BIOWARE how long does it take to fix hacking in the game?

[Neexx]

Please do something about hacking in the game, it makes pvp pointless

[Dissentus]

They will do something about hacking when people learn the difference between bugs/glitches and mechanics. And they most certainly do things about hacking if they have the evidence and it's legit.

 

For instance, I had some weenie in a warzone the other night saying that some Jugg was hacking because it took 7 people to bring him down; never mind the fact that he constantly had rolling hots and a heal bot following him around, of which I seemed to be the only person to notice. Ah, pug warzones, how I love thee.

[gofortheko]

Most cheating is actually the playerbase not knowing what other classes can do.

[Koxxi]

Ok, Id buy that. Some folks are still relatively new and have little chance of knowing the nuances in the game.

 

So I won't say this is a cheat/hack just yet, so draw your conclusions please;

 

I see the glimmer of a stealther moving right to left about 10 steps in front of me, thats no big deal since I was paying close attention to a healer nearby, but this stealthed opponent flashes by at double or triple speed only to unstealth BY GETTING OFF HIS SPEEDER to hit someone else.

 

1)Could be a graphics bug

2)The speed could be a buff

3)being in combat and 'in the moment' maybe my eyes was just playing tricks

4)hey wait so thats how they get from one node to another really fast .. NAAH plain speculation there

5)maybe I just dont understand how they do it, so might be tempted to call it an exploit/cheat/hack ... NAAAHH some people might be just that good

6)need to study the AC skills again

7)accept that I just suck

8) oh well Ill make my wallet do the talking for me

 

Good hunting all, it's been good/fun times!

[TKMaster]

i lost in pvp....someone must be hacking!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Aehgo]

I beat somebody in a 1v1..I must be hacking,appareantly.

[Eillack]

Most "hacks" are bugs or lack of knowledge.

 

Would you like to share more info OP on the event(s) in question?

[Ssfbistimg]

I beat somebody in a 1v1..I must be hacking,appareantly.

 

lucky. I seem to always get myself into 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3. I rarely see a 1 vs 1, everyone loves my ( - ) ( - ) so they jump to me to get a better look.

Edited July 30, 2012 by Ssfbistimg

[Astarica]

I can't help but to think that people must think cheaters are as bad at playing the game as they are if you don't think cheating can be quite rampant without being obvious.

 

Even a 20% speed boost is a decisive advantage and cannot be detected unless you play against the same guy over and over because there are obviously way too many abilities that simulate the same thing. Now people say 'can't be overpowered because there are abilities that do similar things', but yeah those are like say '+30% speed after you use a 1 minute CD ability", not "+30% speed permanently".

 

It's kind of like this thing I saw about spying. If you know you're being spied, whoever is spying you isn't very good at it. If you know someone is cheating, he's obviously not very good at cheating. Because of that I cannot say whether cheating is rampant or not, but there sure are a lot of suspicoius circumstances out there.

[epicfear]

Most hacks aren't actually hacks, just less obvious class abilities.

 

But still, I agree. If i see a gunslinger force choking the healer, i am calling hax!

[darknagashadow]

Despite what many people will tell you, hacking DOES exist in this game merely searching youtube or google will give you evidence that there are plenty of real hacks for this game. the most common hack in the MMO is the "interrupt" bot, which is a very simple script to write with autohotkey or a myriad number of other programs. That can do things like pixel-search based on if/and statements and loops. Things like speed-hacks, or hacks that actually change the rules of the game (such as running from a spawn area before the timer) are much, much more difficult to accomplish, and require people who have invested a significant amount of time and money into educating themselves (their are some kids in their basements who are prodigies but its usually people with a college level degree or better performing these kinds of hacks. This is because extensive knowledge of how the game is written, and how to spoof the client server relationship is necessary. Game breaking hacks are also immediately obvious and dozens of people a day will report them, which makes them a waste.

