On April 10 2011 08:51 MrBadMan wrote: So at first I didnt believe such a hack even existed. Googled it, instantly found it. Seems to be less than a week old judging by their advertisements. They are using GSL footage to advertise their hack...lol. "Idra fails to kill 20 siege tanks with 100 zerglings? We can fix that!".
This is bad news, really bad news. But since the bot routines are easily detectable by Blizzard's anti-cheat software, it shouldnt take too long for the bans to start rolling out.
Uh, that's not a hack, that's a custom map someone's programmed that AI into.
in europe, there was recently a competition to write a SC2 bot, and there was a whole tournament between universities. maybe this is one of them. but the fact that he perfectly injects while having 700+ apm WITHOUT looking at the queens and while having all roaches selected, makes me think this was just a straight hack
Yep, thats legit map that some guys made and are asking for more ideas in thread on tl, for now its 100 lings vs 20 tanks. I don't think it's connected;)
Also, biggest proofs this is hack, is that he didnt select roaches to burrow. You can see what units he is selecting, and he never selected single roach. He always had whole control groups.
2nd thing, he never selected queens i believe.
3rd, this micro he did isnt possible, but even if it would, no human would make perfect injecting while microing 30 roaches singularily, and this guy injected at 25 energy moment while in middle of battle;)
I don't often speak smth is a hack, but this is for sure. Especially this guy quite sucked tbh. Minor thing is lack of any scout, in zvz after hatch first scouting is crucial. So i guess he had hack but didnt want to show in at camera replays, or he just knew he cant lose after getting burrowed roaches, so he knew only thing that can kill him is banelings before he has roaches+burrow. So he blind countered them, but timing was rly fishy as well;)
A little research on the internet will show you that there are auto-larvae spawners, burrow triggers, and more. Someone has built an API that lets you script against SC2, and tons of people are using it for "evil". I'm sure Blizzard will knock it out in a ban wave, but I expect we'll be seeing more of these on the ladder as time goes on. Generally, these people tend to suck at the game and stick to the lower leagues, but you never know where a few will end up.
On April 10 2011 09:33 PantsSC2 wrote: A little research on the internet will show you that there are auto-larvae spawners, burrow triggers, and more. Someone has built an API that lets you script against SC2, and tons of people are using it for "evil". I'm sure Blizzard will knock it out in a ban wave, but I expect we'll be seeing more of these on the ladder as time goes on. Generally, these people tend to suck at the game and stick to the lower leagues, but you never know where a few will end up.
We simply need a "Cheater League" , so this guys can battle it out without hurting anyone.
If a fair amount of players actual "want" to use Cheats and Hacks, give them what they want.
Fighting the "Hacks" is pretty much pointless , as there is allways a "next one" no matter how much you bann / especially as you never bann the "good ones" that really hurt you the most, just the super crazy bad public hacks which you can find simply by google.
*But some of the Hacks just show what peops could really "need".
A auto-larva inject is something the game could easily support on its own; if it would be slighty slow, it would give noobs a help and pros would ignore it as they can do it faster anyway.
*Say Auto-Larva inject has a delay of 3 seconds, but you can't forget it; or it consumes "more" energy than manually inject. Peops are happy in lower leagues and you they don't "need" a hack for it.
**Ofcourse they could "learn" , but thats the point of Hacks, you want your reward without learning.
On April 08 2011 19:38 Okiesmokie wrote: To people saying that he burrowed roaches/injected larva without selecting the units, that is incorrect. sc2gears registers that he did select the units. He just did it so fast that you aren't able to tell by watching it.
(I'm not denying that it's a bot, but people should really stop making such stupid statements)
to be fair anyone watching the replay from the first person view would not see it as u pointed out the action happened so quickly that it was not appearable without the use of a program such as sc2gears which breaks down specific actions. This is not a sign of stupidity it is more a lack of tools which allow the possession of information.
On April 10 2011 09:33 PantsSC2 wrote: A little research on the internet will show you that there are auto-larvae spawners, burrow triggers, and more. Someone has built an API that lets you script against SC2, and tons of people are using it for "evil". I'm sure Blizzard will knock it out in a ban wave, but I expect we'll be seeing more of these on the ladder as time goes on. Generally, these people tend to suck at the game and stick to the lower leagues, but you never know where a few will end up.
