Not an expert, nor do I know any current methods, but almost every duping method which eventually became public works on exploiting one of two mechanics:
Trade Buffer
Server Check on Joining Game Server
Nearly every dupe method I’ve seen also requires some third party software generally for authoring and sending invalid packets to the server. Those that didn’t revolved around lagging a game server so badly that whatever routine which checks if your character is already in a game and prevents you from joining another game with it fails. At one point it was easy enough to ‘desync’ your game from the server by having a necromancer and sorceress spamming bonewall and meteor in blood moore for 15 minutes. Then the abusers could log into a second muling game, transfer the items to be duped, leave, and then leave on the desynced game … effectively re-saving the characters with the items in hand. When these types of methods became public knowledge dupers were rightfully blamed for the lag on the servers, as many games are hosted on individual server IP and if you got a server where people are duping your game will lag and you might accidentally dupe yourself, but usually it would merely rollback your progress.
Trade buffer methods usually involved sending invalid game packets to put your character in a broken state. When a trade is cancelled, both players inventories are essentially reset to the state they were in before the trade was initiated. By sending invalid packets to alter the player’s state, it was possible to drop items onto the ground without cancelling the trade, and then have a player cancel the trade and poof the item is both in hand and on ground. This was achieved by doing things like sending the packet to put the horadric staff into the orifice, except swapping orifice/staff unit Id with other random stuff, sending an interaction packet with your own player unit, sending invalid items into charsi’s imbue screen, etc. This is the precursor to a more involved method which allowed you to sell runewords from the trade buffer to a vendor and the vendor for whatever reason didn’t delete the item but still deleted the runes within the item … which you could then buy back and socket with jewels (“Ith” items which are now deleted by the item scanner) or with another valid runeword combination (“hybrid” runewords, which the item scanner fails to delete).
Generally, when a method becomes public knowledge that method becomes patched out within a few months, so I wouldn’t exactly call it “a simple” cheat.
Actually, back in the day, some creative, but simple, uses of town portals worked quite well. I haven’t tested it in years now, so no idea if Blizzard fixed them.
Actually, there are ways. You can use ML to learn and identify behavioural data from botters compared to human players and attack that. Of course, that’s probably much more processing power than Blizzard is willing to put into this. The other and most reliable way of dealing with “undetectable” bots, is for players to report suspicious activity. If a player is making games extremely fast, 24 hours a day, that’s very unlikely to be a human. That’s how it’s worked for most games, a tried and trusted way.
That only catches those botters stupid enough to leave it running for otherwise improbably long periods of time.
I actually have some sympathy for Blizzard here (an unusual condition for me), there’s so little window for them to do much about hacking and botting and simultaneously manage to make such efforts free from player inconvenience, cost effective, and deterrent effective all at once.
There hasn’t been a test invented yet that a clever person couldn’t defeat, and Blizzard isn’t about to break that losing streak any time soon.
They don’t need to. It’s not necessary to completely eliminate botting, only to reduce it to a level where it’s impact is irrelevant. Many games achieve that.
Typically good handling of reports and quick bans work wonder, it’s just D2 allows you to go into private games so you’ll need the admins to be able to go spectate that and delete bots (perma ban the accounts) for a proper deterrent to cheating using bots. But yeah also deal with maphacks and other things, of course dupes which is critical to the game economy. Again valorant seems to be doing great using a software that has to launch at windows startup (+ server side stuff against wallhacks, limiting the info provided).
Thanks for replies about dupes interesting. I really don’t know if I’m going to play I want to but I’ll look into the cheating situation first, typically games ruled by cheating are really just best staying away from unless you’re into learning how to cheat or something lolz.
I remember getting muted by D2 chat for minutes whenever I tried talking about bots I hated that.
It’s hard to want to buy a blizz remaster nowadays, good thing it’s not actually blizz. :[] For example, SC:R was supposed to have a team ladder but it never came. They say they will deal with cheating, let’s see then but I’d buy only after I see evidence and hope it doesn’t turn to sh*t soon : / Or maybe I should just forget it. Oh well will see. It’s better to hope isn’t it. Love D2
Including those with completely freely traded loot and no subscription model?
