Those "uber 1337 haxxors" finally get the chop

[--Pete]

Hi,

I wondered why, after D2 had been out for years and is past its first flush of popularity, Buzzard found a conscience. Sort of reminds me of the measures that they suddenly discovered were necessary to clean up b.net channels (and, "incidentally", drove many D1 players away).

Since the (mythical?) 1.10 patch was going to give all the non-cheaters a "clean" place to play, why the big sudden need for these measures?

Yeah, one wonders.

--Pete

[davcol]

Two comments on the account closings:

I play an hour or so on USWest most nights. Last night I was able to find several games where people were actually playing.
I did several Diablo and Baal runs and even did the Ancients with complete strangers just for fun. In my experience it's hard to find
games where people want to play. Perhaps this was just great luck - or perhaps bnet has managed to improve the average player
ability with their actions.

I also got into a game with two 16 yr olds that I've been playing with for quite a while. I know they use maphack. They hadn't heard
about the accounts being closed. When I mentioned it they both decided to uninstall the hack. I hope we see more of this.

-davcol

[Count Duckula]

I wondered why, after D2 had been out for years and is past its first flush of popularity, Buzzard found a conscience. Sort of reminds me of the measures that they suddenly discovered were necessary to clean up b.net channels (and, "incidentally", drove many D1 players away).

This makes the 2nd big change that I missed. (I have an excuse this time, I was playing BG2.) I fired up D2 to make sure my accounts were still there. They are, with all their items. Like I would've cared if all my accounts vaporated. I agree with Walkiry--as long as the people who really deserved deletion and banning got hammered, I don't mind a light tap.

I found a LOT of whiners and complainers and arguers in pubby channels, no surprise there. But GeeFrazier could fart on the Battle.net forums and there'd be a bunch of people in pubby channels arguing about size, distance, velocity, stench factor, etc., so saying that people are whining and complaining and arguing in pubby channels is redundant.

Trading is much, much more safe. I popped into a few trading channels, and lo and behold, not an obvious hack in sight. Sure, there were some people selling their souls for them, but what could they purchase them with? The D2 economy just got a much needed shakeup. I'm still going to traffic more in crafted items when trading, but it's nice to know that the pair of Silkweaves I'm trading for won't disappear or cause me to lose my account.

Since the (mythical?) 1.10 patch was going to give all the non-cheaters a "clean" place to play, why the big sudden need for these measures?

I counted 20 item-selling sites on a casual Google search. 3 were shut down by their free hosting. (See what happens when you go against Geocities' ToS? :D) The rest of them have hiked prices, and 7 are closing down their stores because they don't want to lose their accounts. Item prices have nearly doubled on eBay, but nobody's buying. Betcha can't guess why. :D Methinks this is the real reason why Blizzard finally read their ToS and decided to follow it.

[Wapptor]

All that I'm hearing sounds very good, I cannot play on weekdays so I haven't been on lately, everything sounds great so far, now I can trade all that meph found stuff that I wasnt trading before!

-Wapptor

[Isolde]

Despite what has been said, some fully legit people really HAVE gotten their passwords changed by Blizzard, as one can see at the Basin.

They have some sort of request for restore process, but I have no idea what criteria they use for determining if the account used "cheats" or not.  Maybe they have none.

So the question is, is it worth banning 5 legits for 95 cheaters?  Another relevant point is that these "95"  cheaters are likely less than 2% of the total cheaters out there.

My interest was peaked when i first saw the complaints on the basin, and I investigated some of them. I wish I could say what criteria is being used for banning, but for now, keeping it a secret delays the time before a workaround is found. But the detection method has a false positive rate of about 0% (and I double checked vs. some of the complaints). Since I can't state the proof exactly, I'm not going to name anyone specifically. But some people I always thought were legit either aren't or they have someone playing with their account (and hacking) and they don't know it.


Personally I don't think it's worth banning 5 legits for 95 cheaters. And I'll admit mistakes do happen. But so far, it doesn't look like that's the ratio we're talking about here.

