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[?] Spades hacking? - Page 209

Forum Index > SC2 General
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07:06 KST - method linked here has been disproved here

10:54 KST - Find a full timeline of pro comments (including Spades) in the topic here.

08:47 KST - Summary:
Accusations of maphacking have the potential to destroy a player's career if left unaddressed. Because of the potential consequences, we should be careful about accepting unproven accusations. The principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' should be applied here. That does not mean that there has been a conclusion about this case, however, which is why this thread remains tentatively open.

Please discuss with caution and use evidence to back up your claims.

(also a summary post by an unnamed pro on reddit here)
dAPhREAk
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
Nauru12397 Posts
June 05 2012 23:11 GMT
#4161
On June 06 2012 08:09 chebhe wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 08:08 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:04 chebhe wrote:
It is ok to ruin a persons career with a public lynching based on circumstantial evidence, but not ok to say the F word.

you really dont understand the difference?

Sure I do. One is mock civil and barbaric, the other is superficially barbaric but at heart civil.
Do you?

apparently you dont.
hnQ
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
113 Posts
June 05 2012 23:12 GMT
#4162
On June 06 2012 08:01 Embir wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 07:54 RagequitBM wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:50 Embir wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:47 itsjuspeter wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:45 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:41 StarStrider wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:39 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:37 StarStrider wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:34 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:27 StarStrider wrote:
[quote]

Your posts are turning to shit now.

Because I'm responding to you.


You're focusing on pure garbage now and not the issue. The evidence and what story it tells.

See my previous post to you. If you want to discuss the evidence, I'd be happy to. But I think it has already been discussed enough, and most agree that it is condemning when you consider it as a whole.

Did you watch the set that Illusion posted in the IPL5 quals vs Theognis?
You will see the same foul play there.


100 percent proof has nothing to do with it, no one is imposing a 100 percent standard of proof. You made that up to imply absurdity in my position, yet I never subscribed to it.
So if you see shit, or garbage, it's just your reflection in the mirror.
I don't think we even have any good evidence for it. And alot of people agree with me. You don't like it? I don't care. Go away.


You do realize I'm not itsjustpeter right? You just copypasted your response to what he wrote onto your response to me. Your lack of effort is astounding. How much of the evidence did you actually review besides CatZ stream before you came to your decision on this issue?

If you're quoting me, butting in to our conversation and siding with him; acting as a voice for his position, consider it a statement to both of you. You're all carbon copies of eachother anyway, rehashing what other people say. This whole thread is nothing but mob-think.


Why does the quality of your posts continue to diminish? You turn away from the mechanical question and numerous people have tried to inform you yet you dodge any attempt at a discussion and instead take jabs at people and tell them to fuck off if they don't like it. It is people like you that any attempt or effort is wasted. I really hope I'm not the only one tired of you and want you gone.



Im with you on this one. Guy is just trolling. It is like a discussion between atheists and religious people, and chebhe is a religious guy.


Take a look at the quality of the post you just made. Don't go attacking people with a faith in something completely unrelated.


Im not attacking religious people. This comparison only means that chebhe, exactly as religious people, is closed for rational arguments.


User was warned for this post


I'm sorry but that is attacking religious people, there are LOTS of very open minded religious peope.
TheBanana
Profile Joined December 2010
Norway2183 Posts
June 05 2012 23:13 GMT
#4163
On June 06 2012 07:54 jacksonlee wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 07:52 TheBanana wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:44 jacksonlee wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:42 TheBanana wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:20 jacksonlee wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:16 nath wrote:
On June 06 2012 07:08 Trumpet wrote:
Really should have done this the BW way. in BW, the maphack disabled you from clicking opponent's units/buildings so that your click wouldnt get registered and show up as an obvious maphack on replay analyzer. So the conclusive proof then became getting large amounts of replays of someone and having them never click an enemy unit in a large amount of games. The same could be used here, if he never looked at fog of war in his games, not even once for a scan or scout or something, then it'd be pretty obvious.

Has anyone done this? I'm not about to read through 200+ pages to check

well he didnt look in fog of war once in the bo7. that was one of the points that was not in his favor.


http://www.twitch.tv/rootcatz/b/320407912
go to 1:13:50
that's just one example


I'm pretty sure the part explaining from 0:31:30 debunks your example and knocks you back down to zero.
Specifically 0:31:44.


Like I said, that's one example. In the same game, around 1:16:30 to 1:16:50, he checks fog of war on the right side of minimap without a single command, and when he builds comman center at his third at 1:16:40 he never right clicks


Making a command center is a command though. Could you be specific about the second where he checks without a single command? Because I don't see it, it may be because that part is x8.


Between 16:34 and 16:37, a check to the blind side to the right side of minimap, very fast


Ah, ok. 1:16:35 I paused it. But it happens so fast that it's hard to tell. Maybe the fail safe doesn't kick in that fast? Maybe there's a command that's skipped in x8? I don't know. I'm not convinced, but I'll be checking for it. Just started watching Illusions vod.
If you're not getting better faster than everybody else, you're getting worse.
StarStrider
Profile Joined August 2011
United States689 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-06-05 23:16:51
June 05 2012 23:15 GMT
#4164
On June 06 2012 08:11 ShoWTimE94 wrote:
i watched some of the replays and i didnt really notice anything that would make me say he is a hacker. i mean... most of the points in the open post are pointless anyway. some reactions of spades which the op claims are a hint for spades hacking are just reasonable, others can be luck or simply spades assuming.

can someone explain to me the point of the camera block? as someone posted in another thread, with such hacks you have a production tab + supply count so why not simply turn off the "camera block function"(or however you call it).

it's already a massive advantage and i doubt a pro would have to look into the fog of war to realize "oh, the banshee is coming from this direction" or how tall the army is or what ever, when he can see everything on the minimap and what his opponent built and what the supply count is.

also, i watched some replays of people using this camera block thing and it is way more obvious than just a couple of seconds every 5-10 minutes where the camera doesnt move.

i honestly doubt he would have lost a single game when he used hacks. especially in a mirror matchup where positioning and figuring out what the opponent does means basically everyhing.


I agree with your theory on just using the minimap and not needing to camera block. I don't think the evidence is sufficient to say he was camera blocking while looking into FoW. However there is plenty of evidence to know he is hacking, regardless of the lack of what one of those symptoms of the hack program look like.

If you review the replays that I reposted of him vs Theognis, there is close to zero evidence of 'camera block', but substantial evidence that he is watching the minimap. Plus, the same issues occur as in the showmatch of when he would scan before looking. Plus, the same issues occur where he never once looks at fog of war covered areas, whether before scanning or just looking around, whereas he does it every game in the ladder replays he countered with.

More than enough evidence for me.
Spontaneous Pneumothorax sucks, please keep MVP sC in your thoughts. sC fighting! 힘내세요
Leaf0
Profile Joined April 2012
United States4 Posts
June 05 2012 23:15 GMT
#4165
On June 06 2012 08:01 Embir wrote:
Im not attacking religious people. This comparison only means that chebhe, exactly as religious people, is closed for rational arguments.
User was warned for this post


And you think this is appropriate or relevant for this conversation how?

Quit acting so arrogant and attacking anything and everything that doesn't line up with your point of view.

rd
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
United States2586 Posts
June 05 2012 23:15 GMT
#4166
On June 06 2012 08:05 English wrote:
There really needs to be a better way to determine hackers.


Blizzard?
hinnolinn
Profile Joined August 2010
212 Posts
June 05 2012 23:16 GMT
#4167
On June 06 2012 08:11 dAPhREAk wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 08:09 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:08 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:04 chebhe wrote:
It is ok to ruin a persons career with a public lynching based on circumstantial evidence, but not ok to say the F word.

you really dont understand the difference?

Sure I do. One is mock civil and barbaric, the other is superficially barbaric but at heart civil.
Do you?

apparently you dont.


This was a weird conversation. They aren't really related things, so there is obviously a difference, but in terms of offensiveness, ruining a person's career based on speculation is way more offensive and it makes explitives pale in comparison. Though personal attacks probably are still in bad taste.
Bogeyman
Profile Joined May 2010
Sweden307 Posts
June 05 2012 23:16 GMT
#4168
On June 06 2012 05:10 StarStrider wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 05:05 Bogeyman wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:38 Ghanburighan wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:17 Bogeyman wrote:
Okay fine... instead of jumping the band-waggon "blindly" (I saw Catz and co stream their analysis) I'll look through the replays myself. I haven't even looked at the exact points brought up in the OP, and I'll just look through the replays myself and see if I find anything strange. I'll rate everything in terms of how suspicious I find it. Even though I'm not exactly qualified to make exact judgments on how suspicious something is, it is a clear way for me to explain myself.

Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: Shattered Temple
6:03 - Class 1 - Blindly builds a raven a few seconds after cloak and a banshee starts for Lucifron. In Spades' defense he was already going for double-gas and was looking to go for either banshees or a raven way before it was clear that Lucifron was gonna go banshees.
7:09 -> 7:20 - Class 2 - Spades is staring at his base for a long time. What is he doing? With the screen right there, why isn't he building SCVs?
7:20 - Class 1 - Ravens and marines move into a good position to intecept the incoming banshee. Spades has no vision of it nor does he have any conclusive evidence that Lucifron is going banshees. However, he does see a hellion at his front, and since it's close-by-air it's not a bad idea to prepare for banshees so it could just be smart play.
8:00 - Class 4 - Screen pans towards Lucifron's main but stops dead before it reaches the fog. His raven+viking is issued a command to move over the gap between the bases, and shortly thereafter Spades also clicks them into the main without looking there, so unless he hacks he would have to click the minimap. It seems highly unlikely to pan towards a location, stop right before the fog, click over the gap on screen then move your cursor to the minimap and click in the main from there. The more likely behavior is to keep panning into the main (if you're already panning, and it's a short distance) and click when you reach the end location. This type of behavior, if consistent during e.g. a showmatch but basically never happens in normal play on ladder and such, should be enough to be considered as some sort of proof. On it's own it's just really weird behavior.
11:59 - Class 0 - Here Spades genuinely looks through the fog, at Lucifron's main base. It is part of moving his medivac over here, so he's obviously right-clicking the ground (three times, nothing weird about that). So this makes me wonder about what I heard regarding over-riding the screen lock if you right-click. We really need some sort of confirmation on that until this point can be dismissed as counter-evidence.
11:57 - Class 0? - Upon further examination I noticed some clicking in the main of Lucifron. It's right-clicking with the medivac, but you can't see these initial clicks if you stick the the Spades cam. These clicks probably only mean he first right-clicked on the minimap, then left-clicked and continued to right-click on the ground. There's even a brief pause between these clicks before looking at the fog and then the subsequent clicks looking at the fog. So there's really no doubt this is what happened, and it's not anything weird. I still mention it because it may be important once we know exactly how the screen locking works. Spades did look straight into the fog before right-clicking there on the ground but after right-clicking there via the minimap. Can this be replicated with the screen locking hack? If not, well then that's in Spades' favor. If it can be replicated, well then it just means that it's not in favor of either side of the argument.

