Thank you Stormbinder!

[Stormbinder]

Two reasons. First of all, very few people have the skills and plain stubborness of mind that's necessary to fiddle with obfuscated binary files. Secondly, if this cheating was common, Norfleet wouldn't have had the unique reputation he did - both because his "strategies" wouldn't have been as efficent, and because other people would have managed to get them to "work."

Hmmm, why do you think that the Norf was nesseserly the one who discovered how to hack the files? I may be wrong, but he didn't struck me as somebody with good technical skills and programing knowledge. Besides once the protection is cracked, simple "trainer" program can be writen to modify client's turns before they are send to the server, with something like simple shortcut to reset all gems to 200, or whatever. Once it is done any 5 year old kid can use it.

As for the strategies, "madcastling" and "massive clamhoarding" strategies are still very efficient ones, if boring, norf was not the only one who used them successefully. Just like VQ was still overpowered before it was nerfed, regardless of the fact that Norf used her in all his games while cheating.

Basicly I am not saying that there are tons of cheaters out there, and I hope there are none or just a few.

I just wanted to point out these three facts:

First, we have no real way of knowing if there are other cheaters out there and if there are - how many of them.

Second - Norf's kind of cheats are virtually impossible to detect by other players, unless cheater is really greedy or stupid, and the curcumstanses are right.

Third - from my personal experience with computer MP games once the cheat is out the number of people using it would only grew in time, never shrink, until the loophole is closed. Call it human nature, or murphy law, or whatever. But I never seen cheats appear, and just slowly fade by themself with time.

Great signature/quote Leif.

Yes, I rather like it. It's a chapter heading from one of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories.

Yeap, I remember you told me about it long time ago, answering my question. I even tried to find that particular Howard's Conan story, but couldn't. Do you happen to remember its name by any chance?