We simply need a "Cheater League" , so this guys can battle it out without hurting anyone.
If a fair amount of players actual "want" to use Cheats and Hacks, give them what they want.
Fighting the "Hacks" is pretty much pointless , as there is allways a "next one" no matter how much you bann / especially as you never bann the "good ones" that really hurt you the most, just the super crazy bad public hacks which you can find simply by google.
*But some of the Hacks just show what peops could really "need".
A auto-larva inject is something the game could easily support on its own; if it would be slighty slow, it would give noobs a help and pros would ignore it as they can do it faster anyway.
*Say Auto-Larva inject has a delay of 3 seconds, but you can't forget it; or it consumes "more" energy than manually inject. Peops are happy in lower leagues and you they don't "need" a hack for it.
**Ofcourse they could "learn" , but thats the point of Hacks, you want your reward without learning.
But these guys are like smurfs. All they want to do is stomp on the little people. Except they're not even good enough to smurf, so they have to rely on cheats.
The brutal fact is that a lot of this Automaton works allready as 3rd Party Add-Ons, without the need of a custom Map or ingame AI.
Bots in the internet have significant features for Macro and Micro.
On one side i would love to see "bots" battle it out under each other in a "bot league" ; just to get the most insane SC2 action you could ever imagine, no human could ever do that.
But ofcourse it sucks if players use this tools to gain an advantage against others, thats not fair.
On April 07 2011 20:57 Dsn4001 wrote: I took a look at the actual program to see how it works. It's really interesting, it even obfuscates its processes/names to protect itself from Blizz just banning based on program flags.
The program in no way interacts with the SC2.exe, and there are ZERO .dll injections or any other kind of code interference. All it does is just read SC2.exe memory and display it in a overlay. I'm really suprised Blizzard didn't do anything to make it harder for programs to simply read off game data like this. Seems like lazy coding on their part.
Honestly there is no way Warden will be able to detect this hack without Blizz breaking privacy laws. The only way Blizz can possibly prevent this is to change the way the SC2.exe stores game information in its memory.
QFT. And Blizzard has made some changes in the past year regarding how the game stores data in RAM but none of them were targeted at stopping this sort of thing. They seem content to just ban the obvious maphacker kiddies and sue the people that make (unstoppable) external hacks.
It presents interesting discussions from a programming standpoint because to encrypt that data would introduce all kinds of latency to what is already a CPU-intensive game. There are other ways of going about it but seriously Blizzard does not seem to consider this a priority - not that they could stop easily if they wanted to.
On April 10 2011 09:22 SCBadger wrote: in europe, there was recently a competition to write a SC2 bot, and there was a whole tournament between universities. maybe this is one of them. but the fact that he perfectly injects while having 700+ apm WITHOUT looking at the queens and while having all roaches selected, makes me think this was just a straight hack
what league was this game btw?
No It can't be a AI, because not only can you easily tell it's a player playing aside from the injects and roach micro, but because it's not easy at all to have an AI script in SC2 run as a player, in fact it's virtually impossible as far as I know. You'd have to go under a completely different approach of reading the game's memory and directly injecting commands into the game from there (the AI would use any sort of 3rd party code like C). That is essentially what they did in Starcraft 1 as far as I know, and it took a long time. The biggest example is called the Brood War Application Programming Interface (BWAPI), and it resulted in some extremely amazing AIs that can beat semi-professional players (without cheating, not even map hack). They were the result of a similar sort of competition like you mentioned.
I'm actually interested to hear more about this SC2 AI competition, I haven't heard much about such things, and think it has a lot of potential. I'm actually surprised at how little progress people seem to be making in this respect considering the year SC2 has been around for— then again that's nothing compared to the many years of SC1.
On April 10 2011 21:38 NeoR wrote: That was insane micro, it could be hack but I'm no expert.
If that second line wasn't also sarcasm, I could explain it, since there might be many people around that can't understand how this is different than human ability/behavior.
