Cheating and MMORPGs

[Don]

I was reading a recent thread in EQ about how people are pulling mobs past an impassable door to avoid repops. I'm not too caught up on WoW exploits but the last one I heard involves in the Arathi Basin battleground, there's a way to teleport past the impenetrable starting gates on the Horde side, allowing you to capture bases before the other side even has a chance to come out to defend them.

Now the fact that people cheat in MMORPG is obviously not surprising. But what's surprising to me is the way people justify these things. In EQ people are arguing how this is done to compensate for poor zone design, because otherwise they can't avoid the sweeper mobs who patrol the zone and wipe out weak parties, except the sole purpose of the sweeper mobs is to wipe out the weak. This has actually been stated by the devs multiple times, and if you look at the relative difficulty of the named in the same zone (which is way too weak), it's obvious that they're tuned to be so weak because you're expected to deal with the sweepers at least a few times while camping for them.

In the case of WoW, people say it's because Horde is underpowered in PvP so that's why they should be allowed a head start that amounts to basically winning the game before the other side can even exit their starting area.

One of my friend said Americans just cheat more, which is obviously true if you look at say, PSO which is unhacked in Japan and hacked first day in the US. But I find this to be strange, because the Asian countries seem to have more competitive environments compared to the US, and yet US has way more cheaters. In particular, the way cheating is justified in US seems to be borderline comical. It's almost like if you're not cheating in the high end then you're not trying hard enough, and I wonder why is the MMORPG like this. I understand a lot of people will do whatever it takes to win, but you'd think people at least should have the guts to admit they're cheating as opposed to that the game intended you to hit stuff through impenetrable barriers or any similarly whacky things.

[Eric]

One of the coolest WoW cheating scandals was when one of the top 5 Horde guilds in the US decided they were sick and tired of having to clear the trash to one of the last bosses of an instance because it took like 2 hours too long(Everyone was complaining about this on the Raid & Dungeon forums, but of course Blizzard never made it any easier to deal with, and ignored Raiders completely), so this guild decided to use some hack that basically allowed them to run under the instance and get to the boss without having to deal with the trash.

The entire guild was promptly banned, but in the aftermath the guild served as a martyr that made Blizzard rethink the massive amounts of trash, and also the difficulty of said trash between bosses, and in instances in general. Now granted, there's always a good chance that Blizzard might have softened up on their trash regardless of whether or not this guild had cheated or not to bypass it. However, the fact that this guild, in the position they were in, and the time they put into their toons cheated JUST to bypass the trash was a testament to how fucking horrible the said trash was in the first place.

[Don]

Well any successful game has to have pacing or people might get bored and leave. Since WoW doesn't do too much to try to slow you down before the raiding stage it has to make it up elsewhere. Of course I think the current philsophy is just they don't care if the ubers get bored and leave anymore since they make up like 0.01% of the population anyway.

On a related note, I remember going to the Chinese boards on Naruto and they have people who would say stuff like "Naruto (the character) was my hero but now he's just a low-life hacker" in reference to the direction Naruto is going. And this is a country that's notorious for hacking. I really don't think you'll find an American forum that will describe their disappointment in the same way. There was actually a thread that compares the progress of Naruto and Sasuke if they were WoW players and Naruto pretty much goes like hacks, hacks, more hacks. Sasuke, on the other hand, is considered a hard-working guy who leveled up his character the old fashion way.

[SineSwiper]

One of the coolest WoW cheating scandals was when one of the top 5 Horde guilds in the US decided they were sick and tired of having to clear the trash to one of the last bosses of an instance because it took like 2 hours too long(Everyone was complaining about this on the Raid & Dungeon forums, but of course Blizzard never made it any easier to deal with, and ignored Raiders completely), so this guild decided to use some hack that basically allowed them to run under the instance and get to the boss without having to deal with the trash.

I heard about this. It had to do with a Rogue going stealthed the entire dungeon, going to the boss, wacking the boss, and then having somebody port them to the beginning of the dungeon. Since this was before leashing (in fact, was the reason for leashing), the boss would run ALL THE WAY back to the party, bypassing the trash.

Nowadays, leashing is standard in all MMOs. (Leashing is where a boss will eventually lose interest in a hated player after a certain distance.)

In any case, there's minor occurances of our guild trying certain tricks to get past a few enemies, but it's more of strategies than bugs or cheats. Stuff like using Distract to pause an enemy's patrolling, so that you can create a hole to sneak past into the boss room.

