Radar

[HappyG]

What if Mythic introduced Radar as a legitimate part of the game, that every player had and could use? Would this be a good idea, even though it would solve the radar issue once and for all?

SWG had that, and IMO it ruined an important aspect of PvP - element of surprise.

[Psychiatrist]

Requiel, feels good that you're actually working on it. Sometimes feels like nothing is done... perhaps because you don't see "I quit because I'm banned", but instead "I quit because I got rl".

I don't know. Hoping they get caught eventually :/

[Nejtun]

Requiel, feels good that you're actually working on it. Sometimes feels like nothing is done... perhaps because you don't see "I quit because I'm banned", but instead "I quit because I got rl".

I don't know. Hoping they get caught eventually :/

check the link , i am only on page 17 of the post . This guy was obviously banned properly ( GM reply is quite early on and tbh , you can stop reading after that unless you want to see the cheater stuff himself up more and more :D), so it does happen , just right now it if you see it and hopefully the game gets a bit cleaner

[Ethild]

Damn this rep system. It allows people to disagree with your post without giving the reason why. My original post was correct, if a little brief.

Cheating happens when the client knows too much - this info will always be used by certain players to gain advantages over others. For example, the client teleports and such when it lags - you can still move your character even when your server-side position isn't updated. This means the client can tell the server where it is - hence all the people using speedhacks.
When will we see a change for the better? As long as you let people cheat, they will cheat. You let them by giving them the possibility to do so.

It works this way because it needs to. You basically have 2 main choices as far as movement is concerned in this scenario of game development.

* You can either have the client constantly inform the server where it is, and what speed/direction its travelling in (as is now).
* Or you can have the server validate everything before the move is acted on, and then have the client process the move.

The later is how spells work, but not how movement is done. To allow the user to feel 'in' the game, movement must be acknowledge by the client in real time. Having it validated first not only creates a delay (making the game feel unplayable), but also means you regularly hit the situation of overmovement/undermovement as your movement orders always have a delay, it feels like playing in cement.

When will we see a change for the better? As long as you let people cheat, they will cheat. You let them by giving them the possibility to do so.

They are not deliberately trying to 'let' them cheat. In fact they have taken several steps against it, although I will admit the steps were slow in coming. Traffic was initially sent using a very weak "home grown" symmetric encryption routine which was broken fairly fast. The algorithm was changed every couple of patches to annoy "program authors" but it was literally a week or so before it was re-calculated. Finally Mythic cottoned on (around 1.67ish? -- note thats 2 years after release!) and added a simple RSA style key exchange to then be used for symmetric encryption (effectively stopping passive viewing of data).

Now keys for reading net traffic have to pulled from the machine running DAoC itself so its no longer passive, but that doesn't mean its not impossible to cheat by any means.

If you look at the change from always symmetric to an initial RSA secret exchange, "3rd party tools" were unavailable for a couple of weeks at best. It was broken fairly fast. The battle of Game Author vs Program Author is never going to be won so long as there are determined authors out there willing to give up their time to develop such tools. Its one author, thousands of players.

I really do think they could spend their time more productively. There are many bugs that still need fixing, and classes and abilities that still need balancing. These have far greater an effect on my daily gameplay enjoyment than a small minority of users who think RPs means a bigger penis in real life, and so need to cheat to get it.

PS: If you disagree please feel free, but I would love some feedback this time instead of a random red box.

[Rami]

Damn this rep system. It allows people to disagree with your post without giving the reason why. My original post was correct, if a little brief.



It works this way because it needs to. You basically have 2 main choices as far as movement is concerned in this scenario of game development.

* You can either have the client constantly inform the server where it is, and what speed/direction its travelling in (as is now).
* Or you can have the server validate everything before the move is acted on, and then have the client process the move.

The later is how spells work, but not how movement is done. To allow the user to feel 'in' the game, movement must be acknowledge by the client in real time. Having it validated first not only creates a delay (making the game feel unplayable), but also means you regularly hit the situation of overmovement/undermovement as your movement orders always have a delay, it feels like playing in cement.



They are not deliberately trying to 'let' them cheat. In fact they have taken several steps against it, although I will admit the steps were slow in coming. Traffic was initially sent using a very weak "home grown" symmetric encryption routine which was broken fairly fast. The algorithm was changed every couple of patches to annoy "program authors" but it was literally a week or so before it was re-calculated. Finally Mythic cottoned on (around 1.67ish? -- note thats 2 years after release!) and added a simple RSA style key exchange to then be used for symmetric encryption (effectively stopping passive viewing of data).

Now keys for reading net traffic have to pulled from the machine running DAoC itself so its no longer passive, but that doesn't mean its not impossible to cheat by any means.

