D3 all legit?

[axxxel]

Do you think it's possible to kill duping completely? What's it like in WoW, do they have dupes? I understand botting is hard to get to but wouldn't it be awesome to have an all-legit diablo? I think this is the most intriguing thing about it...

[konfeta]

It's probably possible, depending on how well they squash bugs and potential loopholes.

[Swordslash]

Based on Blizzard's history, I am beyond skeptical. Can it be done? Obviously! In fact, I can't believe they could never stop it in D2. In fact, clearly their item system has fundamental flaws that were impossible to fix with patches. I have to either believe that, or that the D2 programmers were either impossibly lazy or incompetant. So I choose to believe it was just an unfixable "oops" in the base item code or functioning of battle.net.

Maybe Blizzard can contact CCP (Eve-Online) and ask them how to create a massive, thriving economy without any giant dupe holes...

[konfeta]

AFAIK D2's duping involved tricking Battle.net servers with severe amounts of lag and game crashing.

D3 will be using Bnet 2.0, so they probably figured out a way to account for that.

[visom]

There will always be hacks in games. You can't guarantee a game to be hack free, the only thing you'll need to worry about is: how fast until that hack gets patched?

Besides, there's always those few people that have private (and powerful) hacks that are only shared to the very few which is very hard for Blizzard to find.

To flux: How would blizzard handle private hackers? Even though I don't work for Blizzard, I can assume that private hacks are very hard to find and patch since so little people use it. Does Blizzard take the effort to ban those people that uses private hacks? Or just ignore them (to a certain extent) and primarily go after those free, public hacks?

[Flux]

jay wilson just about guaranteed it during our interview. Said stuff about how they'd learned from WoW, had a better server architecture now, etc.

No website security is ever 100%, but I think we can expect considerable improvement over what we saw in D2. There haven't been any big WoW duping or hacking outbreaks, as far as I know. Just small stuff here and there...

[Apocalypse]

the thing is, the bigger and better a game is the more and more people that will try break it. i have alot of faith that the dupes and hacks in d3 will be kept in check

[jamesisbest]

I think looking over Blizzard's past I am guessing there will be very few hacks and no huge dupe/hack outbreaks. They keep getting better and better at stopping hacks in their games, the first Diablo was hack central, I remember people walking on buildings and huge hacking rates. I didn't like the multiplayer for the original Diablo so I mainly stuck to singleplayer. Diablo 2 was still filled with a lot of hacks but it was toned down quite a bit from the original Diablo, and a good comparison is open b.net and closed b.net for Diablo 2 there were still significant differences in the amount of hacks and the severity of the hacks. During the time I played WoW I never heard of people duping and heard there was some hacking but very little compared to Diablo 2. It also seemed like the few people who did hack were often caught within a few months. Botting on the other hand is a different story and gold-selling is a problem with WoW but is still a step forward compared to hacking and gold-selling that Diablo 2 was plagued with. My concern is not about hack control which I think they will tremendously reduce due to much better anti-hack at Blizzard, my concern is gold-selling reduction. I'm almost certain there will be gold-sellers, but to what extent will be largely up to how inventive Blizzard will be at stopping such activity.

[Jambe]

Maybe Blizzard can contact CCP (Eve-Online) and ask them how to create a massive, thriving economy without any giant dupe holes...

Yeah! Although, to be fair, there are thousands of mining bots running on Tranquility at any given moment. Graphical bots (ones that simply operate the game using scripted mouse/keyboard movements) are pretty hard for any developer to prevent, from what I understand. Client-side sniffing programs can find them but it's always a find-and-patch situation. Do you play EVE?

As others have said, they can't make program completely unhackable, but they can certainly make D3 tougher to crack / exploit / whatever than D2.

[tmorrow]

Removal of all hacks is a big ask and a virtual impossibility. Removal of duplicates on the other hand is not that far fetched as has been explained several times in the past. The solution revolves around the assignment of unique id's for all drops (runes in D2 didn't have unique id's). Of course even unique id's wouldn't help in the case of complete server ownage by an evil hack program infiltrating the Blizzard's game network - let's hope that never occurs.

[nasarius]

The solution revolves around the assignment of unique id's for all drops (runes in D2 didn't have unique id's).

Sort of. Assigning unique IDs will let you detect/audit for dupes and recover afterwards, but it's not what prevents them.

