Crossfire Archive
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: CF: hello

Jettero Heller (jettero@corky6.dyn.ml.org) wrote:
> > > prevent the easy cheating by just studying the lib/ stuff (now people
> > > have to download the stuff to cheat...). So chances are one would have
> 
> Speaking of which:  Are the visual calcs, and hp losses calcs and things done
> by the client?  There might be a handfull of "winner" people that re-write the
> client to forget to subtract hps from their chars... or... yeah.

Well, the server knows everything about the character, so this is not
a possible way to cheat. However, you can make intelligent clients,
like one that lets your character drink a healing potion whenever the
character looses more than, let's say, 50% of his current HPs. Or a
client that automatically casts fire immunity when required, or
changes your armor, or (I would like that!) changes your weapon to
match the monster you are going to hit next. With a normal client,
a player selects the best overall armor/weapon, which is suboptimal
on servers without grey island. With a client that automatically
changes your equipment, suboptimal equipment is a much smaller
problem.

You can even make a client that let's your character run through all
the shops every two hours (or whatever the reset time is), buying
enchant armors and/or potions. Later on you can instruct your client
to visit all Jessies and kill them, so you gain experience overnight
:-) Actually you can instruct your client to clear out all the maps
with that have at least one or two monsters, something that a real
player never does since the exp/time ratio is too bad. With an
auto-client this doesn't matter.  There is no way one could prevent
this.

However, I have an idea how one could prevent one form of cheating:
telling passwords to other players, and/or using the passwords on a
new server/character. How about adding a %<word> into the password
string, which then gets one-way-"encrypted" using a per-server
password and the character name (maybe the character password as well)
as key? This would create unique passwords for all players.

Still doesn't prevent other forms of cheating (esp. the "use
crossedit..."  form). But then, there is no way to prevent
cheating. The best bet, probably, is to ignore the problem ---
cheaters don't usually stay around for long, since the game gets
boring rather quickly for them. There are exceptions to the rule, of
course ("this quest is too hard to solve without crossedit") :-(

Christian
Follow-Ups: References: