OMG HAX!!!1!

The last handful of WvW events I've been in have been great fun (as they always are) but I feel like they are getting pulled down, energy wise, by folks in Raidcall calling "HAX!" as often as they are.

Every game, every online game, and certainly every MMO will ALWAYS have an ongoing battle of Devs vs Hax.  It sucks, it really sucks - but it is always going on.

But when there are 40+ of us in a Raidcall channel, having a great time, and listening to the event leader spend their time herding us like a band of cats through the lands - having to hear folks continue to discuss what was a hack, is that a hack, i think they used a hack, that has to be a hack, I heard about a hack, there was a hack they saw this one time....    It brings the whole room down. :(

Yes - there are jerks, but I really think it would benefit everyone's fun level if we just moved on and let time/devs work the issues out.  if the event leader wants to bring it up - great, but otherwise - I would love if everyone else could just keep those feelings/info/irratation to themselves.

Honest question - Do you think not discussing whether something is a problem and whether or not it should be reported will hinder the devs A)finding out about the problem and B)having the appropriate weight of reports to act on said problem? I agree that it probably should not happen when a leader is trying to lead an event though. Maybe there is a more appropriate venue for that discussion. For me, having 30+ invaders show up inside a keep that never had the walls breached after a match reset tends to bring me down. What is fun about that? (other than disrupting said plan)

The issue for me is in the culture/attitude of the people you are playing the game with. There will always be hacks - but if you end up with a group of folks who continually feel/express that they are victums and how much this sucks... it will eventually kill the group. Now it may be that the hacks are so bad that the WvW expierence is ruined and not worth playing at the time. It may be that for some people it is - in that case I would encourage them to take a break until it is fixed. But for the rest of the folks, hearing about it over and over just brings down the fun. And for new people playing, they will end up with an impression of the game (its fulla cheats!) that I just do not think is true. You also end up with a culture where people's first reaction to losing is that it was hacks - rather than an honest analysis of what happened and did you in fact just get beat by some tactic you didn't know about. I'm sure there are people who have quit GW2 because they are sure that Giascioch is full of cheaters - rather than they figure out that mesmer teleports are, in fact, part of the design of the game. So instead of learning something, they end up ditching something that is a great game.

BOTTOM LINE: If you don't think it's right report it. Complaining in RaidCall isn't going to fix the problem. It only casts a negative shadow on peoples time in game. Cheating is a part of every game. Heck I once created a character with the sole intent on hunting and killing one of the most well known and obvious cheaters in DAOC. If your opponents have to cheat to beat you it's a compliment. If you still beat your opponent even when they cheat it's really saying something. The thing we want to avoid is throwing out the Hax, cheater, exploiter titles on any time you get yourself killed. It's an age old thing to do in sports, gaming, and hell even cards. If someone beat you they must have cheated. Don't fall prey to this thinking. Look at your combat log. See what killed you. Learn from it adapt and make yourself stronger. If you see 9K spike damage in 1 shot report it. If you see flying people report it with a screen shot. If you see people walking through walls report it. Nothing gets fixed by complaining to a bunch of gamers about it. Things get fixed by reporting them to developers. Don't clog up chat channels with complaining. That doesn't give us a very enjoyable community. It just makes people angry and casts a negative tone on our experience.

Discussing "hackers" in RaidCall is really a waste of breath. ArenaNet can't hear you there. If you see something that looks suspicious, file a report and move on. If the raid leader asks everyone to submit a report, do so, but recognize that mass-reporting is of limited utility. ArenaNet knows what's going on, and they have known it would be a problem since before beta. I would bet all of my FHP that they're working on it just as fast as they can. Yelling louder (i.e. mass reporting) will neither make them work faster, nor convey any more information than a single report. All it does is add 30 tickets for the GMs to wade through trying to find the next person in need of actual help. It's not like red lights and sirens go off when they get 30 tickets from the same server. If it helps, "hacks" in video games generally conform to the following cycle: 1. Game releases. 2. Very smart people write programs that allow...interesting behavior in the game. They do this because it's an interesting puzzle, and also because they can. 3. The smart people release their programs to the world with source code, so they can take credit for their good work, and get feedback from their peers. 4. Less smart people download those programs and use them to do silly things in the game, like teleport into a keep, or kill a raid boss with a single attack. They get reported and banned. 5. Gold farmers and account scammers download the source code for those programs, fill it with keyloggers and malware, and re-release it. 6. More less smart people try to download the original programs, but wind up with the infected versions. They lose all their items and gold, then go scream abuse at the real smart people. They tell anyone who will listen that those programs are infected. 7. The less smart people catch wind that some programs are infected, and some are not. They don't know how to tell the difference between the two, so they stop hacking/botting entirely, because they can't find one they can trust. 8. The smart people continue to write programs, but they rarely release publicly, because they're tired of the abuse. They even use their programs in-game to give themselves an edge, but not enough that it's obvious that they're cheating. They will likely never be caught, because they aren't making waves. GW2 is about at stage 4 right now, and rapidly transitioning to stage 5. Watch for an announcement that ArenaNet banned a ton of botters/hackers - those will most likely be stolen accounts, compromised by an infected botting or hacking program. Every game does it, and it's hilarious every time.

