though I dislike hackers, the hack itself never really bothered me much. It is more a question of principle to me; it bothers me if the hacker keeps bragging about his skill or BMing the other player.

While others who manage to keep the overall good manner are not so bad in my eyes.

Say, TT1 is an awesome guy. Specially because he gave up on hacking altogether. He is like a recovered junky, lol, and therefore some sort of hero.

rei

United States3594 Posts

September 21 2010 23:10 GMT

#43

once a hacker always a hacker, doesn't matter what TT1 do after, that stays with him for as long as he doesn't change his name. testie accomplished so much more than TT1, but it doesn't change the fact taht he hacked over and over and got caught again and again. You can respect their skills, but you can't respect their idea of fair play, they don't respect fair play, they spit on the idea of fair play with their map hacks

Thermia

United States866 Posts

September 21 2010 23:14 GMT

#44

As an ex-hack creator in BW (nothing too complicated or at all game-changing, just spoofers and text stuff that could, for example, take advantage of when you could talk in color and make blank lines to imitate someone, the actual people that write the hacks usually aren't the cheating, scum of the earth type of player, if they even play at all. I just used hacking in bw as a way to experiment with ASM, as there wasn't really anything else interesting to mess around with at the time. Most "hackers" are just script kiddies or random players that find a site and download a hack that some actual coder made, and it is the ones that give out these hacks in return for praise and sometimes monetary compensation that are the actual dirtbags who should be stopped - I'm pretty sure blizzard finally started doing this in sc2 with c&d letters, actually.

Excalibur_Z

United States12235 Posts

September 21 2010 23:32 GMT

#45

Lasgo and Ashur were the ones that created OP3, but the OP here is mistaken about what exactly was possible with the FPVOD feature. While it sounds cool on the surface, what it actually did was slowly scroll the screen from one user's selection to his next selection. Screen locations are never saved in replay files, which is where the FPVOD feature falls short. What maphackers commonly do is scroll their screen to a location, let's say the corner of a map for example, and they don't actually select anything because that can be flagged as a suspicious action. If you went back and watched that in FPVOD mode, the screen would never scroll over to the corner because that data isn't found in the replay file. A gross mischaracterization of the FPVOD feature in OP3, to be sure. It was nowhere near as powerful as the Player Camera feature of SC2.

EDIT: More:

When you read the interview you will see that the Starcraft Broodwar scene was left alone in the dark for some time. Blizzard never had a really strict policy against hackers. They didn't offer any help whatsoever for people that actually cared enough to develop working anti hack tools, or that keep community servers running. Broodwar is simply too old to support. This is a policy that is just not a slap in the face for the Starcraft fans, but also for those who play Diablo. To be fair, in the older days Blizzard locked accounts that were using 3rd party programs such as hacks and win bots. But due the fact that it was quite easy to create just another account this measure was quite useless. One could simply register another account and get his stats back within hours by using win bots. That ruined the “old” battle.net ladder for no normal player could keep up with the win bots. Furthermore players got banned because they used things like penguin plug.

That's not true at all. I can remember many occasions working as an intermediary between Blizzard employees and anti-hack developers. I spoke with superpenguin and Ashur who each divulged precisely how a particular hack operated and what fixes needed to be made on the coding end, I forwarded the information to certain Blizzard employees and put those employees into contact with them. A quick patch was usually distributed (this was the reason for the frequent patches) and it disabled the hack. Blizzard has legacy teams dedicated to legacy title support, but they're quite small (the later patches of BW was a single person as I recall), and therefore they're more than happy to get in-depth information (particularly from anti-hack developers) in order to expedite fixes.

vindKtiv

United States215 Posts

September 22 2010 01:34 GMT

#46

I really enjoyed the article. And for people severely hating on hackers, what's the big deal? You play a game against a hacker and you lose. Move on with your life. The hacker isn't going to be sad that he conned you out of a win (and probably never will), and if you work yourself up over the issue then you only have yourself to blame.

DURRHURRDERP

Canada929 Posts

September 22 2010 01:55 GMT

#47

On September 21 2010 22:05 Gecko[Xp] wrote:

Show nested quote +

Ouch. That's sort of embarassing, but to be honest: I haven't found anyone who had a clue about that. Or how PP worked. I completely misunderstood it then. T_T

Show nested quote +

Yes it is. That's not the only part. I just wanted to show how "they" think. No corrections made there, nothing added or changed.

penguin plugin made the hacker's units attack themselves (IE: if he had 10 marines next to each other they would start killing each other)

funnybananaman

United States830 Posts

September 22 2010 03:08 GMT

#48

Awesome article, a lot of stuff i didn't know about hacking in there. very interesting

synapse

China13814 Posts

September 22 2010 04:00 GMT

#49

Spotlight!
I thought the Hacker's Mindset part was very interesting o_O

puppykiller

United States3128 Posts

September 22 2010 07:44 GMT

#50

amazing artical!
great to have info on such a relevant topic.
I play BW on west a lot and never know whether or not I'm playing a hacker. Once i got really fed up and google searched "starcraft hacks" and was apalled to see how unbelievably easy it was to acsess hacks (i would never hack btw, i've been robbed to many times)

Phanekim

United States777 Posts

September 22 2010 08:37 GMT

#51

really nice article.

Shana

Indonesia1814 Posts

September 22 2010 09:14 GMT

#52

Very good read! It was pretty interesting and insightful

I don't care if my opponents is using hack though, it's just a game anyway

Jakalo

Latvia2350 Posts

September 22 2010 09:56 GMT

#53

Very thorough, thanks.

dronebabo

10866 Posts

September 22 2010 10:06 GMT

#54

--- Nuked ---

Crushgroove

United States793 Posts

September 22 2010 10:47 GMT

#55

what an educational article! Well done.

Mortician

Bulgaria2332 Posts

September 22 2010 13:12 GMT

#56

Wow, that was awesome. Thanks for the article!

ArbAttack

Canada198 Posts

September 22 2010 13:27 GMT

#57

On Bnet, with the newest version of Oblivion hack, there is NO way to detect 2 features of it, namely, automine and maphack (Automine has been changed from frame 5 to 15, which is quite normal, and maphack is undetectable as always unless the player makes it too obvious).

On iccup, private hacks have existed for ages and ages which perform the same functions as Oblivion.

Navane

Netherlands2748 Posts

September 22 2010 15:01 GMT

#58

Good read. Well structured.

ToeJam

United States282 Posts

September 22 2010 15:20 GMT

#59

Well researched post

A+!!!

IceCube

Croatia1403 Posts

September 22 2010 18:42 GMT

#60

Very nice read, really can tell you put alot of time in it.

I didn't know that keeping track with hacks is so hard work and requires so much time but I did suspected it to be becouse it made Iccup what it is best ladder of all times. All in all very nice read. Thanks!