simonli526
Member!
aren't bnet deleting account for those people that use bots?
Bot users say bye bye
- Thread starter simonli526
- Start date
Ultmose
BattleForums Addict
well if they were, dont you think that someone would have said something about it a long time ago, besides they cant detect who uses bots and who doesn't, atleast not now
kennyj
Member!
Actually, they were, and they can. Blizzard's position on bots is that if they don't screw the servers and don't screw other players, they don't care. Exploits are another story of course. This is why they are very unlikely to go after maphack, for instance, since it's not an exploit and it's arguably benign. Pindlebot in particular, because of its massive popularity and the tendency to make a new game every 30 seconds to 2 minutes, which sucks down RAM on the servers at a prodigous rate, was banned as soon as blizzard could figure out how to watch for it. I think they're refined their methods and relaxed some of the restrictions a bit, since then - they were screwing up real players as well, probably caused a fair amount of server load on their own, and caused so much paranoia over bots that most people decided that pindle just wasn't worth it.
What do they do, you ask? Simple, really. Everything that the servers see can be logged. The server is almost guaranteed to never know what you're running on your computer, so it won't see pindlebot itself, or maphack, or anything like that. However, your actions on battle.net can be easily watched by some simple AI. What they do is watch for behavior that can be classified as "bot-like." Some of the indicators that a bot is running:
packets like fastwp are used
An account makes many games in a short time (say, once every 40 seconds)
An account spends very little time in the chat between games before making a new private game (this is a BIG indicator)
An account ends a game, then logs into bnet again
Each of these things can be VERY easily logged (in fact, they likely were from the beginning, for purposes such as performance profiling, though it's hard to say for certain) and the analysis of them wouldn't be difficult at all - once planned, the code probably took mere hours to write (testing is another story entirely.)
One thing that has been seen a lot since the pindlebot crackdown is the famous 15-minute Realm Down error. This means that Blizzard has flagged you as being bot-like. According to some, repeat offenses can result in an account or even CD key being banned. There are several claims of this, though it's important to remember that anyone can say anything they want to.
Now, some other tidbits:
at the beginning of the bot crackdown, people began to realise that if you stayed in a chat for even a short time before entering a game or (worse) creating one, you were much less likely to experience problems. This indicates that Blizzard was intentionally giving those who get in and out of chat mode a hard time. I do believe they're relaxed their rules there a bit, because they were causing problems (that's the thing with AI - you can test it all you want under controlled conditions, but you never know for certain how well it'll work until it's out in the real world.)
Blizzard cannot (yet) detect hacks that work at the client side and don't do anything that can be observed at the server side. This COULD change in the next patch if Blizzard decides to implement a few primitive cheat detection techniques such as checking the running process list for things like d2hackit (required by pindle and many many many hacks, see also jed and d2jsp) and doing an occasional checksum on some memory areas to make sure that nothing was changed that wasn't supposed to be (this would catch MapHack red-handed, at least in theory.) However, all but the most primitive such measures can be intrusive and may even degrade performance, something an already CPU-intensive and easily lagged game does not need. Blizzard's techs can be called many things, but stupid is not one of them - if they want to badly enough, they'll find a way to sniff out damn near anything sooner or later. Whether or not they implement the measure is another story entirely.
Keep in mind that if any measures like this are implemented, they won't show up except in a patch. Most all fixes to stop exploits have occurred server-side, which Blizzard doesn't need to patch any clients for.
Oh, and by the way: it has been talked about extensively on battle.net chats. All of a sudden, one night in late november or early december (I forget, I was a little preoccupied to take note) the waiting list to create a new game dropped from the usual 600 or so down to near 100. Pindlebot users were out in full force, cursing the very existence of Blizzard for stopping their bots. Everyone else was laughing their asses off. There was less lag, the realms were more stable, and it was good. Unless you acted in such a way that made you look like a bot.
What do they do, you ask? Simple, really. Everything that the servers see can be logged. The server is almost guaranteed to never know what you're running on your computer, so it won't see pindlebot itself, or maphack, or anything like that. However, your actions on battle.net can be easily watched by some simple AI. What they do is watch for behavior that can be classified as "bot-like." Some of the indicators that a bot is running:
packets like fastwp are used
An account makes many games in a short time (say, once every 40 seconds)
An account spends very little time in the chat between games before making a new private game (this is a BIG indicator)
An account ends a game, then logs into bnet again
Each of these things can be VERY easily logged (in fact, they likely were from the beginning, for purposes such as performance profiling, though it's hard to say for certain) and the analysis of them wouldn't be difficult at all - once planned, the code probably took mere hours to write (testing is another story entirely.)
One thing that has been seen a lot since the pindlebot crackdown is the famous 15-minute Realm Down error. This means that Blizzard has flagged you as being bot-like. According to some, repeat offenses can result in an account or even CD key being banned. There are several claims of this, though it's important to remember that anyone can say anything they want to.
