As Quark noted, your average cheating 'tard is little more than a fool with a tool (Trainer).
Hackers are a different creature entirely.
Quote:...he hits me once with his staff and I die instantly. I send a message to my teammates to come resurrect me so I can beat this guy down and he takes them down as they enter my dlvl then he says "You like my work? then go to diabloslair.com" then my game crashes.
Cheaters have very many lame "tricks" up their sleeve. Luckily,
all of them can only do the same sort of things.
1) Autokill: Cast a spell and instantly kill someone. Most versions of this count as Player-Kills-Player, which results in only the dropping of an ear and some gold. On occasion I've heard of a version which causes a player to drop his items, but the vast majority don't have this.
2) Litter: Some cheaters think it's funny to drop cheated gear all over the screen. (Alternatively, sometimes they'll keep buying junk from Griswold and throw it down.) Mostly just a nuisance.
3) "Townkill": If you get, "(Player) has just cast an illegal spell" message, the player in question has just cast a spell in town that cannot normally be cast there. In the current patch, this is completely harmless to you -- it just spams up the screen as they teleport about town.
4) Duplication: Due to a game bug, *any* player can duplicate items. You can spot deliberate duplication by a player dropping an item and walking back and forth between it and some non-descript game tile, occasionally picking up the item and dropping it again.
Usually referred to as "auto-dupe," trainer-assisted duplication requires no such pacing. So you can't tell that they're doing it.
If two duplicate items are dropped on the ground at the same time, the game deletes one of them and generates a "Duplicate item detected. Destroying duplicate..." message. Sometimes you'll get this message right when you enter a game. This is fairly common and does
not indicate duping. Rather, the message was tiggered by a player dropping an item while you were entering.
Commonly duplicated items:
King's Sword of Haste -- usually Bastard, usually indestructible
Godly Full Plate of the Whale -- impossible to get
Prefixed Rings of the Zodiac -- Obsidian, Drake's, and Dragon's are most common
Stormshield -- Stink shield for a warrior, but cheaters love it
Dreamflange, Thinking Cap, Naj Light Plate -- Typical mage gear
Arch-Angel's Staff of Apocalypse -- Any charge value over 12 is cheated. Cheated version is often an indestructible War Staff.
Merciless Bow of (Suffix) -- For their Rogues...
There is no byte value that records whether an item has ever been duplicated. Therefore, your best bet is to
Trust No One™.
5) Import/Export: Trainers allow cheaters to view the contents of any player's backpack. They can then "export" these items to a file and "import" them, creating a duplicate or just more storage space. Because your character files are stored on
your harddrive, they cannot alter them. They can't strip your character of his gear and experience points.
6) Theft: Don't even need a trainer for this. Item theft is quite common. Often players will ask to "see your gear" just so they can steal it. Sometimes they'll beg for your gear ceaselessly, even reassuring you that they'll duplicate it and give it back. There's no point risking it, and helping them cheat doesn't help anyone.
7) Game Crashing: They can do this, too. They seem to get a huge kick out of it for some reason.
8) Godmode: Many of these types seem to like dueling. Dumbasses.
9) Character Alteration: Trainers can modify level, stats, mana, and life. Character class, too, if I'm not mistaken, but I don't think I've ever seen this in-game. Two of these are most obvious.
Level: If they entered the game at one clvl and suddenly they're
not...
Life: This is the easiest give-away. Max life for W/R/S is 796/681/618 respectively. Keep in mind these are values for clvl 49's (50 doesn't get a +Hp bonus for leveling) with max vitality, no Black Death hits, and
junk equipment (all of which adds to HPs). Any values near these are either cheaters or some weirdo who has an affinity for junk equipment. (
*fondly recalls his mage with 603 HPs*) Any values above these are illegitimate.
Also common are cheaters who use GPoWhale. Dressed in plate, they usually have ~100 HPs more than a normal character would have at that clvl.
10) False Items: And sometimes the cheaters just make things up. Only two unique items exist on two different base types. Gnarled Root as a Club and Spiked Club and Stormshield as a Gothic and Tower Shield. If you know your uniques, and you know their bases, you can spot cheated uniques a mile away. Dreamflange? That's a mace. Thinking Cap? That's a 1/1 durability Skull Cap (durability can be "Hidden"ed up by shrines, though). Demonspike Coat? You've found that. It's Full Plate Mail.
Quest items from SP and Lightforge cannot drop at all.
On the non-unique end of the spectrum, sometimes cheaters make (unstable) enchantments of their own. "Diablo's" items are a common example.
When it comes to durability, cheaters greatly favor Indestructible. As such, it can be an easy way to tell if someone's cheating. In D1, an item can only be indestructible by three possible means.
-It's "of the Ages"
-It's a unique item which lists "Indestructible" in its affix list (see Demonspike Coat)
-The player spent a horrendous amount of time shrine hunting for Hidden Shrines and managed to push the durability up to 255
exactly.
Quote:So what I am asking you guys is are there ways to detect people like this as they enter my game?
Nothing I'd recommend.
[o: *LEMMING* :o]
