Guild Wars 2

I have no idea, however I would like to hear an official response by Anet on what they have done about this.

I think the crickets speak for themselves …

Alas, we do not have the names of enemies who flyhack as they are simply “invader.” And those who flyhack are often far above the ground where we cannot target or click, they also combine it with a speedhack which makes them too far to get a bead on them.

Ah, good to hear! I can think of more than a few players that are glad Anet is working on it. Many of us believed you all were, but silence gets worrisome. I know I’ll share the news with my comrades. I think many servers are trying to report their own hackers too, WvWvW is too fun to let a few cheaters spoil it.

Well, it is usually the orbs they use the speedhack for, I’d say if you either removed the orbs completely or just disabled them for the time being.

Also on another take, a mesmer used it to get inside the inner wall of the keep (dreaming bay) placed a portal and ported the entire army inside. The solution for that would be to replace or remove the mesmer portal ability.

I’m pretty sure its been said that portals are working as intended. If you aren’t sweeping your keeps to make sure they’re clean, that’s a different problem. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to continue leveling my mesmer.

What RND said.

TC has lost our bay keep several times by mesmers. First, we thought it was an exploit, then we realized how crafty our enemy kittens were being.

Now when we take it, we do a thorough sweep and have several patrols for awhile making sure it’s clean. This added a new level of depth to the game. It’s fun.

Stop getting angry over losing a battle, learn the tactic and counter it. I love how this game was designed overall and believe many share my sentiment. Though you likely won’t see them on the forums, too busy having fun in game.

The ability is not the problem alone, but with a flying hack…

the mesmer portal is fine, it’s a valid strategy. the problem is the flying hack. removing mesmer portals would be like removing thief shadowsteps back when people could use them to break out of the map. it’s not a solution.

but seriously, there needs to be a patch (emergency patch or not) to counter flying hacks. it’s by far the most demotivational thing that i’ve seen on WvW. hours worth of effort to get the orb, then bam it’s gone because someone flew over it, grabbed it and flew off while everyone watched.

well the edit button is gone >.>

anyway, on fort aspenwood borderlands, an hour ago at most, someone from dragonbrand flew over the FA garrison’s walls, grabbed the orb, and disappeared. a few minutes later, it showed up on dreaming bay, which dragonbrand had just recaptured (thanks to some poor swiping on our part that allowed a mesmer in)

So lame that people do this. Thanks for the response Matt.

Thanks for the response Matt.

Matt Witter.6982:

I don’t have a list in front of me of who or when, but we have banned many people that have been reported for flyhack/maphack. For security reasons, i’m not able to say how the process works.
If you see players using any sort of hack please report them. You can do this in WvW by targeting the player in question, right clicking and select report.

What option do we report them under…?

Botting?

@Matt Witter,

Thanks for saying something in the forums on this issue. I am sure I am not the only one that appreciates the reply.

@Azure Power & Matt Witter

Same question: report under what cathegory?

That’s exactly why I created this suggestion post: add a other / comment section for reporting so that we can explain the situation when it is not a “standard” report.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Report-comment

If 1 person can hack and orb and give their entire server a marginal advantage across all 3 servers, then the orbs are too powerful.

Dragonbrand had all 3 orbs going into prime time last night thanks to hacked orbs; that is just a stupid ridiculous buff that can’t be countered in any way, and gives them a powerful lead.

Stuff like that isn’t right. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen from 1 person hacking the game. 1 person shouldn’t have the power to control the flow of 3 servers fighting each other like that.

One simple solution would be to give a timer to picking up the orb, same as killing a keep lord. You have to stand in a circle for say 20-30 seconds, and while doing so the holding team is alerted that their orb is being taken. During legit takes it wouldn’t be such a big deal.. but on hacking takes it would slow things down and make them much more vulnerable to killing or reporting.

Plutonium.1308:

One simple solution would be to give a timer to picking up the orb, same as killing a keep lord. You have to stand in a circle for say 20-30 seconds, and while doing so the holding team is alerted that their orb is being taken. During legit takes it wouldn’t be such a big deal.. but on hacking takes it would slow things down and make them much more vulnerable to killing or reporting.

And there is your solution ANET Timer ftw, we still want the hackers and hacks fixed, but this is a great idea. Doesn’t hurt the game, if your are worried about travel timer, add whatever time you make for placing on the orb on the alter and add that to the travel time to get it there. That evens out complaints that will come from, “well now our time is shorter” when you actually added the same amount of time to place the orb in the travel time. Well said Plutonium!

Tracker[WAR]

Why make orbs moveable in the first place?

Why not change it to a numbers based capture style system (like we already have in game) where X amount of the opposition team need to be within range for X amount of minutes in order to win the orb. Then, instead of being able to pick it up and carry it, it will automatically appear in your keep (or whatever) with maybe an internal cooldown so it can’t be immediately taken back if there is fighting at that point.