[Don]

I find it hard to believe that the trash would not assist the boss as it goes through the whole zone. Eric said 'run under the instance' which sounds like some kind of geometry exploit, which is fairly easy to pull off since virtually every MMORPG lets your client have the zone information (or it'd be rather expensive to tell you that there's a tree here or a door there), so you have considerable power and do stuff like say tell your client that there really is no door here and walk through it.

[Eric]

Aye, what Don said, two totally different tricks.

The one you're describing Sine didn't really get anybody banned.

Another situation where "cheating" came into play.

The last boss of the 2nd major raid instance of the game(Blackwing Lair) involved the boss despawning for the night if you wiped after you got past the Phase 1 of his encounter. So this led to forcing wipes if you weren't perfect in phase 1, and trying to get the conversion just right to attempt phase 2, and having nothing to do with your night if you wiped in phase 2.

Some guilds took the high road and only did that 1 attempt for the night(resulting in raids ending early).

And others would just sit outside the instance for 30 minutes, let it reset, and then attempt it again, which you could do over and over.

Sparked a debate about what was intended, and who's cheating and who's not.

Needless to say this was also revised later down the line. Nobody who "Cheated" was punished, and Blizzard made it the norm to attempt said boss over and over.

WoW Classic was notorious for having all sorts of cock-blocks that were downright retarded and people continually cheated to work around. I can't off the top of my head think of any case in Burning Crusade where people were attempting to cheat to bypass annoying content.

[SineSwiper]

Hmmm, well, I do know that the trick was done before, and it was the reason why leashing was implemented. I almost positive it was WoW, too.

[kent]

if you're using tools outside the game so you're walking in an area that doesn't exist, you should be banned, there's no justification for hacking the game. if you're that frustrated just quit.

if it's an exploit like what Sine said, you have to do that stuff or you're not trying. it's up to the devs to design things to prevent that.

in FFXI, there's one area where you can pull mobs to a wall and attack them with magic on the other side of the wall and the mobs have no way of pathing there (players can only get to the other side by using a different entrance). that's definitely cheating but i don't blame people for doing it.

within about a week the devs patched the boss there to have a draw-in ability where it'll pull the target directly underneath it if they're too far.

they didn't redesign the zone and theoretically you can still use that wall to kill regular mobs like that but besides that one boss, you'd take longer just to get stuff to the wall than to kill it normally.

[Don]

Geometry exploits are way too common and I don't think people get banned for doing that because in theory the devs are supposed to be the one to make sure you can't just walk past an impassable door. In reailty, you can't test for every crack or hole that your walls may have or all the possible conditions that allow someone to get over it. Both of the ones I mention involves having some point in an otherwise impenetrable wall where a player can squeeze through. The case Eric mentions sounds like you got to actually hack your client to tell your computer that you can walk underneath the world, because it's pretty unlikely the geometry can be so bugged that you can squeeze through the ground (the floor is generally a pretty solid object with no cracks in it).

[Eric]

So I did some digging Sine, on what it was you were referring to, and I got this.

"It's funny how things get distorted with the passage of time. "What Conquest did" is one of the most confused memories out there.

Conquest was one of a tiny handful of guilds making any progress in MC right around the end of January/beginning of February. FoH and Afterlife had too, but I'm not sure who else, if anyone. They were the first guild, I believe, to make it to the final portions of the zone. Anyway, they were obviously being watched since they were basically testing this raid content for the first time as they did it. Initially, they discovered a simple hunter split-pull trick where you could pull some mobs over a frost trap and then feign them back, and from then on you could single-pull the mobs without them linking. They used this to kill Garr more easily (though they'd already killed him previously). Then they got a first Sulfuron kill doing this, which they admit didn't really count. In EQ, using weird mechanics and tricks to split pulls was kind of standard practice, so they didn't think too much of it. A GM appeared and told them splitting linked mobs was an exploit, and not to do it. "Ok," then said. Anyway, later on in that clear, they had reached Golemagg, but wiped to him. In the interim, all the lava packs had respawned. They were standing in Garr's room faced with a choice of "call the raid because it's too late to reclear, or see if we can somehow pull Golemagg out here."