Now, some other tidbits:
at the beginning of the bot crackdown, people began to realise that if you stayed in a chat for even a short time before entering a game or (worse) creating one, you were much less likely to experience problems. This indicates that Blizzard was intentionally giving those who get in and out of chat mode a hard time. I do believe they're relaxed their rules there a bit, because they were causing problems (that's the thing with AI - you can test it all you want under controlled conditions, but you never know for certain how well it'll work until it's out in the real world.)
Blizzard cannot (yet) detect hacks that work at the client side and don't do anything that can be observed at the server side. This COULD change in the next patch if Blizzard decides to implement a few primitive cheat detection techniques such as checking the running process list for things like d2hackit (required by pindle and many many many hacks, see also jed and d2jsp) and doing an occasional checksum on some memory areas to make sure that nothing was changed that wasn't supposed to be (this would catch MapHack red-handed, at least in theory.) However, all but the most primitive such measures can be intrusive and may even degrade performance, something an already CPU-intensive and easily lagged game does not need. Blizzard's techs can be called many things, but stupid is not one of them - if they want to badly enough, they'll find a way to sniff out damn near anything sooner or later. Whether or not they implement the measure is another story entirely.
Keep in mind that if any measures like this are implemented, they won't show up except in a patch. Most all fixes to stop exploits have occurred server-side, which Blizzard doesn't need to patch any clients for.
Oh, and by the way: it has been talked about extensively on battle.net chats. All of a sudden, one night in late november or early december (I forget, I was a little preoccupied to take note) the waiting list to create a new game dropped from the usual 600 or so down to near 100. Pindlebot users were out in full force, cursing the very existence of Blizzard for stopping their bots. Everyone else was laughing their asses off. There was less lag, the realms were more stable, and it was good. Unless you acted in such a way that made you look like a bot.
Ultmose
BattleForums Addict
holy shit, thanks for the life story
Ultmose
BattleForums Addict
the ai thing will not work with the current versions of bots however, i noticed that the bot spends a different ammount of time in the channel each time, and it randomly picks its route in the game, which means that it is harder to classify it as bot like. i noticed that teh bot shops at different npc's each time, which make the game length vary form 11 to 39 sec (based on an average of 8000 runs) now i know that there are ways to stop this, but only by watching the actual character do things in the game, and basically creating a better AI to know when a bot is running. Blizzard will never be able to tell weatehr map hack or p bot is running on someone's computer because that would be hacking, and they dont want to get sued
xltravislx
Member!
Look blizzard should realize they an do what they want but all they are doing wasting there time if people want to hack badly enough they will and instead of making shit that doesnt help ne one they can make the game better maybe even a diablo exspansoin exspansoin.................lol
kennyj
Member!
True, that's the thing with countermeasures - they tend to be worked around. I wouldn't say that Blizzard would never be able to detect anything because it would be "hacking" (this is actually a grossly incorrect use of the term, but I'm trying to be less of a symantecs nazi so I won't go into it ) because many measures, including most of the ones I outlined, are very non-intrusive.
What you're essentially saying is that taking any information about the computer a program is running on is hacking. I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't work that way. All the time, software must take a look at the system it's running on simply to function. For instance, when you run a modern game like Diablo, it will check to see if your sound card drivers support EAX, and if they do, it will allow you to enable support for EAX if you so choose. A more complex example is that a program will identify the processor you're using in order to choose what code to run. For instance, some applications can alternate between modules made for Pentium processors, modules further optimized to use MMX instructions, and even modules optimized even more to take advantage of SSE/SSE2/3DNow. These kinds of things happen constantly, and are a neccesary part of software development.
Another common example that's much closer to what I talked about is that many programs will check to see if other programs are running that are known to be incompatible, in order to prevent problems. In this case, it would be Diablo checking to see if there were any applications running that had no purpose other than to mess with Diablo. Blizzard's right to do this would be questionable, but since it doesn't interfere with anyone's enjoyment of the game, it's far from likely that they could be challenged for it. No game company that I know of has ever been sued for simply preventing a cheat from being used, and I doubt there's a sane judge in this country who would allow such a charge to stand.
Now, the final thing: Blizzard has every right to check its own program over. It's arguable that looking at other processes could be challenged, but there's no legitimate reason that there should be any code within the Diablo executable that isn't supposed to be there. If the Diablo program is modified to check itself to ensure that key blocks of code are not modified, it's merely checking it's own integrity and is certainly not intruding upon you in any way. After all, the code is 100% non-malicious and you ran it voluntarily.
There are precedents, by the way, for checking other processes. For instance, in response to software piracy, some programs will check to see if BlackIce, a popular debugger, is running - since it can be used to foil piracy protections.
