Hacks and bots

Thoughts

I would like to inquire about bots and hacks, now I know most of this stuff was available on retail and they did what they could in order to prevent hacking from affecting our game play as much as possible, but at best it was a futile attempt because most of the software that was written in order to gain tactical advantage was implemented later in the expansion packs.

examples of such software includes software within our memory and software that uses pixels on our monitor in order to bot (fish mine herb etc)

Blizzard solved bottling problem by having a larger population per realm so that the botters would not affect the economy of the servers (example we have 3k people and retail might have 50 000 active connections per realm or more)

Hacking wise Blizzard implemented reporting a player feature, which actively banned accounts, which costed 12-15 dollars a month to maintain in addition to the time spent.

Concerns

My concern with Lordaeron was that we are neither a subscription service, nor a large enough population per realm to circumvent bots.

Examples include plain AFK with little to no ability to send player a warning before booting him from the battleground. Plain bots that fight better than average players, but still have minor idiosyncrasies which can be picked up by experienced players. Bots that gather materials, while a player is in the battle ground.

Suggestions

Implement a reward system, where players are given vote points or coins for reporting violators ( in my opinion most people will sell their closest friends for some of these coins, it doesn't have to be a lot, just enough to motivate a rat to hit an orgasm button [ report ]
Which leads us to repeated offenders, in other words if a player was reported more than 5 times for hacking or botting, chances are he is a bot.

Now I know that professionals think that giving pets or simply 50 vote points is sufficient, but I'm here to say that it isn't and that's the end of the story and it's not subject to discussion. If you want people to betray one another you need to set a monetary value to the alleged action. (5 coins and up) for 25 coins distributed amongst 5 players you can ban a serious offender, who hacks into your work and modifies it to gain tactical advantage at the expense of 3000-5000 active players.

Which leads us to the auto pilot...most moderators will have to sniper name tags from the notepad and add them to the ban listed database. Names can be posted on forum for either an explanation or a fine 25-50 coins depending on the amount of coins, distributed amongst the community in order to catch a hacker or a botter. This will generate donations and prevent hackers on our server.

Poll

Would you like rewards to consist of mounts and pets, vote points or coins, which will help to pay for running the server.

I think this is one of those things that will work itself out. With a smaller community, it will be more noticible when somebody does something out of line and will get reported. People will report it even without an insentive, especially if that person is doing something that effects their gameplay.

Hahahahahahahahahhahahaha
50.000 hahahahahahahahahahhaahhahahahahahahahajajahahahah ahahahahahahahahahhahahahhaah 50.000 jahahahahahahahhahahahaahahahahaahhaaahahaaaahaaha hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahhahahahahahahahah aahaaahahahahaaaa 50.000 hh hmph hahahhh .....hah.
Top retail servers like Outland, Frostmane etc MAYBE and only MAYBE have 3-4k online people at their peak. 90% of retail servers have around 1.5 to 2k online max. The only reason you might think there is (hahahahhahahh i just cant stop laghing) 50.000 is because they push cross realm zones in big cities. I played on "normal" populated server during Wotlk launch and there was never even near the ammount of players in Dalaran as it is right now on any of moltens servers.
And yes im saying molten realms have more players of their own than 90% of retwil realms.
And yes im saying you obviously never played retail or never enough to realize this.
And no retail didnt solve hacking problem at all i could login now and bot for hours with only fear being that someone might notice me and report in that case gms react very fast.

u CAN'T ask for coins or vp rewards...NEVER NEVER..the ppl find every system possible for a workaround to earn coins and vp faster.