So they did -- a rogue stealthed to Golemagg, got a summon, and then attacked Golemagg and accepted his summon. Golemagg ran out to Garr's room, aggroing everything along the way. But bosses move faster than regular mobs, so he was in front of the pack when they reached Garr's room. (No zone pulse or anything back then.) The rogue vanished, and everything else, while Golemagg prox-aggroed the raid in Garr's room. They fought him there. Now, there are two versions of what happened, and why it happened. When they had Golemagg down to low health, he was despawned.

They were suspended for exploiting. Now, a post on the forums by a blue poster said it was for bypassing content via the stealth/summon/vanish trick. But apparently Conquest was told that it was for getting Golemagg's adds stuck in the geometry in Garr's room and using LOS to negate their attacks. Overhangs in MC used to be horribly glitchy with LOS, but they didn't work the way the GM apparently thought they did (one theory is that the Core Rager offtank was using improved shield block, back when a shield block completely negated physical attacks like Cleave/Whirlwind/Mangle/etc. -- remember that, anyone? -- to pretty much neutralize all of the dog's attacks so it looked like he wasn't actually hitting the tank at all to an observer)."




And the guild in my story that skipped to the last boss of the instance was the first Horde guild in the US to kill Kel'Thuzad in Naxxramas(The final raid instance before Burning Crusade).

Their banning made it to various online news sites heh: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofw ... id=6160983

[Don]

That sounds like your typical uber guild wannabe revisionist story. The exploit here involved is so low tech I can't imagine that was actually what they get banned for. You rarely get suspended if it's due to something the devs just forgot to take care of, as is in this case. I've never heard of people getting suspended for pulling the Prince in Karazhan to the entrance where his Infernals no longer hit you and that impacts whether you'll actually win or not as opposed to just bypassing X hours of trash. FoH was nuking mobs through walls in phase 1 in Plane of Time in EQ and all that happened to them was GM came and DT them all when they beat phase 1 in a way that's clearly not intended, and believe me EQ would like to get rid of these guys as soon as possible. Again you're talking about something that allows them to beat something they had no chance of beating, and no one was suspended.

The only plausible part of this story is the part about the shield block negating all special attacks. But I'm pretty sure shield block only negated proc type attacks. I think the Core Ragers proced Thrash(?) or something that does additional DPS, but it wouldn't negate the attack itself so you should still see the combat animations. You could have a GM witnessing some guy taking way less damage than is expected, but that's pretty weak proof for cheating. While you can't ever rule out the possibility some really clueless observer just jumped the gun, even in that case you'd just expect either mobs despawn or the raid get DTed as opposed to just outright suspension.

[Eric]

It also goes a bit deeper then that, Conquest was also the guild that first released videos showing how to kill every single boss in Molten Core, and opened up raiding for the masses. From my understanding it was a middle finger directed at the raiding developers, because...well...they weren't supposed to do that, and nobody expected them to. :p

I don't know if you would consider this taboo in EQ or whatever(releasing strategies and videos showing how to kill bosses), but for the most part the Raid developers took it as a gut check apparently, I remember Tigole(The lead developer for WoW's raiding design) came out and said when they released that video it kinda caught them off guard(it was in an old 1up Podcast).

[Don]

Conquest was like a 3rd rate guild back in EQ (might have cracked top 10 at one point) and probably on WoW who only made a name for themselves for exploiting, but they didn't even have hacks and stuff unlike say the ghost killers in EQ who could kill anything without having them fight back. There seems to be this code amongst uber guilds that you're never supposed to let people who are not in the know realize how un-uber everyone in the uber guild is. The other day a guy in Triality, which is like the Nihlium of EQ, told me about how one of their cleric (the most important class in the game) is afk in raids while playing WoW the whole time but they can't get rid of him/her because clerics rule the universe in EQ. As someone in the uber side of MMORPG you're not supposed to let people know that the usual accusation to the uberguild is actually true.

In the earlier days of WoW there's a ton of encounters that fall under the secret infoz type where if you know where to position the boss and his adds that's already winning 75% of the fight. I think the videos damaged the mystique of the uberguild because after you see it, it is very obvious that there was actually nothing tough about these guys aside from knowing some gimmick that usually involves positioning. WoW also has far more visual cues compared to most MMORPG I'm aware of which means you can actually figure out what people are doing to counter certain aspects of the fight.

