What to do about maphack?

I feel we kind of lost this discussion when we left the old forum, so I bring it up here again. The original first post :

Quote :

First of all, this topic is not a blamegame. This is about the actual problem maphack is leading to. Recently Ive lost all passion to play games beacause you basicly know that some players dominate only beacause of maphack. As far as I see it we have 2 solutions, either we get rid of maphack or everyone starts using it (or at least we officially allow it).

As far as I understood it Hillo had a more or less functioning way to catch maphackers, but I dont know this guy very well and I havent seen him in a while. Can someone who know him ask him if he can help us? Or maybe someone else (Madhatters? Chakra?) knows a way to deal with maphack? I have basicly no knowledge at all about mapmaking but Ill gladly help out in any way I can beacause I really feel this is a problem that will eventually kill sheep tag unless we deal with it. For a long time I feel this community had some sort of honor in it. I trusted basicly all considered top players to not use maphack and also I didnt really consider how much of an advantage it is.

Today is different. I dont know who is really good and who just maphack, I feel extremly frustrated when I die to invis when I know if I did what other players do and just download maphack this would basicly stop completley. I also feel demotivated to focus not to die to invis when I know I wouldnt have to if I just downloaded maphack. This is just a small part of it. Consider the expansionpossibilities, finding banks as wolf, when I see people running out of mass to make a bank in a way I could never do beacause I dont know where the wolves are.

If you cba to read the quote this is my key point : either we give up and basicly officially allow maphack and adjust the map after it or we find a good way to counter it. The destructive impact todays system where we basicly reward people with low moral standards will if it goes on robs us of the chance to take any competitive sheep tag, ranking or even mapdevelopment seriously. Today important issues such as the invispotion cannot be discussed without taking into account that an unknown but big part of this community uses maphack and is basicly completley immune to it. It is also impossible to take tournaments seriously when we more or less know that players in the tournament would have nothing to offer in a serious sheep tag game if it wasnt for the use of cheat. So, what to do?

BAN

Ye, ban exa.

Ban both me and apolar from the fucking bot, this is only way out of this mess, we are both sad geeks of shit who leave/ruin/afk in games to get attention.

Well is it possible to punish the players somehow? If a ban system should work we need a wide agreement on how.

Shoop wrote:

Well is it possible to punish the players somehow? If a ban system should work we need a wide agreement on how.

We could easily bring the rules for StLegends into discussion and adjust them so everyone and not only Clan Behh agrees on them and add hacking to the list of crimes

Shoop wrote:

Well is it possible to punish the players somehow? If a ban system should work we need a wide agreement on how.

I agree, Cmk will agree too i think. Nomapgrids bot will be gone in some days. So only mine and Cmks are Bot are available and since we are the owners its only by us to ban them or not

TayVaNo wrote:

Shoop wrote:

Well is it possible to punish the players somehow? If a ban system should work we need a wide agreement on how.

I agree, Cmk will agree too i think. Nomapgrids bot will be gone in some days. So only mine and Cmks are Bot are available and since we are the owners its only by us to ban them or not

I'd be happy if we could develop the banning-system together
I doubt cmke will implement one though

Well, lets see what he has to say at least?

I have no idea if this works but i'll post it anyways so chakra / madhatters / whoever who knows anything about wc3 engine can say if it works.

I played a lot of techies in dota and i always use town portal to get to the lane faster, then i place mines and go and hide. Somehow some people know where the mines are right off and avoid them so i get suspicious and check the replay. If i choose the player who i suspect maphackings view it always appear a white signal on the tower where i tp for them although it is fog for them there. It's the same signal as allies get. Only my allies and the maphackers get this signal.

So i was thinking, if maphackers only can see the town portal signal in fog, that should be an extremely easy way to bust them. Just choose a random place on the map where nobody can see. For example this dumbass mountain on bot behind shops which fill no function. Just make it impossible to ward on and make some random shit tp there randomly every minute. Then all maphackers would get this tp-signal and should be extremely easy to bust when you watch the replay.

no ban-system is gonna work here. either you're gonna give too low of a ban-period for it to have ANY significance, or its gonna be so long that it will end up hurting us more than it helps us. keep in mind that once the ban-period for maphack is gone, you have to bust a player AGAIN in order to ban him. noone is going to get busted twice.

the ONLY way a ban-system will make any sense in this situation is if we have an anti-mh feature implemented in the map. this way we can bust a maphacker every time he maphacks, and punish him for a short period of time (anything from 2 days to 2 weeks, depending on what we agree upon).

since it's unlikely that we're going to be able to implement a functioning anti-mh system, the best idea is to remove the advantage maphackers get from maphacking. kill the invis. if you want to cry about mirror images and small details, its going to be in vain. i dont care about the insignificant advantages (yo0 polars mouse cost 15 euro more than mine! adVanTAgE!). there is a reason noone whined about maphack until invis got buffed immensely. no invis = no maphack. end of story.



i see it as irrelevant whether the invis is good or bad for the map when we assume that noone maphacks. the benefits of totally removing the maphack advantage outweighs any positives of keeping it at this point. so the invis debate we had before(whether or not it adds mastery and blabla) is irrelevant.