[Thecla]

Yes, this "Judgement Day" is absolutely a great thing for b.net and D2, and I wish they'd done it a lot sooner. D2 is pretty a old game now, so it's past saving or destroying, but this action can only help clean up the public cess-pits of b.net. I always felt that Bliz's big problem in D2 was that they refused to do this kind of thing for too long: there will always be bugs and exploits, even on a server side game, so this kind of action is the only way to maintain the integrity of the realms.

Reading the complaints on the b.net forums shows that Bliz seems to have done a pretty good job at targeting maphackers and bot-users, and I don't have one shred of sympathy for any of them (pretty much every complaint includes an admission that they did in fact use 3rd party progs, often followed by some of the more amazing self-rationalizations I've been priviledged to read, which just warms my heart).

I don't believe the ever obnoxious GF, however, when he claims that there were no mistakes -- with that many bans there are guaranteed to be mistakes, and who knows how many. Unfortunately, based on my experience with the PNF mess from January, I wouldn't expect a quick or accurate response from Bliz support to anyone whose account shouldn't have been closed. Also, Bliz has to take some responsibility for not fixing things like the drop/trigger hacks, even though those still don't justify anyone using a 3rd party prog as protection (any more than using god-mode in D1 was justified as protection from the cheating PKs there).

I also think there's a good reason why they're doing this now: what would be the point of releasing 1.10 if its clean economy was immediately flooded with botted items? (And going after the root problem instead of, say, trying to hide Pin better is the way to go.) I don't know if they'll delete existing hacks and dupes when 1.10 comes out (I hope so), or just concentrate on keeping the new ladder characters as clean as possible. At any rate, they've sent a clear message that people using 3rd party progs can and will be banned.

[FoxBat]

Some people have commented that lines on europe have disappeared. Their method may kill quite a large % of pindlebots, which makes the realm run alot smoother, and with less maintenence. So it's definitely lessening the load on servers by quite a bit, despite the relatively small numbers.

[Mavfin]

D2 may be an old game, but WC3 is not, and several thousand WC3 CD-keys were banned immediately, with no time-limit, if I understood correctly. So, maybe it's a signal that the times they are a-changin'. One can always hope, eh? That would serve the purpose of at least having the aim of a hack-free launch for Frozen Throne. Is it possible that some of the 1.10 modifications are in the client/server traffic for better hack detection, and maybe fewer holes to exploit, too?


Now to see if they're going to do something about Starcraft map hacking.....maybe that's what SC 1.10 is all about. Maybe the release is only a coincidence, too....

I guess we'll find out.

[Archon_Wing]

They should being cd-banning of D2 cheaters too.

There is always this fear that hackers will use their e-bay sales to purchase new Cd-kEys. However, I feel that is actualy only for the better. It will only give Blizzard more revenue to fight them with. The only fools are the greedy ones who try buying hacked items of E-bay. I have no pity for them.

So hackers and fools lose in the end. Good riddance. :)

[Bolty]

Talking with him recently on AIM, I realized that his accounts, his years of effort were gone, all his friends were quitting d2, many of my friends were quitting d2, and his will to play anymore was gone, and he like many others despised blizzard, they felt that they had ruined their game.  And quickly, while some were forcibly (banned) kicked off battle.net some of my other friends just quit because their friends were no longer there.

Good.

-Bolty
No Mercy

[Bolty]

And despite what those "fully legit" people say, more often than not, they do use maphack.

Yep.

"I'm fully legit. I don't cheat! I just use maphack. That's not cheating. Everybody does it." - typical "legit" B.netter

Excuse me while I laugh! Look, these accounts were banned. Almost everyone here complains constantly about cheaters on Battle.Net, and now when something is done about it they start sympathizing with the cheaters? Don't get me started. You know with me it's always been black-and-white: you cheat in a multiplayer environment, then **** you and the horse you rode in on for robbing me of the money I paid for my game. To me, there is no limit to the lengths I'd be rooting Blizzard to take to keep any and all cheaters the hell off of Battle.Net permanently.