Now, these things can be effectively used to simply make Diablo refuse to run, thus making the software useless until you disable the hacks. If the application goes the extra step and sends information to Blizzard that's another story, but its still a tough case. If Diablo goes and looks for personal information and sends that to Blizzard you might be able to sue for invasion of privacy, but that's it. It's not until the software causes damage that you can claim that Blizzard is hacking you, and there's no reason that Blizzard would do that.
Anything short of causing damage is a tough sell. You don't even want to know what some of the stuff on your computer is doing. Here's a short list of programs that watch your activities and report them to media companies so they can direct advertising at you:
Gator
GoZilla
anything from Real
Windows Media Player
KaZaA
Download Ad-Aware (search Google) to see what's spying on you.
Now, all I've talked about is how blizzard could "get away" with doing what I discussed in my last post. It doesn't mean that they'll actually do any of it. More protections equals more programming and more testing, not to mention it means increased CPU utilization. If Blizzard implements any measures like I've discussed, they won't be terribly complex.
) because many measures, including most of the ones I outlined, are very non-intrusive.What you're essentially saying is that taking any information about the computer a program is running on is hacking. I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't work that way. All the time, software must take a look at the system it's running on simply to function. For instance, when you run a modern game like Diablo, it will check to see if your sound card drivers support EAX, and if they do, it will allow you to enable support for EAX if you so choose. A more complex example is that a program will identify the processor you're using in order to choose what code to run. For instance, some applications can alternate between modules made for Pentium processors, modules further optimized to use MMX instructions, and even modules optimized even more to take advantage of SSE/SSE2/3DNow. These kinds of things happen constantly, and are a neccesary part of software development.
Another common example that's much closer to what I talked about is that many programs will check to see if other programs are running that are known to be incompatible, in order to prevent problems. In this case, it would be Diablo checking to see if there were any applications running that had no purpose other than to mess with Diablo. Blizzard's right to do this would be questionable, but since it doesn't interfere with anyone's enjoyment of the game, it's far from likely that they could be challenged for it. No game company that I know of has ever been sued for simply preventing a cheat from being used, and I doubt there's a sane judge in this country who would allow such a charge to stand.
Now, the final thing: Blizzard has every right to check its own program over. It's arguable that looking at other processes could be challenged, but there's no legitimate reason that there should be any code within the Diablo executable that isn't supposed to be there. If the Diablo program is modified to check itself to ensure that key blocks of code are not modified, it's merely checking it's own integrity and is certainly not intruding upon you in any way. After all, the code is 100% non-malicious and you ran it voluntarily.
There are precedents, by the way, for checking other processes. For instance, in response to software piracy, some programs will check to see if BlackIce, a popular debugger, is running - since it can be used to foil piracy protections.
Now, these things can be effectively used to simply make Diablo refuse to run, thus making the software useless until you disable the hacks. If the application goes the extra step and sends information to Blizzard that's another story, but its still a tough case. If Diablo goes and looks for personal information and sends that to Blizzard you might be able to sue for invasion of privacy, but that's it. It's not until the software causes damage that you can claim that Blizzard is hacking you, and there's no reason that Blizzard would do that.
Anything short of causing damage is a tough sell. You don't even want to know what some of the stuff on your computer is doing. Here's a short list of programs that watch your activities and report them to media companies so they can direct advertising at you:
Gator
GoZilla
anything from Real
Windows Media Player
KaZaA
Download Ad-Aware (search Google) to see what's spying on you.
Now, all I've talked about is how blizzard could "get away" with doing what I discussed in my last post. It doesn't mean that they'll actually do any of it. More protections equals more programming and more testing, not to mention it means increased CPU utilization. If Blizzard implements any measures like I've discussed, they won't be terribly complex.
simonli526
Member!
AGREE
kennyj
Member!
xltravislx: actually, what they're doing is discouraging casual users from doing things that bog down the servers and make the game suck for everyone else. When a select few people use bots it won't matter much, but when you see things like a month ago where everybody and their mother ran some version of Pindlebot (and many configured it wrong, just to make matters worse) the whole system slows down for everyone, the game lags, the in-game economy gets screwed up, you see more bullshit like spammers advertising their ebay item sales, and the servers' stability is reduced.
They're not wasting their time by doing these things - by reducing server load, thy reduce the number of complaints and they make life for the administrators a lot easier, not to mention reducing the costs of bandwidth and mitigating any need for new hardware.
When they do this, it helps EVERYONE. That, and by forcing the bots to refine themselves, they become more efficient and screw up the servers less.
