Its a program that gives people max resources for crafting, etc. They can gamble for eternity to get the best stats with unlimited resources. I want to play the game but also don’t want to compete against this kind of stuff.
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That’s not something Blizzard can stop. The encryption keys on Playstation have been cracked so no matter what Blizzard does, the saves are compromised and Save Wizard will plague the platform.
You should direct your complaints to Sony.
save wizard is one thing, but that jester guy ruined the leaderboards by over and above what save wizard can do. he modified the game which allows him those .05 second clears of 150 naked. I saw a video of someone doing it and it basically spawns all the great rift completetion orbs on the gound, he runs over them and boom 150 clears.
which is partly why i bought d3 for the pc so I can just do a clean game with not crazy cheaters. No having someone else clear 150gr in a second doesnt ruin my game fun directly. I still only play to complete a season and get the pet/wings/frames however it sort of sucks they screw people that want that #1 top rank achievement.
I think id play more console if they (blizzard) would do a leader board reset 1 month before the season ends by than all the cheaters have already moved on to other games to cheat in.
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Duuuude… What!? Consoles are f****ed big time than.
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yeah… its depressing on playstation (I heard xbox at least doesnt have a “jester” yet).
While this is true, there is something Blizzard can do to mitigate it, which is low impact and doesn’t take much effort. Just put in some basic validation upon loading the save. This would also help against the hacked gear that plagues all the consoles.
Sure, players would still have all perfect primals, but having all the best gear and 500 extra of every stat (paragon, damage, etc.) is far less impactful than having +1 trillion extra stats. A player with skill who puts in 500 hours into a season can overcome a cheater who puts in 5 hours.
That’s Sony’s job as console server belonging to them and you can’t convince’em to do such check. None of their games require special control points like that, this also apply for many different popular titles out there. This addition means loading times increased and this could create another problem of people dropping off from connection by increasing server and cloud traffic. That console platform is hacked, let it go.
Play on PC and you will compete against bots.
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I’m not talking about the external portion in terms of making sure it has the correct encryption scheme. I’m talking about the portion which is Blizzard’s job in terms of actually loading the save. There are already checks to prevent crashing in code. This is super low impact.
And saves, even online, are still console side. You want something that’s cross platform and works with the PC too? Add preprocessor directives.
#ifdef (CONSOLE)
// Sanity check goes here
#endif
In terms of increased loading times, it might add a few nanoseconds to the load time.
As far as I know servers of console version belongs to Sony. If you want any update, even starting a season Blizzard has to contact Sony for it.
That’s only half of the issue. Core keys are compromised and we don’t know what they can achieve. Only Sony does.
You have no idea how it applies to the cloud and server traffic when ten thousands try to get in at the same time when season starts, I believe. There will be queues and as you said they would still have near infinite resources with checks to adorn themselves in Primals. This ain’t really different at all. Playstation also had a weird hardcore scene from the start.
If solution was so easy and as half as impactful what you suggested, I believe Sony would take some solid measures against that already.
The actual data in the save does not belong to Sony. It belongs to Blizzard. Different games have different save layouts. The saves are loaded up locally. It’s 100% Blizzard’s responsibility on this end. And even in the slight chance you were talking remote loading on the PC, where calculations are done on their end, it would barely impact anything on that side too.
I 100% guarantee you there are already validation checks in the code to prevent other things such as crashing on Blizzard’s end. This is programming 101 stuff.
As far as why there aren’t sanity checks already? That’s easy. The game was initially designed for the PC, where you didn’t have access to saves. You put in code in terms of what you feel is necessary. There’s no reason to put in sanity checks for something that could never happen. Because yes, if you were testing for things that couldn’t happen, you could easily impact performance. There’s an infinite amount of things that are impossible to occur. I’m most likely guessing when the game got ported over, code was just copied over. It works? OK, good enough. At the time the game came out, encryption keys weren’t broken.
And when it came to the PS4 & Xbox One, when non season was already compromised, it’s a simple question of what’s the easiest fix. You can either do stuff right, and take a week to get it working, or take 1 hour to put in a quick hack to prevent item trading and save importing.
It’s the same thing with why Echoing Nightmares are Greater Rifts can’t be loaded in a <70 game. It’s a quick fix. And there are even bugs. If you try opening up a Greater Rift in a game below 70 multiple times, the game will crash. But it’s not worth fixing because why would anyone ever attempt to do that, if the first time it tells you that you cannot do that.
Solutions can be easy, but they still end up taking time. And I agree that in the software industry, a week of effort is an infinity in terms of cost, and only worth doing under the most dire of circumstances. But when your leaderboards on multiple platforms are all infested by cheaters, yes, I’d say that’s worth putting in a fix. And I’m not saying that it will fix the cheaters. It’s not about stopping cheats. Yes, that would take forever and is near impossible.