If you look at the change from always symmetric to an initial RSA secret exchange, "3rd party tools" were unavailable for a couple of weeks at best. It was broken fairly fast. The battle of Game Author vs Program Author is never going to be won so long as there are determined authors out there willing to give up their time to develop such tools. Its one author, thousands of players.

I really do think they could spend their time more productively. There are many bugs that still need fixing, and classes and abilities that still need balancing. These have far greater an effect on my daily gameplay enjoyment than a small minority of users who think RPs means a bigger penis in real life, and so need to cheat to get it.

PS: If you disagree please feel free, but I would love some feedback this time instead of a random red box.

RED BOX RED BOX xD

[Jupiler]

interesting ethilds, please go on if you find the time

[HappyG]

* You can either have the client constantly inform the server where it is, and what speed/direction its travelling in (as is now).
* Or you can have the server validate everything before the move is acted on, and then have the client process the move.

The later is how spells work, but not how movement is done. To allow the user to feel 'in' the game, movement must be acknowledge by the client in real time. Having it validated first not only creates a delay (making the game feel unplayable), but also means you regularly hit the situation of overmovement/undermovement as your movement orders always have a delay, it feels like playing in cement.

In case I described above, my target was "to far away to attack", although it was close enough on my client. Therefore (and because of the fact client always maintain melee range if you use /stick) I assume, that message was sent directly from the server. That leads to the fact, that from my point of view distance between me and player was calculated and range checked on server, not my client. At the same time, my target was attacking me in melee
with no probs, so either his range check was done on his client, or server fucked it up. In both cases it seems strange to me, because I dont see nor client, nor server check, but some fucked up mixture of both.

And about speed checkes... with normal ping, server could easily calculate how far is player able to move in a given time period, and order the client to move back it would exceed that. With a few % of tolerance to accomodate the lag, this shuld work just fine.

[Xest]

Having it validated first not only creates a delay (making the game feel unplayable), but also means you regularly hit the situation of overmovement/undermovement as your movement orders always have a delay, it feels like playing in cement.

That's not entirely true anymore, modern affordable server hardware can certainly handle convincing real-time validation now, that said however DAoC is 4 years old now so it's probably more down to the fact that this type of code is just entrenched to deep in the server service by now to be able to make such a drastic code change that would probably break a lot of other stuff in the process. Also, the last year or has seen a massive amount of time put into advancing grid computing technology (probably mostly because high speed networking hardware - 1gbps+ has become very very cheap), this means MMOG games are going to get even bigger, better and more beleivable than ever before, in a few years you should be able to say goodbye to the dull monsters in games like DAoC/WoW and so on that simply attack if you get close and just hit you with the odd spell and start seeing creatures that think a little more like those in games like Half-Life, all whilst retaining much more server-side processing than you've seen in the past to help prevent cheating. Some recent grid projects involve IBM porting Quake II onto their new grid tech. making MMOG Quake II and Googles announcement that they're teaming up with NASA to build a massive new site that will house a lot of NASAs resources such as research info and images from the surface of planets like mars to pictures of deep space solar systems - most of which will be made publicly available and easily searchable in good old Google fashion

Wait until some of the newer MMOGs come out and they'll be a lot less prone to cheating because of this, perhaps the latest gen. MMOGs like guild wars already do this but I haven't played them so couldn't say. As for DAoC, I'd wager a bet that the mostly manual anti-cheat methods that are in now aren't really going to improve

[Cryn]

Nice to know about the watch list and the active pursual of suspected cheats. It's much needed I think.

Never really understood cheating though. Surely if you win, the fact you know you cheated makes it feel like you didn't?

[Lothandar]

There's perfect examples of where good serverside programming does not cause lag. Lots of people use that as an excuse. Just optimize everything much better, this game could get a lot better at optimizing things.

This is not an excuse, every fps coming out lately uses the client side prediction system because it is a lot smoother. Thus the wast amounts of speedhacks for all of them.


I rather cope with that than go back to the wait 200 ms until the server receives your message that you've shot your gun.

Oror, wait 350 ms (yes I got this kind of ping towards the daoc servers) until the server realised I pressed a movement key. No thanks.

It seems you don't grasp the meaning of what I said. Serverside programming?


You do know that daoc uses both, do you? For performing player actions is done on the server, and look at the delay. I got a noticable delay between pressing my keys and the game reacting.

Addon: I really hope Xest is right and it will be possible to move more things to the server, leaving the client with the smallest amount of information possible.


BUT, until they are able to do this without me lagging my ass off, I don't want any of it. I don't even care about radar users, it's like cheaters in cs "part of the deal". The difference is vast though. A smart aimboter can still make your day a sucky piece of shit, but to return to our game, mmorpgs, a smart radar user will certainly not ruin your day. A dumb one might, but he will get banned losing a lot of invested time, quite fast, so dumb radar users are quite rare.