The prevention part is all about making sure that every item transfer (character to character, character to ground, etc) is a change that's immediately made permanent in the database. The changes must be "atomic": remove item from player A + give item to player B must be a single operation.

This is a well-explored topic in any industry that needs to maintain data integrity, even in the case of a hardware failure or server crash. It gets a bit more complex in the case of a MMOG or even D2/D3, where you're dealing with a massive distributed architecture that needs to be very efficient.

On the other hand, hacks like ShowEQ and D2 maphacks are more or less impossible to prevent. You get bandaids like Warden which stop you from running the hack on the same computer, but still let you intercept and display the information on another computer. Again for performance reasons, sometimes you need to send the client more information than should be immediately displayed (eg, off-screen monster locations). The act-revealing part of the hack could be easily stopped, though. And bots will always be possible; there's no technical solution for that.

[phool]

duping - very unlikely
botting - inevitable, the only question is where the balance will be placed between irritating legit players and limiting botting
minor hacks (e.g. chicken) - almost inevitable
major hacks (e.g. bps hack) - likely but hopefully short-lived and non-ubiquitous

[stillman]

Hmm...if botting is certain, then mabey they could make the game so that progress in high leveling and farming is just really slow no matter how godly anyone's gear is. Adjust it so that it would take 70 computers all going at once to farm enough loot to make 20$ a week. So the sweat shop someone makes would take 30 years to pay for after buying all those computers.

But progress that slow, I guess, constitutes bad "balance placed between irritating legit players and limiting botting". I guess we just can't win.

[mince pies]

the thing is, the bigger and better a game is the more and more people that will try break it.

Games don't get much bigger than WoW, which is virtually hack/dupe free anyway

[Apocalypse]

Games don't get much bigger than WoW, which is virtually hack/dupe free anyway



wow is a different beast, if bliz requires us to pay monthly for this game then i can compare the two, until then its apples and oranges

[Starving_Poet]

Games don't get much bigger than WoW, which is virtually hack/dupe free anyway

WoW's Warden system isn't all the great. Warden can be detected by the clients before it has a chance to act.

[imjustsomeguy]

WoW's Warden system isn't all the great. Warden can be detected by the clients before it has a chance to act.

I don't know anything about warden but in the 2+ years I played WoW I never encountered or heard of any hacks/dupes. Bots and gold farmers were the only issues.

[raveharu]

If Blizzard wants to effectively eliminate hackers, not only must they have strong anti-hacking features in the game, they can employ several active GameMaster(GM) to monitor the game, and to deal with the advertisement spam BOTs(on the spot ban + cd-key ban).

Then again that would require $$$, so hmmm... :ponder:

[Sein Schatten]

I don't know anything about warden but in the 2+ years I played WoW I never encountered or heard of any hacks/dupes. Bots and gold farmers were the only issues.

There were some hax. Speed hacks. The positional data is client site and you can increase the position delta client site to run faster.
There is also exploits I think we all know. (One Shotting raid bosses with Reckoning) ;)

[nicro tower]

Well WoW is like 50000 people on one giant server with people monitering it, so it's kinda impossible to get away with hacking. Diablo on the other hand is like 50000 people on 10000 servers, which is a bit harder to monitor all at once.
But I have faith blizzard will think of something.

[Sein Schatten]

Well WoW is like 50000 people on one giant server with people monitering it, so it's kinda impossible to get away with hacking. Diablo on the other hand is like 50000 people on 10000 servers, which is a bit harder to monitor all at once.
But I have faith blizzard will think of something.

20.000, not 50.000. And no, Blizzard is not monitoring the servers. There are automatons which alert a human (transferring huge sums of gold will trigger one, for example) but that is possible for D3 as well.

[Starving_Poet]

You people dismiss bots and gold farming as if they're trivialities, whereas those two things are far far more dangerous to maintaining an economy than a couple dupes here and there.

[Kiroptus]

Well... I dont know for sure but D2 just seems badly coded which might be one of the reasons why dupping is so easily done. If D3 is better coded I think that dupping can be eliminated. It doesnt seem too much of a problem.

And botting is ridiculously easy to stop. Its just that D2 is so old that nobody cares anymore. Just design a more difficult entrance to the final level, add proper immunities (magic immunity would certainly stop the baal run hammerdin botters), make a more elaborate way to enter the boss run (maybe having to kill a random monster that can drop a key to proceed to the next level, whatever SOMETHING that advocates player control), dont make teleport so overpowered, etc...