What I’m suggesting is mitigation to make cheating less impactful. Maybe they decided that cheating is cheating, and not worth doing because you can’t fix the problem. Sanity checks won’t stop cheating. They’ll just change the impact of the quality of the cheat. But on the player’s end, that would be impactful.
another simple way is actually having someone from blizzard (intern job) login to diablo 3 on the different platforms, check the leader boards and have the ability to flag/remove/ban people with gear that have 3 gem slots or “made by jester”. Its a simple process and interns would probably love doing thyat instead of getting people coffee
If that was the exact case, which is not, we’d have pirated D3RoS servers all over the place because code in that disc is available to everyone. Code supposedly copied at some places and roof framework of PC and console are different. One will have XNA other will have .Net, plus the ratio of languages (C, C++… etc.) between two variations will differ.
Console and PC version of a game won’t be 1:1 copy of each other. That is against their DRM protection measures to let such backdoor happen. I am not even a good or proficient coder but I can tell that is not the case.
That’s a shortcoming of console servers and shortsightedness of allowing client side information. Apparently their console has its master code compromised so anyone have it can cheat their way. If I have something saved on my computer or console, it’s not Blizzard’s responsibility anymore.
There’s nothing they can do at this point besides contacting Sony with their own solution but since game allowed client side information from the start plus master code being exploited.
Sony provided the cloud and servers and updating the still happen through them. If there was a solution they’d be notified way before you as this thing went on for months and would come up with something if it could change anything. Reducing the “impact” still allow cheaters to have their way and as long as there are backdoors (core code is there allowing information from client side) cheaters will reclaim it back.
If you have a really good solution feel free to reach both Sony and Blizzard but I see no point. Game can not be repaired unless they force everyone to buy Sony PS+ pass for online play only.
They could simply not store the savegames on the console?
Like the most obvious thing to do ever.
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Having the saves stored exclusively on the server side would solve cheating on consoles. No local saves at all. The problem is that it should have been like that from the start. The console should have never had local saves. But no, they had to have local saves because “convenience”.
I’m not sure that drastic change is possible at this point.
Online saves would only be slightly more secure than local saves due to the nature of how the console version of Diablo 3 works. As long as the game runs locally, you still have memory injection that could be applied, which is why some basic sanity checks on the loading of the save could mitigate this problem.
The game also runs locally on PC, shouldn’t the same concern exist there? Sanity checks should always be used of course.
It is weird, Blizzard had been running MMO security for a decade before releasing D3 on console, but it seems like they just threw out all existing knowledge and went YOLO.
This is the PC forums so for clarity the situation is this for Consoles:
- Nintendo Switch is fully hacked and Diablo 3 has modded gear in Seasons.
- PlayStation 4 has modded gear in Seasons (Non Season comes from PS3 import save) from using a jailbroken PS4 but the ability to do this is very complicated and requires hacking ability…but…PS4 also has Save Wizard, an online editor that cannot add modded gear but modify numbers of mats…Save Wizard can also take a save from a PSN account and resign it to another PSN account and people who mod in Seasons, whilst there are very few who can do it, they make the Save File available to be downloaded and resigned via Save Wizard to loads of PS4 users hence why modded gear is now rampant in PS4 Seasons.
- PS5 does not have a version of D3 specific to PS5 but rather it runs via compatibility the PS4 version and thus suffers the above.
- XB1/XBSX has not been hacked and has no editor or modded gear in Seasons (Non Season does via XB360 save import) and XB1/XBSX is the “cleanest” Console version.
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The game isn’t run locally on the PC. It’s run on Blizzard’s servers. Diablo 2 has an offline variant, as well as an online variant. But it’s why there are cheats on the local side that don’t exist on the battlenet side.
What you see on your end is pretty much a dumb terminal. You end up getting some information to display your character, such as player positions, enemy positions, etc., and when you click buttons, you end up sending information of what you’ve done. (This is also why bots still work, because they can get/send all the necessary info). But you don’t run the game itself locally. When it comes to the console version of Diablo 3, the host is running what would be run on Blizzard’s end on the PC side. This is why, on the PC, if you’re play HC, your character can die if you pull the plug to your network, whereas on the console, you’re safe.
But if everything is online, where it’s 100% controlled on Blizzard’s end, that’s why they wouldn’t need sanity checks. Because you never have access to the necessary data. Otherwise, it would be trivial to do packet injections, so that PC players do 10 trillion damage per hit, critical hits every time, etc.
As far as different languages, frameworks, etc. that was suggested above, that might be true on the backend, but they would likely to have created their own API , as it would be a ludicrous and infeasible approach to any form of cross platform title not too. Yes, there are different commands to do stuff like file IO, or drawing graphics, on different platforms, but you’d create your own API to handle that. So, rather than having hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code that would be platform specific, you’d have a base that’s cross platform, and only the API itself needs to be platform specific, which would be a tiny percentage of that. For example, if you take a look at something like the fopen command in the C runtime library, you’ll notice that it itself varies between platforms, and is just a wrapper of more basic functionality, depending on the platform. So, they might have their own API version of a file open command, which in turn calls the platform specific versions of file opens.