Edit: I'm ticked off now so I'm going to add to this. Look, prevention of cheating in a multiplayer game is impossible. Anyone who knows programming will understand this. However, DETERRING cheating IS possible. The actions Blizzard have taken here to deter cheating are nothing short of tremendous. For the next few weeks at least, the environment on B.net will be in an improved state. People who actually like to legitimately trade will be able to do so. Those who relied on hacks to be able to play will be forced to learn the "real" way or LEAVE.

The ONLY complaint I could possibly have is "why wasn't this done earlier and more often," but we've been down that road before here. Financially, banning cheaters can have a negative impact and, as we're seeing, can tick off a lot of people. But, as I've stated, Blizzard doesn't always do it solely for the money.

Go Blizzard! Keep it up! Have the guts to kick the jerks out and stand up to the masses. At least I'm behind you.

-Bolty

[Baylan]

I must entirely and completely agree with Bolty in this case.

You cheat, you get cought, take your lumps and learn from your mistakes. You screwed with my game - now I'm happy Blizz is screwing with yours.

Way back when, before I played Diablo 2 I played Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors. Some months after the release of the game there was a hack which permitted you to see all of the opponents villagers, military, and buildings. It was extremely powerful because you could see what they were trying to pull and you could prevent it. The creators of the game, Ensemble Studios, patched the game immediately to prevent the hack from threatening the players of the game too much... Players rejoyced and continued to play! When Age of Mythology was released sometime later it was picked up as quickly as Age of Empires 2 by the lovers of Ensemble. Moral of the story - Fix your games and you'll be rewarded.

Way back when, after a stint with Diablo 2 I played EverQuest (or as it's known to many players, EverCrack). Its an amazing 3d world that was a blast. It was constantly patched, constantly monitored, constantly updated and fixed. People who were arseholes were punished - almost immediately. If you had a problem, the /petition command was there to contact a GM. I was spoiled, the chat was clean - the auctioning was kept in one area, there was a wealth of gameplay and unexplored area, and there were a lot of people just like me. Not only that, but there is an entire server that is dedicated to testing things. There is no support on that server, what happens happens, but it is made up of players who are willing to take the risk and see what happens so they can see the cool new stuff a week before anyone else. In EverQuest, if you do ONE thing that is considered abusive, say the equivilent of trapping a wp, you will be put on a list and possibly suspended for a period of time. Abusive language? Similar treatment. Stealing someone elses drop? The item will be returned to the rightful owner and you WILL be repremanded.

Even if the GM's couldn't do anything to fix something, if that player belonged to a guild (like almost all high level players did) the guild could be very hard on the player. There was a common netiquette, or eqiqueette as you might call it. The players were dedicated to making the world better, and that was what made is so enjoyable.

Blizzard has fumbled the football when it comes to fixing D2x... but it looks like they recovered, and they are gonna run it off of their own goalline in order to make everything right... Kudos Blizz. Kudos.

Baylan

[Roland]

If everyone was the same nice legit player, I wonder, would things get boring?

No. Plain and simple: no.

You got it backwards friend. Legitness doesn't become boring. Cheating does. Cheaters come and go, because when you're God, there's no challenge. When there's no challenge, there's no point. No fun. So you leave. Legit gamers stick around, oftentimes long after almost everyone else has disappeared.

Or, look at it this way: If legit gaming truly ever got old, this place wouldn't exist.

And to answer your original question: I feel no sympathy for anyone who got banned. Not now, not ever. They got what they deserved, and they have no right to complain. For every moment of their life that they lost because Blizzard killed their accounts, they robbed at least a hundred moments from a hundred other people. If they want to complain, they best be well-armed, because there's a lynching mob just waiting to hang 'em.

[FoxBat]

Well, the "I'm fully legit. I don't cheat! I only use Lag Reducer" argument sounds quite similar. The black and white only starts and stops where you set it. I'd also be curious to know when and how you decided that computer game cheating in multiplayer was bad. It wasn't something that I believed when I first logged onto D1 shareware, heck I was hardly even aware of it. Only the utter boredom of dupe usage convinced me otherwise. A lot of legits here were not exactly born so, it was something that was aquired.

