Accounts Banned for Speed Hacking - 12/3/04
We wanted to take this time to make an announcement about a serious hacking violation in World of Warcraft, one for which we have zero tolerance. Certain individuals have been identified as using speed hacks to accelerate their characters. This goes against the theme of fair play that we have instituted for the game, and is in clear violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use.
Those individuals who were caught using the speed hack have been banned from the game and have had their accounts closed. We must stress once again that we are opposed to hacking and cheating of any kind and are dedicated to maintaining a fair environment in our games. This will serve as a final warning to others who are considering using the speed hack. If you are caught using it, you will be banned without question from World of Warcraft and your account will be revoked.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation in this matter. If you suspect someone of using the speed hack, or wish to report other instances of cheating, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you again for your continued support.
What does it mean to “accelerate your character?” It runs faster? Those stupid quests don’t take time to scroll (a la Cosmos)? The player has macros? Hack to eliminate spellcasting delay?
If they provided more information, it would be way easier to cheat more discreetly.
Actually it’s pretty well known (someone even posted a video of a blatant speedhacker here: http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1584) . It’s using Gear or a similar program to futz with your system’s CPU clock to make your client send movement updates faster, thus causing your avatar to move faster than you otherwise could.
Speech hacks enable people to either warp to a location instantly, or run move incredibly fast. In EQ it was fairly easy to do this using a packet sniffer and a special macro to send bad information to the server. Most of our pullers used it to make long tedious pulls easy.
It’s easy enough to do I imagine, just download gear or speedhack, set the acceleration, and run faster. What’s amazing is that WOW is yet another mmorpg that doesn’t check clientside movement. When will they learn?
The mmo that checks clientside movement the most is City of Heroes. The side affect of that is rubber-banding if the server is even a tiny bit lagging. The sheer annoyance of that, almost alone, caused me to never play it EVER AGAIN. All MMO’s that I know of DO monitor movement, and will reset you if the server is lagging horribly behind. However, the way it works in EQ is that this movement check is only applied every 6 seconds (With the tick) and that you can do whatever in that period and send bad packets to fool the server.
I don’t think it’s worth processing cycles to ensure 100% compliance. Speed hacking is pretty darned obvious, and can be seen easily.
The mmo that checks clientside movement the most is City of Heroes. The side affect of that is rubber-banding if the server is even a tiny bit lagging.
Interesting. There was a lot of rubberbanding when I played that game. I asumed it was just because characters were moving faster due to travel speeds. It was quite annoying at times.
Co-worker of mine said he almost got banned from an HL2DM server for running really fast, until he managed to explain that he was using the Shift key to sprint :)
Okay, Euri. Obviously it may have been a game-breaker for you but it has never been an issue for me. It’s happened maybe a half dozen times in seven months and when it happened, the effect was getting yanked back about 20-30 yards while running. If that is “shoddy programming”, I can live with it.
I seem to recall you being a major crankypants over the game, regardless.