I'll analyze the rest of the replays later. I've already missed quite a bit of E3.


I look forward to more of your analysis.

Edit: Papaz and others interested in the OP's identity will find a more suitable thread here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=14942771

It's nice to see someone appreciates it. ^^

So, moving on to the next replay. I'm probably doing them backwards but whatever...

Again, these are my rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Daybreak
2:52 - Class 2 - His SCV arrives and sits idle in Lucifrons main, and Spades jumps to it, clicks three times in the general direction of the ramp, then comes back to his own main and sends the SCV back home. He does not scout the left gas, get a good view of the saturation or attempt to look for anything that may be hidden in the fog inside Lucifron's main. He could just suspect a one-rax fast expand given the map and what he has seen Lucifron do in other matches, but it's still odd that he doesn't even try to scout both geysers. On his way out he does not catch of glimpse of the SCV that is ready to build a CC at the nat (in fact Lucifron purposely hides it). If perhaps Spades has brilliant minimap awareness he might have noticed that the SCV that built the barracks went down the ramp just as Spades' SCV enters. He was busy in his own main at the time, and it was only visible for a split second.
2:57 - Class 2 - Without any clear scouting information Spades sends an SCV to build the CC on the low-ground in his nat. Lucifron also does this, but he did check both geysers beforehand. It's just a bit odd though, that Spades wouldn't even try to check both geysers with that in mind.
4:06 - Class 2 - I was considering this might be a class 3, but... he could just be taking a huge risk, hoping Lucifron does what he has done before. It's still a stupid risk. Either way, at 4:06 Spades selects an SCV and sends it to his 3rd with the obvious intent of building another CC. At this time Lucifron still has no gas and only one barracks, but of course Spades has no vision of this, nor does he control any of the watchtowers. Once the SCV reaches the 3rd Lucifron has just recently started building his 3rd CC, smartly inside his main. Spades subsequently builds his CC at the 3rd. A couple seconds afterwards Spades takes the watchtower on his side with 2 marines.
12:39 - Class 1 - A marine in a scouting position is attacked and killed by Lucifrons main army moving towards Spades' constructing 4th. Spades doesn't try to look at the army to see the army composition, which is a bit weird, but it is also understandable and plausible that he wanted to focus on his commencing drop in Lucifron's 3rd, and he may well have simply assumed Lucifron's army composition would be as expected. Also, Spades had seen the double e-bay, 3rax with a techlab and two reactors, and a factory building a reactor for the a starport, so he was right to assume what unit composition would be there, except of course if there are any vikings mixed in with the medivacs or not.
14:30 - Class 2 - I remember Catz and the boys mentioning this. As far as Spades knows (shown by a scan a little while ago) Lucifron is sieged up right in front of his army, and just out of siege range. Lucifron's medivacs come into his vision, and Spades sends his entire marine force forward, straight into potential siege attacks. Why would he do that? Luckily (unless hacking) for Spades, Lucifron just unsieged his tanks and moved back with everything except his medivacs. Still, people make mistakes like this in positional TvT games, just not quite so obvious mistakes.
14:38 - Class 0 - If you want to argue Spades made mistakes he wouldn't have if he was hacking, this might be one of them. Spades moves a medivac into position for yet another drop at the 3rd of Lucifron, but now there's a turret there waiting for him and it kills the medivac with all but one marine in it. It really doesn't prove anything one way or another though, as even with maphack it's by no means certain that Spades would look there and/or notice the turret. Also, after some more looking around it seems the turret wasn't actually there when Spades sent the medivac in the first place. Hey, maybe Lucifron is the one hacking, building turrets when he sees medivacs coming? No... let's get back to being serious...
16:00 - Class 3 - Shortly up to this point there has been a lot of weird shadow-boxing going on. Granted Spades could just be moving his army around based on guess-work (an army killed a marine, then he had no idea where it kept moving, sent one marine to spot if the army went via the potential 5th base, and a scan from Lucifron. All the army movement of Spades' main army was based on that limited intel, and it mirrors Lucifron's hidden army movement rather well.) But it's possibly legit, and such things can happen. What stands out more to me the weird movement right at 16:00. He's about to go kill the rocks, but suddenly turns around and goes straight up the ramp where there may be an army of tanks sieged up for all Spades can see. He leads with his tanks and moves in a big clumped ball. The prize that's awaiting is unguarded medivacs once again, this time they were not even close to being in his vision and yet he sends his army straight to their location. Why doesn't he stim right away and pick them off? Well that would be too obvious. That would be a class 4 or even a 5, definitely a 5 if he stimmed a big group of marines. A single stimmed marine would be less suspicious to me than the clumped ball.
Anyway, to make matters even more weird: as his army moves in a ball up the ramp, before he spots the unguarded medivacs, he goes back into his main and just leaves his army to it's fate. What does he do in the main? He seems to be selected the factories and starport, then switches to the barracks, and back and forth for a little bit. He's maxed so he doesn't actually need to do anything there except maybe add more barracks, which he doesn't.
17:31 - Class 2 - He sends his army towards the 3rd of Lucifron without scanning. He doesn't scan a single time to get positional information. He doesn't even look at his army as it approaches the 3rd. When it gets there he looks over and starts sieging, stimming etc. Why no scans? He has a total of 7 scans saved up before the attack, but instead of scanning he lands 3 mules at his 4th as his tanks are moving into who knows what. In his defense, and why I don't see this as a class 3 (though perhaps I should) is that in the last couple of minutes Lucifron has lost quite a bit of tanks, so perhaps Spades just isn't afraid. Still, he's leading with 8 tanks, 2 marines and 4 medivacs. If he's caught out of position he could lose a lot, but it could be prevented by a scan. It's really weird, but not conclusive evidence.

I just gotta say my respect for Lucifron grew like hell watching that game. Even at the end when he ggs he's actually got a big lead in army size. His macro is amazing, it looked like Spades was just copying what Lucifron was doing, only taking slightly bigger risks (like not scout correctly and still build everything on the low-ground, scanning very rarely etc).

I'll review another game soon I guess.


I really like the way you've broken this down fair and objectively. I was going to do this but you beat me to it. :D Please continue. Also please analyze the Theognis vs Spades pack that Illusion posted, with the same format?

Thanks! I'll see if I can get to the Theognis games before I tire or it feels like the discussion is over anyways. I guess with Spades leaving WW and possibly sc2 (?) we may not need to talk much more about it. But just for the sake of making sure I'll keep analyzing some more replays.

Also, thanks to BoZiffer for the nice comment as well.

Rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Tal'Darim Altar

4:03 - Class 0 - He sends his marines to the watchtower. He clicks once to get the marines to move a bit, then switches over to the watchtower and clicks once there. So I don't know exactly how the screen locking hack works but this time at least he didn't click into the fog of war before looking at it, unlike the game on Shattered Temple where he right-clicked on the minimap first. Unless you can replicate that with a hack active (move screen to a location with fog of war, then right-click) and it still showing in the replay as if you move there before right-clicking your units there, this so far looks like he didn't hack in this game. Of course, you may still argue that he's stream-cheating or maybe using a different version of the hack this game.

x:xx - Class 1 - So Spades is making a crapton of hellions in this game, from double-factory with tech-lab/reactor for blue-flame, and he really doesn't have any way to know if his opponent went 3-rax into gas or quick double gas and maybe banshees. But I will give him the benefit of a doubt, because at least he did see no gas at the start, so that's probably a 1-rax fast expand, and Spades is free to cross his fingers and hope there won't be any banshees incoming. Either way, at 7:20 he moves out with his hellions and checks the front and finds a bunker with two marines in it and 5 additional marines outside (though in fact there are 8 outside of the bunker, but Spades doesn't see it). That's a few marines, but not too many to say there can't be a banshee coming. Still Spades waits to build a starport for almost another minute, instead getting an armory first. Seems very risky, but it could just be that Spades was convinced of how Lucifron would play the map.

17:03 - Class 0 - Not much weird happens up until now (like 5 minor things occur, like movements with the hellions and such, but they really don't prove anything), and what happens now was pointed out as something hackish, but I just don't see it. What happens is Lucifron loads up a big drop to attack Spades' nat. What seemed suspicious was how Spades grouped his vikings and put them in a good position. The thing is the rally for the starport was right there anyway, and Spades only really selected all the vikings, added them to a control group (over-riding the hellions' group), and moved them an inch north. And before that he sieged his tanks. But this can't even have been a reaction to the drop, as the medivacs weren't loaded when the tanks sieged and the vikings were grouped basically at exactly the same time as the medivacs were loading. Sure, the positioning of Lucifron's units (if Spades' was hacking) was indicating he was going to drop, but it wasn't that certain. Regardless, Spades positioned himself well for an attack at the nat, whether by ground or air. The back/north of the main was protected by turrets, the hellions recently saw the position of the army, so even if an attack might come from way the fuck around the right side, it wasn't gonna come just yet. Well I guess there's always the possibility for a drop, but Spades had a pretty good setup at the time.

