MOVED: New patch~!

[jryan]

i was wondering if the new patch coming out is going to delete all hacks and what exactly is it going to delete... and when is it coming out.. also ne other information about the patch would be great thanks
:blink: jryan

[Obi2Kenobi]

There are many other threads that will give you this information...
Hopefully it will delete hacks.

[BigGrim]

Well, isn't this a nice little piece of bait?

A question like this isn't suited for The Armory, since The Armory is for tactics and strategy. The only possible exception to that would be if you would have to change your gameplay strategy because you'd lose some of the hacks you rely on to play Diablo II, in which case you woulldn't be welcome here at the Lounge. If that does happen to be the case, I suggest you leave now before some of the others around here arrive at this thread.

If that isn't the case, I suggest you lurk for a while, look at the individual forum categories and peruse some of the active threads so you don't end up asking about something that has already been covered. That isn't taken too kindly around here. I'd suggest reading the forum guidelines, and watching out for your spelling and grammar. At the Lounge, the ability to communicate clearly is a must. Furthermore, please learn what an ellipsis is and how it should be applied.

Seriously, I really think the use of an ellipsis should be covered in the guidelines. It's starting to get irritating.

-Grim-

[kier]

"i cldnt care if e uses bad grammer, but i do care if e uses acks, witch he souns as if e duz"

translates too:-

"I couldn't care if he uses bad grammer/language, but I do care if he uses hacks, which he sounds as if he does" :P

Allthough I think you will agree the second version is an easier read, I am more concerned with his agreement of hacks. And as for your question, hopefully all hack accs AND accs will be deleted, this includes programs such as map hack, as that is not a program blizzard intended, allthough I doubt they will delete accs using this hack, more just make it imposible for this hack to work :blink:

[Occhidiangela]

Reduce the number of idiots on battle net.

What it has already not done by not being released, it seems, is reduce the number of idiots showing up at the Lounge. (Remembers Expansion Beta nightmare and shudders)

Since Blizzard has not released the patch, and the 'secret handshake' friends of the Lounge are not telling anyone any secrets on that score, your basic question is not answerable here.

But on the off chance that you are still reading, let's talk about Maphack, a client side script that Blizz' servers probably can't detect. If Blizz chose to change some of what their program does for display and item data, Maphack may be disabled for a while until mousepad can figure out a way to put it into his script.

So, if you are concerned about Maphack being 'defeated' by Blizzard, I would suggest to you that such is unlikely in the long term, although you may not be free of folks 'scanning' you for very long in public games, and you may not be able to scan folks with your copy of it on the first day that the patch is released.

Yes, just in case you are unclear on this point, I infer that you are part of the bnet lamer population from your posting style.

[Brista]

Actually I would have thought that detecting maphack would be possible, certainly in a patch if now

Equally I would have thought it possible (and perhaps more amusing) to lie to maphack

Sequence is:
Server loads map & monsters
Server changes msle's to be something innocuous
Players come on-screen
Server changes them back

Now wouldn't that be jolly good fun! :lol:

More seriously though they really can re-write a lot of the game during the patch including the mechanism that allows maphack to work. I would be disappointed if they couldn't solve this problem

Ultimately the real solution is beyond technical but legal. If Mousepad found himself in court for copyright violations and hacking that should help provide a legit playing experience.

[Bolty]

Post moved here from the Armory.

-Bolty

[Swarmalicious]

Is it me or is the lounge is getting kind of crowded lately?

To think, for the longest time I felt like my posts were imposing. Is it written on a bathroom wall somewhere that there's free beer & chicken at LL? :P

[protoshoggoth]

Is it written on a bathroom wall somewhere that there's free beer & chicken at LL

[cartman] Well I don't know about that, but I was told there would be punch and pie. [/cartman]


I may qualify as one of the recent members you refer to. But I did read the LL of old, albeit mostly as (of all things) a lurker. I was the maniac who posted about my experiments timing bow ROF with a laptop shortly after D2 first came out. :)

[Swarmalicious]

albeit


- yeah, but just comprehending the, ahem, 'complexity' of a word like 'albeit' excludes you from the beer & chicken crowd. ;)

[--Pete]

Hi,

Ultimately the real solution is beyond technical but legal. If Mousepad found himself in court for copyright violations and hacking that should help provide a legit playing experience.

