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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games)

Blizzard Bans Speed Hackers from WoW 186

Posted by Zonk from the and-the-cycle-begins dept.
Voodoo Extreme has the world that Blizzard has already banned several accounts for Speed Hacking, a type of cheat that allows a character to move far faster than it should. From the article: "Those individuals who were caught using the speed hack have been banned from the game and have had their accounts closed. We must stress once again that we are opposed to hacking and cheating of any kind and are dedicated to maintaining a fair environment in our games." Adios, punks
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Blizzard Bans Speed Hackers from WoW More

Blizzard Bans Speed Hackers from WoW

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  • Hope they had definite proof... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:50PM (#10997367) Homepage
    Generally speed hacks work by sending packets in such a way as to simulate periods of extreme latency between the client and the server. This leads to a bit of a bad fork for Blizzard...The two most likely ways that they banned people were checking for constant extreme latency (which could occur) in which case they may have banned people who were not cheating, or they tested for programs running on the user's machine, which is a slippery road towards privacy invasion.

    • Re:Hope they had definite proof... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by k_187 ( 61692 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:54PM (#10997391) Journal
      Actually, it had something to do with fooling the game that you were on a griffin, when you weren't, speeding you up like 50x or something. I saw somebody link instructions to it on the forums (which I read because I am obsessed with the game, yet am unable to afford it.)
    • I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that Blizzard lost a lawsuit against them in Germany for the incorporation of hard-drive scans in the internation al version of Starcraft? that reported back to the Blizzard server to let them know if you had any illegal copies of their software on your machine. Long story short, privacy invasion wouldn't be a first for them.
      • The lawsuit was in California, they didn't lose they settled.

        The agreement was they wouldn't upload information about the person without their consent.

        Reading the current EULA for WoW it would seem that consent is given by clicking accept.

        Of course now you're into the undecided realm of click EULA's.
  • ...would the speed hack give an unfair advantage in combat or any other part in the game?
    Article doesnt say.

  • Oh I get it now. (Score:5, Funny)

    by BaronSprite ( 651436 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:55PM (#10997395) Homepage
    The lag wasn't the game going slowly, it was just everyone going faster then I was. Damn kids and their speed hacks... and makeout parties...
    • Damn kids and their speed hacks... and makeout parties...

      These 'damn kids' get their kicks by making their gnome avatars perform goofy animated dances on command. Speed hacks is pretty much it.

  • Maybe now people will trust Blizzard... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:57PM (#10997407)
    One of the complaints I heard frequently on various forums was people claiming that they'd "never play World of Warcraft because Blizzard games always get hacked and Blizzard never does anything about it." Hopefully this will convince them that Blizzard is indeed being proactive about preventing cheaters.

    Unfortunately, I expect that instead they'll just take it as evidence that World of Warcraft is easily hacked and use that as a reason why they refuse to play.

    But I'm glad Blizzard is announcing this, rather than the approach a certain other MMORPG [playonline.com] took of saying "oh, there's nothing wrong, there are no bots anymore, we took care of them all" despite groups of players who seem not to mind doing the same thing repeatedly 24/7 and never respond when you try and talk with them...
    • Hopefully this will convince them that Blizzard is indeed being proactive about preventing cheaters. How is responding AFTER the hack being proactive?

      • Re:Maybe now people will trust Blizzard... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Simple: Proactive = actively searching for these things.
        Reactive = banning people after they've been reported.

        My understanding is that Blizzard is actively looking for cheaters - taking the proactive approach, as opposed making other players report them, which is the reactive approach.
    • when anyone asks me if I'm going to play WoW, I've been saying I'll never play a blizard MMORPG because blizard's security has always scucked, if they do something about it afterward is beside the point. Being tough on hacks is nice and all, but that still means players have to deal with cheaters for a time before blizard bans them / fixes it, shadowbane anyone?
    • If you think there won't be bots in WoW, then you are an idiot. Everyone knew there were bots in FFXI, and they did punish those who were using bots. Did they do it as fast as people wanted? No, they did not. But trying to make WoW out as better...give me a break. There were no hacks like this at all in FFXI while I played. Bots are going to be in every MMORPG...period.

  • Actually... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ironwill96 ( 736883 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:02PM (#10997446) Homepage Journal
    Several people used FRAPS to record people that were using SpeedHacks in the game. So they were not banning people who had not visibly evidenced this behavior several times and been reported by users.

    And they were not faking a Gryphon flight while on the ground, they were faking lag to the client making the server lag-o-port them great distances. This is using a method posted on the BlizzHackers website forums.
    • This sounds like they've made some very bad logistical mistakes if they trust the client with ANYTHING besides displaying the current game state and taking player input. The client should just be a pretty interface to the server database. Nothing important should be client side.

      • Re:Actually... (Score:5, Informative)

        by NeMon'ess ( 160583 ) <flinxmid&yahoo,com> on Saturday December 04, 2004 @08:55PM (#10998928) Homepage Journal
        No they made a calculated choice. In most OLRPGs, getting attacked while having lag is lethal. It's very frustrating for the dead player. In WOW, when lag happens, the player can run away and they're untouchable. NPCs, monsters, and players freeze in place or stop appearing. When the lag ends, the client sends the player's new position to the server. The server effectively teleports the player to the reported position. A bystander at the new position would see a player just appear there. This has created a cheat, in that when lag happens it's possible to run past high-level enemies who might be guarding treasure. I think Blizzard made the right choice considering how much I've hated getting lag killed in the past.
        • Okay, so they have done nothing software-wise to prevent people from doing this? Just their usual 'no mods' rule? So, do they have any way of detecting moderate use of this? For example, someone who runs just that _little_ bit faster than everyone else. This seems to me like it would be indistinguishable from legitimate lag, if correctly implemented. Although this does downgrade it from a game-breaking bug to a pretty small tweak. I suppose Blizzard will be watching _very_ closely for lag-hopping past certa
        • However, when there's no real death penalty to speak of, why bother with the invincibility?
          • Lag death is particularly annoying. It can happen against monsters and players, so it can happen fairly often. If lag effects one person, it's likely to effect a whole group. Thus in a PVP battle things are paused until the lag lessens. Since monsters are immune to lag, it gives the player a disadvantage. Fundamentally, even though the penalty is minor, I've always found lag death such a drag, that not getting penalized when it happens makes more sense. There is a very real disincentive to use lag to
        • Couldn't they fix this problem by ensuring the "lag-o-port" is within a circle defined by the maximum distance possible given the running speed they are capable of? If they exceed this circle (by more than a small epsilon), rubber-band them back to the circle at next update.

      • Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Edgewize ( 262271 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @10:31PM (#10999362)
        Sure, everything would be server-side if there were such things as unlimited bandwidth, unlimited processor resources, and zero-latency connections.

        In reality, collision-detection and movement logic is better handled on the client side. Nobody wants a 150ms delay between when they push the "forward" key and when they start to move. And the computational cost of doing terrain collision on the server for 5000+ players is prohibitive.

        The only thing that Blizzard can do is monitor for data anomolies, such as position updates that are an impossible distance apart for the given time interval. And that is probably how they are catching speed hackers.

  • stupid lame cheaters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyrax777 ( 633996 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:10PM (#10997498) Homepage
    Whats the point of cheating in a online game. It justs fucks with the Balance for everyone. And why the hell cheat in a gane you have to pay to play for!. If just wanted to let a bot run around Id just run something like progress quest since it pretty much amounts to the same thing.

    • Re:stupid lame cheaters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:23PM (#10997570) Homepage Journal
      The whole reason I hate online gaming: For some people their online persona defines them as a human being, and they take it way too seriously. It's a game for crying out loud, it doesn't matter if your dwarf mage is level 23 and can slay the yellow panda of Azerbajn if you aren't having fun.

    • Re:stupid lame cheaters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rpillala ( 583965 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:27PM (#10997592)

      All online games I've played have an element that cares more about winning than playing. If they can find a shortcut to winning they'll do it.

      • I am sick and tired of cheaters. I don't think Blizzard games are nearly as bad as Enemy Terrorities, wolfenstein, UT2004. Dare I say counterstrike.

        The worst thing are those half cheating, scriptable moves that can never be banned. Like auto-lie-down when near enemies. Or using adrenalines and refilling on med packs and ammo all in one motion. These are the worst people to play against.

      • I don't really understand how you're supposed to win in an online game. The game is persistent, and there is no ultimate goal.

        • Reach the level cap as quickly as possible. Get the best gear in game as soon as possible. Be able to 1v1 anyone and/or run around areas ganking as many people at least 10 levels below you as possible. There are always goals for these pvp kiddies. BTW not all pvp players are what I call "kiddies" just the ones with no sense of honor who think they're better than you because their character is.

    • THAT is not the bad part (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BerntB ( 584621 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:32PM (#10997953)
      Whats the point of cheating in a online game.
      They are a..holes, sure. But online games isn't the bad part.