Botting in D2 was IMO, a consequence of bad game design, The game is supposed to have lots of random stuff. Random areas, random exits, random monsters. What makes botting so possible in D2 is just that: Teleport, Easy exits and Magic damage. With a little bit of thought its certainly possible to design a game to be bot-free. Even more for Diablo, which is so random already.

[Starving_Poet]

Botting is actually very hard to stop. There are so many different ways to do it from simple keystroke macros to optical recognition systems to the simple 'farm' setup where you run 8 characters simultaneously that the company that figures out how to do with will rule the MMO market.

[Kiroptus]

But Diablo isnt a MMO. Its a random-level generated ARPG. I can see it being hard to stop on MMO but on Diablo it just requires a bit of thought.

The main reason botting is so easy on Diablo 2 is because of this: Teleport. Once you combine that to the gruesome damage that Hammerdins do, and that almost no enemy in the game are immune to, you create a perfect enviroment for botting. In D3, Teleport already seems more limited than in D2 and bosses will have more complex scripted actions as they said that they want the battles to be more epic. So player control might be more necessary, when in D2 it was all about damage and teleporting around like a madman.


If Botting is possible, it will certainly be less effective as D2 because this game is the most bot-friendly game ever with teleport and blessed hammer.

[Zeek]

The only way to stop botting is to annoy the legit users. Force us to do something to prove we are human. That is the only way you're going to stop a sophisticated bot. As long as the bot works off of graphical cues there is nothing Blizzard could do to stop a bot short of sending an employee to your house to watch you play.

As for duping and cheating I'm sure there will be some hacks out there. I'd be amazed if Blizzard found and fixed every hole in their code. Unless you've programmed anything before please don't assume this is just lazy coding. It's a lot harder then you might think.

That being said I agree with those who say Blizzard has improved from one game to the next. I suspect they'll do the same with D3 and the problems will not be as pronounced.

However, I'm not sure I really want that. When new ladder seasons started in D2 I always got really bored waiting around for HRs and other items to come down in price where I could get some of them and make a really cool character. If we don't have hacks floating around we're at the mercy of the drop rate of good items. Most of us would probably never know what it's like to have a last wish weapon or any of the higher end items without hacks. It's a double edged sword to some extent.

[Gamekk]

Like Flux said it's impossible to be 100% safe.

If we compare it to WoW hacking, then elitists will have hacks, sweet.

WoW was always surrounded by hackers and botters. I can remember at the start of WoW seeing botters. And recently there was this PiRoX bot freeware for battlegrounds you would always see 5 to 10 people (out of 40) in each batleground doing circles in the main base. The bot couldn't be detected, it was just "reports" based from other players. There are now paying versions for this bot.

Not even talking about Glider, which the creator got sued to the bone. It started very early in WoW and 100 000 used it. Means 1% of the subscribers. If you compare to DII... i'd say something like 5-10-15% of people would bot? That's still less but pretty much considerable if you aim to compete with the top players, you will only compete with hackers and dupers again.

About WoW hacks, there have always been some leaks here and there about duping (then selling for infinite gold). However they were quickly patched, due to the support of game masters. In DIII there will be NO game masters, so a dupe will leak, and we will see online stores back online. I'm 95% sure bout that

[JSLAW]

Do you think it's possible to kill duping completely? What's it like in WoW, do they have dupes? I understand botting is hard to get to but wouldn't it be awesome to have an all-legit diablo? I think this is the most intriguing thing about it...

Back in the diablo II days, you were dealing with a fairly small company. You are now dealing with a major power player with higher profit margins than any other company I can think of.

That said, if Blizz were to dedicate even one one-hundredth of one percent of the profits they made from WOW to the creation of Diablo III and BNET 2., then I would have to say that dupes and bots are done for.

For each would be amature cheater out there, Blizz can now easily afford to hire 20 full-time gurus without breaking a sweat. Yes, dupes are dead, gone, finished.

[Starving_Poet]

For each would be amature cheater out there, Blizz can now easily afford to hire 20 full-time gurus without breaking a sweat. Yes, dupes are dead, gone, finished.

And for each of those 20 full-time gurus there will be bored programmers who write hacks simply because THEY ARE BORED.