereh [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

TR had raid / guild leaders banned, TMO did not; comparing the two is disingenuous at best. This goes way beyond a straight numbers game.

Please quit trying to drag an actual issue into RNF. I am not comparing our guilds. Either individually or together, our guilds did not make up as great a % of the cheaters are we make up a portion of the active playerbase, so to punish us specifically for that (ignoring the other guilds that suffer), wouldn't make sense.

That also isn't the latest stated reason we have for VP not being open.

If you would like a refresher of the 4 stated reasons we've been given since April why VP isn't open, i am happy to provide them.

[Dr4z3r]

Originally Posted by Shiftin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you would like a refresher of the 4 stated reasons we've been given since April why VP isn't open, i am happy to provide them.

I never knew there were 4! What were/are they?

[Seaweedpimp]

Originally Posted by Zereh [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

TR had raid / guild leaders banned, TMO did not; comparing the two is disingenuous at best. This goes way beyond a straight numbers game.

The people caught cheating who happened to be tagged TMO are no longer guilded with us. If you want to impress, throw some facts at us about how your guild chose to deal with your cheaters.

^^^^^^^^^^^



Damn zereh is good.



TR failure

[Fists]

Originally Posted by Shiftin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That is a straw man and factually incorrect. The number of people in TR and TMO that were banned as a % of the total number of bans is far lower than the percentage of the active server population those guilds make up on a day to day basis.

Quite true. As an ex member of TMO we had maybe 2-3 people booted from hacking. TR had what 9 accounts. 360 - 12 = 348. MATH BROS.

@Zereh "TR had raid / guild leaders banned, TMO did not; comparing the two is disingenuous at best. This goes way beyond a straight numbers game."

What is the relevance to the topic at hand of opening VP. So what if TMO had a clean slate this time around.. Are you sitting here spewing that either A. VP should only be open to the glorious TMO? or that B. Your content with VP not coming out STILL?

[DoucLangur]

Back on-topic: I find the Ten Ton Hammer articles, especially the introductory first article about the Chardok raid, highly naive at best. Not to expect cheaters on an EQ server, and to try to "communicate" with a group that is clearly warping, is just stupid and a waste of time.

Failing that, I gotta say the major flaw allowing stuff like MQ to work in this game is the distribution of tasks between client and server that Verant/SOE chose to implement. For instance:

"Warping has always been a problem in EverQuest. There are so many ways that a client can legitimately get across a zone. The server cannot assume all cases of fast travel are automatically hacks. What if the client lagged out where the player lost internet connection for a few seconds? It would look like a warp or a speed hack to the server."

If the client only submitted an action to the server (i.e. start running in direction xy, cast gate) and the server told the client with each network packet "your character is positioned at XY, facing in direction D and moving at speed S", then it would not be possible to warp. Because the client could display the character anywhere in the zone, nevertheless, the client could not *tell* the server where the character is, because the server would do it's own math on that.

However, that would become very inconvenient with high latency (ping) between client and server. But the least that the server could do is track the average client speed by looking at the current maximum movement rate of the character (speed affecting buffs, encumbrance) and comparing that to the actual difference between two positions over time. There should be short-time plausibility checks (for short distance warping and checking there is an unobstructed path in between) and long-time average speed checks (to prevent speedhacks warping in small steps within the tolerance of the short-time checks).

Then - regardless what the client does, speedhacks and warping could not be effected anymore. I never understood why that wasn't implemented by SOE except due to the "don't care" attitude that we have learned to love so much.

Kind Regards,

Slozem

[Kevlar]

Originally Posted by DoucLangur [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then - regardless what the client does, speedhacks and warping could not be effected anymore. I never understood why that wasn't implemented by SOE except due to the "don't care" attitude that we have learned to love so much.

Kind Regards,

Slozem

Warping takes advantage of the same commands that make zoning, gating, and stuff like shadowstep and call of the hero possible. Speed hacks take advantage of bard speed or other speed buff powers. No way you could take the ability out of the client and still play the game.

[DoucLangur]

Originally Posted by Kevlar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Warping takes advantage of the same commands that make zoning, gating, and stuff like shadowstep and call of the hero possible. Speed hacks take advantage of bard speed or other speed buff powers. No way you could take the ability out of the client and still play the game.

Maybe I am overlooking something here, but I doubt it in this particular situation. If - for speed reasons - a shadowstep needs to be performed by the client - what hurt is done if - at the same time, the client needs to submit the info "player casted shadowstep at time t" to the server, and the server makes sure that a) the shadowstep is among the abilities of the player, and b) the effects are the same (cast time was taken into account, mana is lowered, etc)? Gating would work the same. The best cheat that could be achieved by shadowstep, if for playability reasons it is not possible to let the server determine the random destination location, would be to shadowstep in a direction of choice, repeatedly.

I already explained how bard speed could not be abused: The server would perform it's plausibility checks against the serverknown current max movement speed of the toon. I do not see how zoning mechanisms could be exploited to gain speed with such settings. Maybe you can explain that. Any Call of the Hero would go through the server anyways, to tell client A that its player is CotHed by client B. No way to exploit that with proper server coding from what I see.

So what am I overlooking?