      What scares me is when I wonder what that kind of people do in real life -- and how many are in my social groups. :-(

      Shudder...

      • Re:THAT is not the bad part (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ewen ( 218843 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @08:10PM (#10998703) Homepage
        Some years ago I was a law student. One class we played this group game whereby cheating (through lying to the group about what you were going to do, then doing something else) would let you win big. Nearly everyone in the class cheated. Some were very proud of the high scores they achieved in the game that way. No one else seemed to see it as a problem; they were disappointed they didn't figure out to cheat sooner.

        I'm not sure what this says about our lawyers today. But I don't think it's good.

        Ewen

        PS: My score was negative. And I'm not a lawyer. Those two things are not completely unrelated.

        • I'm not sure what this says about our lawyers today.

          Was there any punishment for cheating? If not, it was allowed.

          And, yes, that is a cynical attitude. Please read about game theory, prisoners dilemma, etc.

          (Dawkins' "The selfish gene" is really good. It'll change your view of the world.)

          What I find problematic is when you are dishonest with people that trust you. That you have a "social contract" with and you know they will get very angry if they find out that you cheat. I.e. "real" betrayal.

          • No, there wasn't any punishment for cheating.

            But that was pretty much my point. Here you have a class of people that are supposedly going to be the next generation of highly trusted people (ie, lawyers taking care of people's property, money, etc). And they're cheating to get a few meaningless points in a trivial game. Because they can.

            Perhaps it was too much to expect that no one in the class even saw a problem with people the public are supposed to trust just cheating because they can.

            I've since adj
        • When I was a kid, I honestly didn't see -any- moral problem with cheating. To me it was just part of the game, and as long as you won and didn't get caught, you won, and getting caught was just another form of losing, and since if you wanted to cheat it meant you were likely to lose, it seemed to make no difference.

          I think my perspective changed when I realized that losing well had social benefits.

          I suppose a realization like that is much harder to make online.

          I'm sure most of the cheaters would rationa

        • Not all lawyers are bad (Score:3, Insightful)

          by alexo ( 9335 )

          It is just that 99% of them give the others a bad name.

      • Honestly, you're scared and shudder at the thought you might know a person who cheats at a video game? This isn't like they cheat on their wife or they cheat on their taxes, or something that carries actual moral weight. It's just a video game. If I found one of my friends used a bug in a video game to make a dwarf run really fast, I wouldn't care in the slightest.
        • I would care. Hacking in online games is not only stupid (it destroys the challenge of the game), but it ruins the experience for other players. A person has to have a certain degree of asshole-ness to do something like that.

          • Ok, what about finding that if you led a mob down a certain path that it got stuck behind rocks out of melee range and you could spell it to death with zero risk ? (The Overthere - Everquest)

            What about finding that you could should mobs with bleed shots and run out of their range before they fired back, repeat until they die ? (SWG)

            Is this cheating? Is this morally rupugnent?

            It certainly reduces the challenge of the game.

            From my perspective unless you are using an external program to manipulate the pa
            • From my perspective unless you are using an external program to manipulate the packets or inputs then everything is fair game.
              I agree completely.

              Instead consider e.g. the cheating a few years ago in Counterstrike and all the people that quit playing that game. Not all the cheaters where kids.

              (See my other comments for more.)

      • What scares me is when I wonder what that kind of people do in real life -- and how many are in my social groups. :-(

        In real life, those are the folks that lie or exaggerate on FEMA grants or insurance claims. We had a lot of that in Florida after the recent hurricanes. They don't care that it hurts everyone else if they get ahead a little bit.

        • Re:THAT is not the bad part (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          They will tend to take the attitude that everyone else is doing it anyway. Capitalism is just one big Prisoner's Dilemma.

    • You don't hang around Ebay much? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @06:29PM (#10998233)
      there's cash money to be made selling virtual stuff.
      • it's against the ToS of most games these days to do so.

      • Blizzard answered that problem with the concept of soulbound items. There are some items that you get that only you can use from the moment you pick them up. There are other items that you get, that only you can use if you decide to use them. This is how most high level items work.

        I'm not even sure if you can sell characters themselves... You'd almost have to sell your whole user account, which is kinda dumb.

    • Re:stupid lame cheaters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by radimvice ( 762083 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @09:02PM (#10998966) Homepage
      And why the hell cheat in a gane you have to pay to play for!.

