... could be caused by cheating

[lch]

Originally Posted by Lokean

Incidentally, has anybody else tried to explore the limits of what the servers can spot as cheating?

Yes. More than one person was banned because of actually cheating in MP games, too.

Originally Posted by Lokean

I've found at least three things that are definitely cheating, two of which are totally game-destroying, that the server fails to spot.

It should have changed a little after the latest patch. If you still know about things that are not detected, you should send your findings to Illwinter / JK.

[Zeldor]

Lokean:

I think that hacking .2h files would give you much more power, for example making units commanders, adding magic paths, getting more than 1 unique summon in the game. But all that is based just on problems with rolling turns back at llamaserver and it was before last patch.

[lch]

Lokean, your post about the possible attack vectors falls in line with the same cheat possibilities that have been disarmed before, and it's verbose enough to understand how to use those cheats, so I moved it to the Beta Testing area now. In order not to jeopardize MP gaming by giving malevolent people ideas, please only report to the Illwinter email address and/or moderators here via PM about this.

[Lokean]

Sorry, I was actually trying to keep it nonspecific enough that people couldn't glean anything from it. I'll put together an email with example turns and send it off.

[Foodstamp]

I see this message a lot in MP games. I figured it was the server flaking out but it sounds like more often than not this is really someone cheating?

[Lokean]

The only way I expect it could result from the server flaking out would be a corrupted .2h file, which is astronomically unlikely given the size of the files, even if there's no checksum, which there ought to be. I would expect a 'false positive' to be very rare indeed.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think there is a checksum.
--verify Verify all 2h-files and exit (creates .chk files)
the result looks like this...

$> cat early_arcoscephale.chk

2h file is OK!
gamenbr -1
turnnbr 92
serial 1022

[Loren]

I have gotten the message once on llamaserver and I perfectly well know I wasn't cheating. A rollback was involved and that was several versions ago.

I have a feeling I had a hair more money (~100) than I was supposed to but I didn't have the old files around to calculate exactly how much I should have had.

[Lokean]

Bear in mind that rollbacks are not actually part of the product, they're performed by users hacking a workaround for something. From a purely theoretical standpoint they are actually an exploit, they're just not a malicious one.

To clarify, unless the users are doing something to the game that is not included in the code of the game itself (which would include rollbacks, mods and similar user-created features in addition to malicious activity) the chances of the cheat detection throwing out a false positive should be virtually nil for any well designed game, which this one clearly is.

[rtyffg]

Just looked at that move (it is my nation, that got that warning). There are actually about 1200 gold more, than it should have been. If this is the only problem seen, then should there be a rehost or this gold should be divided?