An old Newbie ;)

[Huzurdaddi]

EDIT: OOPS, wrong thread... Anyway, Norfleet spiced up the forums, and everyone had an opinion about him. He cheated, by could choose the strategies that benefitted most from it.

You would figure that any strategy would work if you were cheating. Playing a strategy game with no resource constraints sounds kind of easy.

That being said after the post alleging the hack was made I whipped up a program and it was crazy easy to cheat. I actually don't know if illwinter fixed the holes I'm pretty much taking them on face value that they did. Although given how it worked it would seem to me that to plug it correctly would take far more work than they would be willing to spend on Dom2. This is why I like playing games now where the master password is on and every turn is archived and can be view at the end of the game (it's also fun to look at other people's stratgies ).

Hehehe - I look forward to the day when one of the frequent posters reveal that he is in fact Norfleet. ( Can't you go look for him Who'sYourDaddy ? didn't he say at one time that he was from the Seattle area ? )

Did he? I did not notice but then again with Norfleet it was always a guessing game as to what was real and what was made up. That was at least half of the fun since he did it in such a fun over the top kind of way.

[Alneyan]

Does the program you are talking about require the fatherland file? If so, it is nothing to write home about: if you have the fatherland file, you can do quite a lot of editing, but you aren't supposed to have access to the file in multiplayer games. If your program works with only your nation .trn and .2h files, it is of course another story altogether.

On the topic of missing people, I must say I miss Arryn too.

[Ironhawk]

Norfleet defenitely had an excellent grasp of dom2 gameplay mechanics. But I guess his desire to win consumed him and led to cheating and for that I shed no tears at his departure.

Getting back to Pirate's original question tho:
As far as I know, not much has changed in terms of gameplay. Some of the patches have changed the values of certain pretenders (the VQ point increase comes to mind). Additionally, Zen has released a series of great Balance Mods (pretenders, spells, scales) which significantly alter pretender choices and research.

[Tuidjy]

No, the fatherland file is not required to cheat. A lot of the order
verification is done in the client, and the server accepts it on faith.
It is relatively simple to find where in the .2h file the orders are, and hexedit
a simple 'Defend' into 'Build Temple' for example. By the way, wanna be
cheaters, this particular example will trigger the cheat detection.

This is the reason for which I only play games with master password on,
and most of the time keep a copy of my own turns.

As for the 'Guess who Norfleet is' game, I play it myself. No luck so far.
My current guess is 'alexti'... this should be taken as the compliment it is.

[Huzurdaddi]

Tuidjy said:
No, the fatherland file is not required to cheat. A lot of the order
verification is done in the client, and the server accepts it on faith.

Quite correct. There is however some level of detection right now. But I fear until all verification is done by the server that holes will exist.

[alexti]

Tuidjy said:
My current guess is 'alexti'... this should be taken as the compliment it is.

I thought about crying out that it's not true, but then I've noticed that I have no proof. Yeah, I was on the forums concurrently with Norfleet for few months, I have played few games vs him, but such a shrewd person as Norflett (or me ) could foresee the circumstances and maintain 2 identities and play games as 2 persons... Come to think, I can't even be sure that Norfleet has not created multiple identities and all the people on this forum are just different Norfleet's identities

[Chazar]

alexti said:
Come to think, I can't even be sure that Norfleet has not created multiple identities and all the people on this forum are just different Norfleet's identities

Oh, I cannot name the posts, but that idea has been around before. Yeah, we're all Norfleet and this is just a great trap for you. But you are Norfleet as well! (and I am being called paranoid by my friends, great!) No, please, stop it!

By the way, I wish for another command-option for Dom3: witch-hunting!!! I think Dom2 is seriously lacking this glorious piece of mankind's history. It should cause unrest, kill population, reduce blood-hunt-possibilties for a couple of turns and have a slightly increased chance to detect any hiding stealthy female mage commander which has at least one affliction that makes her sticking out of the crowd. Oh, and there should be a good chance that a random friendly commander of any class and gender is burned at the stake as well (sort of the disband-option that everyone is wishing for, but just random)...

[Zapmeister]

Chazar said:

Oh, I cannot name the posts, but that idea has been around before. Yeah, we're all Norfleet and this is just a great trap for you. But you are Norfleet as well! (and I am being called paranoid by my friends, great!) No, please, stop it!

Perhaps you're referring to an ancient thread I started, entitled OT: An Existential Problem. If you take it to the extreme, every cyber-entity with which you have contact could derive from a single sapient source which, for want of a better word, we may call "Norfleet".

Gandalf tried to be helpful by bringing up the idea of using IP logs to differentiate. But that's exactly the kind of thing Norfleet would do

[Alneyan]

Tuidjy said:
No, the fatherland file is not required to cheat. [...]

*Grumbles* Annoying that. Thanks for the notice! I keep all the files from the games I host, but that may be more important than I had initially thought. Hmm...

[NTJedi]

The worst and dumbest legit player is far better and more welcome within games then any winner who has cheated.