Be Excellent To Each Other

http://kotaku.com/5661492/is-blizzard-b ... ngleplayer

Interesting if true, which I'm hesitant to believe without some more confirmation.

They certainly make sure you know about it - I pay no attention to the in-game news browser but even I know that if you mess with the client in any way you get banned from Battlenet, and hence from the game.
You're a journo now, phone Blizzard yourself and see what they say

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10 ... -cheaters/

Protects the integrity of achievements, or something.

That's what people signed up to when they decided to buy a game that dials home every time you want to play it, online multiplayer or offline single player alike.

Still makes it annoying when tryign to use it on offline mode... oh well

Isnt the simple answer to pirate it if you want the single player game ? (*)

(*) - The only gaming I do on my PC is emulators I dont have a machine which will run any of these new fangled games so play console games instead

I take it Blizzard will be permabanning cheaters on WoW who pay a monthly subscription as well, then?

Because if not, when the biggest players in the business begin making up their own rules on fairness and honesty as they go along, I doubt many will be disinclined to do the same where paying is concerned.

Yes, of course they do.

Ruthlessly, yes.

They do it in batches, and you can tell when it happens as people invariably take to the forums to complain.

We're talking many, many thousands at a time. The loss of subscription is certainly a hit, but not as much as if the game turned to hacked-to-fuck shit.

'Achievement Integrity' seems a little weak for banning someone from an SP game they've paid for. It also suggests that they could take much less drastic steps with relative ease - revoking the achievements gained in that game, for example.

I guess they're making an example - obvious next steps from messing with the client might be stealing the whole thing, for example.

Haven't people been banned from Live for hacking Cheevos?

Yes.

But they still own their games. They could play them offline, or sell them.

From what I have read over time not all bans on WoW are permanent though, and batch-banning will see a great number of people pay a monthly sub por two from their infringement to their eventual ban. Which raises its own questions - is it ethical to accept another sub from a player you have on a record of cheats and you know you will be chucking off the game later?

I have no problem with this, SC2 is a fully online game, whether you're playing single player or not, the achievements/avatars/times etc are all part of your public profile and hacking the game against that backdrop is total stupidity. (Especially since Blizzard are well known for a serious Not Fucking About approach when it comes to shit like this, and SC2 is very in your face right from the off about how it's persistently online all the time it can be.)

I'm no achievement whore myself but there is a sense of satisfaction in earning them, which could be undermined by hacking, particularly for the people who really put the effort in to get the trickier ones.

As I understand it SC2 does have 'proper' cheat codes built into it but of course you forgo any cheevos or suchlike for that session, which is fair enough.

In summary, the hacker was a dick and Blizzard called it right.

What if you don't give a fuck about your public profile, as many probably don't?

Heh

The difference between this and the xbox is, of course, that the PC has historically been a generally open format, with people allowed to modify games however they see fir, while the xbox has always been the opposite if you care about live.

So if you were harmlessly playing around with the games workings in SP, as you may have done several times before (Many times with the creators blessing), only to find that you were suddenly locked out, I can't say it would go down well. Unless of course, you refuse to ever think anything bad about Blizzard.

Pretty sure he wasn't necessarily referring to himself.

Also - Atrocity - how does using a trainer etc make someone a dick? They can make games more fun/mix things up a bit after you're bored of the game proper. Unlimited resources and stuff = mega base building fun. Who's to say he was cheating just to gain achievements?

I think the other thing here is if you were playing on a modded xbox with a modded version of the game then Microsoft could ban your gamertag / profile , and prevent you from using live.

That would not prevent you from playing the single player part of the game (either via the disk or if you downloaded it).

If Blizzard had done the same thing here via a reset of achievements / profile / etc then I doubt there would be the fuss , the real problem is they have stopped them from playing the game.

Heh!

The reason Blizzard tends to batch ban is to get more cheating fucks. If they recognize one method of cheating, and immediately ban hammer those that have been caught using it, the ones that aren't caught will stop using it. But they're still cheating fucks, and will probably use the next cheat.

Amazing how many 'little brothers' are cheating on their sibling's otherwise legitimate account, when the big bans go through.

Anyway, imagine you'd worked for hours on a terrifyingly hard Cheevo, only to find out that a load of 12 year old fuckwads had got it by cheating. Wouldn't you be pissed? Like it or not, some people enjoy earning achievements, and like having 'vidmaster' level cheevos on their account. I guarantee that Blizzard get more business from them than people banned for cheating in the SP game.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the trainer is marketed as an 'easy achievement tool' and that was the goal of this particular person.