18:22 - Class 1 - This might seem suspicious, so I'll mention it even if I don't think it means much. Spades unsieges and moves closer to the ramp, and also a bit closer to his 3rd. He stays unsieged, which of course would be bad if a full-on frontal assault comes marching in. However, he just defeated a decent portion of Lucifron's army, and he hasn't seen where the rest if his army is, and he has basically no map vision. So unsieging his tanks gives him a chance to react to an attack at both his nat or his 3rd. Now maybe it would be even better if he set up a siege-line to cover both his nat and his 3rd, but I'm not sure if he has enough tanks (5) to do that without just spreading himself too thin and die from a flank with any decent amount of marauders in it. Either way this doesn't prove much of anything, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all.

19:13 - Class 1 - Another thing I think was mentioned by someone on the call with Catz. As Lucifron's army approaches, without Spades seeing any of it, Spades sets up a great siege-line from his nat to his 3rd. It's not such a weird thing to do though, since now he has a much better tank count, and he can try to defend both locations.

32:14 - Class 0 - Here's a great scan from Spades, catching the army trying to approach the 3rd. I'm not sure, but I think catz and the boys mentioned this scan? I know it's not the magic scan they refer to, and it looks nothing like those scans regardless of them being magic or not. Anyway, this one can't be seen as a hack scan (scanning so you can act on what you already know) as he scans two other key locations that are empty before he finally finds the army. So far the game looks mostly legit.

32:44 - Class 4 - I might consider this a Class 4 (well actually, I do... I changed my mind after finishing this segment) if it wasn't for the fact that it's been a long game, Spades is probably stressed out, and Lucifron has been drilling the back of his main all game long, so now that he has fended off an attack at the 3rd (though the threat remains), I'm not entirely convinced he can't just snap and think "oh holy crap I don't have a spotter for the back of my main!" and totally over-react. However, it's also entirely possible that he's been so busy dealing with the attack at the 3rd and is exhausted from all the other attacks all over the place that he wasn't watching the minimap, seeing the army unloading in his main (with a maphack), and when he finally looked down and saw a blob of blue there he panicked and grabbed way too many units, even though he should've known the threat on the right side was just as bad, with or without a hack. At 32:39 it is very apparent that he wants to send his units straight towards that area (well, right next to it) in the main where Lucifron is unloading. You can see the air units are selected and there's a right-click a bit to the right of where the army is. Now, even if I think that perhaps Spades could think "oh crap, is my back protected?", he reacts too fast (after Lucifron let the pressure off on the 3rd) and too drastically for it to be anything other than a hack. I mean, that's what I think, but it's still not hard evidence. Also, if his thought-process is "I have to make sure my main isn't dropped" he would either instantly drop a scan (he does that much later, when his army is more or less in place to defend already) or he would at least let the vikings keep flying to scout the area. Instead he hesitates and stops his air units and moves them a bit to the right instead. Why the heck would he do that if he wants to stop a potential drop? The only thing I can think of is that if he is using a hack, he would think "I can't let him know that I'm getting in position. I need him to stay put while I get there". Maybe, just maybe he thinks he needs his vikings with his clump of tanks at his natural in case of an attack there. But why is this not true a couple seconds later when he moves lots of tanks and all the air units to his main and THEN scans Lucifron's army? He had a ton of energy for scans saved up!

So that's enough for today... I could look at the Theognis games tomorrow if anyone still cares.

As for the verdict so far: it's surely leaning towards guilty. But we really do need to clear up exactly how the screen lock works, and replicate the results we see in the game to see if it's possible. Because I have found a few situations where he does look into the fog of war right before he right-clicks on the ground. Wouldn't the hack let me see the place right as the click is done, not before? Of course, it may just manipulate the replay file. But then if you're watching a hacker live from his point of view, can the hack prevent an observer/referee to notice he's looking into the fog? These are things we need to clear up before we can say for sure that Spades is a hacker.
dAPhREAk
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
Nauru12397 Posts
June 05 2012 23:18 GMT
#4169
On June 06 2012 08:16 hinnolinn wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 08:11 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:09 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:08 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:04 chebhe wrote:
It is ok to ruin a persons career with a public lynching based on circumstantial evidence, but not ok to say the F word.

you really dont understand the difference?

Sure I do. One is mock civil and barbaric, the other is superficially barbaric but at heart civil.
Do you?

apparently you dont.


This was a weird conversation. They aren't really related things, so there is obviously a difference, but in terms of offensiveness, ruining a person's career based on speculation is way more offensive and it makes explitives pale in comparison. Though personal attacks probably are still in bad taste.

he is banned so the conversation wont end. discussing whether someone is hacking in a forum and citing evidence (replays, analyses, etc.) is a civil conversation in which everyone should get involved. going into that same thread and telling everyone to fuck themselves is not civil and not helpful.
Santiago4ever
Profile Joined February 2010
Sweden299 Posts
June 05 2012 23:19 GMT
#4170
On June 06 2012 07:24 Positronic wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 07:22 chebhe wrote:
Catz thinks he knows everything. More than he actually does. It's not a surprise he thinks he's pinned the tail on the donkey this time, either.


So I suppose your logic also extends to Illusion, Painuser, Idra, Drewbie, TT1, and others who have said his behavior is extremely suspicious, if not downright conclusive of maphacking.


Idra: Thought Stephano was a hacker before he started going to events. Not your go-to guy for finding hackers.
TT1: Used to be a hacker. Rehabilitated but still not your typical character witness. IIRC he was one of the guys leading the witchhunt on Mistrzzz (while he himself was the one hacking) back in BW.

I agree that his playstyle change is quite suspicious but as for the rest of the "evidence" there was far more moments where Spades did stuff that was completely idiotic if he was MHing.

I've seen cheat-witchhunts before in a lot of games, heck I helped debunk some back in my DoW days. This is far from a clearcut case. I'd suggest to Spades, as well as others with cheating past, that he takes a page out of Mistrzzz's book though and fraps when playing "official" games, probably the only way you can possibly convince people that you're clean once a mess like this has started.

I would like to see some more level heads check out the evidence here though, people like nony, artosis and xeris (all helped with the Oblivion mess in BW) would be a good start.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote: The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part.
StarStrider
Profile Joined August 2011
United States689 Posts
June 05 2012 23:20 GMT
#4171
On June 06 2012 08:16 Bogeyman wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 05:10 StarStrider wrote:
On June 06 2012 05:05 Bogeyman wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:38 Ghanburighan wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:17 Bogeyman wrote:
Okay fine... instead of jumping the band-waggon "blindly" (I saw Catz and co stream their analysis) I'll look through the replays myself. I haven't even looked at the exact points brought up in the OP, and I'll just look through the replays myself and see if I find anything strange. I'll rate everything in terms of how suspicious I find it. Even though I'm not exactly qualified to make exact judgments on how suspicious something is, it is a clear way for me to explain myself.

Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: Shattered Temple
6:03 - Class 1 - Blindly builds a raven a few seconds after cloak and a banshee starts for Lucifron. In Spades' defense he was already going for double-gas and was looking to go for either banshees or a raven way before it was clear that Lucifron was gonna go banshees.
7:09 -> 7:20 - Class 2 - Spades is staring at his base for a long time. What is he doing? With the screen right there, why isn't he building SCVs?
7:20 - Class 1 - Ravens and marines move into a good position to intecept the incoming banshee. Spades has no vision of it nor does he have any conclusive evidence that Lucifron is going banshees. However, he does see a hellion at his front, and since it's close-by-air it's not a bad idea to prepare for banshees so it could just be smart play.
8:00 - Class 4 - Screen pans towards Lucifron's main but stops dead before it reaches the fog. His raven+viking is issued a command to move over the gap between the bases, and shortly thereafter Spades also clicks them into the main without looking there, so unless he hacks he would have to click the minimap. It seems highly unlikely to pan towards a location, stop right before the fog, click over the gap on screen then move your cursor to the minimap and click in the main from there. The more likely behavior is to keep panning into the main (if you're already panning, and it's a short distance) and click when you reach the end location. This type of behavior, if consistent during e.g. a showmatch but basically never happens in normal play on ladder and such, should be enough to be considered as some sort of proof. On it's own it's just really weird behavior.
11:59 - Class 0 - Here Spades genuinely looks through the fog, at Lucifron's main base. It is part of moving his medivac over here, so he's obviously right-clicking the ground (three times, nothing weird about that). So this makes me wonder about what I heard regarding over-riding the screen lock if you right-click. We really need some sort of confirmation on that until this point can be dismissed as counter-evidence.
11:57 - Class 0? - Upon further examination I noticed some clicking in the main of Lucifron. It's right-clicking with the medivac, but you can't see these initial clicks if you stick the the Spades cam. These clicks probably only mean he first right-clicked on the minimap, then left-clicked and continued to right-click on the ground. There's even a brief pause between these clicks before looking at the fog and then the subsequent clicks looking at the fog. So there's really no doubt this is what happened, and it's not anything weird. I still mention it because it may be important once we know exactly how the screen locking works. Spades did look straight into the fog before right-clicking there on the ground but after right-clicking there via the minimap. Can this be replicated with the screen locking hack? If not, well then that's in Spades' favor. If it can be replicated, well then it just means that it's not in favor of either side of the argument.

I'll analyze the rest of the replays later. I've already missed quite a bit of E3.


I look forward to more of your analysis.

Edit: Papaz and others interested in the OP's identity will find a more suitable thread here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=14942771

It's nice to see someone appreciates it. ^^

So, moving on to the next replay. I'm probably doing them backwards but whatever...

