C
Coragin
Guest
Cheating can never be 100% stopped in any online game. Now, take it from someone who cheated at EQ on such a massive scale as to get 6-12 accounts banned per week from it, at $40 per account and still coming out over two grand ahead irl dollars. If there is money to be made, the cheaters will find a way. Now, because I did cheat in EQ, does NOT mean I cheat in any other game, especially this one. I still own my original account that was bought a month or so after the games release. So, no I dont cheat in UO, never have. Unless you count back in the day putting a penny wedged in a hotkey to do hiding or something. Heck I still remember when grizzlies highlighted red, when my order shield blew up killing me after the notoriaty patch.
Now, I dont know how EA works bannings, but SOE (Everquest) would (depending on the infraction) ban all accounts associated with the following...
IP address
Email Address
Credit Card
Accounts you traded with
It could have been all or some depending on the situation. But, you could always start a new account on the same email address, or a fake one if you so choose, didnt even need to exist either because there was no way for them to check if it was a real account.
Yes you can change your IP address quite easily too if you have a router or some knowledge of computers in general. In your router, check your IP address, then goto "clone mac address" and fill in your own that is different than the original (this can be anything), then apply settings. Your router will reset with the new mac address and aquire a new IP address in the process. I did this a lot in my EQ career. And EQ has a ton more cheaters than UO. No dupes, but other things that you would consider much much worse.
The best way to combat cheaters is in fact a patch every so often. But, more importantly fix the loopholes. Put as much server side as possible. As it sits right now, I can see movement parsing is server side, because if you drop connection you stop moving. This wasent the case in EQ, it was client side. Meaning if you had to run past a hostile area, start running, unplug your network cable, run past the area and plug in back it in. You would warp from one place to the other and not be attacked at all.
If EA cared enough to stop all cheating, they would actually hire people do fidn these loopholes. And do you know who the best is to hire? The people who exploit a ton. If you got an IP address or email with 25 or more banned accounts for exploiting and stuff, thats who you want to hire as a third party.
Everquest had a hack that allowed any class or player to attack with a zero delay, this was in game for a few years. The devs could never track it down, the reason beaing is they put a log in place to track those packets and it was such a push of thousands of packets per second that it crashed their tracking programs, causing them to freeze. The way it was finally fixed was by the guy who found it finally telling them exactly where and what the loophole was and how to fix it. And the reason he did it was because it got so wide pread that it was ruining the game by morons who got a hold of it and would use it everywhere, in plain sight of GM's, players, whatever.
But, the cheats didnt stop after that, it was ghost killing next, which is killing something from such a distance with mele attacks that they could not even cast on you, much less mele you. Then warps, pure mele using spells and abilities they do not have access to ect. The list goes on and on.
To slow it down...
1. MAke the risk vs reward much higher for cheating. As it sits with any mmo, if it makes at least the cost of time and account well, then your break even. But if you can make money even with buying new accounts and come out ahead, the reward outweighs the risk.
2. Random spawns wont work so well.
3. If you mine for an hour straight in the same spots, make it so that spot is depleated for your char only for an hour.
4. Make things obtainable through other means, even if it takes more time or gold or even work. i.e. powerscrolls, colored boards/ingots. I dont know how, dont ask me that
5. Track online time. IF an account is online 23 of 24 hours a day every day mining and such, WATCH THEM. Seriously, no one can go without sleep for that long. IT WILL eventually kill you from lack of sleep. It is why guiness does not record it anymore.
6. A GM presence in the game would help a lot too.
Just some ideas to build off of. I dont claim to have all the answers, I am just saying from past expirence and what I know of how another company does things, these things are a good place to start.
And I really hope I dont get the whole "Oh your a cheater" rants now. I only told of that so I can show that given enough of a reason TO cheat, the cheaters WILL cheat. In my case in EQ it was boredom and money. LOTS of money. And I didnt care, it was worth it. I wont say how much I made, but it was a lot. So much that losing 12 accounts at $40 a piece I was always coming out ahead, by thousands. And I paid my way through college.
So, while I did cheat at that game, I always came back to UO because it had more depth, more variety, more interesting templates, HOUSES, and challenge. I am not a cheater at UO, never was. As stated before I still have my original account.
So, thats what I can come up with to combat cheating. Take it how you will, build upon my ideas or trash them, I dont care. Cheating in UO dont seem nearly as rampant as EQ/WoW/DAoC ect.
One last thing, ANYTHING, any ability, spell, ect that does its check CLIENT SIDE can be hacked and used to cheat. Like if you use spirit speak and its does the skill check sever side and you succeed and it then sends a packet to your client saying "success you can heal from corpse x" THAT packet can be spoofed and trick the client to think it returned success ALL the time. Now if sever side controlled all and I mean ALL skills (not just skill checks which is different) than there ould be no way to spoof a packet. Spoofing would mean EA's server sends a packet saying 0.0 skill in SS, failed, this packet is intercepted by a program running that is "hooked" into the client, the program would stop the packet before the client reads it and send one identical that reads "120.00 skill success" even if you had 0.0 skill. If that makes sense...