Think of the tactics – having an assault force to get the thing and a defense force at the keep to repel retaliation attacks.

Smarter not harder.

Worst idea ever to make it able to be picked up by a player.

The carrying system was done for the simple reason, that it allowed the other factions to intercept that orb.

Just another, really harsh way I always wanted to see a company do is, suing that person for business damaging behavior.

Everquest.
1999.

While their support was far from perfect, they did one thing that seems to have gone the way of the dodo: they had in-game GM presence. GM’s had the power to see cheaters and ban them on sight. These days it seems games do no such thing. I can log in, right now, and find teleporting bots in any zone on the map and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can report them, but no GM will come. Maybe eventually “the logs” will get looked at and something will be done but not today. Probably not tomorrow. Possibly not this week.

Arenanet, like so many other game companies, will do something about it “eventually”. After checking the logs.

What happened to just having some employees with the power to log into the game and walk around and look for blatant cheaters and shut down their accounts on the spot? What happened to players being disgruntled that we found a cheater and it took an entire 30 minutes for a GM to show up to ban them? Now we never know if they got banned or not because nobody ever shows up to deal with anything, ever.

We never realized how good Everquest’s efforts actually were.

on the topic of fly hacking, has anyone noticed speed hacks? I’m a thief so I’m very mobile, but this one character must have been running at about 250% speed and he didn’t have any boons. I use very mobile utilities to get around such as Shadow Step, Infiltrators signet, Infiltrators Strike (#2 on sword skill) those alone can cover 2,600 range in two seconds and Signet of Shadows (25% movement speed). This random and I on my server were 2v1ing this guy and he books it to his nearest tower leaving us in the dust, using all my gap closer’s he still gets away, and after using all classes I know none are as mobile as a thief . Is hacking even possible?

i agree that Anet needs GM’s

even if they are dedicated players that get paid with in game gems/gold and are literally just trustworthy players with secondary accounts that allow them to zone patrolling for 2-3 hours a night.

i realize anet is a small company and has to spend their resources wisely. but you have to look at the big picture… without a force of people who find and eliminate cheating accounts, while the devs find fixes for the cheats, then its never going to be anything but an uphill battle until the end…. and the end would literally be the point when the bots outnumber the normal players.

Plutonium.1308:

One simple solution would be to give a timer to picking up the orb, same as killing a keep lord. You have to stand in a circle for say 20-30 seconds, and while doing so the holding team is alerted that their orb is being taken. During legit takes it wouldn’t be such a big deal.. but on hacking takes it would slow things down and make them much more vulnerable to killing or reporting.

that… is actually an amazing solution. “capturing” the area around the orb before being allowed to take it from the altar solves the current issue without removing the orbs (which i think are a nice mechanic that motivates players to attack/defend places), and it hardly interferes with legit captures (since you’ll have plenty of time to sit by the altar once you own the entire place).

players defending an orb would still be able to run away with it in case of emergency and interceptions would still be a thing.

Matt Witter.6982:

I’ll see what can be done about making it easier to report players that are difficult to target.

Make us able to report through chat. (combat log etc)
Basically, where you see xxx player done dmg against you or even if they use an emote let us be able to select that and choose report.

I have posted about this as well trying my best to get people reported.

If Arenanet allowed everyone to fly it would not be a hack.

No doubt the DL will win. I would be very surprised, if they wouldn’t.

I agree with the timer idea or the must kill the keep lord idea as well, while anet can patch this particular exploit, adding one of those mechanics might prevent similar exploits down the line

UO had live gm’s as well who were constantly busting people (me) for macroing. As did WoW way back when, but they were more helping people than busting them. ACTUAL toons in game that were gm’s. UO had an actual jail that your toons were thrown in for violations and you couldnt get out til your sentence was served. Man, them were some good times. Could be as well in this game but they need to be heavy handed. 1 warning then account banned.

Raffie.7865:

If Arenanet allowed everyone to fly it would not be a hack.

I bet they will invent some sort of hack that makes you walk then. We are going to scream like a little girl “WHAAAAAAAT?! They are walking like a morons!!”

Whilst it is awesome that you can keep track on them and detect them and what not. Could you at least give us some update/idea when will you be actually able to stop it – don’t need to say when you will implement it, but just an idea whether you have a solution for this other than banning. Just banning someone for it wont change the fact that the wvw matchup got ruined by some idiot.

Could we atleast get a report option for hacking?

Looks like for the first time a MMO needs punkbuster. Since the hacking is client side they will have no way of detecting it without a 3rd party app running in the background looking for client side modifications. Reporting is the only way for them to catch anyone and we all know how effective and speedy ANet is.

Thadren Calder.1397:

Looks like for the first time a MMO needs punkbuster. Since the hacking is client side they will have no way of detecting it without a 3rd party app running in the background looking for client side modifications. Reporting is the only way for them to catch anyone and we all know how effective and speedy ANet is.