EQ, on the other hand, doesn't have many encounters that solely relies on a clever positioning, and you really can't see much visually so it's not going to help much. The only notable exception I can think of is the Sisters encounter. You have 3 Sisters who each will equip 3 out of the 9 items you have, and they'll start beating each other up and you've to fight the victor(s). The order the 3 items the Sisters get do not matter, that is sister A getting item 1, 2, 3 or 3, 2, 1 is the same fight. But the order which Sisters get the items does matter, e.g. Sister A getting 1, 2, 3 is not the same fight as Sister C getting 1, 2, 3. Mathematically there are 1680 ways to rearrange the setup. Now getting to this phase already requires an equivalent of a whole raid being flasked in WoW equivalent amount of effort, so you usually get only 1 attempts per DAY because you basically have to blow day-long cooldowns to even to get to this phase. Now, out of the 1680 ways you can arrange the items, there are only 3 winnable combinations.

Now the ways the Sisters interact with each other obviously depends on what items they have, and it is a logic puzzle. But even if you're Sherlock Holmes it'd take you a while to figure this out because for example the order the Sisters attack each other changes depending on what items they have. When my guild got to the fight I actually made a chart of all the ways they interact and conclude that there must be about 100 combinations to test, which means it'd take between 1-100 days to beat this encounter.

Except it didn't take that long, because someone posted the winning combination on their web site. Usually when a guild wins something, they put a screenshot of the dead boss as a trophy case. But in the case of Sisters, none of the first 10 guilds that beat her posted any screenshots, because you can tell what has to be the winning combination by looking at what the last surviving Sisters has equipped. Some guild didn't go by the code and when everyone can see that the last Sister must have equipped, and assuming you've some minimal knowledge of this event, you can work backwards and figure out what the other 2 Sisters must have equipped as well. Of course later it turns out that the first guild that beat this did not in fact went through all 100+ possible combinations. They are developer's pet guild and was told of the winning combination. The 2nd guild that beat it had a friend who was a member in the 1st guild that beat it, and so on. But of course if you asked any of the guilds in the know, they'd swear that they only got this far through superb playing and tireless resolve.

Of course, the early raids in WoW are pretty unsophisticated probably due to a lack of experience. I think when WoW went to the 'move around really fast or die' raiding model then positioning gimmicks cease to impact the raid so much. A good raid should be focused on having good execution, not gimmicks.

[SineSwiper]

I knew I heard that story somewhere. Thanks for confirming it, Eric.

Geometry exploits are mostly non-existent in LOTRO because any creature can go into "Anti-Exploit Mode". If a mob has hate for you, and somehow cannot reach you, large question marks appear on the mob. The mob is immune to all attacks, but isn't attacking itself, either. At that point, the creature will try to figure out how to get to you, or eventually, the mob will lose interest and go back to its starting point.

Now, the fact that this mode exists is the fault of the dev's pathing code, but at least you don't have people banned or exploiting kills because the mob isn't pathing right.

As far as splitting linked mobs, that's not really an exploit in my book. Shit, kiting was invented in EQ when there was so many enemies in the new "God" zones (areas were the gods lived; forgot the names) that they couldn't take them all. So, it was basically impossible to take on all of the mobs. I even heard my dad talking about kiting in Jumpgate.

"Positioning gimmicks" are basically just part of the strategy, as long as it isn't really an exploit like attacking through doors/walls, etc. When the guild is fighting the balrog in rift, every attacker (except the tank) positions themselves at the side of Balrog, since he does a nasty AoE from the front, and a nasty one from the rear. Of course, this isn't the ONLY trick, since you have to know what to do when he reacts, all of the stuff to get there, etc.

There's a lot of technical stuff to do with each boss in rift (and especially Helegrod), but I imagine that's the same in most MMOs.

[Don]

I fail to see how there can be any logic when you're fighting an impossibly powerful entity who apparently is only aware of breathing the 1 guy in front of him as opposed to the 30 guys behind him. At any rate I'm not really talking about being behind a mob that only has a frontal AE. Usually positional gimmicks involves a mob that has some kind of AE that is magically blocked by one kind of wall but not another wall. The knowledge of such things turns an otherwise nearly impossible encounter to no problem, and videos give away a lot of this information. Again you don't really see too many of this type of encounter as a game matures because eventually developers figured out that it's a really dumb thing to expect people to find this special corner that blocks off the AE.

WoW has the evade mode as well, but what happens if the game has poor pathing and the boss resets to 100% in the middle of the fight because the guy who overaggro is standing in a bad spot? That's the price you pay for poor pathing. At any rate nothing's going to stop you from telling your client that you can actually walk underneath the world and then avoid all the mobs like that. It'd probaly be prohibitive for the server to check every possible impossible location a player can end up at.

