Maphack and the problems with protection from it - Page 3

On July 29 2013 01:47 2on2.ImBaTosS wrote:
this will be the stream for the next weeks: http://www.twitch.tv/cplaytt_imbatoss u can check it out , i will stream ladder and all of my cups!

On July 29 2013 01:33 2on2.ImBaTosS wrote:
ok first of all i have to tell u , that i have a very strange playstyle and my own style , but is that something u can judge me for ? no u cant , and also i am playing everygame the same opening , vs every race a special opening , its my own bo and i am not changing it , 2 zealots and a mothership core vs zerg , 3 stalker opening vs toss , 1gate expand with chrono boost on the stalker vs terran , i am never changing it so u cant tell me i ply other things when my oppnents goes hatch first or pool first , i sometimes go forge opening when i play against opponents like Bly , its not possible to hold his hatch first , gas pool with gate opening so i decided to go for a forge , and what knowme said that i went for 5 canons .. i know when somebody cnaon rush the expand of bly then he goes normally roaches and i also saw the roaches cuz they attacked my canons , so its not unnormal that i go for 5 canons, and also to mention that my micro is not good enough for my top16 gm , thats nothing u can talk about , in a hacker thread , what a joke , u can also be a high level player when ur micro sux ,the game vs nerchio he called me maphacker , cuz i hold his early pool and knew he went for mass speedlings cuz he had no expand what i scouted? is that maphacking? i dont think so , also the games vs strelok like mentioned , i know he is a mech plyer so he won't play bio at any time , so its easy to say when he will go for drops , to know the timings etc. thats important , and when u know ur opponent wel enough than u can hardcounter him ,also i culd bly call "maphacker" or other people cuz they hardcountered me , its a joke to say somebody is maphacking when he just know what his opponent is going for .. and also i will stream the next days and weeks , so there wont be any kind of doubt.

On July 29 2013 02:34 DnCL wrote:
That's a very good way to react imo: Thank you for not taking it personnal and accepting to stream to clean your name.

On long term, this noise should go down if you keep showing your innocence.

On July 29 2013 01:28 xyzz wrote:

What a ridiculous and pompous reply. Legally and techically impractical? I'm a lawyer by my day time profession and I'd like to know what law (and of which country) is being broken if you willingly install a program on your PC that either says 'SC2 verified clean' when a game starts or doesn't? Additionally how is it technically impractical? We're talking about tournaments here, not every single game on ladder.

I've played online for 15-16 years or so and during the original Quakeworld days, this is exactly what the entire European community did. IIRC the program was called QW/faq/z proxy or something to that direction, and what it did was check that none of your game files were modified, since a lot of people were using alternated player models and weapon beam models and such to make targeting easier. If a team wasn't using the program, they were disqualified. I don't remember anyone refusing to use it, in fact anyone not using it was ridiculed to death and labeled automatic cheaters. It works.

We're not allowed to link into hacks here, so I'll just say that currently the Blizzard protection is non-existent. There are entire message boards (you'll find them on google) dedicated to cheating in Blizzard games where people can find threads with download links into hacks, and the topics of discussion are mostly around 'how to not get caught'. For example, they have 'camera lock' buttons, where when you hold the button, you can go look into the enemy's base what he's building, but the camera is locked into your original position so when you view a replay it seems like the maphacker is just looking at his own units instead of the enemy base. When he releases the camera lock button, the game and the replay tracks his camera movement normally again. If every tournament was at a LAN where cheating is virtually impossible we'd have no big problem, but if we have online qualifiers to money leagues something should be done to address this situation.

On July 28 2013 22:44 grs wrote:
The basic issue with all the hacks and cheats around is that the client receives all data about the game and just hides it from sight. Therefore the hidden information is still on the computer and there will always be a possibility to reveal it. I don't know if it is possible to have an RTS without sending out all data or if - latency wise - the game would still work serverside, where the server just sends out the information each specific client knows about. I doubt it though. In the end; the cheating will not be stopped.

Cheating is being looked at from day one. It's part of why we like a client/server architecture. During development of SupCom we did consider the various ways clients could cheat but synchronous severely ties your hands. For example fog of war is always hackable simply because you have the information.

In PA all of the sim work is done server side. The only thing the client can inject are effectively "orders". Clients can't just randomly move objects around in an authoritative manner.

Many FPS games have at least some element of local control that is hackable. For example aim hacks, speed cheats etc. that rely on the server not being authoritative for all state. So they are usually a bit more hackable than an RTS. Most of this is to eliminate latency which is not an issue in RTS (at least not nearly as much). For example you could easily play a game like this with a 500ms ping.

So basically the clients input orders that come from your local UI. The server than sends back information based on your currently open views into the action. Things under the fog are not sent at all. The main issue with this architecture is that it requires more network bandwidth that a simply synchronous type setup. The server also has to do a lot of work which is why they are being architected to cluster if necessary. The nice thing is that if a local client is slow it can't slow down any of the other players in the game. It's really how fast your server is that matters more than anything.

We won't be able to prevent people from using trainers or AI bots completely. But any kind of direct cheat should be very difficult to pull off without server access.

One interesting thing to note is that TA was p2p but it wasn't synchronous. The net code in PA although different from TA has more in common than you would think.

One thing to keep in mind is that P2P is simply a network topology and that synchronous is the real issue that's different.

Originally SupCom was going to use a P2P async model similar to TA. EA's tech guys basically forced us to change that. When we did the analysis it didn't seem like a bad idea so we did change it, then they cancelled the game.

In retrospect the sync model really hurt SupCom badly. There is no fundamental reason we couldn't have use the model we are using now if we had thought of it back then. Although this game is being designed to take advantage of the larger amount of network bandwidth we have available.

I wanted to build a game at a fundamentally larger scale than sync sim can handle. Running at the speed of the slowest client really limits the ability scale. A p2p network topo also sucks for scaling. I also wanted to be able to multithread the sim code which is difficult to get much benefit out of when you are synchronous.

As to why other people are doing this, I think they are simply stuck in the past. Blizzard for example seems to just be copying their previous games with prettier graphics. I seriously doubt they ever considered changing the network model of star craft 2 because it's just outside the wheelhouse of traditional RTS tech.

I on the other hand think that the technology is a very important aspect of the game and am in a position to execute on that. It's worth noting that Dota2 is client server as well.

Enough of a rant?