 

PVP in this game is not taken very seriously, people writing professional scripts are doing it for money, and the market for SWTOR hacks is very, very, small, games with subscription's are also typically hacked less, because they have a larger team of programmers to detect such things and because you have a lot more money to lose if you get an account banned. GW2 like GW1 will have a big problem with hackers because PVP is so important and because it has no subscription, because of these two things their is no real penalty for a ban besides paying the box price again. (all stats are bo osted to 80 for all serious PVP)

 

it is also a pointless thing to argue about, because even with demo's you will NEVER know when a very good hacker is hacking, I'll give you examples

 

what people usually think advanced effective hacks look like in swtor are:

people gaining godmode or becoming impossible to kill

people running at impossible speeds

people doing impossible amounts of damage

people getting to impossible places or starting the match earlier than everyone else

people causing other players to lag(one of the most difficult hacks of all) when they are in the vicinity of the hacker.

 

what advanced effective hacks in swtor would actually look like:

*enhancing situational abilities that activate on TOGGLE, for example causing predation on a carnage marauder to go from 80% to 90% speed increase, this would be toggled on at the beginning of the match and with two teams of equal skill would insure that a team got the ball first in huttball, or that one team captured an outside turret first in civil war

*a computer program that recognizes the important abilities of another character and interrupts them immediately without the need for human reactions. to avoid the detection the program can make this program miss a small percentage of interrupts randomly, this was the most common type of hack in GW

 

in other words good hacks are like performance enhancing drugs for good players, they aren't going to let you run ten times as fast as someone else, or be the only person to score in a basketball game, or make it impossible to knock you out in a boxing match. But they do make already good player's superstars, they are also notoriously difficult to detect and the benefits of cheating are often much greater than the penalties for getting caught

 

as a sidenote, bug exploitation is a much more common issue,

for example on Jung-Ma the other day I was permastunned four times in a match, I would have thought it was my computer or a bad internet connection or something but after the fourth time I noticed that

A. the permastuns only happened when I was CC'ed by one player

and

B. the permastuns only happened when said player used one ability, force push

the perma-stun glitch is well known but AFAIK this guy was one of a very, very few people who knew how to actually cause the bug reliably. after that day I have never encountered said player again and I assume he was banned.

 

he was banned because he was way, way too obvious.

 

 

However

[Woimy]

I can't help but to think that people must think cheaters are as bad at playing the game as they are if you don't think cheating can be quite rampant without being obvious.

 

Even a 20% speed boost is a decisive advantage and cannot be detected unless you play against the same guy over and over because there are obviously way too many abilities that simulate the same thing. Now people say 'can't be overpowered because there are abilities that do similar things', but yeah those are like say '+30% speed after you use a 1 minute CD ability", not "+30% speed permanently".

 

It's kind of like this thing I saw about spying. If you know you're being spied, whoever is spying you isn't very good at it. If you know someone is cheating, he's obviously not very good at cheating. Because of that I cannot say whether cheating is rampant or not, but there sure are a lot of suspicoius circumstances out there.

 

By the same token, almost every class/tree has a way to generate more crits. That still doesn't mean it's kosher when (in the last case I observed) 2 people from a single guild crit every single action I observed for an entire WZ...no way to 'prove' it isn't the RNG. So you report them and maybe bioware bothers to check.

 

Also, even worse is the sometimes insane lag lately. I honestly don't know if someone is cheating or just magically popping back from every KB and 'skipping' through walls and obstacles. But one when one toon consistently and frequently only benefits from 'lag' it gets suspicious quickly. For example the other day an operative was making my life miserable (as a gunslinger) when I noticed that my pulse detonator seemed to have trouble actually knocking him back...repeatedly, even if it knocked back others around me. Lag? Or some new, improved operative ability? Who knows.

[Alericus]

Interesting side note about bans...I do pvp a lot and funny ya know a lot of the big mouths, the guys who can never lose health, guys who talk trash...its funny..I see em in 1 or 2 matches and then..poof they just gone..never see the name again..weird huh?..but there's no hacking in the game see......

[Astarica]

By the same token, almost every class/tree has a way to generate more crits. That still doesn't mean it's kosher when (in the last case I observed) 2 people from a single guild crit every single action I observed for an entire WZ...no way to 'prove' it isn't the RNG. So you report them and maybe bioware bothers to check.

 

Also, even worse is the sometimes insane lag lately. I honestly don't know if someone is cheating or just magically popping back from every KB and 'skipping' through walls and obstacles. But one when one toon consistently and frequently only benefits from 'lag' it gets suspicious quickly. For example the other day an operative was making my life miserable (as a gunslinger) when I noticed that my pulse detonator seemed to have trouble actually knocking him back...repeatedly, even if it knocked back others around me. Lag? Or some new, improved operative ability? Who knows.

