Those "uber 1337 haxxors" finally get the chop

[Roland]

...I'd agree with you.

(OTOH, I also think it's a sensible business move for the company to make while gearing up to release a MMORPG.)

But not Isolde. ;) He's not an ass-kisser. Just a good guy. :)

[Roland]

They put off what they can while they can.

In other words, if it can wait for the patch, it will wait for the patch. Whether this is a good practice or a bad one... *shrugs* Not my call. But it's what they do, for better or worse. It does create tension between the company and its consumers, no doubt about that. But, at the same time, it allows for them to get alot more done at once, instead of a string of minor things rapidly.

As much as I hate the wait time, I would rather have one BIG patch than ten little patches. But, that's me. I have faith that 1.10 will come out. Whether I like it or not, however, remains to be seen. ;)

It's just like in the Frozen Throne Beta: people complain about the broken elements of the game, screaming over and over "Why aren't they fixed yet? Release a patch to fix them NOW!" And you know what Blizzard does (aside from ignore these idiots)? They DON'T release a patch to fix the most broken element immediately. They wait a couple days, or a week, or two weeks. And then you know what they do? The release a patch that fixes every BIG broken thing that there ever was, as well as a ton of little things you never even noticed, AND adds in a whole slew of new stuff that just adds to the overall game. Now, frankly, I'm MUCH more in favor of THAT style than a "let's patch every single issue as it comes" style, even if it means waiting 6 months. ;) Besides, it's much more cost effective that way. ;)

[CelticHound]

(replying to Roland)

Argh! Bad communication skills strike again!

I just added on to my post above to clear things up. Better?

-- CH

[True Seeker]

They put off what they can while they can.

In other words, if it can wait for the patch, it will wait for the patch. Whether this is a good practice or a bad one... *shrugs* Not my call. But it's what they do, for better or worse. It does create tension between the company and its consumers, no doubt about that. But, at the same time, it allows for them to get alot more done at once, instead of a string of minor things rapidly.

As much as I hate the wait time, I would rather have one BIG patch than ten little patches. But, that's me. I have faith that 1.10 will come out. Whether I like it or not, however, remains to be seen. ;)

It's just like in the Frozen Throne Beta: people complain about the broken elements of the game, screaming over and over "Why aren't they fixed yet? Release a patch to fix them NOW!" And you know what Blizzard does (aside from ignore these idiots)? They DON'T release a patch to fix the most broken element immediately. They wait a couple days, or a week, or two weeks. And then you know what they do? The release a patch that fixes every BIG broken thing that there ever was, as well as a ton of little things you never even noticed, AND adds in a whole slew of new stuff that just adds to the overall game. Now, frankly, I'm MUCH more in favor of THAT style than a "let's patch every single issue as it comes" style, even if it means waiting 6 months. ;) Besides, it's much more cost effective that way. ;)

You have much more faith left that I. But I would so love to be proven wrong here...

[Roland]

Although I didn't quite see what you really meant (obvious, but it still slipped by me somehow). 'Twas more a comment on the general response I've seen (both here, and other boards) whenever a Blizzard employee pops up. You know, the "Oh, the only reason they're here is to kiss our ass so we buy their stuff and stop trashing them" kinda deal. I've been seeing it alot since I started beta testing, although it was still common enough beforehand.

Whenever someone important shows up, a group of people will always attribute it to them trying to be all cushy-cushy so they can boost sales a bit. Just the way of the world, unfortunately. So sad when a person's honest efforts to keep ties to a community get jaded and trashed because of some doofus with his cynical head up his arse.

But, of course, YOU'RE not one of those people. ;) And I knew that. :D

[Grumpy]

I don't consier B-net free. I bought the game to play on line. That was my fee.

[FenrisWulf]

@Grumpy:

Originally posted by Grumpy
I don't consier B-net free. I bought the game to play on line. That was my fee.

Distinction noted. My point was, however, that you're already not spending any additional money past your initial investment while you play on BNet. This was actually a subpoint. My major point is that I thought your judgement of Blizzard was unjustified, and that their level of service has been spectacular considering the minimal amount of monetary support that we need to provide in order to use BNet, and the age of the game in question. Hacks inevitably spring up, and they are patched as quickly as possible by Blizzard. DupeScan was implemented to deal with duplicated items, though methods have been discovered that circumvent detection (but at least they were trying :P). ChestHack accounts were banned, on the order of 20k. To me, the recent hack retaliation is not a case of "too little too late"; it is rather a further instance of the continued and continual service that Blizzard is not technically obligated to provide.