The solution for hack and bot is VERY simple...

bot -> 1 week ban first time, 1 month second time, permaban third time.
hack -> permaban.

eZ

Warmane are implementing features that catch Hackers. Fly Hackers now are flagged as soon as their fly speed reaches above a certain level. Most other available hacks no longer work due to Warmanes Preventions. Players are no longer able to teleport using 3rd party software. Players are no longer able to desynchronise their postion with the server. So to say Warmane is doing nothing about hackers is a total fallacy - they do more than the general populous of players realise. Botting is something that will be difficult to detect - I'm aware of numerous bans for anti afk feature in BGs and a copious amount of other exploits however I know that warmane are actively monitoring the Auctionhouses to ensure that no botter floods the market and devalues a certain item E.G titansteel.
Hopefully with new gold drain features on lordaeron, this will stabilise the economy to a decent level and botters will have a harder time of this.

Finally, 3.3.5 retail was not heavily populated as you would believe, also blizzard could do very little with regards to botters except seek legal action against Pirox, a company renowned for making Retail Bots *They are no longer publically available. With regards to Hacks - Blizzard had a vigilant GM base who were able to address more functional reports quickly - however with the influx of irrelevant tickets that warmane has to address one must understand that adressing each ticket accordingly will take some time - however there is an area dedicated to reporting players.
There will never be an incentive for reporting people, such as VP or coins - just the satisfaction that a person using tools to give them an unfair advantage over you and other players has been stopped.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WARLORDTF

Warmane are implementing features that catch Hackers. Fly Hackers now are flagged as soon as their fly speed reaches above a certain level. Most other available hacks no longer work due to Warmanes Preventions. Players are no longer able to teleport using 3rd party software. Players are no longer able to desynchronise their postion with the server. So to say Warmane is doing nothing about hackers is a total fallacy - they do more than the general populous of players realise. Botting is something that will be difficult to detect - I'm aware of numerous bans for anti afk feature in BGs and a copious amount of other exploits however I know that warmane are actively monitoring the Auctionhouses to ensure that no botter floods the market and devalues a certain item E.G titansteel.
Hopefully with new gold drain features on lordaeron, this will stabilise the economy to a decent level and botters will have a harder time of this.

Finally, 3.3.5 retail was not heavily populated as you would believe, also blizzard could do very little with regards to botters except seek legal action against Pirox, a company renowned for making Retail Bots *They are no longer publically available. With regards to Hacks - Blizzard had a vigilant GM base who were able to address more functional reports quickly - however with the influx of irrelevant tickets that warmane has to address one must understand that adressing each ticket accordingly will take some time - however there is an area dedicated to reporting players.
There will never be an incentive for reporting people, such as VP or coins - just the satisfaction that a person using tools to give them an unfair advantage over you and other players has been stopped.

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The latest anti-hack features (speed-limit and anti long-range TP) are server-sided settings which pretty much every other private server I've personally logged on have had for a while already. It came to Molten (Warmane) a few months after it merged with AT, which also had these simple hack limitations. "Doing nothing against hackers" isn't a total fallacy because there's just no real solution. I really doubt there will ever be a sentinel against *insert the only non-detectable hack here* or enough server-side changes you could make to limit all of its functions. And don't even think about bots, you just can't stop it with no elaborated report or flagrant.

I would like to thank everyone for replying to this post because the safety of this server is important to us all.

Now to clarify some of your issues

Every realm on this server is capped at roughly 3.2k+ (3k regular players and 200-500 extra slots for the donors or people who make this server available to everyone else, LEGALY speaking)
Which means that at any point in time throughout 24 hours the community of this realm renews. In other words in order to maintain a cap of 3000 player base you need roughly 5000 players, similar to retail that needed a much larger base of players in order to populate their realms.
Now to clarify Dile's opinion regarding my performance on retail... I spent about a week of my life to pick out 2nd or 3rd oldest realm in World of Warcraft history because I was looking for a hardcore experience, while you were playing on blizzards baby servers, if you dont remember, World of Warcraft consists of 50-150 realms, some realms are designed for serious HARDCORE players, while others are designed for kids who just want to play wow and a select few realms that are considered to be royal or ancient.
On such realms you get to meet serious people who may have played World of Warcraft, more than once... so you may need 50 000 to 55 000 players in order to fill 10 000 player cap per realm on retail.