All the roaches are ordered to burrow at a certain health level, told to move back (from what I heard, haven't verified the move command), and only unburrowed exactly when they hit full health. All this WHILE doing PERFECTLY timed queen injects.
While a human probably couldn't even burrow the roaches as fast as this, the biggest issue is the individual/personalized un-burrowing of the roaches. Simultanious un-burrowing of roaches combined with the burrowing is impossible for a human to do when you are constantly unburrowing them at PRECISELY 100% health, no later, no earlier, and constantly burrowing roaches at low health of a certain health level, never higher.
There's also rather clear lack of continuity between the automatic actions of the roaches, and what the player wants to do with his units.
Reminds me of the D2 LoD days.. there were rune bots around who navigated using either the graphics engine or by running pattern recognition scripts on the screen graphics. Either way, shit was sick. Wasn't detected by Blizz either, at least not for a long time. I imagine this could be similar.
On April 08 2011 19:38 Okiesmokie wrote: To people saying that he burrowed roaches/injected larva without selecting the units, that is incorrect. sc2gears registers that he did select the units. He just did it so fast that you aren't able to tell by watching it.
(I'm not denying that it's a bot, but people should really stop making such stupid statements)
wow many actions in 1 second! I wish scgears had a feature to show milliseconds
Please not this is not a 3rd party program - all the code was written in Blizzard's World Editor.
I didnt mean that the "Automaton" is just translated and does exactly the same.
I just mean that 3rd Party Tools can actual read the Memory and send commands, which gives you comparable results.
The Roach Micro in the clip is an example, as its auto-inject and all that stuff.
Just google for SC2MapPro and stuff like that ; i would even say thats "exactly" the tool that is used in the clip, as the feature are provided by it.
To be true its allmost shocking how much Hacks exist for this game, and all of them have some features to hide themself.
I mean, the obvisious thing is that someone does crazy amounts of actions in just 1 second, if the commands are intentionally delayed, nobody will see it; and so the features are allready marked as "risky".
Its like MapHacks , some still look in the dark, click stuff they can't see and that makes it super easy to detect them; but others don't do this stuff, or cheat around the Replay Recorder.
I would never say "no it doesnt" , pretty much everything works right now, or is just a matter of time to become a real problem.
No It can't be a AI, because not only can you easily tell it's a player playing aside from the injects and roach micro, but because it's not easy at all to have an AI script in SC2 run as a player, in fact it's virtually impossible as far as I know. You'd have to go under a completely different approach of reading the game's memory and directly injecting commands into the game from there (the AI would use any sort of 3rd party code like C). That is essentially what they did in Starcraft 1 as far as I know, and it took a long time. The biggest example is called the Brood War Application Programming Interface (BWAPI), and it resulted in some extremely amazing AIs that can beat semi-professional players (without cheating, not even map hack). They were the result of a similar sort of competition like you mentioned.
I'm actually interested to hear more about this SC2 AI competition, I haven't heard much about such things, and think it has a lot of potential. I'm actually surprised at how little progress people seem to be making in this respect considering the year SC2 has been around for— then again that's nothing compared to the many years of SC1.
And the game was diamond league I think.
Its a player with a 3rd Party Tool. The tool is able to switch "on/off" , so at the start its on and does the split of workers and stuff like that; than at some point its switched off / maybe just MapHacks are active ; and the player plays on its own. Some "features" will only activate on some circumstances; like the Roach Burrow ; others are just Auto Inject and stuff like that.
Its not a complete automatic AI; while it actual "could" do that aswell, currently this tool seems to be just a massive Hack collection to "support" a human player.
The SC2 API doesnt exist as crazy as in SC1 , but its damn near ; SC2 structs are really not complicated enough to make it difficult to build a API for it (especially as you have the Map Editor to get some details of how the game works in detail; so its easier to search for them in the game memory).
*However, its a pretty difficult task for Blizzard to do something against this "trend" , theirs really no protection at all beside carefull players that look for them.
I think us non-hackers (aka those of us who have self-respect) should just be vigilant and every time we find a hacker we should report him and then go through his match history and get as many people as possible to report him based on their own replays.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/68SsI.png)
