Hi guys,
I am not very good at StarCraft. The highest rank I’ve ever got to was Diamond. I’ve never been Masters, let alone GrandMasters. Back in StarCraft regular I had about a 12% win/loss ratio. This isn’t my kind of game. I am a lot better at turned-based games like Heroes of Might and Magic. I enjoyed Diablo but I wasn’t much good at that either. I’m currently Gold 1 in single player in Legacy of the Void. I have about 2,500 games on this account in Legacy on this server. I have probably played about 50,000 games of StarCraft all up, starting about 6 months after it came out in 1998. I’ve played StarCraft, StarCraft Brood Wars, Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. I played the beta on Brood Wars and Heart of the Swarm. I never really liked Brood Wars and preferred the original. I loved Heart of the Swarm but find myself playing Legacy of the Void most of the time now. So that’s my personal history. Now onto the history of hacking.
Blizzard has always had a major problem with hacking, perhaps more than most other computer game makers. Hacking in Diablo (I) was so bad that just about everyone playing had nothing but unique sets, which they duplicated (duped) for you and if you didn’t do it then you’d just die constantly until you paid up. Private individuals were making hundreds of dollars per player if they wanted to play multiplayer. It was so bad that many people just stuck to single player and ignored the multiplayer version, and some even suspected that Blizzard themselves were behind the hacking. While they eventually partially dealt with this by making the single player game be played on the internet too, it paved the way for hacking in StarCraft too.
Based on my Diablo experience, I knew what to expect when I went into StarCraft, but was surprised to learn that players had what they called “Map Hacking”, the most popular version being the one which let you see what everyone else was doing. It wasn’t the only version, as there were people running around with unlimited money hacks, invincibility hacks and all sorts of other ones. I remember playing one game with a guy who just started the game by building 20 Nexuses in the first 30 seconds, all instantly built.
Blizzard didn’t do anything about it, so what happened was that the community had to do it for them, and what we did was that we basically banned certain players from joining games. Of course, that was after you were into the system a bit, and these people just kept on making more accounts. They paid to hack, and some had paid several hundred dollars for it, so they weren’t going to stop until they had ruined everyone’s games. You’d see people running around with 99% win rates.
One way around it was to play 4 vs 4 games, Top vs Bottom, with the deal that if any hacker joined then everyone else would join forces to defeat them, 7 vs 1 style. Against a hacker we still lost sometimes if their hacks were bad enough, but then we’d ban them from joining our games. 1 vs 1 games had to be done by invitation only or else run the risk of having hackers join.
Eventually, the pro scene came about, mainly in South Korea, and of course I was nowhere near good enough for that, but they did that with LAN games, not on the internet, by invitation only, and hackers were banned. While we still had hackers join some pro scene games sometimes, they’d face serious consequences if they were caught. Some still tried their luck though!
Of course, the game wasn’t balanced then, as the focus was on the single player, but the introduction of a pro scene meant that there was a need for balance changes and for an attempt to get rid of the hackers.
Blizzard eventually introduced programs that automatically detected hacks, but the problem was that hackers just found new ways to get in. They started to have serious consequences for people who were caught hacking, and you could be banned for life.
StarCraft II (Wings of Liberty) was meant to be more hack-proof but it actually introduced a higher level of hacking than ever before, because now they had a promise to become GrandMaster, rather than simply having that 99% winrate, and for a while we had a whole lot of hacking.
Eventually, Blizzard worked out ways around it and helped to write programs that banned hacks, but, of course, the hackers kept inventing new ways around it.
One problem for the hacking is these forums, because they are infested with hackers, and always have been, and they disguise themselves as knowledgeable people, while using fake names and fake accounts, and support hackers. It has always been like this. One way to catch a hacker is to put up a legitimate hacking report and see who claims it is fake - whoever claims it is fake, especially if they are abusive about it - is probably a hacker.
Hacking isn’t as commonplace now as it used to be but it is still a major problem in the game. Even with the game being free to play, still people hack.
Hackers now don’t just go straight to Grandmaster where they’d be easily spotted, but stay in the lower levels, at least until they’ve fine-tuned their techniques.
There are more at lower ranks than higher ranks, and always have been, at least since Blizzard started taking action, because it only makes a difference to their reputation to stop high-level hackers.
Anyway, that’s the history of hacking. Just for your information.