We don't know that though. I used to use similar stuff in Red Alert 2 to build ridiculously large bases with my mate - it was basically the first to crash the other's computer. Fun times. I'd played the game legitimately to death and continued to do so. The trainer thing was just a bit of a laugh. Of course, this guy could've been gaming the cheevos, but we don't really know. Plus, Blizzard are actually preventing this guy from playing his singleplayer game at all because of this. This is pretty much unprecedented on PC, as Dave explained.

Quite astonished at people backing Blizzard here (if this is all true, obv.). Being able to fuck about with PC games is one of the last USPs PC games have and I, for one, don't like the idea of that not being true any more. Cheevos are not a good exchange for that loss.

Yup! If that open-ness goes, everyone might as well just get a 360.

Just to note, I'm staying out of that bit of debate and was merely standing up for their stance in purely multiplayer games.



I don't have any facts to really bring up, but I'm well aware that not all bannings are permanent. Obviously there are degrees of infractions, ranging from being a twat, exploiting, and flat out hacking, which will all carry their own punishments.

I can't comment on the ethics of taking further payments, though Pundy did raise an interesting point about their reasons for batch-banning.

Oh yeah, and I'm not saying I'm against patrolling multiplayer (competitive) games. There's an enshrined place for modded multiplayer games embedded right in the DNA of games like Unreal and Quake too though, where an element of trust exists between the players.

It'd be quite hard to perma-ban a player, rather than an account, though.

Mmm - it was stated earlier that there are in-game ways to enable cheats though, but they turn off your ability to gain achievements. The fact that he used an outside tool to circumvent it seems to suggest that an easy way to get the achievements was in fact his reason for using the tool.

I still maintain that pulling the achievements from his account, which should be incredibly simple to do, is a more appropriate response than a ban, however.

Definitely!

There is the possibility that the built-in cheats are really lame, though. You can do some seriously cool OTT stuff with a proper hack/trainer, but yeah we really don't know the full circumstances.

Google the list of Starcraft 2 cheats. They're pretty comprehensive (to my non RTS playing eyes) and include just about every benefit of these dodgy trainers.

So, this guy either wanted to cheat above and beynd the 'official' codes (cheevo cheating) or he was too stupid to use Google. Either way: har har.

Achievements can fuck off up a sewer pipe. What people do in their single player game is their business, and has no bearing on multiplayer. Interfering with them because of that is ridiculous.

Cheevo's are a multiplayer game.

It's not as simple as that, speaking as someone who's pretty deep into SC2 multiplayer, looking at the cheevos other players have (and even the avatars they've unlocked, as they're unlocked based on specific accomplishments in the game) can give you a surprisingly good idea of what type of player they are.

Really simple example, someone who's got Jim Raynor as their avatar has completed the single player campaign, not played much multiplayer, not done many of the single player challenges, and will most likely play a basic Terran MMM rush strategy.

I know that before the game starts, by looking at their avatar. Their avatar is based on what they've done in the game, and to an extent, how they've done it.

This is how subtle the language of SC2 can be, so having some fucktard hacking his way to all the hard-as-nails achievements and all the hardest-to-get avatars is artificially distorting (or cheating, if you will) how he projects himself in multiplayer.

I often look my opponents up after an interesting game, and their game score and achievements should be an accurate reflection of how they've played the game without hacking, otherwise they're basically duping their opponents.

It'd be like starting a game of poker against someone, believing they were the World No 1, when in fact they're just a low-ranking amateur - you're telling me your strategy would be the same against both guys?

Let's not forget that SC2 has every bloody cheat you could possibly want built into it, just press ENTER and type in the code, job done. Anyone who's hacking in single player is blatantly abusing the T&Cs of both battle.net and SC2 itself, at the very least cheating to artificially pimp out how excellent they are at the game to others, and giving themselves an unfair advantage in multiplayer.

Let's take the MAME BEEX sh'mup challenge, how shit would it be if one of us cheated to keep topping the scores every week? Yeah it's not exactly the end of the world but it's cheap and it spoils it for other people, even though you're not directly affecting how other people play the game or what scores they're getting - so we run on trust that none of us are fucking around.

Hacking in SP mode in SC2 is cheating and spoiling it for others even if you never move out of SP, and if you go into MP based on hacked game achievements/score/avatars/times you are basically cheating in MP as well.

Or what Grim.... said, far more succinctly

Sorry but that's complete bollocks. If you're shit at multiplayer, having a different avatar won't change that. Hacking your way through single player will still show you up as crap when your online record is 900 losses to 3 wins or whatever.

I hardly think you're going to lose because you're expecting your opponent to be better than he is?

