To radar or not to radar?

[Twystyd]

No deleted threads that I can see Bulor. BWC uses radar to pharm keeps ROFL

[Bulor]

=( tis a sad sad day indeed.

how many of you fuckers actually use this shit?

and are you able to stop?


i know during my days in SC i used maphack once.. and it sortof became like crack, i felt like i needed it, but then flushed it out of my system and became once again pure.

[Sirion]

the people that use it know who they are, and hopefully all radar will get fixed by the time frontiers launches.

[SuperHelix]

Let you in on a little secret.

90% of the guild uses it, in fact, 90% of mids, use it, almost 100% of hibs do, about 50% of albs do.

Some people have programs that tell #s, flash warnings, give levels, do all kinds of crap.

Some are obvious, some are not.

Some chase singles, some do not.

It mostly gets used for not hitting 6fg of a zerg with 1-2fg.

Why waste 30-60 min of playing time for a 6 sec battle.

Frontiers will make the game different, right now, its VERY reptitive, and all about name spam and RP points for frontiers.

Word.

[Sirion]

to be honest, i dont even feel bad knowing people run it in emain, because 90% of the time the opposition is using it. it really IS getting to the point that if you dont use it you are a victim, but i like to think that i as well as the people i associate with "play-fair" but when it comes to emain and zergs i dont think there is anything wrong with fighting fire with fire.

[Bulor]

well damn... disappointing indeed.

i'll just hope fronteirs fucks the hell out of cheats.. so everyone will have to play blind once again.

[SuperHelix]

I agree sir.

[Rhuac]

I concur.

Now we can drink and be merry!

[Greak]

Radar rocks!

[Joshll]

It's pretty sad how common place it's become. People rationalize that 90% do it so they need to do it too, but thats just an excuse. About 20% of the daoc population probably uses it, no way it's 90%. I know we've got at least 8 radar users in guild, maybe more.

And you don't need it to succeed. A good skilled group can beat a radar group, and the win is just that much sweeter. We did just fine before all the folks who were away came back, and I think our radar use at the time was rather low, maybe 1-2 people.

You know, if we are doing keep fights, I guess it doesn't bother me that much if someone is using it so that we know when another zerg is inc. But when we are going out of our way to go gank some solo exp'er levelling his croc ring in the alb frontier that we wouldn't have found otherwise, then thats bullshit, and now we are just as dirty as shux.

Or when we are using it to gank low RR albs from behind inside the amf in emain, thats bullshit too. If we are using it to equalize the advantage that cheater 8man guilds are using fine, but when we are using it to beat enemy pickup groups, then thats crap. And thats the problem right there, once you start cheating for good reasons, it starts to become too easy to cheat for bad reasons.

Personally, I wish all of you would dump the radar and we'd just take our chances. We've got enough good players we don't need it.

[killets]

radar will be broken soon.

they've broken 1 of them already... trust me, we are all hounding mythic to nail the other one.

[Farfar]

The "free" radar is gone, so its only the rich people who got it now and now i can run to amf from mpk unstealthed w/o getting zerged for once. Havnt seen that for years.

[Joshll]

Educate me. There were three radar programs before, or maybe 4.

Xunleashed (windows)
Daocskilla (windows)
Odin's Eye (Linux)
Xcalibur? Or is that XU?

I heard daocskilla was broken as of 1.68. How about XU? Since XU is a pay program, are they going to update it to fix it? What about daocskilla? That programmer has been pretty vocal about critisizing mythic to fix daoc's encryption, has he said he is going to repatch his freebie prog?

[killets]

there are 2 ways to radar works.

radar is in essense, getting the information on where everyone is, and plotting the data on a map.

you can either 1) intercept the information between the client and the server, or 2) parse memory directly the information.

method 1) is the more elegant way, because its non-intrusive, and the legality isn't really an issue, since you are just reverse engineering public communications. method 2) is a problem because you do have to reverse engineer the client to figure out where information is being stored in memory. you then have to hook into it which isn't always straightforward, unless the dev left open hooks for you to access information directly from.

now what they've done is encrypted information between client/server, so you can't just read the data stream and figure out whats going on. you can read the encryption key from memory, but then why bother sniffing packets? why not just read everything out of memory.

so most of the packet sniffing radars are busted. this was basically the OE code, from which daocskilla, excalibur, etc were derived. they can fix them by sniffing memory, but again , it'd be a completely different hack if they did.

the memory sniffing stuff is xunleashed. from the website it looks like a complete directx hacking suite hehe. anyways, what this does is parse information directly from memory. how to defeat it? well, its not easy, but you have to make the data a lot harder to parse. it shouldn't be static either. you have to basically make life as tough for the hacker as possible, so that they are discouraged to continue hacking it.

encrypting memory is 1 way.. it raises performance requirements a little, and it will take a lot longer to figure out. i think this is how they're gonna do it for frontiers. but if the hackers have a will, they will defeat it given time. but i doubt they can charge $20/yr like they are now to support it. it takes that unleashed guy like a few days to crack the current system after every patch. if the system was made a lot more convoluted, it would take him a lot of more time.

[killets]

if you're thinking why don't they just only send the information to the client that you're allowed to know, they can't because of lag concerns.

if you're looking one direction, and you turn real quick, if information was on a need-to-know basis, then you'd have to turn, the client would have to tell the server you turned, then the server would have to send you back when you can now see. problem is, if you think about what a good ping is, that's like 100-200ms. when you go round trip, that's almost half a second for things to appear on your screen...

that is not acceptable performance for a multiplayer game.

so there is no ultimate way to defeat radar... as long as the client knows, you can't keep a dedicated hacker away from it. but you can make it so it so the opportunity cost to continue supporting a hack is too great.