An expansion expansion (the correct terminology would be 2nd expansion) isn't too likely in my opinion. If they wanted to (e.g. decided that there was enough potential demand for it) they could easily build one, it's not an issue of wasted time at all - either way, it's a relatively small investment in labor and there's plenty of labor to go around, especially in this economy where techs are becoming a dime a dozen. Besides, more characters would further throw off the game's balance (I like the new characters, but I just don't feel they balance that well with the old ones. I think it would've been better if they simply made better refinements, like adding a power boost to Zeal and making Hydra suck less, although I am happy they nerfed Whirlwind)
They're not wasting their time by doing these things - by reducing server load, thy reduce the number of complaints and they make life for the administrators a lot easier, not to mention reducing the costs of bandwidth and mitigating any need for new hardware.
When they do this, it helps EVERYONE. That, and by forcing the bots to refine themselves, they become more efficient and screw up the servers less.
An expansion expansion (the correct terminology would be 2nd expansion) isn't too likely in my opinion. If they wanted to (e.g. decided that there was enough potential demand for it) they could easily build one, it's not an issue of wasted time at all - either way, it's a relatively small investment in labor and there's plenty of labor to go around, especially in this economy where techs are becoming a dime a dozen. Besides, more characters would further throw off the game's balance (I like the new characters, but I just don't feel they balance that well with the old ones. I think it would've been better if they simply made better refinements, like adding a power boost to Zeal and making Hydra suck less, although I am happy they nerfed Whirlwind
)simonli526
Member!
holy shit, thanks for the life storyOriginally posted by kennyj
True, that's the thing with countermeasures - they tend to be worked around. I wouldn't say that Blizzard would never be able to detect anything because it would be "hacking" (this is actually a grossly incorrect use of the term, but I'm trying to be less of a symantecs nazi so I won't go into it
What you're essentially saying is that taking any information about the computer a program is running on is hacking. I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't work that way. All the time, software must take a look at the system it's running on simply to function. For instance, when you run a modern game like Diablo, it will check to see if your sound card drivers support EAX, and if they do, it will allow you to enable support for EAX if you so choose. A more complex example is that a program will identify the processor you're using in order to choose what code to run. For instance, some applications can alternate between modules made for Pentium processors, modules further optimized to use MMX instructions, and even modules optimized even more to take advantage of SSE/SSE2/3DNow. These kinds of things happen constantly, and are a neccesary part of software development.
Another common example that's much closer to what I talked about is that many programs will check to see if other programs are running that are known to be incompatible, in order to prevent problems. In this case, it would be Diablo checking to see if there were any applications running that had no purpose other than to mess with Diablo. Blizzard's right to do this would be questionable, but since it doesn't interfere with anyone's enjoyment of the game, it's far from likely that they could be challenged for it. No game company that I know of has ever been sued for simply preventing a cheat from being used, and I doubt there's a sane judge in this country who would allow such a charge to stand.
Now, the final thing: Blizzard has every right to check its own program over. It's arguable that looking at other processes could be challenged, but there's no legitimate reason that there should be any code within the Diablo executable that isn't supposed to be there. If the Diablo program is modified to check itself to ensure that key blocks of code are not modified, it's merely checking it's own integrity and is certainly not intruding upon you in any way. After all, the code is 100% non-malicious and you ran it voluntarily.
There are precedents, by the way, for checking other processes. For instance, in response to software piracy, some programs will check to see if BlackIce, a popular debugger, is running - since it can be used to foil piracy protections.
Now, these things can be effectively used to simply make Diablo refuse to run, thus making the software useless until you disable the hacks. If the application goes the extra step and sends information to Blizzard that's another story, but its still a tough case. If Diablo goes and looks for personal information and sends that to Blizzard you might be able to sue for invasion of privacy, but that's it. It's not until the software causes damage that you can claim that Blizzard is hacking you, and there's no reason that Blizzard would do that.
Anything short of causing damage is a tough sell. You don't even want to know what some of the stuff on your computer is doing. Here's a short list of programs that watch your activities and report them to media companies so they can direct advertising at you:
Gator
GoZilla
anything from Real
Windows Media Player
KaZaA
Download Ad-Aware (search Google) to see what's spying on you.
Now, all I've talked about is how blizzard could "get away" with doing what I discussed in my last post. It doesn't mean that they'll actually do any of it. More protections equals more programming and more testing, not to mention it means increased CPU utilization. If Blizzard implements any measures like I've discussed, they won't be terribly complex.
kennyj
Member!
Holy shit, what an original and creative post.
Moriarty
Member!
Using any third party program of any sort whatsoever could get you banned. Simple.
Duh.
Duh.
xltravislx
Member!
Uhhh well when is 1.1 comming out and by exspansoin exspansoin (or as u say exspansoin 2) i ment like a new map or 2 like for dueling or maybe some more items or bosses i think u did summit a piont about the lag so they arent wasting time at least i realize that now i was thinking wrong
Salty_Pirate
Member!
Yar...I've plundered the seven seas for months and still haven't been caught...
Damatrix
Member!
Ohhhh salty
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Diablo 2 ladder: D2R ladder reset may be in April 2022
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