Also: If there's no matching heuristic, then it's shit. If there is, you're not going to get matched against someone who's barely played. And surely then the best* thing would be to ban them from multiplayer, not single player.
*- well, not best, that would be simply docking the achievements and locking them.

You're both missing the point, a person hacking in single player DIRECTLY AFFECTS how that person is projected into the multiplayer game, in terms of their accomplishments, achievements, completion of challenges, overall competence etc - this might not make sense to you or SA (neither of you having actually played SC2 MP as far as I'm aware.....), but these things make a difference in what can often be, in many regards, a pretty psychological game.

And that's before we even consider the basic shittery of hacking your way to get stuff that other people have to put time, effort and skill into the game to get. (See again Grim...'s point above.)

But taking all that into account, removing those achievements and locking him out of re-acquiring them would be sufficient to address that, no?

So? Lock said achievements out, don't lock the entire game and force them to buy a new one. Unless, of course, you're a company managed by a bunch of utter cunts. As before, witha PC game, I'd expect to be allowed to mod it however I wanted. I was allowed to with Doom, I was positively encouraged with many games that followed it. The main tangible advantage of PC games is said ability. Except of course, if you happen to own a game by the mighty Blizzard (They shall do only what is good)

Not really, Blizzard have to spend development time and money - (i.e. the money that the rest of us pay for their games and services) - stopping twats like him debasing their games for the rest of us, so as far as I'm concerned he's just paying his dues.

Put it this way, he won't do it again. (Well, not unless he's really stupid.)

His game, his business. It's up to him what he does with his game. If my mate cheats at chess when he's on his own, I don't really give a shit, because it's his chessboard and his game.

So?

You're not allowed to with SC2 and neither are you encouraged to do so, and neither do you have to buy it in the first place if you find that too onerous.

Mr Hacker chose to buy the game, he proceeded to hack it, he ignored an advance warning issued by Blizzard that the banhammer was coming for ALL forms of hacking in SC2, and he was duly banned.

Now he either has to suck it down and buy another copy, or go back to modding Doom.

Finally, if you think that the 'main tangible advantage' of PC games is your ability to mod them, (how many people actually do that, I wonder?), then that's entirely your right, but I suspect you're not really speaking for the PC gaming community at large, and certainly not for the players of SC2 - who appear to have voted in their millions as to quite liking how Blizzard go about looking after the integrity of their games and player experience, thank you very much.

But your mate isn't cheating at chess as part of a worldwide 'How Good Are You At Chess?' network, and he doesn't expect to be able to upload details of all his cheating exploits to a central chess player database, which will be recorded and maintained at someone else's expense, and used by loads of other chess players around the globe to consider if and how they would like to play against him.

Then allow people to opt out of the cockwaving database. Most people never even play online anyway.

Yeah, but the point is that he appears to have cheated specifically for the cockwaving database entries. Otherwise he'd have used the in-game cheats.

Surely he'll get found out in 5 minutes then, when his multiplayer record gets crappier by the hour?

And if not, then integrating the single and multiplayer measures is clearly terrible implemented and stupid. Even if you legitimately win a billion single player battles, you won't match that in multi.

The fact that you know absolutely cock-all about SC2 (SP or MP), battle.net, their structure, purpose, functionality and mode of operation is becoming more glaringly apparent with every word you write.

Give up while you're behind.

Blizzards statement

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/112/1127865p1.html

Which is a bloody good point really. Who says this guy was only using it in single player? And how can Blizzard tell the difference if he wasn't? All they get is *player X has used cheaty thing Y* .

And another good point:How many of these hacks are also keyloggers in disguise, how many people who play SC2 also have WoW accounts and how many resources does Blizzard use to sort out the results of WoW accounts being hacked? (the answer to that last one.. not an inconsiderable amount, I'm betting)

It all boils down to: no-one has any business using any kind of trainer in SP, thats what cheats are for, if you do, then it has been spelt out what willl happen. If you don't like that, then don't buy the game.

'm going to throw something out there, that you might not agree with, but might be right.

I've bolded the parts that is going to fuck you up.

From playing EvE, and playing with assumptions; don't.

MaliA's top tips when facing an unknown force:

1) What you think or reasonably assume will only ever be correct when it turns out to be this way
2) See point 1
3) Assuming you've gotten points 1 and 2 down your face, consider your options
4) Let's face it, you need to play to your strengths and kick him to the ground, quickly
5) It's an RTS, everyone loves to turtle
6) Denial of area is a good thing
7) Stopping what they want to do is a good thing
You go girl
9) And some more
10) Force their micro into doing shit they can't handle.
11) win
12) Smack talk them as much as you can, this takes their attention away.

Short version, hit fast in many areas and keep them on the run. If they react they can't act.