Fix the hacks, c'mon I know you can do it.

Its obvious that in day to day game play the use of hacks has increased. Not all cheating players are flying and teleporting all the time. But most of the cheating players will at the very least be on a "lite" speed boost. Of course you got the bot farmers and afk farmers, and much more extreme stuff.

Someone found an exploit to your system and it is easy to abuse. It would seem that as a company the actions needed are not being taken to discourage this.

I know that if someone buys gold, 9/10 within an hour or two you guys have temp banned and removed.

You can detect gold buyers but not when someone breaches your system?

How can I know for a certainty that my assets are safe? That somehow some other exploit captures payment information?

I use paypal because atleast they can protect me and I know it.

If you refuse to punish the players, atleast fix and prevent the ability to do it.

Are the hobby hacker/programmers superior?

You can type into google for these exploits, download them and probably look at the code and see how they are doing it, is this just natural order?

Balance is a huge issue, don't get me wrong. But if suddenly players start moving at normal speeds, combat slow applies, and take the damage they are supposed to, perhaps some of the L2P excuse can be reapplied.

So, let me tell you first that I don't like hacking, nor do I support them. What I can tell you is that this game works on a client/server architecture as expected. Due to the massive lag that would be caused if the server calculated EVERYTHING in the system would cause, the server trusts the client on some things like movement. The servers are not hacked when these people are using their hacks, but the client on their own computer is. The server sees that they are in a different place than it thinks that they are, and has to trust the client that it's not lying as it could be lagging and just correcting where they are. The server tries to predict movement, but of course, players are not NPC's and can not be accurately predicted. The server does check things like damage, range, skills, boons, ect. That's why you can't see a player using a portal over max distance, or giving themselves all boons, or boosting their skill damage to 9k per strike base damage. It's literally a client position hack that the server can not reasonably check without making the game unbearably laggy. An example of this is seeing people in WvW gliding, and they sometimes look like they are falling, but then teleport up, then fall, teleport up, ect. Your client doesn't know they are gliding, and makes them fall, then the server tells you that they are in a different position and teleport back up as far as you see. It's the opposite of the hack. Your client gets wrong info VS giving the server wrong info.

TLDR, the servers are safe, paypal has it's own protections and is safe, and it's insanely hard from a technical level to solve this problem which is why it exists in most games. Hope that helps.

EDIT: You also can't easily look at the code of most of these programs as they are obfuscated and try to hide well how they work as they don't want to be found out and copied. Being a programmer doesn't give you any edge here as they are made free, and everyone is free to use them (But don't, that breaks the ToS and makes the game worse). It's not about a "natural order". Cheaters are jsut that. Cheaters.

Hopefully with the next update they will render the hackers useless for another couple of weeks

I found some cheaters in the game during the years too (mostly on WvW), but today I got accused of speedhacking by a kid after a PvP ranked match.I don't know what this dude have seen, but he started accusing and insulting me even after I tried to reasoning with him, asking why he though I was speedhacking, but after all he didn't give a real explanation.

I've played every PvP season since the beginning, and apart from some guys with clear macros, I didn't find any cheater into the game mod.Are you sure we're not talking about rubberbanding confused as some speedhacking? In a match with a real speedhacker I expect being unable to hold a point since he actually can move too fast to let me keep it.

What do you think?

The hacks have become VERY obvious lately in WvW... like the character yesterday who killed 15 -- FIFTEEN!!! -- players in our zerg (I hate zergs, but that's a different issue) without taking ANY damage. Players are teleporting and speed-hacking all over the place.. and the report system provides no means of tagging them and reporting them.If ANet hasn't noticed, it's because they do not want to notice.

I'm no expert in this but I'm thinking this would be an issue that would be more difficult to tackle than it seems. I've noticed similar patterns in other NCSoft MMOs and I can tell you 2 things:

1) they didn't bother fixing them before, which is why their games are still heavily infested with them2) most prominent that I know of work on a basis of packet sniffing, so they have something running in the background that intercepts traffic and after they change these values it gives them advantage.

Point 2 makes me think that even if they changed the code somehow they could still find a way around with these tools.

