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I'm still constantly shocked at how many games do this. In the MMOG world it is really easy to do everything right, UO came out in 1997 and the devs outright t

I'm still constantly shocked at how many games do this. In the MMOG world it is really easy to do everything right, UO came out in 1997 and the devs outright told everyone working on similar games "never trust the client" and "the client is in the hands of the enemy". Yet games like FFXI and WOW that came out many years later have the client setting the position of the player and the server just blindly accepting it, allowing for common and popular speed/pos hacks.

throwaway13337 10y ago
UO had rubberbanding rampant - that is, you'd move on the client, then warp back to an old position after the server said you actually didnt move there. It was terrible. Most all MMOs with WSDA movement trust the client to set the player's position and it mostly works. Cheating through warping or speed is easily detectable through other means of post-verification and banning players that fail that verification. It makes the game feel more fluid to the player while still not really allowing cheating. Everything else is generally handled serverside which is fine because it mostly doesn't need as high a reaction time as movement to feel natural. If speed/warp hacks are a problem, it's not because the developers that use client-set-movement aren't able to fix it, it's because they don't care.
- TillE 10y ago
  Movement in UO worked ok most of the time, and that was with clients on 56k modems and servers powered by hamster wheels. > it's because they don't care That'd be nearly every company running an MMO then. You're quite right in principle: speed hacks and teleportation should be extremely easy to find by doing basic sanity checks every now and then. But in practice these things go on for months and months.
  - throwaway13337 10y ago
    Yes, it's true that they don't care. I know this from experience as one of 'they'. It's I guess oversimplified that we don't care. It's just that I, as a developer, would not be able to justify allotted time to fixing hacks that don't hurt the game much until they do.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  >UO had rubberbanding rampant Only if you had high latency and tried to move somewhere you couldn't actually move. >If speed/warp hacks are a problem, it's not because the developers that use client-set-movement aren't able to fix it, it's because they don't care. That's precisely what I said. Obviously they can fix it, since it was fixed before they started development. They did it wrong and don't care.
  - daemin 10y ago
    Yep, I was playing it from Australia on dialup, had about a 200+ms ping. What ended up happening is my character would be running in the wilderness, then after a few seconds it would snap back because I hit the side of a house/castle.
Thaxll 10y ago
Because it's very expensive to run almost everything server side, it's not the incompetence of the devs it's just about costs.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  No it is not, as I said many games do it correctly. It is a very simple distance check, you can perform millions per second on cheap commodity hardware.
  - Thaxll 10y ago
    So why do you think most games use p2p?
    - clevernickname 10y ago
      Most games use P2P because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to run 1 or 2 servers for matchmaking and offload all of the simulation and network cost to the players, rather than hundreds or thousands of dedicated servers, and because their developers were focused on consoles where cheating is much more difficult. If you're already using dedicated servers for whatever reason, though, the computational cost of strictness with player input is not so great in the grand scheme of things.
flashman 10y ago
One I have experience with is DayZ, which has terrible hacking/scripting problems because it is based on the ARMA military simulator whose audience wasn't inclined towards cheating; the server thus trusts many client actions. They're rewriting the whole engine partly because of this.
anonymoushn 10y ago
WoW has some mild checks against this stuff. In WotLK they triggered all the time if you jumped or turned on a corner of several polygons, and you'd get disconnected :(

throwaway13337 10y ago

UO had rubberbanding rampant - that is, you'd move on the client, then warp back to an old position after the server said you actually didnt move there. It was terrible. Most all MMOs with WSDA movement trust the client to set the player's position and it mostly works. Cheating through warping or speed is easily detectable through other means of post-verification and banning players that fail that verification. It makes the game feel more fluid to the player while still not really allowing cheating. Everything else is generally handled serverside which is fine because it mostly doesn't need as high a reaction time as movement to feel natural. If speed/warp hacks are a problem, it's not because the developers that use client-set-movement aren't able to fix it, it's because they don't care.

TillE 10y ago
Movement in UO worked ok most of the time, and that was with clients on 56k modems and servers powered by hamster wheels. > it's because they don't care That'd be nearly every company running an MMO then. You're quite right in principle: speed hacks and teleportation should be extremely easy to find by doing basic sanity checks every now and then. But in practice these things go on for months and months.
- throwaway13337 10y ago
  Yes, it's true that they don't care. I know this from experience as one of 'they'. It's I guess oversimplified that we don't care. It's just that I, as a developer, would not be able to justify allotted time to fixing hacks that don't hurt the game much until they do.
MustardTiger 10y ago
>UO had rubberbanding rampant Only if you had high latency and tried to move somewhere you couldn't actually move. >If speed/warp hacks are a problem, it's not because the developers that use client-set-movement aren't able to fix it, it's because they don't care. That's precisely what I said. Obviously they can fix it, since it was fixed before they started development. They did it wrong and don't care.
- daemin 10y ago
  Yep, I was playing it from Australia on dialup, had about a 200+ms ping. What ended up happening is my character would be running in the wilderness, then after a few seconds it would snap back because I hit the side of a house/castle.

Thaxll 10y ago

Because it's very expensive to run almost everything server side, it's not the incompetence of the devs it's just about costs.

MustardTiger 10y ago
No it is not, as I said many games do it correctly. It is a very simple distance check, you can perform millions per second on cheap commodity hardware.
- Thaxll 10y ago
  So why do you think most games use p2p?
  - clevernickname 10y ago
    Most games use P2P because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to run 1 or 2 servers for matchmaking and offload all of the simulation and network cost to the players, rather than hundreds or thousands of dedicated servers, and because their developers were focused on consoles where cheating is much more difficult. If you're already using dedicated servers for whatever reason, though, the computational cost of strictness with player input is not so great in the grand scheme of things.

flashman 10y ago

One I have experience with is DayZ, which has terrible hacking/scripting problems because it is based on the ARMA military simulator whose audience wasn't inclined towards cheating; the server thus trusts many client actions. They're rewriting the whole engine partly because of this.

anonymoushn 10y ago

WoW has some mild checks against this stuff. In WotLK they triggered all the time if you jumped or turned on a corner of several polygons, and you'd get disconnected :(