I was curious whether some of the basin bannings are about a script a member developed that refreshes mules, but it seems to not always be the case. People who have been banned seemed to be really into magic finding though. One person uses a mac (for which no cheats even exist to my knowledge), but he's able to do pindle runs in about 30 seconds. Another person would do pindle and larzuk runs for 6 hours a sitting. Isolde is not at liberty to disclose his detection method, but it's not going to help my skepticism of "0%" any. Even things like improper client responses can sometimes be duplicated via glitches and flukes.

Cheating can't be completely stopped, but companies like ID are certainly doing a much better job at it. I think Blizzard would be better off looking into that before banning legits and robbing them of their money. Verant is not a company to emulate. But then there is precedent; rather than using an encryption algorithm on the war3 beta, Blizzard sues BnetD. It seems that they don't mind stepping on legitimate toes to make an example of miscreants.

According to Blizzard, I'm probably a pirate and a cheater, so you'll have to pardon me if I'm not too enthusastic about such a heavy-handed approach. I have no reason to believe that they will not turn on me next.

[Isolde]

The hack detection mechanism doesn't generate false positives. Even for people from the Amazon Basin. It isn't based on usage patterns, behavior, or anything else that could trigger if you aren't using some sort of hack. And it's not illegal or an invasion of privacy (unless you think that detecting someone who's cheating is an invasion of privacy) either for those of who tend to think along those lines.

I looked up the reason why one of the people from the Basin had their account taken away. We recorded over 70 incidences of using a specific and particularly egregious hack on that account over a period of weeks. One incidence could be a bad bit somewhere, not this.

I was pretty disappointed. Honestly, I'd rather it have been a mistake. Then we could restore their account and they wouldn't be posting and generating bad PR. Not to mention that I'd always believed in the people at the AB. And that I'm just generally pretty soft hearted.

Of course, it's still possible that someone hacked their account and used it for cheating. But the chance of that's pretty slim... And if that's the case, they probably don't want their account back anyway.

[Mavfin]

Foxbat, this thread is not about BnetD. This thread is about Blizzard closing down hackers, inclucing maphackers, on B.net playing D2/X. If you can't get over the sour grapes on that issue, please don't bring it here to contaminate this thread.

I applaud Blizzard for this action. Sure, they may have only closed 1% of the accounts, but, it's a very strong signal to the cheaters that they're not welcome, and Blizzard will take away their toys. Cheaters, **** off.

--Mav

[Bolty]

According to Blizzard, I'm probably a pirate and a cheater, so you'll have to pardon me if I'm not too enthusastic about such a heavy-handed approach.

Well, you and I have never agreed about how to handle cheaters. I learned to abhor them by playing Diablo, where the average user is almost completely unprotected from cheaters, except in town (after townkill was patched out). Of course, for years now cheaters can simply crash your Diablo client. So if you're wondering where I got my hatred, it was there.

And you know that 5 years ago or so I went on a PK rampage after a Diablo patch, killing cheaters who were clueless without their cheats. I remember fondly whacking a level 46 warrior with a level 32 naked mage of mine. I went down into the dungeons, saw the warrior casting fireball at a fire immune monster, put 2 and 2 together quickly, and executed him on the spot. I took his items and trashed them in another game.

That's about the only time I've ever PKed people (about a 4 hour session the first night of a patch, all cheaters - pretty easy to spot when doing stupid things like the above example). But it sums up my attitude towards cheaters. Screw them. Once someone cheats, they aren't even playing in my opinion, and the rules of fair play go out the window.

But I suppose we can agree to disagree. I doubt we'll be able to convince each other to adopt the opposite's opinion. B)

BTW, regarding the Basiners, do you really, truly believe ALL the major posters there were legit? There's no way 100% of the posting population ANYWHERE (including here) would be legit. So if you're a major, respected poster of a forum/guild community where you can't hide your account banning by pretending you've stopped playing and your account gets banned, you have two options:

• Defend your "legitness" like crazy, denounce Blizzard, insist they made a mistake forever, never let up, in order to defend your honor, and just generally wig out
  <>
  
• Admit you are a cheater and get run out of the community<>
  [st]
  Gee, what do you think they'd do? And I think Isolde is proving a case here. He has the taste not to name names (and thus start a real fight). But he has no reason to lie. He'd like to prove that some of these people are really legit. But they are not.
  