[ShadowHM]

I don't consier B-net free.  I bought the game to play on line.  That was my fee.

And that fee cost just about the price of a case of beer.

I rather suspect that you got a longer entertainment value out of the game than you did from the box of beer.

So you had higher expectations? You want more?

So do my kids......from everything.

I am tired of seeing continual bashing go on. I still enjoy this game. I don't give a damn about how many cheaters there are or what they have done. Count the blessings instead of the sins.

If'n you want more, go pay to play something that delivers more. Or go buy a box of beer. :rolleyes:

And now that I have that out of my system.........

Great day to ya!

[CelticHound]

Roland here and Bolty in the hack site thread! :o

Geez! B)

More seriously, though, my general world view is that individual people can be okay, but corpporations... well... they are just corporations. When you get a situation where a group of people have come together and can be thought of as forming a common entity - and this applies not just to corporations but to any social unit - it's really, really easy for that group to have no collective conscience. Perhaps this is a discussion topic for another day, but it shows why I have no problem simultaneously believing that Isolde is here for "noble" purposes, while Blizzard's realm clean-up is an entirely selfish action.

-- CH

(edit: minor edit)
(edit2: fix fresh new typo... better stop while I'm behind)

[CelticHound]

Blizzard chose to advertise free internet play as one of the features of the game. They could have also chosen to advertise "free internet play for one year". (Or even "free internet play for the length of time it takes you to drink a case of beer". :) )

To be anal about it, I dug out my D2 box. On the front of the box it says "Compete Free Over the Internet *". The fine print inside the front flap says "* Free access to Battle.net reuires access to the Internet and acceptance of the Battle.net Terms of Use Agreement, Player is responsible for all applicable Internet fees."

A local pizza place has a twist on the two-for-the-price-of-one deal: Buy a pizza this week, get one for free next week. Now, if next week I call in and they tell me, "well, we decided it wasn't economical" and either give me no pizza or perhaps offer half a pizza, what am I going to think?

-- CH
(Who is owed a free pizza. It's a pity my usual order seems so mind warping it causes people to run screaming into the darkness. I still don't understand what's so difficult about pepperoni with extra sauce, though.)

[ShadowHM]

You missed my point. I will try to be clearer. Please take this to be a generic 'You'.

You bought a game. You played it. You played it over the internet, for free, as advertised.

It transpires that there are *gasp* people who cheat. You get irate about it and stomp and whine and have a snit-fit. Over and over and over again.

All over an investment of about the price of a box of beer. <_<

Now if this were over a condominium in your equivalent of Park Place where you found the neighbours were breaking the condo rules by breeding rats, maybe you could get a little sympathy from me. After all.......that is no small investment and you have to live there.

But this is a game. It does have bugs in it. Folks here even know what they are. But it is still completely possible to enjoy the game. Heck, you can still 'compete free over the internet'.

MY box doesn't say "You can freely trade items with anyone you meet in a game." Nor does it assure me that there will be no cheaters.

So, again, to all the whiners ... Write off the damn box of tainted beer. Go ahead and stop buying that brand. Life is not fair. Get over it.

I'm not perfect. None of my friends are perfect. This game is not perfect. If you require perfection in everything, you will have a lousy life.

And now, my rant is done. :D

[CelticHound]

It transpires that there are *gasp* people who cheat.&nbsp;&nbsp; You get irate about it and stomp and whine and have a snit-fit.&nbsp;&nbsp; Over and over and over again.

I guess I missed your point because I don't disagree with it. :P

(As I'd said earlier, cheaters haven't had much effect on me. Also, I'll agree that I have gotten my money's worth out of D2... if I don't count buying a whole new comp to run it... and a second comp and extra copies of game and exp... and a broadband internet connection to play on b.net :o )

I was just reacting to the counter-whine of "but they are providing a free service". Like I said, offering that was a choice Blizzard made as a business.

-- CH

[Roderigo]

Battlenet is a free service. The United States is the 'greatest country' in the world.

If we decided to save on the cost of prisons, and simply execute everyone ever arrested, would you be happy or fearful?

If you weren't personally falsely accused of something, or had a close friend you know 'killed', then you'd be happy, you'd probably be telling everyone that this is great, we're finally getting rid of the criminals. You would probably tell everyone who complained, "Don't worry, this is the greatest country in the world, those criminals deserved what they got"

And you'd be right - except for the very small minority who were falsely accused and had no chance of defending themselves.

