Posted by Mike on Nov 16th, 2006
At least, that’s what seems to have happend.
Reading through some of the threads yesterday, I found the responses I mainly anticipated. This means, of course, that there were a whole bunch of people trying to be the first to bend over for Blizzard.
I understand why the community managers are sticking with the company line. That is, they were probably cheating, and “we tested our software” thing.
I mean, they test all of their patches too, and, it’s funny how after every major patch, major things break. It’s almost as if they insert bugs when writing software, and not all of them are caught before delivery. Almost seems like that, doesn’t it?
But, whatever. I feel bad for the people who were banned because they were using an operating system that works properly.
Oh, right. The best hypothesis I’ve heard as to why Cedega users were getting banned, while Wine users didn’t, is because Cedega jails off processes the way an OS should.
In Windows, there’s an API that World of Warcraft uses that allows it to read the memory of other processes. It does this, hashes the information, and checks it against hashes of know hack programs. This utility is known as “Warden”.
Cadega, apparently, prevents this API from reading the memory of processes that weren’t spanwed by the process using it. You know, it implements it correctly, essentially. There’s no reason, after all, for WoW, or any other program for that matter, to have access to any other program’s memory space, aside from child processes or via shared memory.
Does this allow people to cheat? Possibly. But, in my humble opinion, they should be discovering cheats on the server. Have the server set flags for when, for example, players start running through walls, or when they move half way across a zone in an instant. Flag these things and have the GMs investigate what happened. Was it a lag spike, or was a player in Tanaris one moment, and halfway across Feralas the next.
Seriously, that was an exploit and it was in the game for months! Players warping across multiple zones instantly and no one noticed. The fix? Remove the quest.
They’ve since returned it, but still…
Blizzard makes mistakes. Big mistakes, and it takes them a long time to react.
My suggestion? Leave the game and pickup a different MMO.
Of course, pretty soon every human will have a WoW account, based on how growth has been so far, so maybe that’s not the best approach, even if it is the one I’ve chosen.
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Devin de Gruyl
November 16, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Of course, pretty soon every human will have a WoW account
Not this human, that’s for sure. And it has nothing to do with this situation, either - I just don’t “get” MMORPGs.
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Mike
November 17, 2006 at 9:52 am
Not this human, that’s for sure. And it has nothing to do with this situation, either - I just don’t “get” MMORPGs.
No no no… you don’t understand. You won’t have a choice. It’ll be like, paying taxes. You’re just going to get a letter from Vivendi that has your user id & password in it.
I mean, how else are they going to have a player-base to compete with McDonalds?
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