 

Today I actually saw the first example of blatant hacking when a guy ran at faster than Force Speed from his spawn point in Alderaan to the side turret. We can literallly see this guy cover our visible distance in 3 seconds while defending at grass while going nowhere near a speed powerup, and after we killed the guy (there were 3 of us versus 1 of him) I actually checked with the others to make sure I wasn't only seeing things and sure enough they saw the same thing.

 

If you can go 30% perma speed you can do 300% perma speed too, but nobody that is smart will use 300% at where an enemy can see you because that is just way too obvious. Like the other guy said you really want to toggle your speed hacks at times where the enemy cannot possibly see you, so that even if they suspected you're cheating they can't rule out stuff like maybe you have Marauders chain pumping talented predations as unlikely as that is. In today's example people certainly reported that guy. We don't know how effective that is, but certainly you're not getting away with a 300% speed without being reported once you're spotted.

 

Generally speaking it is very hard to hack anything damage-wise because you client just issues a command like "Now using Force Lightning" and the server tells you back "According to my calculation you crit and did 2000 damage". You don't get to argue this with the server no matter how much you hacked your client because the server is the one that decides the outcome of the attack, not the client. You can try to fool the server, of course, but you can't outright tell the server something like "I did 9999999 points of damage" because the server is just going to tell you that you don't get to decide that as a client. You might be able to hack your cilent to ignore GCD and then have your client report like: "You might not believe this but I just did 10 Force Lightnings in a row", and if the server didn't realize something is fishy it could honor that and get you the extra damage. Still, most decent MMORPGs are pretty good at not getting fooled by these things, which is why you never see 'mega damage' or even unreasonable damage hack. That is, you don't see people critting for even 7K regularly even though if there is a 'damage hack' then you surely can do a 7K crit easily.

 

But all speed stuff is easily hacked because ultimately all movement abilities are controlled by the client. The client gets to control any teleport like effects (quick travel) and any movement effects because no server is powerful enough to calculate your every move. That is when you hit 'forward', it's your computer that's doing the work to figure out what position you end up as. If you pass the work to the server, it's simply too computational expensive for the server to do that and no server can handle that load, so it must trust the client. That's why it's easy to do movement related hack because your client has control here.

[Nategray]

The hacks are very real, google swtor and hacks and tell me they do not exist.

Easiest hacks to find are the speed ones, if you hit someone with a snare but they are not slowed and the affect is still showing on them guess what they are using a hack.

There are also hacks for crits and health regen where it has you out of combat while in combat and many many others..

Again just googe swtor and hacks and realize many people in this game use the hack cheats, the game uses client side settings.

[Morrolan]

what people usually think advanced effective hacks look like in swtor are:

people gaining godmode or becoming impossible to kill

people running at impossible speeds

So when people are running at impossible speeds what are they doing? I've seen players go at speeds that are clearly far beyond what simple buffs would do, like covering the length of huttball in a second or 2.

[ZDProletariat]

So when people are running at impossible speeds what are they doing? I've seen players go at speeds that are clearly far beyond what simple buffs would do, like covering the length of huttball in a second or 2.

 

Since 1.3 people loading in a WZ have their character appear in the middle of the map, then when they finish loading, they run super fast to spawn to wait at the door.

 

Also, there is such a thing as a marauder's speed buff, which if coupled with high latency on your end can appear to be super fast.

[Astarica]

So when people are running at impossible speeds what are they doing? I've seen players go at speeds that are clearly far beyond what simple buffs would do, like covering the length of huttball in a second or 2.

 

Those guys are just bad cheaters. Today I saw someone came out of the middle to the side turret and covered that distance in literally 3 seconds. That's faster than even Force Speed and was obviously hacking. He was presumably reported after our defender checked with each other to make sure it wasn't lag.