To all of those legitimate players who think their accounts will be there tomorrow:

What's easier:

-> Banning the top 1-5% most active accounts eating up expensive bandwidth

-> Asking player's permission to scan their memory to verify that 'no hacks that modify the game' are being run. Then banning or preventing 100% of those attempting 3rd party modification programs and making absolutely no mistakes.

Which option would free up more battlenet resources?

Which option do you think the majority of legitimate players prefer?

Just a clarification, if your account was banned for 'hacks' by Blizzard, you have NO appeal. As they said, they made no mistakes and if it was Blizzard who made the ban/account pswd change, they will never correct it.

If you just happen to have a password problem at the same time, totally unrelated to the account banning, those are the only cases they will listen to.

> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.

In other words "Shut up all you complainers, we could have done an effective, through job to ban hackers, botters, and fix the realms, but we'd rather just get rid of those who use up too many of our resources instead, bot users or not."

> People who left will come back, and people will stop screaming about it

Only problem with this is - they will come back only to get unfairly banned again.

Think about it - if they were legitimate players to begin with, and set up enough false positives to get banned in the first place, do you think they will change how they play the game?

The real hackers/botters will come back of course, they know what they did wrong, and will stop doing it. Only the people who were banned unfairly are still scratching their heads and asking why... and still getting no response other then to 'shut up'


Let's take for a second the assumption that Blizzard's programmers setup reports to log player activities, and searched those logs for events that looked like botting, ie hundreds of games created in a short period of time.

Then they deleted every single account created under the same CD-Key.

-> Some kid opened up a Diablo II case at his local store, wrote down the key, botted, and got all of his AND your accounts banned.

Response: Blizzard says that one of the accounts created under the same cdkey was botting, they have 'proof' - therefore you're lying.

-> You purchase the game from Ebay, from a friend, similar to the case above, and someone else has your CD-key.

'Ditto, account banned, they have proof, you're lying, no appeal.

-> (my particular case) - You are trying to do millions of cow games to prepare for the next patch, you and your brother are doing 3 minute cow runs for 3-4 hours a night, over the last month or two, getting a account of '90 characters. Heavy usage + frequent lag/connection interrupted/realm downs/'create button faded' gets you banned.

What is the evidence for banning? Their reports showing you using/abusing their service. I'm sure that if they didn't have a report on you, your account would be restored, but if report was triggered due to similar behavior you took that made you look like a bot, then they will not 'under any circumstance' restore your account because their report is right and you are wrong.

-> Blizzard is forbidden to scan your computer for 3rd party hacks.

Bots simulate player behavior, if player behavior is close enough to how a bot operates, how are they going to tell the difference? Instead, why not simply ask people's permission to 'detect' known hacks or bots running in memory, and simply ban 100% of those who use them and leave the legitimate users alone?

If they can't scan for the exact signature of a bot program, then they are looking at bot-like behavior. And if your play on Diablo makes you look like a bot, why is it hard to conceive that you could get banned?

-> Blizzard's programming techniques are not flawless.

There are many people on my friends list today that are still botting - it's obvious, they've set their away to a generic message, and simply spam you with 'Player30412' 'Player30413' games over and over again, even late at night.

If there -was- a clear and easy method for detecting all botters, why didn't it catch all of them? And vis versa, why is it so hard to assume it 'caught' some people incorrectly?

-> Why will Blizzard not specify at least vaguely 'why' your account was banned?

This is a new pattern, in the past they've announced that 'X number of users were banned from using Chest Hack'. 'X number of Warcraft III users were banned for using Maphack.

Maybe it's because in this case the top let's say 1-5% of all users using the most amount of Blizzard's resources were banned. Or else as I mentioned above, reports were generated figuring the most probable 'possibilities' of using a hack. Since their techniques aren't flawless, and since they admitted themselves, they are obviously not foolproof and could be easily circumvented if they told people how they did it.

And also, easy to assume, not 100% accurate and banning people incorrectly.

-> Unfair realm down, unfair cd-key tagging suggest hack-detection is not foolproof

How many players experience realm down, an anti-cheat method, from simple lag?

How many players who never used hacks, ever, had their cd-key tagged from getting disconnected from a game? Called Blizzard, challenged them to check their account, said they never used any hacks, and were told 'it's an automated process, don't worry, the tagging will go away in a few days'

If plenty of people unjustly get tagged and realm down, is it a stretch of the imagination to assume they could get unfairly banned?

