WoW Hackers

So, all these people keep getting banned from WoW. What are they using that’s getting them tossed out? Anyone have experience with these hacking macros? There are a ton of forums out there that claim to offer info on MMO exploits, but they all want money first. Not gonna happen, fuckos! Giving my credit card info to a site run by professed hackers? Yeah…

Anyone heard about some cheating macros from years gone by?

Well,

There was some early hacks that read the wow memory and displayed it graphically next to the game. e.g. you could have a map showing you the locations of everything near you (that the game knew about but did not tell you). – required playing in windowed mode.

You had bots and advanced bots that would either click a specific point on the screen, or perform a slow operation where you could run between specific points on the map and fight anything on the way. Or more advanced ones using external application and internal UI functions to monitor your health etc values to have a more advanced botting experience.

Or teleport hacks that would move your z-position below or way above ground and warp you accross the continent, or to specific waypoints where chests and rare resources spawned (favoured by goldfarmers for a while).
You could also teleport below ground and attack people above ground, but they could not fight back.

Or Direct3D Hacks that read the game memory and gave you additional graphical functions in game, such as a radar showing you everything even if you were not a hunter so you could see enemies before they saw you, etc etc.

There were also a few dupes where you could enter and exit some instances and also perform some functions to dupe money (dont know enough about this unfortunately).

You also had the ability to walk along ‘seams’ on the mountain (mountainwalk) – a very fun technique to explore areas you were otherwise prohibited from exploring… think of it like climbing the Mount Everest, few people have done it, and the view is spectacular. Although it could also be used to kill people without them having any way to fight back at you unless they too were ranged.

Pathfinding bugs which meant you could attack a mob and he would either be unable to reach you, or have a long detour, allowing you to kill it before it could even hit you – great way to level quickly.

Probably a few more I missed…

Fishing bots were very popular, since it is tedious and takes forever. The more advanced bots would either “scan” a designated area on the screen or have some other method of detecting the ‘splash’ when you are supposed to right click to get your reward.

Unfortunately a few of those bots etc have caused blizzard to remove the UI and game functions that had other usages except for botting, which makes the whole game suffer for it. :-(

Until fairly recently, there was a hack that allowed for teleportation in Dire Maul (and elsewhere too, I assume). What would happen is that professional gold farmers would use this hack and then (playing a hunter) teleport to a spot in DM North where they could not be attacked by the King but could kill him. Killing the King without killing any of the other bosses first yeilds several BoP blue rewards, but more importantly, it had better-than-average chance to drop a Libram of Rapidity, Protection, or Focus. Prior to the 1.11 patch, those librams were required for the Zandalar Tribe enchant, and (at least on my server) sold for over 500g.

Video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-530519624422454044&q=wow+teleportation+hack

A lot of them are banned for using this.

http://www.wowglider.com/

On my old server, a good percentage of people killing demons in Azshara or the naga on the beach there were botting. It’s easy enough to tell - they follow a pre-ordained path, so they eventually come back to the starting point; they turn a little left and right sometimes when trying to find a creature in range; but most importantly, they don’t complain if you tap the mobs first and do a lot of the damage so that you get the loot and xp. :)

Yeah, I did some great powerlevelling this way once. I reported the guy, then followed him around for a couple hours taking all his loot. It was great!

Another tell is that occasionally they’ll get stuck running against an obstacle.

I wasn’t aware of this. What did Blizzard remove?

You can no longer trigger a skill without a button press, for instance. You cannot know your world position accurately. Stuff like that.

Its cool how people figure out how to do stuff like that.

A ingame ui for teleportation, wish I had that. Would save a lot of hours stuck on the wingriders.

Could you be a little more specific? Are you saying that it’s no longer possible to activate skills with hotkeys? What do you mean by saying that you can’t know your world position?

In addons, you used to be able to trigger skills solely via scripting. Nowadays, that script must be running in response to a physical button press in order to trigger a skill. Addons used to be able to get accurate 3d positions in the world of players, which let a lot of addons do wacky things like calculate how fast you were moving, how many meters you’d travelled, etc.

Does Windows not support the TIOCSTI ioctl()? You could probably do it on the Mac version, anyway…

Bruce

It’s not a matter of what windows supports, WoW only allows a very limited access to functions via lua to addons. Addons cannot reach outside of WoW’s lua scope.

Oh, okay, so there’s no way to invoke an external program from LUA? I guess they’ll just have to write their own scripting program to work with WoW.

Bruce

Yep, no executing external stuff. Addons live and breath in a WoW controlled space. Any of these botting programs that are out there are most likely tapping in to WoW’s own code to do it, rather than throught he addon system.

There were (and probably still are) entertaining ‘hacks’ that you could do with the ingame macros.

One of them was jump, logout, cancel. Spam that and you would jump and land in midair and you could repeat it forever to get really way the fuck up in the air, no limit AFAIK.

Another was /invite player, /kick player. That one would disband anyone that was grouped, regardless of whether or not it was your group or you were leader. Tons o fun.

Both of those were fixed within a short time of being posted on the FOH boards.

olaf

Sending a key to the Windows OS through the API is fairly simple so I don’t get how that’s going to stop any hacks. If they function can be bound to a hot key, it can be pressed from outside the game through programming.

It’s really a matter of them getting their protection program to recognize new cheat programs before they get popular.

The Bots and Cheats will change to adapt.
Unfortunately it seems that with the expansion of on-line games, there’s an equal expansion of hacking.

I don’t get it though…
How can you call yourself a gamer and then cheat all the way through a game?
Especially if you paid\are paying for it.
The only person you’re cheating really is yourself.

Well, I bet the gold farmers don’t lose any sleep over that one.

Well, since appart from teleportation hacks there is nothing you can do in wow (to my knowledge) that you cant do without botting, I dont see any harm in bots playing the game, as long as they pay the same as everyon else.

In UO you macroed at night so you could have fun playing the game at daytime instead of clicking the training dummy for 2-3 hours before you were strong enough to venture outside with all the pks =)

Good point…

A friend of mine tried to justify buying Game Gold for WoW over the net.
His argument was that he didn’t have the time to play the game enough to amass wealth. His thinking was that something as trivial as “Gold” shouldn’t interfere with his fun during his limited gaming time.

My thought: Isn’t getting there half the fun?

I must be doing something wrong then. I’m actually enjoying playing a character up to the level cap and then, gasp, deleting it and starting another one (GW)!

Sometimes, IMHO, not being able to buy the best “Things” in the game makes for better game play. Better Co-op, more challenge, etc.

I’m glad that most of the Major Mags have banned Game Gold ads. To me, it just seems like another way to cheat.