Again, these are my rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Daybreak
2:52 - Class 2 - His SCV arrives and sits idle in Lucifrons main, and Spades jumps to it, clicks three times in the general direction of the ramp, then comes back to his own main and sends the SCV back home. He does not scout the left gas, get a good view of the saturation or attempt to look for anything that may be hidden in the fog inside Lucifron's main. He could just suspect a one-rax fast expand given the map and what he has seen Lucifron do in other matches, but it's still odd that he doesn't even try to scout both geysers. On his way out he does not catch of glimpse of the SCV that is ready to build a CC at the nat (in fact Lucifron purposely hides it). If perhaps Spades has brilliant minimap awareness he might have noticed that the SCV that built the barracks went down the ramp just as Spades' SCV enters. He was busy in his own main at the time, and it was only visible for a split second.
2:57 - Class 2 - Without any clear scouting information Spades sends an SCV to build the CC on the low-ground in his nat. Lucifron also does this, but he did check both geysers beforehand. It's just a bit odd though, that Spades wouldn't even try to check both geysers with that in mind.
4:06 - Class 2 - I was considering this might be a class 3, but... he could just be taking a huge risk, hoping Lucifron does what he has done before. It's still a stupid risk. Either way, at 4:06 Spades selects an SCV and sends it to his 3rd with the obvious intent of building another CC. At this time Lucifron still has no gas and only one barracks, but of course Spades has no vision of this, nor does he control any of the watchtowers. Once the SCV reaches the 3rd Lucifron has just recently started building his 3rd CC, smartly inside his main. Spades subsequently builds his CC at the 3rd. A couple seconds afterwards Spades takes the watchtower on his side with 2 marines.
12:39 - Class 1 - A marine in a scouting position is attacked and killed by Lucifrons main army moving towards Spades' constructing 4th. Spades doesn't try to look at the army to see the army composition, which is a bit weird, but it is also understandable and plausible that he wanted to focus on his commencing drop in Lucifron's 3rd, and he may well have simply assumed Lucifron's army composition would be as expected. Also, Spades had seen the double e-bay, 3rax with a techlab and two reactors, and a factory building a reactor for the a starport, so he was right to assume what unit composition would be there, except of course if there are any vikings mixed in with the medivacs or not.
14:30 - Class 2 - I remember Catz and the boys mentioning this. As far as Spades knows (shown by a scan a little while ago) Lucifron is sieged up right in front of his army, and just out of siege range. Lucifron's medivacs come into his vision, and Spades sends his entire marine force forward, straight into potential siege attacks. Why would he do that? Luckily (unless hacking) for Spades, Lucifron just unsieged his tanks and moved back with everything except his medivacs. Still, people make mistakes like this in positional TvT games, just not quite so obvious mistakes.
14:38 - Class 0 - If you want to argue Spades made mistakes he wouldn't have if he was hacking, this might be one of them. Spades moves a medivac into position for yet another drop at the 3rd of Lucifron, but now there's a turret there waiting for him and it kills the medivac with all but one marine in it. It really doesn't prove anything one way or another though, as even with maphack it's by no means certain that Spades would look there and/or notice the turret. Also, after some more looking around it seems the turret wasn't actually there when Spades sent the medivac in the first place. Hey, maybe Lucifron is the one hacking, building turrets when he sees medivacs coming? No... let's get back to being serious...
16:00 - Class 3 - Shortly up to this point there has been a lot of weird shadow-boxing going on. Granted Spades could just be moving his army around based on guess-work (an army killed a marine, then he had no idea where it kept moving, sent one marine to spot if the army went via the potential 5th base, and a scan from Lucifron. All the army movement of Spades' main army was based on that limited intel, and it mirrors Lucifron's hidden army movement rather well.) But it's possibly legit, and such things can happen. What stands out more to me the weird movement right at 16:00. He's about to go kill the rocks, but suddenly turns around and goes straight up the ramp where there may be an army of tanks sieged up for all Spades can see. He leads with his tanks and moves in a big clumped ball. The prize that's awaiting is unguarded medivacs once again, this time they were not even close to being in his vision and yet he sends his army straight to their location. Why doesn't he stim right away and pick them off? Well that would be too obvious. That would be a class 4 or even a 5, definitely a 5 if he stimmed a big group of marines. A single stimmed marine would be less suspicious to me than the clumped ball.
Anyway, to make matters even more weird: as his army moves in a ball up the ramp, before he spots the unguarded medivacs, he goes back into his main and just leaves his army to it's fate. What does he do in the main? He seems to be selected the factories and starport, then switches to the barracks, and back and forth for a little bit. He's maxed so he doesn't actually need to do anything there except maybe add more barracks, which he doesn't.
17:31 - Class 2 - He sends his army towards the 3rd of Lucifron without scanning. He doesn't scan a single time to get positional information. He doesn't even look at his army as it approaches the 3rd. When it gets there he looks over and starts sieging, stimming etc. Why no scans? He has a total of 7 scans saved up before the attack, but instead of scanning he lands 3 mules at his 4th as his tanks are moving into who knows what. In his defense, and why I don't see this as a class 3 (though perhaps I should) is that in the last couple of minutes Lucifron has lost quite a bit of tanks, so perhaps Spades just isn't afraid. Still, he's leading with 8 tanks, 2 marines and 4 medivacs. If he's caught out of position he could lose a lot, but it could be prevented by a scan. It's really weird, but not conclusive evidence.

I just gotta say my respect for Lucifron grew like hell watching that game. Even at the end when he ggs he's actually got a big lead in army size. His macro is amazing, it looked like Spades was just copying what Lucifron was doing, only taking slightly bigger risks (like not scout correctly and still build everything on the low-ground, scanning very rarely etc).

I'll review another game soon I guess.


I really like the way you've broken this down fair and objectively. I was going to do this but you beat me to it. :D Please continue. Also please analyze the Theognis vs Spades pack that Illusion posted, with the same format?

Thanks! I'll see if I can get to the Theognis games before I tire or it feels like the discussion is over anyways. I guess with Spades leaving WW and possibly sc2 (?) we may not need to talk much more about it. But just for the sake of making sure I'll keep analyzing some more replays.

Also, thanks to BoZiffer for the nice comment as well.

Rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Tal'Darim Altar

4:03 - Class 0 - He sends his marines to the watchtower. He clicks once to get the marines to move a bit, then switches over to the watchtower and clicks once there. So I don't know exactly how the screen locking hack works but this time at least he didn't click into the fog of war before looking at it, unlike the game on Shattered Temple where he right-clicked on the minimap first. Unless you can replicate that with a hack active (move screen to a location with fog of war, then right-click) and it still showing in the replay as if you move there before right-clicking your units there, this so far looks like he didn't hack in this game. Of course, you may still argue that he's stream-cheating or maybe using a different version of the hack this game.

x:xx - Class 1 - So Spades is making a crapton of hellions in this game, from double-factory with tech-lab/reactor for blue-flame, and he really doesn't have any way to know if his opponent went 3-rax into gas or quick double gas and maybe banshees. But I will give him the benefit of a doubt, because at least he did see no gas at the start, so that's probably a 1-rax fast expand, and Spades is free to cross his fingers and hope there won't be any banshees incoming. Either way, at 7:20 he moves out with his hellions and checks the front and finds a bunker with two marines in it and 5 additional marines outside (though in fact there are 8 outside of the bunker, but Spades doesn't see it). That's a few marines, but not too many to say there can't be a banshee coming. Still Spades waits to build a starport for almost another minute, instead getting an armory first. Seems very risky, but it could just be that Spades was convinced of how Lucifron would play the map.

17:03 - Class 0 - Not much weird happens up until now (like 5 minor things occur, like movements with the hellions and such, but they really don't prove anything), and what happens now was pointed out as something hackish, but I just don't see it. What happens is Lucifron loads up a big drop to attack Spades' nat. What seemed suspicious was how Spades grouped his vikings and put them in a good position. The thing is the rally for the starport was right there anyway, and Spades only really selected all the vikings, added them to a control group (over-riding the hellions' group), and moved them an inch north. And before that he sieged his tanks. But this can't even have been a reaction to the drop, as the medivacs weren't loaded when the tanks sieged and the vikings were grouped basically at exactly the same time as the medivacs were loading. Sure, the positioning of Lucifron's units (if Spades' was hacking) was indicating he was going to drop, but it wasn't that certain. Regardless, Spades positioned himself well for an attack at the nat, whether by ground or air. The back/north of the main was protected by turrets, the hellions recently saw the position of the army, so even if an attack might come from way the fuck around the right side, it wasn't gonna come just yet. Well I guess there's always the possibility for a drop, but Spades had a pretty good setup at the time.

18:22 - Class 1 - This might seem suspicious, so I'll mention it even if I don't think it means much. Spades unsieges and moves closer to the ramp, and also a bit closer to his 3rd. He stays unsieged, which of course would be bad if a full-on frontal assault comes marching in. However, he just defeated a decent portion of Lucifron's army, and he hasn't seen where the rest if his army is, and he has basically no map vision. So unsieging his tanks gives him a chance to react to an attack at both his nat or his 3rd. Now maybe it would be even better if he set up a siege-line to cover both his nat and his 3rd, but I'm not sure if he has enough tanks (5) to do that without just spreading himself too thin and die from a flank with any decent amount of marauders in it. Either way this doesn't prove much of anything, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all.

19:13 - Class 1 - Another thing I think was mentioned by someone on the call with Catz. As Lucifron's army approaches, without Spades seeing any of it, Spades sets up a great siege-line from his nat to his 3rd. It's not such a weird thing to do though, since now he has a much better tank count, and he can try to defend both locations.

32:14 - Class 0 - Here's a great scan from Spades, catching the army trying to approach the 3rd. I'm not sure, but I think catz and the boys mentioned this scan? I know it's not the magic scan they refer to, and it looks nothing like those scans regardless of them being magic or not. Anyway, this one can't be seen as a hack scan (scanning so you can act on what you already know) as he scans two other key locations that are empty before he finally finds the army. So far the game looks mostly legit.