-> Why doesn't blizzard take care of any of the serious server-side bugs in Diablo II

This one is pure theory, but consider this - Diablo II is an old game. Blizzard isn't earning money on it. What they want is for their 'free' realms to be as lag free for their Warcraft III players and future WOW players. Deleting people who tie up resources is in their best interest. Trying to improve gameplay, introduce new features, fix bugs on an outdated game, isn't.

Deleting bugged items would be easy, and 100% server side. Your characters, and all item-coding is done on their side. Deleting Iths would take a simple fix: have the existing 'dupe checker' simply delete all invalid runeword items, or any runeword item that does not contain the actual runes.

Taking care of most of the known bugs in Diablo II would also be easy - small, server side patches. Most bugs aren't even related to the client-side version of Diablo.

Why aren't any of these taking place? What -DID- take place is a purge of ALL the users who were tieing up expensive server resources.
Obviously, most people who were online hours and hours a day were bot users, but obviously, many weren't. Again, it's not much of a stretch to assume that since Blizzard couldn't care less about solving a single bug in their bug-ridden 1.09 patch, that they couldn't care less about the Diablo II users who no longer are contributing money to their coffers.

Why else would they adapt a 'If you were banned, you were guilty, end of discussion, we won't tell you why, shut up' stand if they really didn't care less?

> In other words: cheaters can make great liars to save their own butts.

Final example: Blizzard is saying ALL of those people complaining are lying, Ignore them. Despite the fact that releasing a completely bug free product is impossible, our procedure for banning people was 100% foolproof and there were absolutely NO mistakes made.

Ignore the fact that we can't get rid of hacks, bugged items, spam bots, etc. We're perfect and everyone else is lying. Isn't this a bit unrealistic?

If they banned legitimate users this time, don't you think it's possible they might ban YOU next time?

[FenrisWulf]

Er, Roderigo, did you read any of the posts by Isolde at all? He's a Blizzard employee, vouched for by Roland and Jarulf. He's also apparently a great guy, which he proves on his own (but also through similar Roland/Jarulf vouching :D). And he has said that the bannings in this case were not based on pattern recognition, nor behaviorial analysis. In fact, that the detection method seems to have generated no false positives at all. Thus...your point is a bit moot, I feel. Long and thoroughly argued, perhaps, but still moot.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Even when they tell people that, yes, GPOW can exist, it's just rare.

Bah. They may be great artists. They might be good musicians. Even fair sound fx people. But their track record for programing (and knowing what they programmed) is not too great.

So, how did they determine who cheated, who to ban? With a Buzzard written program which, miracle of miracles, is the first bug free code they ever generated.

Sorry, but I for one don't buy it, and I don't care how nice the people at Buzzard are. It's not their personalities I'm questioning, its their programming skills.

--Pete

[Isolde]

First off, it's pretty unlikely that it was a programmer that claimed that GPOWs can be generated since as far as I know, since most of the programmers I know would rather pay fines than chat with fans. <_<

Second, blizzard programs have written a lot of bug-free code. They've also written a lot of bugged code. Just like every other programmer I've ever heard of. And blizzard QA has missed a lot of bugs. And I personally have written a lot of code which I now forget but I'll continue to discuss as if I remembered because I think I still remember it. And if someone points out that I'm wrong, I'll be happy to admit it and thank them for the correction. So in this, I'm happy to agree with you: my track record for knowing what I've programmed is none to great.

A lot of people diss blizzard for horrible programming, and a lot of that is deserved. However, in doing so people tend to overlook our accomplishments too. Take a look at what the D2 servers are doing: ai for an average of forty monsters per player, path finding for all that, collision, countless missiles, all at most of the time 25 frames per second, and none of it exceptionally good ;) but there it is. A couple of hundred thousand players at once, which is by the way, more than the number of people chatting on yahoo at the moment. And all of it has to be done with a dense enough player to server ratio and low enough bandwidth in a real time game that we can avoid charging a monthly fee. And we were stupid enough to promise to people that that's something we could do, even though we had no evidence that it would be even possible to do so. So question our programming skills all you want, I'll admit that looking at some of the bugs that've come up it's deserved. But I'll always know that we did some pretty damn impressive things amidst all of our mistakes as well.

