07-18-2006, 02:59 AM
Quote:Also, your point that some cheaters are not complete scum is proven by the fact that you can still play public games on Diablo 1. I was recently told separately by a couple of different people that by exploiting the code skillfully enough, a player can modify your character as well as his own and the environment. The programs to do so are supposedly private, which is logical, because they could as easily be turned on the creator as anyone else.
That's absurd. Anyone competent enough to write the tool should be able to write the corresponding patch that blocks it. Most anti-crash / anti-corruption changes are pretty short, so it's not even a matter of not having enough code space in which to work.
With regard to Merlinios' remark about bogus duplicates in inventory: that's a Diablo bug. It sends notifications when you equip/unequip gear, but never updates other players' view of your inventory. Thus, scanners tend to report a duplicate if you equip an item which was in your inventory when the scanner user entered the game. As an interesting side effect, this can also be used in reverse to conceal an item from a scanner. By having the item equipped when the scanner user joins, then moving it to your inventory, it vanishes from the scanner's view entirely.
Given the OP's great emphasis on legitimate play, and Alamara's apparent pursuit of the same: where do you stand on corrective hacks? For instance, preventing duping is a tiny hack, yet it avoids cheating and is a convenience too (no more need to worry about converting something good into junk). What about fixing MS bug? Hacks to block remotely induced crashes? A code tweak to fix the PvP logic to ignore most autokill attempts? None of these make the game easier (and some of them make it harder), yet they all involve changing the flow of Diablo's code. Does that make them inherently wrong?