I’m actually interested in the points you raised.

Are you 100% sure they will have no way to trace it, that it’s report only? There are no alternatives but to install a client side app?

Do you mind elaborating (or anyone for that matter).

punkbuster is the absolute worst anti hack system out there. it’s rightly known for being more likely to falsely ban/kick legit players rather than stop hackers(hint: it’s totally inneffective at stopping hacks)

even gameguard is better, and it’s also completely ineffective at stopping hacks.

actually the only effective anti hack software is VAC, but it’s manually monitored and adjusted by irl real actual people.

I have no way to be certain, it’s just what makes sense to me. Other games that don’t have this problem have everything server side. Games which are vulnerable to things like speedhack have always been client side modding to get the desired results. Counterstrike, battlefield 3 etc… which is why they use punkbuster to detect the client side changes and tell the server to kick the client. If the code being changed within the game was server side we wouldn’t have this problem. I don’t know why ANet chose to have these values be controlled by the client.

Here is a list of the following hacks based off of what i have seen and been told also in my experience the same types of hacks happen in any game where there is hacking. Speed hacking (which modifies the movement speed of the character not casting speed or attack speed because thats server side, and its easy to tell this because when lagging you can still run around but not cast or attack properly till the server lag ends or catches up with itself). No clipping (which is fly mode walk through walls etc…), being able to adjust the gravity for jumping higher, and being able to teleport to any location on the current map. If these were server side im sure we would see none of this. The kicker is maybe with the way the game is designed it would cause too much lag to have this be done server side which is why they chose client side control for these things.

As to getting caught, if client side mods were so easy to detect why do games that suffer from this use a 3rd party locally installed app to detect them…

If you would fix the game, we wouldnt have to report them. Increse the altar of powers HP so that no single person can kill it or make it only vulnerable if the keep lord is down!

Thadren Calder.1397:

I have no way to be certain, it’s just what makes sense to me. Other games that don’t have this problem have everything server side. Games which are vulnerable to things like speedhack have always been client side modding to get the desired results. Counterstrike, battlefield 3 etc… which is why they use punkbuster to detect the client side changes and tell the server to kick the client. If the code being changed within the game was server side we wouldn’t have this problem. I don’t know why ANet chose to have these values be controlled by the client.

Here is a list of the following hacks based off of what i have seen and been told also in my experience the same types of hacks happen in any game where there is hacking. Speed hacking (which modifies the movement speed of the character not casting speed or attack speed because thats server side, and its easy to tell this because when lagging you can still run around but not cast or attack properly till the server lag ends or catches up with itself). No clipping (which is fly mode walk through walls etc…), being able to adjust the gravity for jumping higher, and being able to teleport to any location on the current map. If these were server side im sure we would see none of this. The kicker is maybe with the way the game is designed it would cause too much lag to have this be done server side which is why they chose client side control for these things.

As to getting caught, if client side mods were so easy to detect why do games that suffer from this use a 3rd party locally installed app to detect them…

“We do have counter measures in place on our end, so player reports are not required in order to catch a cheater, they just make it that much easier. I’ll see what can be done about making it easier to report players that are difficult to target.”

Suggests they can trace it.

Ya I’ve seen that post but what are they suppose to say? “No we can’t detect it.” I’d like more details on how many people have been banned due to them “tracking” it and not just from reports and screenshots. Because it sure doesn’t seem like they have a handle on it at all and it is only getting worse.

Yeah more hard numbers on how many people would be nice, but if they say they can track it, I’ll be inclined to believe them.

I don’t like how slow they are on fixes for this stuff, but I believe them when they say they can track them and they’re working on it.

@ Thadren Calder.1397

You posts interestingly (and sadly) are answering many of the questions I had that hadn’t been adequately addressed or where information remained strangely elusive.

Edit: Also wondering if we should be asking the GW2 community if they want/think we need some client side app….

Hope they update the report menu, I can only see Botting, Inappropriate character name, verbal abuse, spamming, scamming, and selling gold. We need fly hacking or Speed hacking or just plain “hacking” in there.

I’d completely support a client side app like punkbuster whether it worked 100% or not. At least its something….

Yes the cheating in this game is getting out of hand and they do need to update the report menu.
Even built in exploits like logging out while in battle should have been removed by now.

The problem is you don’t even need third party programs to get inside some keeps. There are so many ability bugs/terrain glitches that you just physically run into keeps.

And yes, this is what happens when a company tries to build hype by having Beta Weekends instead of a real Beta. When you refuse to properly test your game, why would you be surprised that it gets broken?

I see too much people Flyhacking now. And when i mean fly i mean jumping from the ground on the top of tower. They are impossible to catch.

When Arena.net will fix this issue ? Orb Steal ruin the WvWvW, by unfair mechanism. We can’t blam an entire server but only cheater and we CAN’T repport them all. So Arenat need to do something to correct this.

ya its sad they have to hack a game just to kill are fun.