      Because with companies like IGE [ige.com] that buy and sell accounts and virtual currency/items, effectively creating real-world exchange rates for virtual money, people can make real profits off of cheats, exploits or techniques that improve their efficiency relative to the rest of the players.

      • Sure, but the sellers might well be banned, too:

        From the "Terms Of Use" for WoW:

        Section 7. Selling of Items

        Remember, at the outset of these Terms of Use, where we discussed how you were "licensed" the right to use World of Warcraft, and that your license was "limited"? Well, here is one of the more important areas where these license limitations come into effect. Note that Blizzard Entertainment either owns, or has exclusively licensed, all of the content which appears in World of Warcraft. Therefo

  • I've always thought that this kind of hacking would not be a problem once internet technology gets suitably advanced. Once everyone has super fast internet connections, you wouldn't need to have the program stored on your own system where punks can work at hacking it. All you would do is buy an account, and then everytime you wanted to play, you would download a fresh copy of the program. You play for however you want, and then you log off, and the program is ereased off your computer (or maybe if you're

    • Re:May not be a problem for much longer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:22PM (#10997561) Homepage Journal
      that doesn't really solve anything, as the code is still run on the client side.

      easy solution, if one had infinite network bandwith and speed, would be to make the clients as dumb terminals as possible - with all possible game logic on the servers - so that you would be able to trust the data coming from the client blindly, simply because the client would be only sending stuff like 'button a pressed'.
      • You don't need infinite bandwidth, just enough for the client to receive images and upload keystrokes and mouse commands. Simple.
        • Simple, but latency kills that idea quickly. Especially once you transition this technology to games like Counter-Strike, where 40 ms lag spikes can noticably degrade the system. Not to mention the amount of processing power required to render 16 people's screens for them.
        • Is the human mind even capable of conceiving the CPU/GPU resources that a company would have to possess to be able to transmit everything to the dumb terminal, which is only transmitting/processing keyboard/mouse input?

          The "server" room in this example would also be hotter than a thousand suns. Also, the subscription cost would be more on the order of 100 a month rather than 15.

          So, yeah, get used to dealing with people hacking things client side.
          • Uh, Second Life [secondlife.com] is entirely streamed from the server. The download is only 10 - 20 megs, and then everything you see and do is sent over the internet.
            It works great and does not require a very fat pipe.
            You can feasibly play it on a 128 kbit line, althought its bandwidth slider can be pushed up to 1 mbit.

            • Re:Bandwidth be damned (Score:3, Insightful)

              by 0racle ( 667029 )
              And there are how many users at any one time? How many for WoW at any given time? It might work for a small community, but at the moment, its not going to work for WoW, EQ2 or any of the extremely large MMO games.
            • Perhaps I'm dismissing the idea out of hand, but the post to which I replied insinuated that every aspect of the game should be run on the host side, with the client receiving 100% of the game, from what is currently done (character data, player location, location of enemies, objects, etc) as well as rendering of graphics, and execution of 100% of code, which would be rediculous.

              The way I read the parents post, bandwidth being equal, a p4 with a ati 9x00 and a gig of ram would have the same quality of expe

            • Yes, the DATA RESOURCES are streamed from the server. The game is still rendered on your client, and your keystrokes are still handled locally. The only major architectural difference between Second Life and WoW is that one comes on CDs ahead of time, and one gets downloaded in the background.
          • Can you even imagine trying to fit a whole computer in just one room, it' have to be a small stadium at least.
            At least that's what they said circa 1960. Think about how much more powerfull todays desktop pc's are over 1970's mainframes. I've got a 64bit processor with more cache memory than many mainframes had total in the early days.
            So right now, yes the server cluster that could handle that for just a few dozen users would probably need a small nuclear reactor and put out more heat than a small ci
        • for it to be usable for thousands of players, it would very quickly turn to the unrealistic to achieve levels for bandwith and processing power.

          maybe you could send the triangles the player sees with texture info already on the client though within reasonable limits.

    • Re:May not be a problem for much longer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:22PM (#10997564)
      Um, no, the hackers would just patch the downloaded program in memory or on disk or however it is stored. They could use some magic algorithm to decide what and where to hack. Child's play.

      The only real solution to stop hacking is to run _everything_ on the server and only let the client render what he sees. The only thing that can not be stopped using that method is bots.
    • Until someone finds a buffer overflow in the server to change stats, or they fake the server into thinking they re-downloaded the app when really they didn't. Banning cheaters is the best approach, at least for the forseeable future. Though you don't get them all, you get their social network to warn them, which is probably a stronger deterrant then simply trying to keep the cheaters out from a technical standpoint. Sadly, as long as games exist, there will probably be a way for someone to cheat.