Ayame yes we can because Warmane is considered to be just as ancient and hardcore as one of these blizzard's realms that I have mentioned above. We support this server longer than you can imagine and you never know.... maybe I'll be the one who answers the tickets and catches all the hackers inside the server and I just want you people to have a little reward for helping me do this.

Hello dear Warlordtf I am very happy to see that you are still playing on Warmane and I would like to mention this to you again for the 6th time I can catch all of the hackers on this realm in under 2 years because I already did this 6 times in a row, we are dealing with the same people over and over again and they are re-releasing Lordaeron under Warmane because they want to give some of the banned members another chance to clear up their act and play fair on it's second release... out of 5 hopefully.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WARLORDTF

Warmane are implementing features that catch Hackers. Fly Hackers now are flagged as soon as their fly speed reaches above a certain level. Most other available hacks no longer work due to Warmanes Preventions. Players are no longer able to teleport using 3rd party software. Players are no longer able to desynchronise their postion with the server. So to say Warmane is doing nothing about hackers is a total fallacy - they do more than the general populous of players realise. Botting is something that will be difficult to detect - I'm aware of numerous bans for anti afk feature in BGs and a copious amount of other exploits however I know that warmane are actively monitoring the Auctionhouses to ensure that no botter floods the market and devalues a certain item E.G titansteel.
Hopefully with new gold drain features on lordaeron, this will stabilise the economy to a decent level and botters will have a harder time of this.

Finally, 3.3.5 retail was not heavily populated as you would believe, also blizzard could do very little with regards to botters except seek legal action against Pirox, a company renowned for making Retail Bots *They are no longer publically available. With regards to Hacks - Blizzard had a vigilant GM base who were able to address more functional reports quickly - however with the influx of irrelevant tickets that warmane has to address one must understand that adressing each ticket accordingly will take some time - however there is an area dedicated to reporting players.
There will never be an incentive for reporting people, such as VP or coins - just the satisfaction that a person using tools to give them an unfair advantage over you and other players has been stopped.

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Ignorance is bliss. I quited wow like 7 months ago, and back then i`ll put my hand in fire and say that on Deathwing about 30-50% of entire server population ware using that stupid teleport hack. I remember when i got in Borean Tundra, at horde base, we ware 11 ppl, and 10 ware hacking, got sick of how many reports i made to gm's (some with SS, other with tickets, it was nearly imposible to SS someone that blink at the speed of light) i got so disgusted about the number of hackers, that i quited, now i plan to come back on Lordaeron at launch, but if they don't do anything substantial, failure is inevitable, history will repeat itself
Giving rewards for reporting (with proper evidence), like 1 coin for every 10/25 reports would make lots of ppl to use some of their time to be police on server. Banning all accounts of the same IP/similar names would make a huge difference also
ex: xxx1 = clean account, xxx2 = hacks, both should get banned, i dont think in coincidences that two differite ppl would have an name to the account thats very similar.

As i said, ignorance is bliss, after a while i stop reporting, why ? simple, why bother.

Hackers will always exist, of that you have no doubt, but initially, at least for a week or two, I hope all of them show up, I'm more than sure there will be active GM's, its only natural.

Later on, trust on sentinel really, and considering that they want to update the models of the characters, sneak in a little file that detects any hooks to wow.exe, it will eventually be found of course, but it's easy to hide such feature and it will hit a lot of hackers who only download the hack and wanna hack right away.

The only thing you can do is make it harder to hack, its never hack free, but from what I recall in the day when there was the launch of Lord 1x, there was not much hacking happening afaik, I'm sure there was the tracking hack (you know what we're talking about), and others too, but as long as they were discreet I didn't mind.

Also until all lvl 80 first achievs are done, I'm sure Gm's will be quite active to notice any hacking going around so those who want to rush it will be easily shut down, so I wouldn't worry too much about that part.

If Molten had permabans on first offense, way less people would be inclined to risk losing their character by cheating.