First, he is not violating copyright. He is not using Buzzard's code. All he's doing is looking in his own computer's memory space.
Second, "hacking" isn't a crime. Even the bastardized usage of "hacking" that the ignorant media foisted on an ignorant population.
Third, he'd need to be found. If he's smart enough to write some memory munging code, he's probably more than smart enough to avoid detection. If anyone tried to track him down, odds are as good that they'd end up on your front door as anything.
Fourth, he'd need to be in a jurisdiction that gave a damn about games and Buzzard.
Fifth, he'd need to be brought before a judge that thought cheating in a "kid's game" even merited time in court.
And last, if he's a minor, there isn't much that could be done to him anyway. "Geez, I'm sorry judge. But it's not like I let loose a virus or anything. I was only playing around with the code and it didn't hurt anyone."

Legal solutions implemented in the USA for global technical problems (1) don't work and (2) are stupid.

We'll see. Buzzard's been hatching the 1.10 egg long enough for a total engine re-write. If they focused on the problems rather than adding more crap, then maybe. I've tried to avoid the hype, but from what I've seen so far, I don't have much hope for improvements, only for additions (and the accompanying additional problems).

But I'm still hoping.

--Pete

[CowInvader]

Posting as someone who would claim to know a little bit about the hacking community and how it all goes down I would say that as it exists in starcraft unless Blizzard moves the map server-side (as they have done with so many other things... gambling being the most notable example) then it will always be able to be retrieved by a version of the maphack. Also, as long as unit portraits or character models persay are still based on the equipment that you wear, much of the "item scanning" will still be able to occur (albeit a lot of the precision and full item viewing could be taken out of the whole exploit.) As for other hacks like item grabbers and chickening software, as long as you are communicating with battle.net they will be able to be built (likewise for the bots). The only way I can see around that kind of thing would be to blacklist the programs from running, which is very easily circumvented. So, will it fix hacks? It has the potential to destroy some of them and if Blizzard follows similiar patterns, all of the memory addresses within the hacks will need to be changed, so write a letter to your favorite hack maker and ask them not to update it :D

Anyways, bubye.

[Brista]

Legal solutions implemented in the USA for global technical problems (1) don't work and (2) are stupid.

OK, I expressed myself poorly

The real solution in my view is both technical and legal

The frustration here is that Blizzard's efforts have been solely technical

Now for fun profit and fame a lot of amateur hacks spring up. The game is very popular and the nature of closed BNet and the drop system mean that cheats and dupes will always have appeal to many players

The key to stopping this is deterrence

Purely technical measures do not deter once the cheating culture is entrenched - 131 000 accounts were locked in April with no noticeable effect on the culture

Legal measures would close down most of the websites that distribute cheats and sell dupes

Sure, if someone is determined to distribute them and as slick as you argue they might be, Pete, they can keep going

But if a 14-year old kid gets a court summons through the mail then the parents are going to have words. If a college gets a letter about the involvement of its machines in hacking then questions will be asked of the students

There are dotcoms out there profiting on the dupe economy. They could be shut down in one court application. And there is E-Bay which would probably simply stop the trade in dupes if asked to

Copyright violation, or at least Intellectual Property violation, is arguable. Could Mousepad distribute Maphack without mentioning Blizzard's trade-marked product? Has he not analyzed at their proprietary code to work out his shareware and based his offering upon it?

As for foreign jurisdictions Blizzard is an international company with offices abroad and is part of Vivendi. Besides even in non-US countries we have laws and we have lawyers. It's not that hard or expensive to serve an injunction on someone who doesn't fight it in court

So there are three choices I think for Blizzard

1) Give up. Invest less and less energy on technical fixes since the hackers can't be beaten
2) Muddle along as they are. A handful of dedicated people fixing hack after hack - surely not why they wanted to work at a games company?
3) Supplement their current policy of technical fixes with an active interest in pursuing people who distribute cheats, hacks and dupes

No particular reason why they should adopt 3) at this late stage but I'll certainly keep banging the drum :)

[HunkyDory]

Actually I would have thought that detecting maphack would be possible, certainly in a patch if now

Equally I would have thought it possible (and perhaps more amusing) to lie to maphack

Sequence is:
Server loads map & monsters
Server changes msle's to  be something innocuous
Players come on-screen
Server changes them back

Now wouldn't that be jolly good fun!  :lol:

More seriously though they really can re-write a lot of the game during the patch including the mechanism that allows maphack to work. I would be disappointed if they couldn't solve this problem

Ultimately the real solution is beyond technical but legal. If Mousepad found himself in court for copyright violations and hacking that should help provide a legit playing experience.

