all that has happened is b short cut the system to move from point a to point c bypassing point b .
It appears that way to you when you're viewing it on your client, but in actuality he doesn't bypass point b. it appears that he bypasses point b on your screen because of latency issues.. your clients don't sync with the server at the same time, or even the same rate. neither of you see what's actually happening on the server at that exact moment, at best you're both seeing what happened about a 5th of a second prior to that moment... at worst he's seeing what happened a 5th of a second ago, and you're seeing what happened 2/3rds of a second ago, in which case you'll see a LOT of skipping, but that doesn't mean he's using a speedhack.
the appearance of skipping is purely a matter of client/server latency and syncing. on the server side the player doesn't teleport several tiles, that's just what
you see on
your client. it's the same reason why 2 people of more-or-less equal connection speed will have disputes over who actually won a race between the 2 of them when there's nobody else to witness the finish of the race... even if they were neck-and-neck the whole race, side-by-side, both people appear to be 4 tiles ahead of their competitor,
on their own screen.
here's a crude example of what happens when you see someone skip, whether they're speeding or not (yes you
do see people skipping, but it doesn't mean they're hacking):
tick 1: playerA is approaching your screen-area, on his client. you can't see him yet, on your client. on the server, he's between 2 tiles to 1 half screen further away from you than it appears on his screen.
tick 2: playerA is on screen of you on the server. on his screen he's 2 tiles ahead of his position on the server. on your screen he's 2 tiles behind his location on the server.
tick 3: your client syncs with the server slightly before his does... so his location updates to the server
after your client has recieved the location info. so his location on his screen is 2 tiles ahead of his location on the server. his location on your screen is 4 tiles behind his location on the server side.
tick 4: his client syncs with the server slightly before yours does... his new location info syncs with the server, and then the server syncs with yours.
the new location info says he's moved 6 tiles from the last location you saw him at on your screen. voila, he skips.
you'll basically see a lot of skipping when you're pinging higher than others. there
IS a speed cap on the serverside. believe you me, speedhackers used to move a
lot faster before they implemented the server-side speed cap. even if you use a hack that makes you move a greater distance in a period of time than the cap allows, your avatar 'rubberbands' back several tiles to the max distance from your last synced location.
the only benefit derived from using a (legal, because it doesn't effect the client's data stream or make any client modifications) speed 'hack' like Cheat Engine (for example): the fact that your client's networking runs faster... it also comes with a downside: the time-out timers are also sped up, so you can get extra disconnects from the fact that the client
thinks it's lost connection because it
thinks too much time has elapsed between syncing. that downside is less of a problem in UO than it is in other games for some unknown-to-me reason.... it could also be the solution. the devs should consider decreasing the time-out timer limit on the client, so if people use a program to speed the client up it'll disconnect a lot (more than it already does rofl).
I personally would rather see them fix the crashing/disconnecting issues than see them put in counter-measures for something that
only gives you any benefit if you are laggy!!!!!!!!!