Well if we implement your way of thinking amir then its ok for ppl to cheat as long as they don't have a big advantage over you... And like i said in the other thread invis is about 40% of the problem. Maphacking gives a huge advantage even with out invis. Ppl just didnt notice it until invis was buffed because it became easier to see who is maphacking or not. Ppl just assumed that these players were really good even though secretly they had an advantage. You might not have a problem with ppl being able to see everything you do, being able to help their allies because they can see everything, and who can mass freely, but cheating should not go unpunished in any shape or form. You can say "hurt the community" blah blah but removing invis hurts the community, removal of stacks hurt the community ect... Even if the ban time is too small or long it is the best way to go. Id rather play 2v4s with people who have morals and play fair then to play a 5v5 with 5 ppl on the other team who cheat.

I think we should remove invis, but regardless if we do that it is important that we show as a community that maphacking is not okey.

IF we can get the hostbotowners onboard I suggest a smaller ban from normal ST games and a longer ban from competitive ST.

I prefer anti-mh-system.

Invis is a really nice item, it's not OP. One game youre imba and you make the game, another game you fail and make the team lose.

it's most times 50%/50%

This is not a discussion about removing invispotion except as a way to deal with maphack.

Also, ofcourse everyone would prefer an anti maphack system. You got one?

I know i know. I just wanted to bring that fact to this.

Did you already ask Hillo or another mapMaker who got experience?

Your opinion is not a fact Mapgrid, if you want to debate invispotion here is the thread : https://sheeptag.forumotion.net/t12-say-goodbye-to-maphack

(By the way amir, can you change the title of that topic for archiving purposes, it might be relevant in the future to look back to old disucssions and then it would be good if it was named something with Removing Invis or something).

Again, we are exploring different ways to deal with maphack. When you shoot down other ideas with the argument that "anti-maphack would be better" it would be good if you could produce the way to deal with anti-maphack. It is not up to others to argue for your case and right now we are looking at concrete alternatives we can do.

I think we wasted enough time on wether we should punish cheaters or not.

It's time to start about how to punish them without hurting the community too much.

Well as I said I think a small ban from the availeble hostbots (requires an agreement between hostbot owners) and a longer suspension from competitive sheep tag would be a good idea.

remove invis = all agree or? solves all problemos.

we can discuss punishment for being caught with maphack. even if the advantage would be really small compared to now once we remove the invis, we can give a few days ban for maphacking. we can also try to implement some sort of anti-mh feature in the map, there have been a number of good ideas which could potentially work.

now..does it make sense to make the punishment AFTER the crime has been committed? nooo. you establish the crime + the punishment first. lakes even supported this when exa made tons of accusations for polar ruining games by saying "anything polar did after we implemented the rules = he got banned for". i don't think many people would be happy if we started banning people who left games in 1995. and the same should logically apply to any other game-ruining/cheating. you don't ban lakes 3 days in 2012 for leaving a game in 2006...for very obvious reasons.




conclusion: noone should get punished for having left a game in 1995, and noone should get punished for maphacking in 1995. we can start punishing people that get caught from now on, and we can remove the invis so that people don't get discouraged to play(for more reasons than just the maphacking advantage).

I agree that we should remove invis, but I dont agree it solves all problems and I still think we should somehow punish maphackers.

Also, I think its very important that we isolate this issue from leaving games, smurfing etc. Just like we should isolate those issues from maphacking. Its 3 separate discussions and we gain nothing on piling up the problems we have when dealing with leavers when we discuss how we should deal with maphack.

My suggestion is still that we ban the people from games for a short period of time, perhaps 3 weeks and also that we suspend them from competitive sheep tag for a while. But obviously we need a vast support in order to apply these rules and we also need a lot of time to discuss the details. It may well be that we reach the conclusion that it is impossible but the first question everyone have to answer in order to proceed,

is there even a will to punish maphackers? Will you stand up for it when times come to push? If not we can forget all about it and on the other hand deal with the possible consequence that it becomes acceptable to maphack. Which I think should be a big concern for this community.

everyone is going to boycott hostbots that don't ban maphackers.

i dont care what punishment u put on maphackers or what u agreed to. as long as invis is removed i dont even care if people maphack. but ill support the punishment.



logically u won't punish people who maphacked in 2005 for the same reasons u won't ban people who left games in 2005. what reason is there to separate maphack from leaving games? the punishment can be different but the fundamental reasons for punishing any sort of game-ruining is the same: to improve gameplay. it will be very bad if we suddenly start banning everyone who has ever ruined a game in any way. i dont see a reason not to punish people who left games in 2005 if you're going to punish people who maphacked in 2005.

anyway, even if we isolate maphacking, it still doesn't make sense to ban people for 3 weeks today for something they did in 2005, and it will be really easy to fabricate evidence/screenshots against others because noone remembers what happened in 2005.

We can discuss how to punish them later, first we need to see if we have a support to punish them in the first place. You, me and Greatlakes is a good start, but we need a lot more people

Count me Shoop lol, I agree on punishment but only when we caught them, not when its suspicious.

I just had an idea: can you create some sort of hashcode-value for all units visible to a player on the map?

If you can: just compare the value of every player in each team, if it's not equal for everyone in each team we know there is a hacker.
Chakra, Madhatters, can you calculate an aggregated integer-value out of visible units? (would be good if you can treat mirrors and normal wolves differently, because then not only invis, but also mirror detection would be shown, (would be legend if you could also take pings into the calculation for the hashcode! but i doubt that would work firm))