The only time I could see Hack Chatter being necessary is if it is obvious, happening right at that moment and you want others to take notice of it happening. For instance last night when I was in Kraas's event we had a enemy warrior jumping into our group, doing damage, then as soon as he was nearly dead he would somehow disappear and pop up behind enemy lines. Although not being totally obvious, the disappearing act was suspicious activity and we made sure to point it out to those around us so that we could discuss and report it. I dont have a clue what it could have been outside of a mesmer portal, but I didnt see one, so, what else?? Otherwise, the constant "Hack chatter", ya, I agree, it is tiring and can be just as disruptive as the hacker. oh, and Fog, 9000 damage is achievable with the right specs and the stars align. I did 10300 last night, hope I dont get reported for hacking :(

But was it 10300 damage, from spikes?

@ Pepsi I must be misunderstanding something. Is 'spike' an ability because I cant find it on gw2db... unless its Spike Trap from ranger. But it doesnt really matter cuz its off topic here. @Arowefell 8. The smart people continue to write programs, but they rarely release publicly, because they're tired of the abuse. They even use their programs in-game to give themselves an edge, but not enough that it's obvious that they're cheating. They will likely never be caught, because they aren't making waves. Saw a lot of this last night. We would kill a guy and plant the flag on him confirming him dead, then 2 seconds later, oop, hes up and fighting again. What is the best way to report this sort of thing.

There are a few abilities that with the right spec and gear and situation can result in a player taking up to around 15k on a minimal toughness non heavy player in under a second. Thief backstab and Warrior Kill shot come to mind.

@Sprong: Pulling a stunt like that right in front of you makes that person most definitely not one of the smart ones. Sounds like he was probably teleporting. You kill him, he respawns at the nearest waypoint, and teleports back to where he died. To you, it would look like he'd just sprung back to life a few seconds after you'd killed him. I say "probably" here, because there are a large and growing number of teleport and flight programs available right now. They're not very sophisticated, and anything but subtle in the hands of a moron, but they're easy to use and quite functional. It is possible that someone's discovered a way around being defeated, however. This would have some interesting implications, as getting around the defeated state would theoretically be only a half-step away from full on invincibility. I haven't seen true invincibility since the early days of WoW, and I think it's unlikely that ArenaNet has made the types of architectural mistake required to make it possible. The best way to report something suspicious is "as fast as possible". The preferred method is to send an email to exploits@arena.net. Include as much information as you have, as well as any screenshots or video of the suspicious behavior. Quickness is key. If a GM doesn't see any evidence of misbehavior, either in-game or in the logs, it's hard to act against it. Once a GM gets your email, he or she can watch the area/person/group in question and, if they misbehave again, bring the Ban Hammer down. If you don't report it right away, however, or the person stops exploiting, the GM has no way to know if something bad actually happened, or if you're just mad that you got killed. Once you've sent the report, that will pretty much be the end of it. They won't respond to you, they won't tell you what happened, and you probably won't see them show up in-game (GMs are usually invisible, especially while on the hunt - I believe we saw this a couple of weeks ago during Fog's Wednesday PvE event).

Wonder how well the GMs can respond to video footage. That was the prefered way of reporting cheaters in APB:R. I got some great footage of 4 hunters teleporting around pharming it up in a cave along with some normal players (so you can clearly see that its not a network issue) last night. Going to flip it into youtube and post it with ANet - I'll let folks know how it goes.

Anet's ban hammer should come down soon, this HAX is affecting the morale of all WvW players.

Enerjak from sorrows furnace found two gw2 hacking programs with a quick google search. Let's hope Anet can "purchase" this and reverse engineer it and counter it

ArenaNet is banning people like crazy. They put down 3000 botters yesterday afternoon, and they say they're responding to hacking reports (that's all they'll ever say though). They've kind of got the cart before the horse here. For every 3000 botters you ban, 5000 more crop up using the same botting program. If they'd attack the program, then banning people would actually have an effect. There are dozens of hacking and botting programs out there for GW2. Some are free, some are paid, I've even seen a subscription model. For some basic initial protection, ArenaNet wouldn't even have to buy or download any of these programs - some simple validation of a few client-side values would break almost every hacking program out there. This is pretty basic, and wouldn't solve the problem, but it would increase the barrier to entry for people writing and using the hacking programs, and that's really the best you can hope for in a situation like this.

Something that helps alot over F2P games - is that it costs $60 per attempt that you get banned at. Having any cost of entry on retry is good stuff at cutting down the attempts.

That's true, and it's one of the reasons that account security is such an issue. If you wanted to farm gold and sell it, you could buy a couple dozen copies of the game at $60/ea, or you could buy a list of existing usernames and passwords, and get tens or hundreds of accounts for the same price. At a lower cost per account, you don't have to be as careful, because you don't really care if one gets banned - chances are you made your investment back by cleaning out the legitimate characters on the account, and whatever you made botting is just gravy. However, if everyone gets smart about account security, and stolen accounts become more rare (driving the prices up), it gets harder and harder to make your initial investment back, much less make any money. You'd need to sell some serious gold to make up your $60/account investment, especially if you're aiming to beat ArenaNet's gold price by a significant margin.