So anything controlled client side can be manipulated given you have the knowledge to manipulate it. Most of it is handled pretty easily too. But, I do believe almost everything in UO is handled server side, save weather, light and sounds now. But, I may be wrong.
Now, I dont know how EA works bannings, but SOE (Everquest) would (depending on the infraction) ban all accounts associated with the following...
IP address
Email Address
Credit Card
Accounts you traded with
It could have been all or some depending on the situation. But, you could always start a new account on the same email address, or a fake one if you so choose, didnt even need to exist either because there was no way for them to check if it was a real account.
Yes you can change your IP address quite easily too if you have a router or some knowledge of computers in general. In your router, check your IP address, then goto "clone mac address" and fill in your own that is different than the original (this can be anything), then apply settings. Your router will reset with the new mac address and aquire a new IP address in the process. I did this a lot in my EQ career. And EQ has a ton more cheaters than UO. No dupes, but other things that you would consider much much worse.
The best way to combat cheaters is in fact a patch every so often. But, more importantly fix the loopholes. Put as much server side as possible. As it sits right now, I can see movement parsing is server side, because if you drop connection you stop moving. This wasent the case in EQ, it was client side. Meaning if you had to run past a hostile area, start running, unplug your network cable, run past the area and plug in back it in. You would warp from one place to the other and not be attacked at all.
If EA cared enough to stop all cheating, they would actually hire people do fidn these loopholes. And do you know who the best is to hire? The people who exploit a ton. If you got an IP address or email with 25 or more banned accounts for exploiting and stuff, thats who you want to hire as a third party.
Everquest had a hack that allowed any class or player to attack with a zero delay, this was in game for a few years. The devs could never track it down, the reason beaing is they put a log in place to track those packets and it was such a push of thousands of packets per second that it crashed their tracking programs, causing them to freeze. The way it was finally fixed was by the guy who found it finally telling them exactly where and what the loophole was and how to fix it. And the reason he did it was because it got so wide pread that it was ruining the game by morons who got a hold of it and would use it everywhere, in plain sight of GM's, players, whatever.
But, the cheats didnt stop after that, it was ghost killing next, which is killing something from such a distance with mele attacks that they could not even cast on you, much less mele you. Then warps, pure mele using spells and abilities they do not have access to ect. The list goes on and on.
To slow it down...
1. MAke the risk vs reward much higher for cheating. As it sits with any mmo, if it makes at least the cost of time and account well, then your break even. But if you can make money even with buying new accounts and come out ahead, the reward outweighs the risk.
2. Random spawns wont work so well.
3. If you mine for an hour straight in the same spots, make it so that spot is depleated for your char only for an hour.
4. Make things obtainable through other means, even if it takes more time or gold or even work. i.e. powerscrolls, colored boards/ingots. I dont know how, dont ask me that
5. Track online time. IF an account is online 23 of 24 hours a day every day mining and such, WATCH THEM. Seriously, no one can go without sleep for that long. IT WILL eventually kill you from lack of sleep. It is why guiness does not record it anymore.
6. A GM presence in the game would help a lot too.
Just some ideas to build off of. I dont claim to have all the answers, I am just saying from past expirence and what I know of how another company does things, these things are a good place to start.
And I really hope I dont get the whole "Oh your a cheater" rants now. I only told of that so I can show that given enough of a reason TO cheat, the cheaters WILL cheat. In my case in EQ it was boredom and money. LOTS of money. And I didnt care, it was worth it. I wont say how much I made, but it was a lot. So much that losing 12 accounts at $40 a piece I was always coming out ahead, by thousands. And I paid my way through college.
So, while I did cheat at that game, I always came back to UO because it had more depth, more variety, more interesting templates, HOUSES, and challenge. I am not a cheater at UO, never was. As stated before I still have my original account.
So, thats what I can come up with to combat cheating. Take it how you will, build upon my ideas or trash them, I dont care. Cheating in UO dont seem nearly as rampant as EQ/WoW/DAoC ect.
One last thing, ANYTHING, any ability, spell, ect that does its check CLIENT SIDE can be hacked and used to cheat. Like if you use spirit speak and its does the skill check sever side and you succeed and it then sends a packet to your client saying "success you can heal from corpse x" THAT packet can be spoofed and trick the client to think it returned success ALL the time. Now if sever side controlled all and I mean ALL skills (not just skill checks which is different) than there ould be no way to spoof a packet. Spoofing would mean EA's server sends a packet saying 0.0 skill in SS, failed, this packet is intercepted by a program running that is "hooked" into the client, the program would stop the packet before the client reads it and send one identical that reads "120.00 skill success" even if you had 0.0 skill. If that makes sense...
So anything controlled client side can be manipulated given you have the knowledge to manipulate it. Most of it is handled pretty easily too. But, I do believe almost everything in UO is handled server side, save weather, light and sounds now. But, I may be wrong.