So far linked mobs go, they're somewhat of an inherent futility. The only way you can make mobs completely unsplittable is if they share the same aggro list, but in that case they might as well be one mob. Another alternative would be that every mob has a way to utterly kill anyone trying to kite them but that'd mean you'd have a hard time pulling them even if you're trying to do it legitmately. This is why most good raid encounters do not depend on inability to split linked mobs as the difficulty, because people always find a way to get around these things.

[SineSwiper]

Well, even a boss that is fighting 24 people is still following the hate table. It's just that the guardian is using a lot of tricks to get the boss directed towards himself, and the illusion is that the other 23 people just aren't doing as much damage, so the boss feels that he shouldn't be paying much attention to them. So, it IS somewhat "realistic".

On the other hand, the boss should be turning at the point of greatest potential when he's doing AoEs, but then you'd be faced with possibly 10 dead people at once, and that would make things really hard.

There are things in the game that rely on going against the hate table. For example, one of the bosses will occasionally throw a boulder for massive damage on the second guy on the hate table (usually a hunter with lower armor/HP). Another will just randomly bash somebody. I would like to see one that focuses on certain classes, though.

[Don]

Well the aggro list thing also is just a cheap attempt to justify why your one tank who is most likely doing the lowest damage is somehow the guy the boss focuses all his attention to. It becomes realy gimmicky when combined with raid wiping AEs, not to mention unrealistic. It's interesting to note that directional-based AEs are a relatively late thing in MMORPG, probably invented to simulate some realism but they're used in a way even more unrealistic than a blanket hit-everything type AE because the power on those frontal AEs are usually way too strong to the point that the boss ends up only using it on 1 guy, because otherwise everyone else will die.

It's hard to have any meaningful difficulty that involves manipulating aggro list that doesn't end up being cheap and unrealistic at the same time. If you have a boss that randomly hits a different person for large amount of damage, then why doesn't he just randomly hit a healer for a large amount of damage and kill them? And why should someone who is doing nothing wrong be punished by getting hit really hard? Again this is something I see encounters tend to move away as the game matures simply because it doesn't make a lot of sense and is not enjoyable either.

[SineSwiper]

I disagree. This kind of change up in the behavior is a refreshing change to the other 50 levels of predictable hate behavior. I don't think it happens often enough.

[Don]

Err okay so your boss has a random swing mechanism like say WoW. It randomly hits a guy for 10000 damage for no reason. Well this damage better be lower than the lowest max HP of a reasonable well geared character for this encounter because otherwise you're talking about instant kill that cannot be avoided, which is bad. This also implies the game can't have a frenzy mechanism ala EQ where being low on HP makes mob hate you more (because they try to kill you first) unless the damage is so low that it will not trigger the frenzy. Further you got to make sure that this random swing mechanism never overlaps with say an unavoidable AE, because otherwise you're taking AE damage + random swing damage. Again if this exceeds the max HP of the lowest HP character then you're dealing with an instant kill mechanism that cannot be circumvented.

So when you put it all together, you basically get something that's akin to a Final Fantasy 'lower guy's HP to 1' mechanism because you can't actually do enough damage to kill the guy no matter what (because then the encounter is broken). This is why WoW's healing is often compared to whack-a-mole because there's really no logic as to why someone in your party suddenly is missing 99% of his total HP. It just happens and if you spot the mole in the next 6 seconds before some periodic damage kicks in, then that guy lives. Otherwise that guy dies.

Again this is something WoW moves away from as the raiding game matures. The latest fad seems to be environmental damage, which at least is pretty fair and damage that is somewhat mitigated by skill. The fact that WoW now comes with a built in threat meter is pretty strong evidence that any kind of aggro manipulation is simply stupid. I think another popular mechanism used by WoW is low random damage continously, so that over the length of the fight you obviously have to be aware who is getting hit but you've some control over how to deal with it.

[SineSwiper]

Well, ultimately, trying to make mob battles "realistic" is pretty futile because you're farming these bosses over and over again, anyway. So, by that virture, you're much smarter than them. If they were too smart to kill, you'll end up with something like the FF12 stuff in the other thread.

[Don]

Well, the whole reason people get paid to design encounters is to make something that pretends to be smart that obviously isn't.

[SineSwiper]

Aye, so it's kinda pointless to argue about how unrealistic it is :P