Maphack and the problems with protection from it - Page 8

On July 29 2013 21:51 Baarn wrote:
There has been some research going on into solving this problem at Stanford. It's kind of a long read but they offer a solution that does work. Here is the link to their thoughts in pdf format if anyone cares to read it. http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/onlinegames.pdf

Edit: I'd suggest reading this also if you want to know how maphacks work.

On July 29 2013 22:05 Morfildur wrote:


I couldn't see another reply that covered it satisfactory, so:

• Replays always contain both sides, so all information has to be available one way or the other.
  
• UMS maps can have triggers where an action from a unit outside of vision range effects something inside vision range, e.g. "If player 1 moves a unit to point X,Y then spawn 10 units of the same type on the opponents side" - player 2's game doesn't know which unit is on point X,Y - so synchronising that kind of maps would add a lot of other problems with lots of exceptions for those situations everywhere in the code, leading to more bugs. LoL can do it because it has no custom games.
  
• Constantly sending updates about which units are visible or not requires a lot more bandwidth than just sending the orders, reducing the server and bandwidth requirements by at least 90%. A single game of SC2 could literally run with a 386 as server since it just moves network data around.
  

On July 29 2013 23:27 StreetWise wrote:


Sadly this program would technically be against SC2 TOS. The only way would be for Blizzard to make an official version and require all tournament participants to run it while in a tournament. They would also have to change the seed before every round. But looking at this paper if Blizzard was serious about their online qualifiers they could easily do something like this. If a player doesn't feel comfortable running a program like this, they simply don't participate in the tournament. As for ladder, they most likely would not force everyone to run a program like this to play ladder, so the only safe place would be online tournaments.

On July 30 2013 01:10 Extenz wrote:
Just make when someone targets something not in their vision they get kicked and perma banned.

On July 30 2013 04:38 Blacklizard wrote:
There is another way to combat hacking that Blizzard should consider which has nothing to do with detecting hacks.

1. Make scouting less difficult. That was done from WoL to HotS and I believe universally applauded, but it needs to be even more so. It needs to be so easy that there are no surprises at average player level and up and both sides know what the other guy is doing, dropping, building, etc.

2. Make micro more important than counter builds/units. Give units more ways to be micro intensive to beat things they historically couldn't beat. Half the posts in this thread are about bad micro on the accused yet counters being implemented blindly and winning games. I really wish Starcraft 2 wasn't so micro-unfriendly for this to be the case.

3. Slow down the game speed a little bit. This automatically makes #1 and #2 easier without even changing the game.

Balance would need to be tweaked after doing any of these things, naturally.

On July 30 2013 05:03 Blacklizard wrote:
I would not want to change the game that much, but I tell you hacks are becoming a problem on ladder and last time that happened I stopped playing BW. I don't want it to happen to SC2.

On July 30 2013 05:12 TheRabidDeer wrote:

You stopped playing BW because you were frustrated. BW mechanical and micro skill was so high that if you were good, it wouldnt matter excessively if they map hacked or not because your units would just beat theirs or you would have so much production that they couldnt keep up. Making it so that everybody technically has hacks does not make the game better, it makes it significantly worse.

On July 30 2013 06:09 Blacklizard wrote:


One condescension deserves another I suppose, so here goes. Back then I had the ear of the main designer, and when Pardo asked if it was worth it to turn off fog of war entirely to eliminate maphackers ruining ladder I responded with "Well, it'd be more fair, but it'd ruin the game". So yes, I understand what you are trying to say, but I don't think you are understanding me.

Probably a year later I more or less quit the game, in no small part to maphacking being rampant; and I refused to resort to maphacking. Also real life took over actually... I have to give some credit to my wife.

However, implementing things like "giving units more micro" is certainly not ruining the game. Implementing even more scouting while drastic, would only ruin gimmicks. So terrible?

And actually, as bad as maphacks were, the game of SC1/BW continued to thrive despite probably the majority of competitive players using hacks online. So I guess even going so far as removing fog of war wasn't enough to destroy the game. The game lasted because it was just that good. Can't SC2 hold up the test of time if more micro is involved and less hidden gimmicks?