  I can imagine this will cause a real rift in the community there. Members who post here and are banned will probably never reveal that; they'd know I'd ban them instantly.
  
  -Bolty

[CelticHound]

No, no, no! The only absolute, black & white definition of cheating is mine! :o

Well, the "I'm fully legit.&nbsp; I don't cheat!&nbsp; I only use Lag Reducer" argument sounds quite similar.

I think that exploiting the rogue lightning hose bug is cheating. And thus anyone who has publicly posted about doing so must be a cheater. (Hi Bolty :P )

And if they say they were just testing, well then they must be cheaters in denial!

No mercy! Ban them from b.net!

Was it cheaters that drove me to only play in private games? Not as such - it was PKs and other grief players. (Not that I think cheaters and grief players are independent groups.) And once out of the pubbies, the cheaters only bothered me to the extent that they lag-attacked the servers to dupe or caused long queues to create games. Iths? White items? Both were non-existant as far as I was concerned. It seems to me that hearing people talk about them in chat just provided a useful screen for people I wanted to avoid.

Surprises me now, but I'm starting to wonder if the botted items didn't help to make up for a screwed up drop system and insane gambling odds.

It weird, but maybe b.net has demonstrated to me how trade creates wealth.

-- CH
(As far as I can tell I haven't been directly affected by the banning. But I'm a touch ticked at the moment - the HC paladin I'd put a lot of time into is now a ghost because my D2 client crashed with an 0xc0000005 exception.)

[Thecla]

I looked up the reason why one of the people from the Basin had their account taken away. We recorded over 70 incidences of using a specific and particularly egregious hack on that account over a period of weeks. One incidence could be a bad bit somewhere, not this.

Just curious, Isolde, does this mean you work for Bliz?

I have to say that the PNF problem (where I lost a character, eventually restored 2 months later) made me more skeptical about Bliz's ability to manage this type of thing without hitting legit players too. Bliz never explained what happened there, and it did seem that many PNF characters were almost randomly affected. On the other hand, the vast majority of recent posts do suggest that at least nearly all of the recent account closures for mh/bot use were fully justified.

[FoxBat]

I'm not sure if you're aware or recall, but Lag Reduction/D2Accelerator can be considered a hack. That is the sense in which I would be considered a "cheater." I had wondered if part of the confusion is whether Basiners may have been using what we might consider "harmless" hacks that behave similarly enough to "harmful" ones, thus the relevance of that. That's a part of why cheating is hardly black and white to me. Not that I really condone botting either, but I prefer to put some thought into making such decisions. Thus much of the post has nothing to do with BnetD, nor did I think anyone would care enough to respond to that portion. You can remove that sentence and the post is mostly intact.

However, I don't know enough whether to trust Isolde's 'no false positive' method, because programmers and systems do make mistakes, or to trust that said long-standing Basiners aren't cheating. Since Blizzard has called Bnetd "pirates" in the past, it raises a caution flag to me as to whether one can blindly accept that everyone they nailed really are cheaters as they claim. If we can't bring previous behavior into a judgement as to the trustworthiness of a source, I'm not sure how we can judge such a thing.

Anyway, the BnetD thing is not intimately related with this one, there's only a loose connection. I think it's there, though maybe not that strongly and not something that needs to be argued at length here.

However, It's hardly a "contamination" as I see it, it is hardly the length and passion that have been seen in countless lurker rants before, it is far less off topic than is commonly done on many threads here, and it was rather unlikely to generate a long discussion. I don't see how such an 'ad hominum' can be fairly justified. Leave the BnetD part alone if you like because it's not that important, or lay out why you think my relation among the two is false, but I don't think you can rationally dismiss the post like that.