What if I think about using my kick but my kick is actually a macro that only kicks on a random RNG based number generator. Would the other persons computer just explode from the probability paradox as my kick is both kicking and not kicking a casted spell?
Smeld, kickbots, and bots in general are an epidemic right now.
There was someone who ran the numbers after getting information from people who participate in the bot discord and it came down to 1/3 of the ladder is using some kinda bot basically.
Big surprise I’m sure is that a large % of it is shami players
Wish I had held on to the reddit link.
Not…really, no. 
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.8 was the max one… most were around .2 -.5 seconds. Middle of spamming his rotation on his burst, he instantly kicks between pom blasts or stops his missiles instantly.
Id have to look back at the logs, but it was EXTREMELY sus with how consistently he was insta kicking soothing mist on our MW that game almost off CD.
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You’re assuming that the backend works by just checking the origin timestamps of the messages it receives. Let’s say I have 500 latency client → server direction
I cancel my cast at time 0. Server receives my message at time 500. Opponent has 30 latency and kicked at time 250. Server receives kick message at time 280. Opponent receives cancel message at time 530.
Who should it give preference to? I’m not making any claims about how it handles such situations, but this is an example of why it’s not necessarily just comparing origin timestamps.
Ignorance is bliss.
How much do the pay you to be a fanboi and troll the forums?
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That scenario is confusing to me. With stuff like this I like to simplify it to the bare minimum if possible and the bottom line is the “juke bot” is always going to be the last to know when the other player pressed kick so how is it going to react to that and juke it? The server already made the determination on if the kick landed or not. I just can’t make logical sense out it. Again, there definitely could be something I am missing, but I am just not seeing it so far.
Good heavens I wish I was paid. 
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My work is in robotics so I’ll use an example from there, but I don’t know how likely WoW backend would work this way because I’m not a professional gamedev.
Different types of messages in robotics are published at different frequencies. For example you probably publish location (small message) more frequently than the current image you’re seeing (large message). It is in theory possible that there’s a fast-to-publish pass-through message client->server->client which notifies that a kick has been pressed but does not display anything on client UI. Then client2 responds by canceling, and the message client2->server arrives within some forgiveness window for juking a kick. Batch message which requires actual computation and comparing all messages from both clients goes out, and determines that the cast was successfully juked.
It seems a bit silly to me if this is actually the case, but you never know. Synchronization is not an easy problem.
EDIT: there’s a fan-made remake of some server code here https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk/blob/master/src/server/game/Events/GameEventMgr.cpp. I can look through to see if I can find how this server handles it, but it’s not actual WoW server code
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You have some good ideas but I think this may be the only way it could work. If the server had a forgiveness window (a specified amount of time) in favor of the person casting/juking AND sent the info that the other person kicked to the casters client then theoretically I could understand how it could happen. Of course the ms between both clients would also be huge factor in that scenario. That would seem like an obviously bad way to handle such a thing and ripe for exploitation though.
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Yeah for sure, most likely scenario is that OP is just getting farmed. I think WoD is the last time I really felt that cheating was a significant issue
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Agreed but I did see a lot of cheating in DF where people were botting for a while but then it all seemed to die down after some ban waves went out and Blizzard found a way to detect those current methods. I can understand kickbots and rotation bots but I just couldn’t see how this specific juke bot would work.
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Lol clearly you didn’t play Season 1 of Dragonflight in Shuffles. Nearly every lock past 2100 was kickbotting, and nearly every ele shaman past 2100 was rotation + kickbotting until the spec was nerfed.
Haven’t noticed too much kickbotting in TWW, although I did do a Kotmogu on Priest where I had a fresh account feral druid chasing me the entire game running a kickbot that was the fastest I’ve ever seen, so maybe they have been updated.
The major cheating this expansion is group sync queueing and wintrading
You’re right I didn’t
If you play shadow priest your kick pretty much always hits. Maybe reroll?
Also though I notice a high influx of people kicking torrent (rightfully so). I’ve started fake casting it to some success. All depending on the situation obviously.
consistent instant kicks is always pretty sus, the timing variety makes it sound human to me tho.
FWIW MW’s were always victim of this, pretty much any heal that’s channeled is prekick bait. Like penance before soothing mist.
Perfectly forming his rotation around the interrupt sounds kinda sus I guess. I’ve never played arcane ever so I can’t relate to how the flow is / how much flexibility they have.
Yep big money in the smaller participation game mode
The likelihood of there being something that can tell a user’s client to stop casting based on when you press your kick is extremely unlikely, if not totally impossible. If something like this exists, it is probably using predictive methods which would indicate its also fool proof.
WoW uses TCP as its transportation protocol which in turn uses sequence and acknowledgement numbers for its smaller packets in a larger data stream. So for someone to press an ability, it would require the client to send data to the server, the server to then return and acknowledge the prior packet and increase the values in coordination. Not to mention the data is also encrypted which on top of normal latency would almost be impossible to decrypt, analyze, and then react. You’d actually need to be sniffing the packets on the server side to likely ever get that information in a manner that you could use it to your advantage; ie before the server acknowledges the packets it’s received or as it is received.
Unless WoW has completely changed how it operates and has switched to UDP, this link explains how the clients and servers communicate:
https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/pub-et_12119.pdf
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reminds me of the first week of blitz and the majority of my games involved glads and their alts. There was this Fmage… that juked over 10 interrupts from half the team just on ray of frost. All other spells got interrupted over the course of the match but when it came to RoF, procc’d precog every time. Impressive but with a lot of illegal script suspect feelings about him. 
Is that what we call fishing for precog then killing somebody with an important unkickable cast during it