32:44 - Class 4 - I might consider this a Class 4 (well actually, I do... I changed my mind after finishing this segment) if it wasn't for the fact that it's been a long game, Spades is probably stressed out, and Lucifron has been drilling the back of his main all game long, so now that he has fended off an attack at the 3rd (though the threat remains), I'm not entirely convinced he can't just snap and think "oh holy crap I don't have a spotter for the back of my main!" and totally over-react. However, it's also entirely possible that he's been so busy dealing with the attack at the 3rd and is exhausted from all the other attacks all over the place that he wasn't watching the minimap, seeing the army unloading in his main (with a maphack), and when he finally looked down and saw a blob of blue there he panicked and grabbed way too many units, even though he should've known the threat on the right side was just as bad, with or without a hack. At 32:39 it is very apparent that he wants to send his units straight towards that area (well, right next to it) in the main where Lucifron is unloading. You can see the air units are selected and there's a right-click a bit to the right of where the army is. Now, even if I think that perhaps Spades could think "oh crap, is my back protected?", he reacts too fast (after Lucifron let the pressure off on the 3rd) and too drastically for it to be anything other than a hack. I mean, that's what I think, but it's still not hard evidence. Also, if his thought-process is "I have to make sure my main isn't dropped" he would either instantly drop a scan (he does that much later, when his army is more or less in place to defend already) or he would at least let the vikings keep flying to scout the area. Instead he hesitates and stops his air units and moves them a bit to the right instead. Why the heck would he do that if he wants to stop a potential drop? The only thing I can think of is that if he is using a hack, he would think "I can't let him know that I'm getting in position. I need him to stay put while I get there". Maybe, just maybe he thinks he needs his vikings with his clump of tanks at his natural in case of an attack there. But why is this not true a couple seconds later when he moves lots of tanks and all the air units to his main and THEN scans Lucifron's army? He had a ton of energy for scans saved up!

So that's enough for today... I could look at the Theognis games tomorrow if anyone still cares.

As for the verdict so far: it's surely leaning towards guilty. But we really do need to clear up exactly how the screen lock works, and replicate the results we see in the game to see if it's possible. Because I have found a few situations where he does look into the fog of war right before he right-clicks on the ground. Wouldn't the hack let me see the place right as the click is done, not before? Of course, it may just manipulate the replay file. But then if you're watching a hacker live from his point of view, can the hack prevent an observer/referee to notice he's looking into the fog? These are things we need to clear up before we can say for sure that Spades is a hacker.


Thanks man. Another excellent post.

Since I know it is alot of work, I am willing to review the Theognis games that I have looked at, in the same manner and format as you do. Would that be okay with you if I stole your method since it seems to be so clarifying and objective? Just trying to do my part. You can review it and tell me if you think it is up to the standard.
Spontaneous Pneumothorax sucks, please keep MVP sC in your thoughts. sC fighting! 힘내세요
Fyrewolf
Profile Joined January 2010
United States1533 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-06-05 23:22:45
June 05 2012 23:20 GMT
#4172
+ Show Spoiler +
On June 06 2012 08:16 Bogeyman wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 05:10 StarStrider wrote:
On June 06 2012 05:05 Bogeyman wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:38 Ghanburighan wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:17 Bogeyman wrote:
Okay fine... instead of jumping the band-waggon "blindly" (I saw Catz and co stream their analysis) I'll look through the replays myself. I haven't even looked at the exact points brought up in the OP, and I'll just look through the replays myself and see if I find anything strange. I'll rate everything in terms of how suspicious I find it. Even though I'm not exactly qualified to make exact judgments on how suspicious something is, it is a clear way for me to explain myself.

Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: Shattered Temple
6:03 - Class 1 - Blindly builds a raven a few seconds after cloak and a banshee starts for Lucifron. In Spades' defense he was already going for double-gas and was looking to go for either banshees or a raven way before it was clear that Lucifron was gonna go banshees.
7:09 -> 7:20 - Class 2 - Spades is staring at his base for a long time. What is he doing? With the screen right there, why isn't he building SCVs?
7:20 - Class 1 - Ravens and marines move into a good position to intecept the incoming banshee. Spades has no vision of it nor does he have any conclusive evidence that Lucifron is going banshees. However, he does see a hellion at his front, and since it's close-by-air it's not a bad idea to prepare for banshees so it could just be smart play.
8:00 - Class 4 - Screen pans towards Lucifron's main but stops dead before it reaches the fog. His raven+viking is issued a command to move over the gap between the bases, and shortly thereafter Spades also clicks them into the main without looking there, so unless he hacks he would have to click the minimap. It seems highly unlikely to pan towards a location, stop right before the fog, click over the gap on screen then move your cursor to the minimap and click in the main from there. The more likely behavior is to keep panning into the main (if you're already panning, and it's a short distance) and click when you reach the end location. This type of behavior, if consistent during e.g. a showmatch but basically never happens in normal play on ladder and such, should be enough to be considered as some sort of proof. On it's own it's just really weird behavior.
11:59 - Class 0 - Here Spades genuinely looks through the fog, at Lucifron's main base. It is part of moving his medivac over here, so he's obviously right-clicking the ground (three times, nothing weird about that). So this makes me wonder about what I heard regarding over-riding the screen lock if you right-click. We really need some sort of confirmation on that until this point can be dismissed as counter-evidence.
11:57 - Class 0? - Upon further examination I noticed some clicking in the main of Lucifron. It's right-clicking with the medivac, but you can't see these initial clicks if you stick the the Spades cam. These clicks probably only mean he first right-clicked on the minimap, then left-clicked and continued to right-click on the ground. There's even a brief pause between these clicks before looking at the fog and then the subsequent clicks looking at the fog. So there's really no doubt this is what happened, and it's not anything weird. I still mention it because it may be important once we know exactly how the screen locking works. Spades did look straight into the fog before right-clicking there on the ground but after right-clicking there via the minimap. Can this be replicated with the screen locking hack? If not, well then that's in Spades' favor. If it can be replicated, well then it just means that it's not in favor of either side of the argument.

I'll analyze the rest of the replays later. I've already missed quite a bit of E3.


I look forward to more of your analysis.

Edit: Papaz and others interested in the OP's identity will find a more suitable thread here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=14942771

It's nice to see someone appreciates it. ^^

So, moving on to the next replay. I'm probably doing them backwards but whatever...

Again, these are my rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Daybreak
2:52 - Class 2 - His SCV arrives and sits idle in Lucifrons main, and Spades jumps to it, clicks three times in the general direction of the ramp, then comes back to his own main and sends the SCV back home. He does not scout the left gas, get a good view of the saturation or attempt to look for anything that may be hidden in the fog inside Lucifron's main. He could just suspect a one-rax fast expand given the map and what he has seen Lucifron do in other matches, but it's still odd that he doesn't even try to scout both geysers. On his way out he does not catch of glimpse of the SCV that is ready to build a CC at the nat (in fact Lucifron purposely hides it). If perhaps Spades has brilliant minimap awareness he might have noticed that the SCV that built the barracks went down the ramp just as Spades' SCV enters. He was busy in his own main at the time, and it was only visible for a split second.
2:57 - Class 2 - Without any clear scouting information Spades sends an SCV to build the CC on the low-ground in his nat. Lucifron also does this, but he did check both geysers beforehand. It's just a bit odd though, that Spades wouldn't even try to check both geysers with that in mind.
4:06 - Class 2 - I was considering this might be a class 3, but... he could just be taking a huge risk, hoping Lucifron does what he has done before. It's still a stupid risk. Either way, at 4:06 Spades selects an SCV and sends it to his 3rd with the obvious intent of building another CC. At this time Lucifron still has no gas and only one barracks, but of course Spades has no vision of this, nor does he control any of the watchtowers. Once the SCV reaches the 3rd Lucifron has just recently started building his 3rd CC, smartly inside his main. Spades subsequently builds his CC at the 3rd. A couple seconds afterwards Spades takes the watchtower on his side with 2 marines.
12:39 - Class 1 - A marine in a scouting position is attacked and killed by Lucifrons main army moving towards Spades' constructing 4th. Spades doesn't try to look at the army to see the army composition, which is a bit weird, but it is also understandable and plausible that he wanted to focus on his commencing drop in Lucifron's 3rd, and he may well have simply assumed Lucifron's army composition would be as expected. Also, Spades had seen the double e-bay, 3rax with a techlab and two reactors, and a factory building a reactor for the a starport, so he was right to assume what unit composition would be there, except of course if there are any vikings mixed in with the medivacs or not.
14:30 - Class 2 - I remember Catz and the boys mentioning this. As far as Spades knows (shown by a scan a little while ago) Lucifron is sieged up right in front of his army, and just out of siege range. Lucifron's medivacs come into his vision, and Spades sends his entire marine force forward, straight into potential siege attacks. Why would he do that? Luckily (unless hacking) for Spades, Lucifron just unsieged his tanks and moved back with everything except his medivacs. Still, people make mistakes like this in positional TvT games, just not quite so obvious mistakes.
14:38 - Class 0 - If you want to argue Spades made mistakes he wouldn't have if he was hacking, this might be one of them. Spades moves a medivac into position for yet another drop at the 3rd of Lucifron, but now there's a turret there waiting for him and it kills the medivac with all but one marine in it. It really doesn't prove anything one way or another though, as even with maphack it's by no means certain that Spades would look there and/or notice the turret. Also, after some more looking around it seems the turret wasn't actually there when Spades sent the medivac in the first place. Hey, maybe Lucifron is the one hacking, building turrets when he sees medivacs coming? No... let's get back to being serious...
16:00 - Class 3 - Shortly up to this point there has been a lot of weird shadow-boxing going on. Granted Spades could just be moving his army around based on guess-work (an army killed a marine, then he had no idea where it kept moving, sent one marine to spot if the army went via the potential 5th base, and a scan from Lucifron. All the army movement of Spades' main army was based on that limited intel, and it mirrors Lucifron's hidden army movement rather well.) But it's possibly legit, and such things can happen. What stands out more to me the weird movement right at 16:00. He's about to go kill the rocks, but suddenly turns around and goes straight up the ramp where there may be an army of tanks sieged up for all Spades can see. He leads with his tanks and moves in a big clumped ball. The prize that's awaiting is unguarded medivacs once again, this time they were not even close to being in his vision and yet he sends his army straight to their location. Why doesn't he stim right away and pick them off? Well that would be too obvious. That would be a class 4 or even a 5, definitely a 5 if he stimmed a big group of marines. A single stimmed marine would be less suspicious to me than the clumped ball.
Anyway, to make matters even more weird: as his army moves in a ball up the ramp, before he spots the unguarded medivacs, he goes back into his main and just leaves his army to it's fate. What does he do in the main? He seems to be selected the factories and starport, then switches to the barracks, and back and forth for a little bit. He's maxed so he doesn't actually need to do anything there except maybe add more barracks, which he doesn't.
17:31 - Class 2 - He sends his army towards the 3rd of Lucifron without scanning. He doesn't scan a single time to get positional information. He doesn't even look at his army as it approaches the 3rd. When it gets there he looks over and starts sieging, stimming etc. Why no scans? He has a total of 7 scans saved up before the attack, but instead of scanning he lands 3 mules at his 4th as his tanks are moving into who knows what. In his defense, and why I don't see this as a class 3 (though perhaps I should) is that in the last couple of minutes Lucifron has lost quite a bit of tanks, so perhaps Spades just isn't afraid. Still, he's leading with 8 tanks, 2 marines and 4 medivacs. If he's caught out of position he could lose a lot, but it could be prevented by a scan. It's really weird, but not conclusive evidence.

