White Hat Weapons
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Lately we've heard quite a lot from the Black Hat camp. For purposes of this thread let me define a Black Hat as someone who develops techniques to play the game in an unintended fashion, typically in order to gain in game or possibly real world advantages. Black Hat attacks can range from utterly simple, to extremely sophisticated, but they all undermine the game, to one degree or another, and lessen the gaming experience for ethical players.
White Hats are the good guys in this scenario, trying to defend the game against the Black Hat attacks. GGG, being a small company, has to play the White Hat game smarter than usual since they can't just throw money at the problem. We've seen them take various steps, some very creative and unusual, to lessen the affect Black Hats have on ethical players. Following in that mindset, creative and unusual White Hat defenses, and assuming the White Hats can spot probable offenders through techniques such as data mining of server side logs, and assuming they can verify who is breaking ToS silently by ghosting (watching a suspect account in real time with a modified client), what responses can they take besides the old well worn and increasingly ineffective ban hammer? Throwing out some alternatives to banning (or even warning in some cases) just for fun: Dried up loot drops - this was suggested by someone else on another thread - perfect example of the kind of out of the box thinking I'm looking for - the offender simply finds little or nothing, his ICQ and ICR have been invisibly nerfed into oblivion. Attack of the lag monster - artificially induced lag, all server communications with the offending account are given a randomized delay of 250 milliseconds over normal processing time. Lamerball - a dev or authorized individual working on their behalf takes over control of a unique mob in the offender's instance... need I say more? Intentional desync - characters on the offenders account find that Heisenberg was right, position is uncertain. Ideas? |
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i have an excellent idea, im going to go read a book!
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" GGG already have a number of systems in place to devalue the concept of "gold farming". The biggest factor however will be community participation, if people cheat/exploit and support cheats and exploits. This is what horrifies me about that other thread. The path to success for that particular mindset is gaining support and participation (just look at pyramid schemes, economies and support structures in general). The pretense of doing something for the "greater good" of the community by participating, encouraging and rewarding dodgy behaviour is total crap. |
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" Not really, we've had one really long (well, two I guess) posts from one self-entitled and vocal moron and one guy asking if it was allowed to run multiple clients. That said, serverside logging and summary bans is the way to go, while unorthodox methods like this are cool, they wont do anything. This sorta thing needs to be handled in a professional and non-flashy way, so bans and in extreme cases economy resets is the way to go. Closed beta member since: March 19, 2012
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" I don't understand the aversion to gold farming from people. The people who spend time farming and trading for money will make more money. It's simple as that. Then you have idiots like the community of guild wars complaining about people working for money is a bad thing and that casual players doing shit all should automatically be as rich as the people devoted to farming/trading/whatever for all their money. It's a ridiculous concept. |
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" I don't think the issue so much is with the farming, it's with the potential for automated gold farmming (orb or item farming in PoE, I guess). If you wanna do intensive farming manually and without unauthorized 3rd party apps, then you should be allowed to. What you should not be allowed to do is create 50 accounts, automate them and farm with your 50 bots. Closed beta member since: March 19, 2012
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" In a game where accounts are free and advancement is quick at lower levels, it is not until someone has a decent sized investment (in time) on a single account that the threat of a ban has any meaning. Against some other forms of exploitation, banning only helps the 'bad guys' by allowing them to better understand a game's server side defenses. What I was suggesting in the original post is instead of using bans in cases where banning would be either ineffective or counter-productive, a wide range of options still exist to make the bot farmer cry. Different methods of degrading his efficiency and reducing his profit margins are possible and likely much more effective than warnings and bans. A warning or a ban only works when the offender has something to lose. Last edited by Omnivore61#1813 on Jan 6, 2013, 5:18:17 PM
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Any "punishment" that can be mistaken for bad programming/server issues... will be, and will also make legit players wonder if their lag, desync, unbeatable boss etc was due to a false positive on hacker detection or was a real game issue, causing massive anxiety and resultant public angst.
Creative, but I think it would be terrible for public relations. |
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" This. Although I understand it's your post, and you have the freedom to define terminology within your post (especially if you define it at the outset), it's very confusing to label black-hat and especially white-hat that way. Both terms define hackers who actively try to find exploits in computer systems; the principle difference is in what the choose to do about it afterwards (the white-hats doing the good-guy thing and reporting the security weakness to the proper authorities). Your idea of white-hats — hackers poised in the active defense of a system, monitoring it against attacks and counter-attacking as soon as a threat is detected — is a far cry from the reality of 90% of what white-hats do, and also might be illegal (if they would be hacking someone's computer without legal authorization). When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Jan 6, 2013, 7:40:36 PM
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" Against, for example 'bot farmers', punishment isn't the goal, in fact isn't even possible. The only way to discourage them is to reduce the profit as much as possible. GGG has already done this to an extent in the design of the game itself, the barter economy as one example. If any game company were to pursue the course that I outlined against exploiters, I certainly would not advise ever publicly admitting to using 'degradation of service counterattacks', I'd just use them and try to keep the false positive rate as low as possible. White Hats are allowed their own secrets. Warnings and bans still have their place, they are effective where there is a real player behind an actively played account with time invested, and they would be the public 'first line of defense' against exploits. Bottom line, it'd only be terrible for public relations if the game company was idiotic enough to admit using it. |
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