And personally, I think I learned a heck of a lot doing it. And if we can ever convince the financial types to try something this crazy ever again, I think we'll do a much better job the second time around. At least I hope so anyway :P

[Brista]

However, in doing so people tend to overlook our accomplishments too.

bottom line is we're here and we like the game. So do an awful lot of other people. If 131K accounts is 1% then we're talking about 13 million online accounts. Plus a big single player audience

I don't know about anyone else but I have a lot of games sitting on the shelf that I enjoyed a great deal and finished in a few days. To me, I got my money's worth out of those

I have some that I don't like at all. Well that was a waste for me, other people might like them. In some cases games have been a real let-down. Recently Homm4 came out with no MP capability - it took a patch some months later to get this basic facility working

So yes, it might well annoy me that Poison Dagger operates on a base 18 frame swing. Not fair!

But the gripes are not so bad as to spoil the play experience

And I've got a lot of value out of this game, far more than I paid for it

The actions of fans have been bad enough to spoil the play experience on public BNet which the company is tackling now. I could wish for more to have been done in the past - particularly with regard to the online market in cheat items - EBay and so on

But firstly it is hardly the company's fault that a section of the fans have made every effort to mess up the game. If you are watching a football match and some idiots run on to the playing field is it the club's fault? I don't think so.

And secondly Blizzard are showing their teeth now and I imagine will ferociously be banning these people during the first few weeks of the Ladder. 1% of accounts have been banned. If 25% (my guess) actively cheat then you have a 4% chance per account of losing your account every time Blizzard do this. If it happens a few more times most cheaters will have been hit on at least one account. That will wrestle the mindset of average players back to the "better not cheat" view which most people start with

Good luck, Blizzard ! :)

[l33t h4xx0r]

Roderigo's analysis reflects my view of Blizzard and their politics exactly. They - like 99.99999% of all corporations in this world - always choose they most cost-effective solutions, no matter what the consequences for legit users are. And if a legit user complains, then it's the well-known:

"Note: Blizzard Entertainment is in no way responsible for your character(s) or account(s). If you choose to create and play a character on our hack-free, secure realms, you do so at your own risk. Blizzard is not responsible for the loss of your character(s) or account(s) for any reason including Internet lag, bugs, Acts of God, your little sister, or any other reason whatsoever. Consult the EULA for more details. Blizzard will not restore any character(s) or account(s). Don't even ask. La-la-la-la-la, we can't hear you ..."

But this attitude will have to change if they start to charge their users monthly for the upcoming "World of WarCraft" MMORPG. If they continue in this fashion for a server-based game where you have actually to pay for your realm characters, then they can start to dig their grave in advance.

[Mavfin]

So you're of the opinion that Blizz is going to clean up D2 and keep WC3 clean as much as they can, partly as testing/rehearsal/whatever for WoW? That's an interesting idea. Very interesting. Because they WILL need those capabilities for a paid MMORPG. Anything's possible, I guess.

[--Pete]

. . . that it was 98% accurate. Until I stopped to think and realized that meant an average of two mistakes per line. ;)

Hi,

I have to give Buzzard a lot of credit, compared to other game companies, for writing code that at least runs without locking up the system or dumping me to the desktop every now and again. So, compare to the industry norm, that makes them excellent. The length of your yardstick determines how tall you are, I guess.

Most of the problems I've seen with Buzzard code is *not* the fault of the individual programmers, it is the lack of programming standards in the company. Things like calculating the values used and displayed in two separate places, making the giving rise to the infamous "lying character screen". Things like placing values in data files, then hard coding the same variables (but with different values) in the code. And so forth. The problem isn't unique to Buzzard, or (unfortunately) even to the game industry. It appears to be simpler, faster, cheaper to go cowboy with the code development. Enforced standards, code reviews, walkthroughs are perceived to be too expensive. OK for the military boys and NASA, but not for non-critical earthbound software. The funny thing is, the companies that have converted to doing it right have learned in every case I've seen reported that discipline actually reduces the overall cost of the projects. Sure, it adds 10% to the coding effort. But that's only one percent to the total effort, and it saves many times that in debugging and revision costs.

But that is all neither here nor there. The fundamental point remains. People are being banned on the basis of information generated by code generated by Buzzard (or Blizzard, if the South branch is involved). The company claim is that no errors are being made because? The code is right? The assumptions are right? The analysis is right? What?

Just what is different in this project from all other Buzzard/Blizzard projects that one is to have vast confidence in the program?

--Pete