I just gotta say my respect for Lucifron grew like hell watching that game. Even at the end when he ggs he's actually got a big lead in army size. His macro is amazing, it looked like Spades was just copying what Lucifron was doing, only taking slightly bigger risks (like not scout correctly and still build everything on the low-ground, scanning very rarely etc).

I'll review another game soon I guess.


I really like the way you've broken this down fair and objectively. I was going to do this but you beat me to it. :D Please continue. Also please analyze the Theognis vs Spades pack that Illusion posted, with the same format?

Thanks! I'll see if I can get to the Theognis games before I tire or it feels like the discussion is over anyways. I guess with Spades leaving WW and possibly sc2 (?) we may not need to talk much more about it. But just for the sake of making sure I'll keep analyzing some more replays.

Also, thanks to BoZiffer for the nice comment as well.

Rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Tal'Darim Altar

4:03 - Class 0 - He sends his marines to the watchtower. He clicks once to get the marines to move a bit, then switches over to the watchtower and clicks once there. So I don't know exactly how the screen locking hack works but this time at least he didn't click into the fog of war before looking at it, unlike the game on Shattered Temple where he right-clicked on the minimap first. Unless you can replicate that with a hack active (move screen to a location with fog of war, then right-click) and it still showing in the replay as if you move there before right-clicking your units there, this so far looks like he didn't hack in this game. Of course, you may still argue that he's stream-cheating or maybe using a different version of the hack this game.

x:xx - Class 1 - So Spades is making a crapton of hellions in this game, from double-factory with tech-lab/reactor for blue-flame, and he really doesn't have any way to know if his opponent went 3-rax into gas or quick double gas and maybe banshees. But I will give him the benefit of a doubt, because at least he did see no gas at the start, so that's probably a 1-rax fast expand, and Spades is free to cross his fingers and hope there won't be any banshees incoming. Either way, at 7:20 he moves out with his hellions and checks the front and finds a bunker with two marines in it and 5 additional marines outside (though in fact there are 8 outside of the bunker, but Spades doesn't see it). That's a few marines, but not too many to say there can't be a banshee coming. Still Spades waits to build a starport for almost another minute, instead getting an armory first. Seems very risky, but it could just be that Spades was convinced of how Lucifron would play the map.

17:03 - Class 0 - Not much weird happens up until now (like 5 minor things occur, like movements with the hellions and such, but they really don't prove anything), and what happens now was pointed out as something hackish, but I just don't see it. What happens is Lucifron loads up a big drop to attack Spades' nat. What seemed suspicious was how Spades grouped his vikings and put them in a good position. The thing is the rally for the starport was right there anyway, and Spades only really selected all the vikings, added them to a control group (over-riding the hellions' group), and moved them an inch north. And before that he sieged his tanks. But this can't even have been a reaction to the drop, as the medivacs weren't loaded when the tanks sieged and the vikings were grouped basically at exactly the same time as the medivacs were loading. Sure, the positioning of Lucifron's units (if Spades' was hacking) was indicating he was going to drop, but it wasn't that certain. Regardless, Spades positioned himself well for an attack at the nat, whether by ground or air. The back/north of the main was protected by turrets, the hellions recently saw the position of the army, so even if an attack might come from way the fuck around the right side, it wasn't gonna come just yet. Well I guess there's always the possibility for a drop, but Spades had a pretty good setup at the time.

18:22 - Class 1 - This might seem suspicious, so I'll mention it even if I don't think it means much. Spades unsieges and moves closer to the ramp, and also a bit closer to his 3rd. He stays unsieged, which of course would be bad if a full-on frontal assault comes marching in. However, he just defeated a decent portion of Lucifron's army, and he hasn't seen where the rest if his army is, and he has basically no map vision. So unsieging his tanks gives him a chance to react to an attack at both his nat or his 3rd. Now maybe it would be even better if he set up a siege-line to cover both his nat and his 3rd, but I'm not sure if he has enough tanks (5) to do that without just spreading himself too thin and die from a flank with any decent amount of marauders in it. Either way this doesn't prove much of anything, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all.

19:13 - Class 1 - Another thing I think was mentioned by someone on the call with Catz. As Lucifron's army approaches, without Spades seeing any of it, Spades sets up a great siege-line from his nat to his 3rd. It's not such a weird thing to do though, since now he has a much better tank count, and he can try to defend both locations.

32:14 - Class 0 - Here's a great scan from Spades, catching the army trying to approach the 3rd. I'm not sure, but I think catz and the boys mentioned this scan? I know it's not the magic scan they refer to, and it looks nothing like those scans regardless of them being magic or not. Anyway, this one can't be seen as a hack scan (scanning so you can act on what you already know) as he scans two other key locations that are empty before he finally finds the army. So far the game looks mostly legit.

32:44 - Class 4 - I might consider this a Class 4 (well actually, I do... I changed my mind after finishing this segment) if it wasn't for the fact that it's been a long game, Spades is probably stressed out, and Lucifron has been drilling the back of his main all game long, so now that he has fended off an attack at the 3rd (though the threat remains), I'm not entirely convinced he can't just snap and think "oh holy crap I don't have a spotter for the back of my main!" and totally over-react. However, it's also entirely possible that he's been so busy dealing with the attack at the 3rd and is exhausted from all the other attacks all over the place that he wasn't watching the minimap, seeing the army unloading in his main (with a maphack), and when he finally looked down and saw a blob of blue there he panicked and grabbed way too many units, even though he should've known the threat on the right side was just as bad, with or without a hack. At 32:39 it is very apparent that he wants to send his units straight towards that area (well, right next to it) in the main where Lucifron is unloading. You can see the air units are selected and there's a right-click a bit to the right of where the army is. Now, even if I think that perhaps Spades could think "oh crap, is my back protected?", he reacts too fast (after Lucifron let the pressure off on the 3rd) and too drastically for it to be anything other than a hack. I mean, that's what I think, but it's still not hard evidence. Also, if his thought-process is "I have to make sure my main isn't dropped" he would either instantly drop a scan (he does that much later, when his army is more or less in place to defend already) or he would at least let the vikings keep flying to scout the area. Instead he hesitates and stops his air units and moves them a bit to the right instead. Why the heck would he do that if he wants to stop a potential drop? The only thing I can think of is that if he is using a hack, he would think "I can't let him know that I'm getting in position. I need him to stay put while I get there". Maybe, just maybe he thinks he needs his vikings with his clump of tanks at his natural in case of an attack there. But why is this not true a couple seconds later when he moves lots of tanks and all the air units to his main and THEN scans Lucifron's army? He had a ton of energy for scans saved up!

So that's enough for today... I could look at the Theognis games tomorrow if anyone still cares.

As for the verdict so far: it's surely leaning towards guilty. But we really do need to clear up exactly how the screen lock works, and replicate the results we see in the game to see if it's possible. Because I have found a few situations where he does look into the fog of war right before he right-clicks on the ground. Wouldn't the hack let me see the place right as the click is done, not before? Of course, it may just manipulate the replay file. But then if you're watching a hacker live from his point of view, can the hack prevent an observer/referee to notice he's looking into the fog? These are things we need to clear up before we can say for sure that Spades is a hacker.


@Bogeyman: Thank you for taking the time to write these. Could you clarify your definition of Class 0 please? If it was in an earlier analysis I must have missed it.
"This is not Warcraft in space" "It's much more...... Sophisticated" "I KNOW IT'S NOT 3D!!!"
IcedBacon
Profile Joined May 2011
Canada906 Posts
June 05 2012 23:22 GMT
#4173
On June 06 2012 08:18 dAPhREAk wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 08:16 hinnolinn wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:11 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:09 chebhe wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:08 dAPhREAk wrote:
On June 06 2012 08:04 chebhe wrote:
It is ok to ruin a persons career with a public lynching based on circumstantial evidence, but not ok to say the F word.

you really dont understand the difference?

Sure I do. One is mock civil and barbaric, the other is superficially barbaric but at heart civil.
Do you?

apparently you dont.


This was a weird conversation. They aren't really related things, so there is obviously a difference, but in terms of offensiveness, ruining a person's career based on speculation is way more offensive and it makes explitives pale in comparison. Though personal attacks probably are still in bad taste.

he is banned so the conversation wont end. discussing whether someone is hacking in a forum and citing evidence (replays, analyses, etc.) is a civil conversation in which everyone should get involved. going into that same thread and telling everyone to fuck themselves is not civil and not helpful.