Completely rewriting parts of the code could solve the issue but isn't something that can be done in a day or two, not even a month or two perhaps. It costs money, energy and time and I doubt they will do something about it.

@Kronos.3695 said:I found some cheaters in the game during the years too (mostly on WvW), but today I got accused of speedhacking by a kid after a PvP ranked match.I don't know what this dude have seen, but he started accusing and insulting me even after I tried to reasoning with him, asking why he though I was speedhacking, but after all he didn't give a real explanation.

I've played every PvP season since the beginning, and apart from some guys with clear macros, I didn't find any cheater into the game mod.Are you sure we're not talking about rubberbanding confused as some speedhacking? In a match with a real speedhacker I expect being unable to hold a point since he actually can move too fast to let me keep it.

What do you think?

Well I don't ever ask them or accuse them. I just observe. I've seen rubber band and latency issues. My most recent experience was on capricorn. I was on the docks beginning a decap and I saw a necro switch his direction from going to the bazaar (he was almost there) to me. He made it to me before I could finish decap. Some people have trouble making that distance during a capping, but the necro came from across the map before I could complete a decap. At the very least during that particular incident, I was not confused. The rest of the match he was able to match me for decaps and help mid

If the problem can't be fixed by changing gameplay mechanics, then at the very least, Anet should be able to detect when players are using hacking softwareon their server.

Manually ban any players who log on with the hacking software.

It is a much easier solution then completely rewriting the code for how clients/players interact with Anet's Pvp servers.

Banning hackers is just as important as banning gold sellers, if not more so.

I don't think Anet has considered the cost of not banning hackers in PvP or all game modes. I know that I would be more inclined to purchase more gems and gold if I knew that hackers were banned.

Just write a code that compares the location data the program wants to send out with the data Anet receives. Anet can activate the comparison program on a random sample of connected players to keep the processing load down. If the program detected inconsistencies between the position Anet was passing along to other players and the position saved in an encoded cache within GW2 files (recording activated on Anet’s side and uploaded back to Anet) then flag the account for observation and action.

If processing power is the issue just limit the processing power aspect by only auditing a limited number at any time.

@"saerni.2584" said:Just write a code that compares the location data the program wants to send out with the data Anet receives. Anet can activate the comparison program on a random sample of connected players to keep the processing load down. If the program detected inconsistencies between the position Anet was passing along to other players and the position saved in an encoded cache within GW2 files (recording activated on Anet’s side and uploaded back to Anet) then flag the account for observation and action.

If processing power is the issue just limit the processing power aspect by only auditing a limited number at any time.

I'm assuming that you are a programmer or at least understand the architecture of games in general of this type. I'm curious on what sort of proposal to fix this you can think of, because I can't think of much. Processing power is all done on the server in this case since we have learned we can't trust clients. We could check to see if someone is going more than 50% faster than normal speed to prevent more than that, though whatever the maximum mount speed would actually be the top. That accounts for horizontal movement only, and would have to be game wide as far as I know as just "adding it in PvP" would be a lot harder than it sounds. Vertical movement can be caused by some skills, and glitches on the upwards direction, and falling is pretty fast, so vertical bounds checking, with mounts modifying that also would be hard. Movement skills such as mirage sword, or shadow steps, portals ect, would also trigger a this system if you were to detect based on movement. It gets pretty messy really fast. The server can only get your movement once per ping interval (and that's not movement in reality, but now position). How can the server see the difference between a ping spike and a large movement if it's not skill based? This rabbit hole can go deeper, but some things to think about. I want people to know that it's not fun to have hackers, but it's an insanely hard problem to solve.

The only known "solution" is on EVERY SINGLE BUTTON YOU HIT, gets sent to the server, and you have to wait for a ping back before you know you are allowed to hit it. That causes a huge delay on skills alone for some people, but it gets much worse with movement in a game like GW2 that is heavily dependent on position. With this solution, you aren't playing a game on your system any more, you are playing a game on the server, and just seeing it on your end. Secure yes, but also a horrible experience, especially if you are over 50ms ping, and that's a range that's still on the high end even for a wireless controller that "normal" people start to notice.