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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> We succeeded. People were scared, and they realized we weren't lying. The amount of invisibility-exploiters dropped from over 50% to less than 1%, and we went through several Sieges without catching a single cheater. This remarkable feat gave us a lot of credibility in terms of catching cheaters.

I think you rushed to a conclusion. Did people actually stop cheating? Or did they figure out a way to avoid sending that name-request packet back to the server?

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It's impossible to do that, unless they managed to write a new client. If they don't request that packet on the original client, it'll cause the client to crash. It also would be of no use to them, because then they wouldn't know who, from which guild, whether it was an ally or enemy, was there.

I also had spies everywhere. If there was an ingenious method of getting around it, we probably would've known. In addition, no one really knew how we were catching them, so it would've required one of the developers to leak (unlikely), or someone extremely intuitive to find out.

I'll admit a possibility - but all the odds are against it.

>It's impossible to do that, unless they managed to write a new client.

Possible with ROPS.

Possible with OpenKore (a "new client" itself) in XKore mode.

OpenKore wasn't working with Eternity's Silentium[1] active at that point.

[1] Silentium was Eternity's encryption system. I'll post the code some time in a later post, if anyone is curious.

So you describe in your post that the original hack involves modifying the client but now claim that it can't be done?

  if (visibility = no), then {player = visible}

How about:

  if (visibility = yes ), then { request player name }

Feel free to argue that this will require more than just replacing BNEs and CMPs with NOPs or JMPs. Or indeed making the executable bigger. Or indeed many other things that are "hard".

In addition, no one really knew how we were catching them

No: most people have no idea. The ones writing the attack know very well how you spot them.

You have succeeded in preventing the muggles from cheating and seem proud about it.

If you only request names for visible players, what use is seeing the invisible player? You wouldn't know whether it was your ally or enemy, and revealing everyone has terrible consequences as certain defense procedures can only be executed in hiding. Also note that hexing functions as opposed to flipping a value is very different.

Okay, some people might have known. However, no one could be sure unless they did a lot of hit & miss testing. Even if they knew, there's no reliable way to circumvent this system that I can think of. You need the name packet for the exploit to be useful (or guild packet... but same thing).

I'm proud because of the results, not because of the solution. We worked with the extremely limited resources we had and found a fully functional solution. You don't think that's something to be proud of?

I can think of a number of solutions, some human, some programming, to the arguments you put forth here.

That you would even make these arguments, when counter-arguments are so immediately obvious, is why you will fail. Its like playing chess, but you can't see even one move ahead. You are basically arguing that h5 is a really silly place to put the queen because look, you can put your knight on f6 and attack it. [1]

You are engaged in a war of escalation, and yet you cannot even iterate strategy and tactics on paper. If you can't even imagine how someone might exploit the situation you describe, then you will forever be surprised when you encounter the exploit in the wild. You have no chance of proactively preventing any kind of cheat.

Your enemy is not the muggles. Your enemy is not your average programmer. Your enemy is someone who lives for winning the meta-game: of outwitting your programmers, not your games designers.

EDIT: For entertainment value:

Observe how I predicted what my "enemy" would do: Feel free to argue that this will require more than just replacing BNEs and CMPs with NOPs or JMPs. Or indeed making the executable bigger. Or indeed many other things that are "hard".

And how you did it anyway: Also note that hexing functions as opposed to flipping a value is very different.

Very different for you. You see, you replied anyway thinking that your statement demonstrated support of your argument. Whereas I wanted you to respond that way, because your statement actually supports my argument, which is that you are hopelessly outmatched and dont even know it.

EDIT: Adding link based on downgrade of expectation that the reference would be understood.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholars_mate

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