I believe it’s possible Blizzard will get on top of bots in D2R, I just think it’s really unlikely. The loot model (free for all loot, that can be freely traded) is a botters (and hackers) wet dream, for both amateur and professional botters and Blizzards prior history of very infrequent “mass ban waves” makes botting quite profitable for item re-sellers.
Combine that with the ability to quickly and easily make new accounts that allow for effectively “laundering” botted or even (potentially) duped items and Blizzards behaviour and the games mechanics are, deliberately or not, very much in favour of the botters and dupers.
Again, yeah. If they are few enough that you can hardly see them. In current D2, if you search open lobbies, the majority if not all of them, are gonna be run by bots. That’s not okay.
If it gets to a level where they’re hardly seen, that will be a huge improvement over what we have now. That is possible. I’ve seen it happen in free-trade games, like Tibia (although in that case, bots are more used for leveling than for gear farming). Hell, even PoE, there’s a bot problem, they are there, but it’s not nearly in the level D2 currently has.
Despite being free Valorant’s method seems to work quite reliably [anti cheat that must start at windows startup or won’t be validated : kernel access or something like that]. In short a similar method may be used in addition, in order to automatically detect bot programs or programs that look into the game’s inputs/outputs. That may not be necessary, but it seems effective. D2R would need that less because the game isn’t free.
If bots are rarely or never seen in public games but strive in private games it won’t be enough because the game economy and trading would still be completely ruined, no integrity. Playing legit means you weigh nothing, you easily get cheap OP stuff in trading, the difficulty lowers really fast, you get led around by botters and those who trade with them a lot, pvp is not balanced or fair etc. When we see them a lot in public games is when the game is completely ruined, and the cheaters don’t even need to hide.
If there’s any sort of “auto-action” from player reporting it’ll be abused to all hell and it’ll never use real Blizzard staff, because Blizzard isn’t going to want to spend the dough on having employees manually checking out reported players.
The only realistic way botters will be detected and banned is through AI routines, not through staff on wages slogging through games manually trying to catch botters “in the act” in some sort of hidden observer mode, and sure as hell not through player initiated reporting.
I know they drop better in full player games. I was just stating I done 1 nightmare run that night, and an Ist rune dropped. It didn’t take me 2000 runs just to find one. Yes, I already know that MF has nothing to do with rune drops.
Well it’s really important to have admins who manually check on reports (main anticheat method on wow private servers). Automatic bans via # of reports doesn’t work though and leads to bad errors and annoying practices. If they have a server team, they should be able to handle reports.
Love or Hate bots without the Baal/Diablo bots the game would be dead pretty much.
D2R though is a different story as many will be playing again so no need for bots but they will be there.
You will never remove automated play from games (Bots or Macros) its the way it is.
Ive learnt to just live with them and enjoy what you do and not worry what others are doing.
The thing about luck, is that sometimes you’re lucky. If you know a thing or two about statistics you will know that the standard deviation for things like that is pretty high, you can find it in your first run, in your 2000’th run, or never (you’re likely to find it at some point, but it is mathematically possible that you may never do)
Bots MFing make it feel pointless to MF legitimately, bots grinding XP make it feel pointless to grind XP legitimately. I don’t understand how anyone can defend the state of the game with mass botting, knowing that there’s countless programs at work at all hours, doing what takes your force of willpower and grit, for free. It just erodes away at the game. Every exciting, hard-won, or lucky-stars payoff you manage is just a fart in the wind to the economy you’re connected to. Because meanwhile, the game is playing itself for some stupid reason.
I found a Ber, after coming back to D2 ladder within the past couple weeks. Then I thought of how easily bots find them, regularly, and sell them for pennies. I’m not even sure I care that I found it anymore. Even that character having benefited from bot XP runs, and from other characters who in turn benefited from bots, just feels tainted. The only thing that has kept me playing in that environment was excitement for what I thought was the coming clean slate.
