How is cheating possible?

[Stormbinder]

All I know for 100% certian from the Posts is that:

1) stormwhiner attempted to setup Norfleet in a game where he had allied before the game started with all of the other players. A clear indiction of a pathetic coward.

ROFL. Small tip Huzzur, why don't you at least use "IMHO" word instead of "I know for 100% certain", when you make such a statements? Trust me, it will make you look better at the end.

FYI I didn't even know any of the players before the game, except Cohen. Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game. I never spoke to any of them about any in game alliances before the game. And I din't even send any in game message to any of them until about turn 10, when I got the message from Arco (or Jotuns, don't remeber) asking me if I want to ally with him against Ermor, since Ermor was starting to grow very powerfull by than, based upon graphs that were visible to everybody.


You can go and ask any of these peoples yourself if you want to, they all are forum members.


So unless you intend to accurse all 5 of us of lying, I suggest you take your words back and next time try to think, before you post anything "with 100% certainty"

Stormbinder

[Sly Frog]

Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game.

Beautiful. This is just the way to draw more people into a game that is hard to easily get into but needs more blood to keep the games fresh.

Yes, I'm sure that people cheating, or even power gaming in general is the way to bring new blood into the wonderful game that is Dominions.

If it isn't absolutely, positively clear already, let me make it clear: I'm not blaming Stormbinder for that, just the morons who need to damage the integrity of the game, and in front of first time players no less. For a game like Dominions, which needs to intrigue and entice all of the new players it can because it is a niche game and the pool of players will naturally shrink over time, this is defenseless.

[Molog]

It is obvious Norfleet was cheating if you look at Norfleets Posts and his sg empire in the game provided.

[Stormbinder]

Beautiful. This is just the way to draw more people into a game that is hard to easily get into but needs more blood to keep the games fresh.

Yes, I'm sure that people cheating, or even power gaming in general is the way to bring new blood into the wonderful game that is Dominions.

If it isn't absolutely, positively clear already, let me make it clear: I'm not blaming Stormbinder for that, just the morons who need to damage the integrity of the game, and in front of first time players no less. For a game like Dominions, which needs to intrigue and entice all of the new players it can because it is a niche game and the pool of players will naturally shrink over time, this is defenseless.

You are absolutely right Sly Frog. Cheating can easely turn off new players from any MP game, especially from such a long and complex game as Dom2.

Fortunately these particular three new players were not turned off by these events. Once we established contact in the game I've created mailing list for them, that we used to communicate with each other, and I've send several dozens of emails to them, (probably 20K-30K text total ) giving them a lot of advice amd tips on what are the effecitve tactics for their nation to do in our game, as well as general game tips and advice, and answering their questions. From the personal game-wining point of view that was probably not the best course for me to do, as Norfeet wrote in our Ermor's game thread, if he would be me "he would wipe them all from the map immideatly, and wash his shoes after it". However I didn't want to go this road, and instead chosen to cooperate with them and educate them. During the game and especially after the game was finished, they all send me a lot of emails, saying how gratefull they are for all advice they got, how much they learned about about this game and how excited they were to participate in the alliance against Undead Legions. One even said he is saving all my emails for personal archive for studing and references later on during his future Dom2 games.

All three of them are registrated forum members now, and you may already seen some of their Posts in this and in other threads. They are starting a new game now, and all are very excited about Dom2 as far as I can tell. So I am glad to say that at least these three people were not turned off from Dom2 because of the blatant cheating that they were unlucky to encounter in their first game.

Regards,
Stormbinder

[Huzurdaddi]

ROFL. Small tip Huzzur, why don't you at least use "IMHO" word instead of "I know for 100% certain", when you make such a statements? Trust me, it will make you look better at the end.

FYI I didn't even know any of the players before the game, except Cohen. Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game. I never spoke to any of them about any in game alliances before the game. And I din't even send any in game message to any of them until about turn 10, when I got the message from Arco (or Jotuns, don't remeber) asking me if I want to ally with him against Ermor, since Ermor was starting to grow very powerfull by than, based upon graphs that were visible to everybody.

Well that sure contradicts what you said in the thread. You said: "I have been receiving all of their gems since the start of the game."

Bummer. You should not have let that slip.

Anyway on to the topic of the thread. I was silly. Why attack the encryption/hashing of the turn file when there is a perfectly servable program which knows exactly the way to encrypt and has the file: dom2 itself. I was thinking more like a programmer than a hacker.

If I ever get home before 10 PM I'll write up somethig that injects some code in to the process and see if I can find the parts of memory and edit then and see what happens. I'm praying that it will get caught.

Of course more 3137 dudes probably have some memory hex editing programs already and don't need to know ( or want to know ) how to inject code and they could probably do it faster, but it's an interesting project. I'll post the results ( but not the method ).

Hopefully it's already taken care of. Let's keep out fingers crossed.

[Zapmeister]

Well that sure contradicts what you said in the thread. You said: "I have been receiving all of their gems since the start of the game."

Bummer. You should not have let that slip.

Hmm, very odd. I searched the forum for the string "gems since the start of the game" and was only able to come up with your post above. So maybe, despite the quotes, you were actually paraphrasing his words. I went back to the thread to see if I could find the actual quote, but only found:

Add to this the fact that Arco, Pythium and Jotunheim have been sending *all* their gems to me, since I was spearheading and coordinating our anti-Ermor efforts

...which clearly places the start of the gem-pooling at the start of their alliance. Perhaps you could provide a reference to the quote that mentions the start of the game.

[Pickles]

Quoting Huzarddi
"Well that sure contradicts what you said in the thread. You said: "I have been receiving all of their gems since the start of the game.""

I took that to mean that all of their income for the start of the game as accumulated to the point they were given.

So Stormbinder may have meant this when he wrote it.
It is certainly not evidence of plot (much as I wold like there to be one)

Pickles

[Stormbinder]

I took that to mean that all of their income for the start of the game as accumulated to the point they were given.

So Stormbinder may have meant this when he wrote it.
It is certainly not evidence of plot (much as I wold like there to be one)

Pickles

Aye. Both Pickles and Zapmeister are absolutely correct, that's exactly what happened. Of course other nations started sending me gems only after we formed an alliance, but since they were newbie players and dind't actually spend any of their gems, it meant that they perry much send me all thier games accomulated from the start of the game, as I wrote earlier.

[Graeme Dice]

Well that sure contradicts what you said in the thread. You said: "I have been receiving all of their gems since the start of the game."

There's no contradiction. There's no reason that people would have necessarily spent the majority of their total gem income that early in the game, and it's not like you lose your gems if you don't use them every turn.