Actually detecting Maphack is the easiest thing in the World.

Ask yourself the question what does Maphack do?

Answer in black : it reveals the map

Solution in black : test if the map has been revealed if a player has not visited the area before

And yes, Isolde, I doubt you guys did not come to the same solution but you may use my patented Maphack detection method, I grant Blizzard a free eternal license.

And now I don't want to hear anything about that stupid hackers proggie again in my life.

Regards, Hunky

[Zath]

I don't think it's that simple, Hunky. In order to maintain game performance for people with slow connections, map layouts and monster locations are loaded on the client side as soon as players enter an area. Information regarding which parts of the map was actually explored is then stored locally and vulnerable to hacks. You can nullify maphack by keeping that information server side, but this could slow down server response considerably.

Instead of trying to nullify maphack by storing all information server side, what I believe to be a better solution is to continue pre-loading map layouts and monster locations client side, but maintain them in a form that is useless to a human player until the last moment. The D2 random map generator constructs a map by selecting a finite number of map elements and randomly piecing them together. The key here is that you can tell the client to continue loading these map elements and the monsters within, but stop short of telling it how to piece them together. A player can still peek into memory and see which map elements have been loaded, but this is not going to help him find his way from the Worldstone 2 waypoint to the Throne of Destruction. He can still see the stairs, the monsters, the shrines, and everything else on the map, but it will just be a huge jigsaw puzzle to him. This type of virtual encryption would be impossible to crack unless the random map generator and the map seeds are reversed engineered.

The game performance hit from this solution would be minimal too. Each time a player moves into a new map element, the server only has to send a very small packet to the client telling it which of the pre-loaded map elements are immediately next to that one. Maphack can still allow players to see a screen or two ahead, but it would be no where as useful as it is today.

[Occhidiangela]

The Spell Teleport sort of demands that the game be able to sort, piece together, and present those bits rather quickly when a tweaker Sorceress goes bouncing all over the place while looking for doors and waypoints and such.

I agree with quite a bit of what you say. Hunky also missed another important point.

The drop highlighting feature that people all claim is their favorite feature, and the scanning of other people's items. That bit is really the straw that, IMO, broke the camel's back and got me most irritated with maphack users.

I guess the upside is that fewer people asked me 'Pally, what sword' all the time.

My typical answer, when I gave one, would be

"A rune sword. Why do you ask?"

*snort*

With the scanner, it is not infrequent for a public player to tell me

"Hey, neat armor, I never thought about that set up" for the +91 life +30 Fire Res and +23 Lightning Res socketed Blue armor that I put on a sorceress. (thos are mods after a Ral and Ruby went into the sockets.)

More often, if anything I got: "You stuff suxors" but then, aint that what pubbies is all about for some players? Telling other folks that they suxors?

[Zath]

How about a one second spell timer for teleport then? That should be plenty of time to transmit and process a 3-5 byte packet that identifies which map elements lie ahead. Teleport may be a little too powerful as a travel spell right now since you can literally waltz pass monsters before they "wake up". I used to do Baal runs with my sorc all the time, and it's possible to finish one in under 3 minutes (really!) since you are basically immune to all attacks while zipping around with teleport.

[Ignatz]

"translates too:-
"I couldn't care if he uses bad grammer/language, but I do care if he uses hacks, which he sounds as if he does" "

That is to say:

"Translates to:

I couldn't care less that he uses bad grammar and language, but I do care that he not use hacks. It sounds as if he does."

Please do not bother correcting others unless you're absolutely certain that you, yourself are correct. It's not informative, it's not clever, and it's not funny.

Ignatz

Preventative flame gear: Yes, I'm doing exactly what I said not to do. Doing so provides support for my point, which is to reduce the incidence of grammar-fight silliness.

[kandrathe]

Ouch! Trying to read that black text made my eyes cross.

I think actually you could detect it due to the client sending a ton of reveal map packets as soon as the client enters a new area.

[kandrathe]

What Blizzard needs to do to defeat maphack is use a little more packet encryption with their own proprietary encryption algorithm. If they would then leave undiscovered map area's encrypted until the point of discovery, it would force any maphack program to "steal" Blizzard decryption code, and it is then a clear copyright violation.