Thought it was never going to happen... good riddance. My brain was starting to hurt.
"I went Zerg because Artosis is a douchebag." -IdrA
Cornix
Profile Joined June 2011
United States220 Posts
June 05 2012 23:24 GMT
#4174
Class 0 was just 'not suspicious' I'm pretty sure.
iS.SunnY, writer extraordinaire. Miami CSL!
Quanticfograw
Profile Blog Joined October 2005
United States2053 Posts
June 05 2012 23:24 GMT
#4175
I really don't understand how people will use an explanation that, "IF HE HACKED, HE WOULDN'T OF LET THIS HAPPEN". Hacking doesn't make you omniscient or unbeatable. Previous hackers were never the best in the world but their skill surpassed what they are normally capable of due to their unfair advantage so plz stop using the excuse "he wouldn't of lost a single game if he hacked". Also I believe that since his history in sc1 it makes it a lot easier to see this as a possibility. I am curious as to the percentage of people who played sc1 competitively when spades hacked think yes or no to the hacking accusation.
https://twitter.com/quanticfograw
lulutheking
Profile Joined April 2012
France106 Posts
June 05 2012 23:25 GMT
#4176
Hey guys last time i went on TL ther was an Choya twitter response thread open , where is it now ? has it been shut down ?
Machu PIchu
Fyrewolf
Profile Joined January 2010
United States1533 Posts
June 05 2012 23:27 GMT
#4177
On June 06 2012 08:25 lulutheking wrote:
Hey guys last time i went on TL ther was an Choya twitter response thread open , where is it now ? has it been shut down ?


Yes it was closed. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=342418
"This is not Warcraft in space" "It's much more...... Sophisticated" "I KNOW IT'S NOT 3D!!!"
Bogeyman
Profile Joined May 2010
Sweden307 Posts
June 05 2012 23:27 GMT
#4178
On June 06 2012 08:20 StarStrider wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 06 2012 08:16 Bogeyman wrote:
On June 06 2012 05:10 StarStrider wrote:
On June 06 2012 05:05 Bogeyman wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:38 Ghanburighan wrote:
On June 06 2012 01:17 Bogeyman wrote:
Okay fine... instead of jumping the band-waggon "blindly" (I saw Catz and co stream their analysis) I'll look through the replays myself. I haven't even looked at the exact points brought up in the OP, and I'll just look through the replays myself and see if I find anything strange. I'll rate everything in terms of how suspicious I find it. Even though I'm not exactly qualified to make exact judgments on how suspicious something is, it is a clear way for me to explain myself.

Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: Shattered Temple
6:03 - Class 1 - Blindly builds a raven a few seconds after cloak and a banshee starts for Lucifron. In Spades' defense he was already going for double-gas and was looking to go for either banshees or a raven way before it was clear that Lucifron was gonna go banshees.
7:09 -> 7:20 - Class 2 - Spades is staring at his base for a long time. What is he doing? With the screen right there, why isn't he building SCVs?
7:20 - Class 1 - Ravens and marines move into a good position to intecept the incoming banshee. Spades has no vision of it nor does he have any conclusive evidence that Lucifron is going banshees. However, he does see a hellion at his front, and since it's close-by-air it's not a bad idea to prepare for banshees so it could just be smart play.
8:00 - Class 4 - Screen pans towards Lucifron's main but stops dead before it reaches the fog. His raven+viking is issued a command to move over the gap between the bases, and shortly thereafter Spades also clicks them into the main without looking there, so unless he hacks he would have to click the minimap. It seems highly unlikely to pan towards a location, stop right before the fog, click over the gap on screen then move your cursor to the minimap and click in the main from there. The more likely behavior is to keep panning into the main (if you're already panning, and it's a short distance) and click when you reach the end location. This type of behavior, if consistent during e.g. a showmatch but basically never happens in normal play on ladder and such, should be enough to be considered as some sort of proof. On it's own it's just really weird behavior.
11:59 - Class 0 - Here Spades genuinely looks through the fog, at Lucifron's main base. It is part of moving his medivac over here, so he's obviously right-clicking the ground (three times, nothing weird about that). So this makes me wonder about what I heard regarding over-riding the screen lock if you right-click. We really need some sort of confirmation on that until this point can be dismissed as counter-evidence.
11:57 - Class 0? - Upon further examination I noticed some clicking in the main of Lucifron. It's right-clicking with the medivac, but you can't see these initial clicks if you stick the the Spades cam. These clicks probably only mean he first right-clicked on the minimap, then left-clicked and continued to right-click on the ground. There's even a brief pause between these clicks before looking at the fog and then the subsequent clicks looking at the fog. So there's really no doubt this is what happened, and it's not anything weird. I still mention it because it may be important once we know exactly how the screen locking works. Spades did look straight into the fog before right-clicking there on the ground but after right-clicking there via the minimap. Can this be replicated with the screen locking hack? If not, well then that's in Spades' favor. If it can be replicated, well then it just means that it's not in favor of either side of the argument.

I'll analyze the rest of the replays later. I've already missed quite a bit of E3.


I look forward to more of your analysis.

Edit: Papaz and others interested in the OP's identity will find a more suitable thread here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=14942771

It's nice to see someone appreciates it. ^^

So, moving on to the next replay. I'm probably doing them backwards but whatever...

Again, these are my rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Daybreak
2:52 - Class 2 - His SCV arrives and sits idle in Lucifrons main, and Spades jumps to it, clicks three times in the general direction of the ramp, then comes back to his own main and sends the SCV back home. He does not scout the left gas, get a good view of the saturation or attempt to look for anything that may be hidden in the fog inside Lucifron's main. He could just suspect a one-rax fast expand given the map and what he has seen Lucifron do in other matches, but it's still odd that he doesn't even try to scout both geysers. On his way out he does not catch of glimpse of the SCV that is ready to build a CC at the nat (in fact Lucifron purposely hides it). If perhaps Spades has brilliant minimap awareness he might have noticed that the SCV that built the barracks went down the ramp just as Spades' SCV enters. He was busy in his own main at the time, and it was only visible for a split second.
2:57 - Class 2 - Without any clear scouting information Spades sends an SCV to build the CC on the low-ground in his nat. Lucifron also does this, but he did check both geysers beforehand. It's just a bit odd though, that Spades wouldn't even try to check both geysers with that in mind.
4:06 - Class 2 - I was considering this might be a class 3, but... he could just be taking a huge risk, hoping Lucifron does what he has done before. It's still a stupid risk. Either way, at 4:06 Spades selects an SCV and sends it to his 3rd with the obvious intent of building another CC. At this time Lucifron still has no gas and only one barracks, but of course Spades has no vision of this, nor does he control any of the watchtowers. Once the SCV reaches the 3rd Lucifron has just recently started building his 3rd CC, smartly inside his main. Spades subsequently builds his CC at the 3rd. A couple seconds afterwards Spades takes the watchtower on his side with 2 marines.
12:39 - Class 1 - A marine in a scouting position is attacked and killed by Lucifrons main army moving towards Spades' constructing 4th. Spades doesn't try to look at the army to see the army composition, which is a bit weird, but it is also understandable and plausible that he wanted to focus on his commencing drop in Lucifron's 3rd, and he may well have simply assumed Lucifron's army composition would be as expected. Also, Spades had seen the double e-bay, 3rax with a techlab and two reactors, and a factory building a reactor for the a starport, so he was right to assume what unit composition would be there, except of course if there are any vikings mixed in with the medivacs or not.
14:30 - Class 2 - I remember Catz and the boys mentioning this. As far as Spades knows (shown by a scan a little while ago) Lucifron is sieged up right in front of his army, and just out of siege range. Lucifron's medivacs come into his vision, and Spades sends his entire marine force forward, straight into potential siege attacks. Why would he do that? Luckily (unless hacking) for Spades, Lucifron just unsieged his tanks and moved back with everything except his medivacs. Still, people make mistakes like this in positional TvT games, just not quite so obvious mistakes.
14:38 - Class 0 - If you want to argue Spades made mistakes he wouldn't have if he was hacking, this might be one of them. Spades moves a medivac into position for yet another drop at the 3rd of Lucifron, but now there's a turret there waiting for him and it kills the medivac with all but one marine in it. It really doesn't prove anything one way or another though, as even with maphack it's by no means certain that Spades would look there and/or notice the turret. Also, after some more looking around it seems the turret wasn't actually there when Spades sent the medivac in the first place. Hey, maybe Lucifron is the one hacking, building turrets when he sees medivacs coming? No... let's get back to being serious...
16:00 - Class 3 - Shortly up to this point there has been a lot of weird shadow-boxing going on. Granted Spades could just be moving his army around based on guess-work (an army killed a marine, then he had no idea where it kept moving, sent one marine to spot if the army went via the potential 5th base, and a scan from Lucifron. All the army movement of Spades' main army was based on that limited intel, and it mirrors Lucifron's hidden army movement rather well.) But it's possibly legit, and such things can happen. What stands out more to me the weird movement right at 16:00. He's about to go kill the rocks, but suddenly turns around and goes straight up the ramp where there may be an army of tanks sieged up for all Spades can see. He leads with his tanks and moves in a big clumped ball. The prize that's awaiting is unguarded medivacs once again, this time they were not even close to being in his vision and yet he sends his army straight to their location. Why doesn't he stim right away and pick them off? Well that would be too obvious. That would be a class 4 or even a 5, definitely a 5 if he stimmed a big group of marines. A single stimmed marine would be less suspicious to me than the clumped ball.
Anyway, to make matters even more weird: as his army moves in a ball up the ramp, before he spots the unguarded medivacs, he goes back into his main and just leaves his army to it's fate. What does he do in the main? He seems to be selected the factories and starport, then switches to the barracks, and back and forth for a little bit. He's maxed so he doesn't actually need to do anything there except maybe add more barracks, which he doesn't.
17:31 - Class 2 - He sends his army towards the 3rd of Lucifron without scanning. He doesn't scan a single time to get positional information. He doesn't even look at his army as it approaches the 3rd. When it gets there he looks over and starts sieging, stimming etc. Why no scans? He has a total of 7 scans saved up before the attack, but instead of scanning he lands 3 mules at his 4th as his tanks are moving into who knows what. In his defense, and why I don't see this as a class 3 (though perhaps I should) is that in the last couple of minutes Lucifron has lost quite a bit of tanks, so perhaps Spades just isn't afraid. Still, he's leading with 8 tanks, 2 marines and 4 medivacs. If he's caught out of position he could lose a lot, but it could be prevented by a scan. It's really weird, but not conclusive evidence.