  • not to be a smart ass, but: (Score:4, Funny)

    by rritterson ( 588983 ) * on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:34PM (#10997636)
    Why is this news, again? Every MMoRPG has a few cheaters, who get caught and banned. It's like reporting that a 14 year old kid was caught stealing candy at the local corner store and was grounded for it. Whee... It would be news if Blizzard said 'we marvel at the intelligence of these cheaters. We consider them magical beings and will do all we can to accomodate them'

    • Re:not to be a smart ass, but: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:09PM (#10997804)
      Well, it's the first time since the game went live that Blizzard has taken some action regarding cheaters, for one thing. As popular as WoW is (far more than EQ2, from what I understand), the stance Blizzard takes on cheaters is actually important to a significant portion of the game community. For another thing, the article indicates that speed hacks are already being used in WoW.

      Now, six months down the road, if Blizzard is still banning people for cheating, then it's probably not worthy of another /. post.

      Of course, considering that new developments don't actually have to occur for a story to be revisited on /. ....

    • True, but what this also does is send a warning to other cheaters out there that it won't be tolerated, and that Blizzard is taking an aggressive stance on it. Think of it as crowd control.


    • This kind of exploit was common in the first generation of MMORPGs, we had overlaid maps that show the movement, and threat level of all NPCs & PCs, invisible or otherwise in DAOC, movement cheats in EQ1 iirc, tradskill bots in EQ & SWG.

      Blizzard is pitching itself against the second generation MMOPRGs (of which EQ2 is the first) and it is interesting that it should fall into the same traps as the previous generation. Part of my decision to play EQ2 was the fact that Sony/Verant have had years of ex

  • Cheating eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Master_T ( 836808 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:44PM (#10997689)
    I think it has to do with a deep-seatesx psychological perception of self-inadequacy. Such people perhaps have never had the chance to be in charge or to be in a position of power and so instead of playing the game like everyone else, they feel the need to cheat to obtain a position of power. Doing stupid things that piss everyone off give such persons a feeling of power and importance based upon the attention they receive, even though it is negative. This syndrome does not just appear in cheaters, but in the kind of people who steal planes just to steal planes in Battlefield and who flashbang their team every chance they get in CounterStrike. It is rooted in a deep need for attention which they most like receive little or none of in real life. This problem, to use Freudian terms, would be called a "Smacktard Complex" driving people to do rude, annoying and stupid things just to anger those around them. It gives them feelings of power and supplies them with attention as they deeply desire. So, everytime you ignored that idiot at school or at work, a cheating smacktard was born.

  • What about macros/bots? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:50PM (#10998042) Journal
    Has Blizzard taken a stand on these?
    • It depends on how you define 'taken a stand'. There is a known bot that will fish for a player. They have disabled the high level fishing areas to prevent a flood of high level items from these bots. Presumably they are working on either a sure-fire way of detecting the bot from someone who's fishing and doesn't feel like responding to people talking to him, or they are reworking how fishing works to break the bot and make it harder to use.

      So they've identified the problem, and taken immediate action
  • I remember when UO was out people were using all kind of hacks such as the speed hack until they implemented server side checks.

    So using the speed hack for example, if some took a step the server would have to send an acknowledgement back to the client that the move was accepted. There was a small buffer to compensate for lag. This worked well except when you bumped into a dymanic object during high periods of lag in which case you would see yourself walk through the object only to get "bounced back" bec
  • Than they did in the Diablos and Starcraft. Recently they deleted around 500,000 starcraft accounts in two seporate waves.

    That said I think there is a lot greater risk hacking in WoW than in Starcraft. In SC if you hack and your key is banned, you can play on alternate servers. As far as I know there is no Alternate network to connect to for WoW.
  • Why oh why do we hear this time and time again. Whether it be auto-miners, bots or speed hacks?

    It wouldn't really be the case that the games designers are short sighted would it?

    It wouldn't really be the case that some people have almost zero real imagination?

    Just like the OSS movement, I would really love to see at least one game where we could contribute things which made the game better for all. In other words, better AI (please please) better anything. All it takes is to allocate a few worlds as a sa
  • I remember when ppl were doing speed hacks on Final Fantasy XI. It was so unfair to see them run by your charcter at 80MPH while you jog at a jumpy 5. It really tips the balance of the game. So I belive ban-mation is sutable punshiment. If you commit a crime, you must be punshed. In this case. They were speeding.

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