Posted 28 February 2013 - 06:36 PM
Hacks are probably as common here as they are on other FPS games. It's the way they're set up that makes the hacks ineffective or not effective enough to make as easily noticed here as much as they would be in CoD or BF.
The "hacks" we're likely to see are:
-forced packet loss or otherwise inflating their ping one way
-modified textures
-a wall hack of some sort
The most common ones we'd see are people doing packet loss or other ping inflation's. If he has sky high ping he's on a crappy connection, on another continent, or downloading something while playing. These people usually miss as much as they get hit, so it really only benefits the 3L or 2D. If he's hard to hit like his ping is outrageous but he's scoring consitent hits and his ping is low, he's controlling the flow of his connection one way. You can do this either via software or hardware. And it still generally only benefits faster mechs, but it does make it so they aren't forced to rely on SSRMs to score hits reliably.
Modified textures are common in all shooters. DoD and BF2 were some of the worst offenders, had a friend that played that make the smoke textures transparent, one sides characters bright red and the other's bright blue, had all objects with a minor transparency to them so he could see through them, and adjusted the textures on terrain to make those colors stand out even more. This wasn't hard to replicate in DoD or BF2 (and I did submit my friend to the developers). So I imagine a bit of work here, and voila, texture hacks.
Wall hacks would require higher level scripting that your common script kiddie couldn't do. Hence the reason people buy the hacks. It's probably a bit more common than aimbots, but still not particularly common. And I doubt there are many users of this anyways, the population is simply too small and the game doesn't offer a reason to hack other than to grief. DoD and BF2 had tournaments that teams competed for, some with cash prizes, so of course people would cheat. Except that most tourneys had the finals in a LAN setting so most teams that hacked their way to the top would drop out with a lameduck excuse or they'd go and get killed by the teams that were just that good.
As far as viability of the first method. I've tested the "torrent a movie" method and it's only good with SSRM/ECM lights. I recorded 10 games with and without. Results without, I died twice in my 3L averaging ~2 kills. Results with, I never went below yellow armor and averaged ~2.5 kills. I did note that hitting with lasers was nigh impossible on anything but heavy and assault mechs though. And the jumping around was nauseating at best.
The contolling the flow one way yielded better results, and my both my router and modem have settings that can be exploited for this, so I never tested another method. I could consitently hit with the lasers on my 3L and the ballistics on my Cents and Dragons, all the while taking negligible damage in return. My Dragon went from being just a heavy striker to being able to brawl and my Cents could solo mechs that should have disintegrated them. I recorded 10 matches each in a DRG-1C, RVN-3L, CN9-AL, CN9-D and contacted PGI.
PGI can't do anything about people doing either that I can think of, but I did submit the data and videos.
4
This topic is locked
Warrax the Chaos Warrior, on 21 February 2013 - 04:10 PM, said:
.