I just gotta say my respect for Lucifron grew like hell watching that game. Even at the end when he ggs he's actually got a big lead in army size. His macro is amazing, it looked like Spades was just copying what Lucifron was doing, only taking slightly bigger risks (like not scout correctly and still build everything on the low-ground, scanning very rarely etc).

I'll review another game soon I guess.


I really like the way you've broken this down fair and objectively. I was going to do this but you beat me to it. :D Please continue. Also please analyze the Theognis vs Spades pack that Illusion posted, with the same format?

Thanks! I'll see if I can get to the Theognis games before I tire or it feels like the discussion is over anyways. I guess with Spades leaving WW and possibly sc2 (?) we may not need to talk much more about it. But just for the sake of making sure I'll keep analyzing some more replays.

Also, thanks to BoZiffer for the nice comment as well.

Rates of suspicion:
Class 1 - Could be co-incidence or just smart/prepared play
Class 2 - Rather odd
Class 3 - Seems fishy
Class 4 - Highly unlikely behavior
Class 5 - Clear proof

Map: MLG Tal'Darim Altar

4:03 - Class 0 - He sends his marines to the watchtower. He clicks once to get the marines to move a bit, then switches over to the watchtower and clicks once there. So I don't know exactly how the screen locking hack works but this time at least he didn't click into the fog of war before looking at it, unlike the game on Shattered Temple where he right-clicked on the minimap first. Unless you can replicate that with a hack active (move screen to a location with fog of war, then right-click) and it still showing in the replay as if you move there before right-clicking your units there, this so far looks like he didn't hack in this game. Of course, you may still argue that he's stream-cheating or maybe using a different version of the hack this game.

x:xx - Class 1 - So Spades is making a crapton of hellions in this game, from double-factory with tech-lab/reactor for blue-flame, and he really doesn't have any way to know if his opponent went 3-rax into gas or quick double gas and maybe banshees. But I will give him the benefit of a doubt, because at least he did see no gas at the start, so that's probably a 1-rax fast expand, and Spades is free to cross his fingers and hope there won't be any banshees incoming. Either way, at 7:20 he moves out with his hellions and checks the front and finds a bunker with two marines in it and 5 additional marines outside (though in fact there are 8 outside of the bunker, but Spades doesn't see it). That's a few marines, but not too many to say there can't be a banshee coming. Still Spades waits to build a starport for almost another minute, instead getting an armory first. Seems very risky, but it could just be that Spades was convinced of how Lucifron would play the map.

17:03 - Class 0 - Not much weird happens up until now (like 5 minor things occur, like movements with the hellions and such, but they really don't prove anything), and what happens now was pointed out as something hackish, but I just don't see it. What happens is Lucifron loads up a big drop to attack Spades' nat. What seemed suspicious was how Spades grouped his vikings and put them in a good position. The thing is the rally for the starport was right there anyway, and Spades only really selected all the vikings, added them to a control group (over-riding the hellions' group), and moved them an inch north. And before that he sieged his tanks. But this can't even have been a reaction to the drop, as the medivacs weren't loaded when the tanks sieged and the vikings were grouped basically at exactly the same time as the medivacs were loading. Sure, the positioning of Lucifron's units (if Spades' was hacking) was indicating he was going to drop, but it wasn't that certain. Regardless, Spades positioned himself well for an attack at the nat, whether by ground or air. The back/north of the main was protected by turrets, the hellions recently saw the position of the army, so even if an attack might come from way the fuck around the right side, it wasn't gonna come just yet. Well I guess there's always the possibility for a drop, but Spades had a pretty good setup at the time.

18:22 - Class 1 - This might seem suspicious, so I'll mention it even if I don't think it means much. Spades unsieges and moves closer to the ramp, and also a bit closer to his 3rd. He stays unsieged, which of course would be bad if a full-on frontal assault comes marching in. However, he just defeated a decent portion of Lucifron's army, and he hasn't seen where the rest if his army is, and he has basically no map vision. So unsieging his tanks gives him a chance to react to an attack at both his nat or his 3rd. Now maybe it would be even better if he set up a siege-line to cover both his nat and his 3rd, but I'm not sure if he has enough tanks (5) to do that without just spreading himself too thin and die from a flank with any decent amount of marauders in it. Either way this doesn't prove much of anything, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it at all.

19:13 - Class 1 - Another thing I think was mentioned by someone on the call with Catz. As Lucifron's army approaches, without Spades seeing any of it, Spades sets up a great siege-line from his nat to his 3rd. It's not such a weird thing to do though, since now he has a much better tank count, and he can try to defend both locations.

32:14 - Class 0 - Here's a great scan from Spades, catching the army trying to approach the 3rd. I'm not sure, but I think catz and the boys mentioned this scan? I know it's not the magic scan they refer to, and it looks nothing like those scans regardless of them being magic or not. Anyway, this one can't be seen as a hack scan (scanning so you can act on what you already know) as he scans two other key locations that are empty before he finally finds the army. So far the game looks mostly legit.

32:44 - Class 4 - I might consider this a Class 4 (well actually, I do... I changed my mind after finishing this segment) if it wasn't for the fact that it's been a long game, Spades is probably stressed out, and Lucifron has been drilling the back of his main all game long, so now that he has fended off an attack at the 3rd (though the threat remains), I'm not entirely convinced he can't just snap and think "oh holy crap I don't have a spotter for the back of my main!" and totally over-react. However, it's also entirely possible that he's been so busy dealing with the attack at the 3rd and is exhausted from all the other attacks all over the place that he wasn't watching the minimap, seeing the army unloading in his main (with a maphack), and when he finally looked down and saw a blob of blue there he panicked and grabbed way too many units, even though he should've known the threat on the right side was just as bad, with or without a hack. At 32:39 it is very apparent that he wants to send his units straight towards that area (well, right next to it) in the main where Lucifron is unloading. You can see the air units are selected and there's a right-click a bit to the right of where the army is. Now, even if I think that perhaps Spades could think "oh crap, is my back protected?", he reacts too fast (after Lucifron let the pressure off on the 3rd) and too drastically for it to be anything other than a hack. I mean, that's what I think, but it's still not hard evidence. Also, if his thought-process is "I have to make sure my main isn't dropped" he would either instantly drop a scan (he does that much later, when his army is more or less in place to defend already) or he would at least let the vikings keep flying to scout the area. Instead he hesitates and stops his air units and moves them a bit to the right instead. Why the heck would he do that if he wants to stop a potential drop? The only thing I can think of is that if he is using a hack, he would think "I can't let him know that I'm getting in position. I need him to stay put while I get there". Maybe, just maybe he thinks he needs his vikings with his clump of tanks at his natural in case of an attack there. But why is this not true a couple seconds later when he moves lots of tanks and all the air units to his main and THEN scans Lucifron's army? He had a ton of energy for scans saved up!

So that's enough for today... I could look at the Theognis games tomorrow if anyone still cares.

As for the verdict so far: it's surely leaning towards guilty. But we really do need to clear up exactly how the screen lock works, and replicate the results we see in the game to see if it's possible. Because I have found a few situations where he does look into the fog of war right before he right-clicks on the ground. Wouldn't the hack let me see the place right as the click is done, not before? Of course, it may just manipulate the replay file. But then if you're watching a hacker live from his point of view, can the hack prevent an observer/referee to notice he's looking into the fog? These are things we need to clear up before we can say for sure that Spades is a hacker.


Thanks man. Another excellent post.

Since I know it is alot of work, I am willing to review the Theognis games that I have looked at, in the same manner and format as you do. Would that be okay with you if I stole your method since it seems to be so clarifying and objective? Just trying to do my part. You can review it and tell me if you think it is up to the standard.

Absolutely! I haven't had the time to get a copyright for the format yet. ^^
I might look at the Theognis games anyway. It would be interesting to see if we found different stuff. Surely we won't rate everything the same way, because no matter how hard we try we can't be absolutely objective. But we can try.
gl hf!
IcedBacon
Profile Joined May 2011
Canada906 Posts
June 05 2012 23:27 GMT
#4179
On June 06 2012 08:25 lulutheking wrote:
Hey guys last time i went on TL ther was an Choya twitter response thread open , where is it now ? has it been shut down ?


It's closed. It was basically just pointless speculation going on in it.
"I went Zerg because Artosis is a douchebag." -IdrA
Aunvilgod
Profile Joined December 2011
2653 Posts
June 05 2012 23:28 GMT
#4180
[QUOTE]On June 06 2012 08:16 Bogeyman wrote:
[QUOTE]On June 06 2012 05:10 StarStrider wrote:
[QUOTE]On June 06 2012 05:05 Bogeyman wrote:
[QUOTE]On June 06 2012 01:38 Ghanburighan wrote:
[QUOTE]On June 06 2012 01:17 Bogeyman wrote:
Okay fine... instead of jumping the band-waggon "blindly" (I saw Catz and co stream their analysis) I'll look through the replays myself. I haven't even looked at the exact points brought up in the OP, and I'll just look through the replays myself and see if I find anything strange. [...][/QUOTE]

Sorry, but who are you? If you are a well known GM I apologize but I do not see how every little Silver/Gold/Plat would notice hacking. We guys should rather shut up and listen to what people who were playing competitive RTS for 10 years and even dealt with this specific hacker before have to say. This thread is like a class of 4th graders having an argument with their science teacher about a complicated scientific matter...
ilovegroov | Blizzards mapmaker(s?) suck ass | #1 Protoss hater
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