blizzard's opinion on cheating
(for ease of reading, this will be in Times New Roman)
This text is taken from a March 4th battle.net thread:
The #1 topic on
the Battle.net forums has been that of cheating.
There are many different opinions and suggestions on what can be
done,
what *should* be done and even on the morality of cheating.
Blizzard's position is that we will eliminate cheats that target
other
players, such as TownKill and AutoKill. We can not and will not
eliminate
cheats that bump up your own character. If you want to cheat your
own
character up to level 50 with all the spells, you're only ruining
the
game for yourself. If you don't like playing with people who
cheat on
their characters -- don't play with them.
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On Tue Mar 04 09:35, Jimmy_The_Hand wrote:
>[...] There's no way that you can expect cheating to be
removed in a game
>where *the*data*file*is*saved*on*the*users*system! The only
way you are
>ever going to see a cheat-free environment is one where the
data is stored
>on a secure sever.
Whether the characters are stored on the server or on the user's
hard drive
makes no difference with respect to cheating. As long as programs
like
SoftICE are able to edit Diablo's memory space while the game is
running,
they can modify your character in memory, and then simply wait
for Diablo
to save the modified character on either the server or your hard
drive.
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There are also several issues with patch v1.02 that we would like
to
address at this time:
1.) IT DOESN'T STOP ITEM DUPING, HACKED UNIQUE RINGS ARE STILL
VALID ITEMS,
HACKED ITEMS STATS ARE STILL VALID, CHARACTER EDITING STILL
POSSIBLE
CHARACTERS WITH OVERLY HIGH STATS, SPELLS CAN BE SET AS SKILLS
Again, we are not eliminating cheats that bump up your own
character.
The reason we put in code to remove duplicate items was because
they were
causing bugs, not because we realistically think we can stop
people from
using hacked items.
We are also not going to wipe out people's characters, so we will
not
be able to "roll back the clock" on the cheating that
has already
taken place.
2.) LEGITIMATE ITEMS ARE DISAPPEARING
We have been made aware of this bug and will fix this in a future
patch.
3.) TOWNKILL IS BACK
We have just confirmed that this is again occuring. We will
identify what
they're doing and break it in the next patch.
4.) INCREASED LATENCY IN NETWORK GAMES
We will investigate this and fix it in the next patch.
5.) DECREASED OVERALL GAME PERFORMANCE
We will investigate this and fix it in the next patch.
Again, we have actively made efforts to stop cheats that target
other
players, like TownKill and AutoKill, and intend to continue
working on
ways to keep the play experience fun for everyone on Battle.net.
This text is taken from an older Battle.Net thread:
While no game is
totally immune from cheating by dedicated, highly technical
individuals, we have attempted to take steps to prevent casual
cheating.
Unfortunately this can sometimes inconvenience people who are
playing the
game fairly. We've been getting a lot of questions about
multiplayer saved
games, and we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of
the common
concerns.
Why can't I back up my character?
Allowing backups of characters introduces a number of different
ways for
players to cheat. For example, you can easily duplicate gold and
items by
entering a multiplayer game, dropping an item, restoring your
character,
returning to the same game and picking up the item.
Why can't I move my character to another machine?
Multiplayer save game files are heavily encrypted using
information that is
specific to a machine. Again, we did this to prevent casual
cheating. If
you could transport characters from one machine to another, we
expect that
someone would build up a godlike character and then upload it
onto the
Internet for everyone else to use.
Why doesn't Diablo store multiplayer characters on Battle.net
servers?
There are many reasons why we chose not to do this. First of all,
it doesn't
really solve the problem of cheating -- there are ways to cheat
in any game,
without resorting to hex editing the save game file. Second,
storing
characters on Battle.net prevents you from using the same
character on
Battle.net that you use in modem, direct link, and IPX games.
Third, we
don't want to slow the game down for people who only have 14.4k
or 28.8k
modems by using up a significant portion of their bandwidth
sending character
data to the server.
What are you going to do about cheating?
There are no simple solutions to the problem of cheating in a
game as large
and complex as Diablo. We will continue to examine the issue, and
make
changes as necessary to ensure a positive online playing
experience for all
our customers.