 

If you can do 30% perma speed increase you can do 300%, but 300% is overkill for most stuff and way too easy to spot. There's really no reason for you to be 300% faster to get the Huttball first when something like 90% will make it look like your team just happen to have a Marauder speced in predation and you still get the ball first. Besides, at 300% speed you'd be well ahead of your own team which makes it actually pretty dangerous since you can still be rooted/stunned while going super speed, so unless your whole team is going super speed (which would be ridiculously obvious and probably get your whole team banned after one game) you might as well slow down.

Edited July 30, 2012 by Astarica

[Astarica]

Since 1.3 people loading in a WZ have their character appear in the middle of the map, then when they finish loading, they run super fast to spawn to wait at the door.

 

Also, there is such a thing as a marauder's speed buff, which if coupled with high latency on your end can appear to be super fast.

 

Err people always say 'there's this buff or that buff' but when you try to chase down a guy who has been snared by 3 different guys the whole time and he's still just a little bit faster than you (who is not snared) that's not something any buff can do.

 

Problem is, the good cheaters aren't stupid. They're only a little bit faster than you because that's all you need to be unable to catch up to him. Someone who is good at cheating will always move at somewhere around 30-50% speed buff, which is indistinguishable from a lot of short duration speed buffs except they have it permanently, and you can't prove it unless you fight the same guy over and over again. Noet that if someone is 30% perma speed and they're 30% or 50% snared those two interact correctly and he will come out with something like 10% speed increase. In fact this works against you the better your team is because if your team is good at applying snares then from your point of view you cannot tell if the guy sped up because he activated a speed hack, or someone cleansed his snare, or even just the snare wore off.

 

In a normal game you can't even prove that say someone didn't just cleanse the speed and maybe that guy had an innate 15% faster run speed (plenty of specs do that). Really the only way you can tell is if you play the same guy repeatedly and he has the Huttball, since the Huttball snare cannot be cleansed so eventually the speed hacker will have to give away the fact that he is faster than what is normally possible.

Edited July 30, 2012 by Astarica

[Morrolan]

Since 1.3 people loading in a WZ have their character appear in the middle of the map, then when they finish loading, they run super fast to spawn to wait at the door.

 

Also, there is such a thing as a marauder's speed buff, which if coupled with high latency on your end can appear to be super fast.

 

Except he actually admitted to speed hacking.

[Derian]

The hacks are very real, google swtor and hacks and tell me they do not exist.

Easiest hacks to find are the speed ones, if you hit someone with a snare but they are not slowed and the affect is still showing on them guess what they are using a hack.

There are also hacks for crits and health regen where it has you out of combat while in combat and many many others..

Again just googe swtor and hacks and realize many people in this game use the hack cheats, the game uses client side settings.

 

Unless of course they are immune to the snare due to a class ability? lol

[Never_Hesitate]

Unless of course they are immune to the snare due to a class ability? lol

 

Does it still show in their debuff list then?

(That's a question, I don't know it so I ask you. Don't come at me like it was a statement)

[Chimerako]

I've seen the speed hacks and PVP bots. The PVP bot isn't even that hard to find on line...but to many peoples point most so called "hacks" are players seeing lag or not knowing how some mechanics work. I've seen the insta-stun on force leap. I tested it by repeatedly force leaping the same guy and was basically stunned before hitting the ground. i've seen a hack applied to health...i was hitting a BH I was in full BH with some WH mixed in and he basically took 4k to 3.5k crit from 10 to 15 hits and just stood there without his health moving. There was no healer and he never popped a HoT or regular health pack. But i have no way to confirm what he was doing.

[Derian]

Does it still show in their debuff list then?

(That's a question, I don't know it so I ask you. Don't come at me like it was a statement)

 

No. If they are hit with something they are immune to it doesn't show up. Good question. For instance, there is a spec for Juggs/Guardians to be immune to CC after a force leap. If you hit them with something like electro dart, nothing will pop up on their buff/debuff bar.

 

There are a lot of specs like this that exist, but you never heard about them because people are too busy trying to get other classes nerfed. They aren't trying to advertise things like being able to spam an aoe slow lol.

Edited July 30, 2012 by Derian

[DrDon]

ok yes, hacking ruins the game blah blah blah, but IMO > 90% of what people call "Hacking" is just a common bug / exploit. and that is not against game rules...

 

well if you purposely exploit a bug you can be ban... but the simple thing is, if its in-game you can do it.