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?

[Wendigo]

How can you possibly know that these are rare incidents?

Now you are getting contagioned with Norfleet's paranoia.

In my 3+ years of playing first DomI & now DomII I have only been burned once, and that was a 'map edit'. The cheating host was spotted & exposed easily.

I have joined many games in different servers since then with mostly unknown (at the time) opponents, and always met some excellent people. No cheating in them at all I believe.

I dispute also the idea that 'mild' cheating could become common: cheating in a MP games when no rewards are available always comes down to an ego issue: 'must win at all cost' for recognition or whatever, so it's never mild but rather tries to _fully_ guarantee victory, all the more the more opponents involved. Both the data KO offered re Norfleet's empire at turn 23 & my own experience confirm this.

The problem with this issue is IMO that Norfleet was such a dedicated player, involved in a dozen or more games at the same time...so it looks like many people might have been burned by him and a good deal of newbies at that, which is a sad first experience.

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.

From our discussions at the time I certainly recall that a bunch of us defended that 'economic building' & 'turtling' strategies were only viable in big maps & vs non agressive opponents, and that argument was never countered at the time, but rather we were told 'look, Doom horrors wished for at turn 30!! after empowering to As9, this proves you are wrong'...now we know how those Doom horrors were wished for.

It all comes down to investing scarce resources in either the short term or the long, and the answer to the question of what to do with someone that is putting all his eggs in the long term is always 'kill him before he gets his return on his investment'.

[Cainehill]

And just to point out something: if there is a way to have gems set to 200 specifically / exactly, it seems much more likely that this is a debugging / internal game testing command that was left in and discovered. Possibly a bogus way of using the wish spell, without having the astral / research necessary.

Say, Stormbinder : you're demanding / whining for Illwinter to make the game cheat-proof. You going to donate them the money to hire a couple of dedicated security/encryption specialist programmers, considering that big companies (Blizzard, for example) with multi-million budgets can't manage it with programmers largely dedicated to said task?