How will hackers be stopped ?

The things you are describing are just address value to be change, this does not require hook points/detours or any real modification of the assembly. But overall it depends on what level of "cheat" you are describing. A aimbot would require code injection (and good bit of understanding of programming). Wile something like say a simple teleport hack generally only requires a simple value change, no injection required (No programming skills required, any skiddy with a memory editor could do it).

Yes and what you describe here is a pointer value. It takes little to no effort to trace a "Randomized address" back to its pointer.

What things have I described? I've never mentioned any specific type of hacks. You mistook me for someone else? All I said was there's no need to modify/reverse engineer the actual game client to create cheats (no matter how sophisticated they are) as all the real time data a cheat program ever needs is in the memory. Code injection refers to the way some cheats work, which is out of the scope of this discussion. Yes, it does take efforts to resolve dynamic memory addresses. It requires complete understanding of the memory structures within the game, which is quite complex. Yes, editing a value is easy, but figuring out which one to edit is not. "Skiddies" need someone to figure it out for them.

Not really, there are a number of memory editors that automate the process with little understanding required, once the value is found its as simple and right clicking it and clicking "find pointer address". The one method that can confuse them though is using math in the value, such as real value*2+1, this makes it slightly more effort to locate the value with a simple scan.

this guy obviously could help, ask SOE to hire him and track down all the hackers

It sounds easy when you do it manually with an editor. But can you do this in code automatically in a program, i.e, coded in the cheat itself, so it automatically finds, say the base address of the data for player #1, etc, every time it injects? Not that easy I hope.

There is nothing to find, once you have the pointer address that is all that is required. Also think you are mixing up terminology, a base address is just the address of a module or process, so really it would be base address(address of the process)+offset/s(location of the value within the process)

What I mean by "base address" in my previous post is the starting location (offset) where the first player record is stored, which is gonna be different every time. Anyways, can't you randomize both the process base address and the offsets? I heard Windows 8 uses random memory allocation, making games harder to hack.

As the name "pointer" states, it points you to a specific address in memory. As the game (OS and everything else) is dependent on such pointers to be able to manipulate that data, it implies that there always has to be at least one pointer that "knows" where to find that data.

So if you cannot access that memory directly because the layout is randomized, your tasks shifts to figure out how to find that pointer that "knows" the location. If you randomize those pointers as well, there needs to be a 2nd pointer that knows the location of those 1st pointers, so your task would shift to first find that 2nd pointer.

So no matter what SOE does, by the definition of how computers work it will always be possible to hack the game. The only question is whether or not they can make it so difficult that hackers eventually give up. But as hack-authors usually love the challenge of mind more than actually cheating in the game, the difficulty that could stop them would have to be so insane, that even SOE would barely be able to work on that game anymore.

Well, how about this, release small patches everyday that change some things, which would make most cheats not working until fixed by the authors later, and by the time they fixed it, a new update is out. In other words, the hackers will be in a constant update loop that they barely have time to cheat in-game.

Can report that having played on Woodman EU since launch I've now seen 1 hacker only.

1 (one).

Evidently Woodman is a paradise - hacker free and full of amazing gameplay.

In the other games I played that never stopped them. If it ever did it wasn't for more than a few hours.

IMO SOE only has two truly solid measures to deal with this, find a way to always have GMs online looking at the game(may be impossible if they can't manage more than one server at the same time, considering the amount of servers and employees they seem to have) and acting quickly(this means cheater reporting should be remade to be quick and detailed like a /report menu instead of a damn ticket) or find a way to stop people from simply making new accounts after a ban.

While that would work to prevent the hacks from working for a short time, it has a completely different issue: as you need to actually change the game's code for that to properly mess up hacking tools, SOE has a chance on every change to introduce a new bug. Which means there has to be excessive testing to make sure that the every-day's patch doesn't mess up the game. And a full test with a product as big as PS2 does not only take a lot of time, but therefore a lot of money as well as SOE would have to probably dedicate an entire team to just change the game's code every day.

And I am not sure what would be worse: hackers or a new crash-bug every 3rd day.

Here is the problem, windows 8 is garbage. Most of the admins/programmers/or general power users i know refuse to use it due to its interfacing and heavy usage of dotnet. As for the randomization aspect, generally no point in randomizing the base address, as you can just target the image name or PID in its place. Windows 8 memory location is based around the usage of C#, and lets just say it is not exactly secure by any mean's (it is so user friendly it will do a lot of the reverse engineering for you).

Though the goal in this case should be focused on detection rather than prevention.

The problem isn't the blatant hackers, sooner or later you will get them.

The problem are the ones who only use it for an edge, not complete domination. Give me some of the tools I've seen for hacking, and even without using an aimbot my kdr is going to go way up.

After playing DAOC back in its heyday, playing fairly for years, finally trying a hack after never succeeding in pvp because of rumors, and realizing that every "good" player on the server was using it I quit the game. It took DAOC years to clean it up (and I don't know if they really succeeded or not, I quit after all).

Unless SOE has some sort of client side detection system, this sort of hacking will go on and it will ruin the experience for honest players (who will quit).

I think SOE should team up with Valve (Evenbalance sucks so ignore them) and come up with some specially tailored version of VAC that either flags suspicious accounts for GMs to investigated or ban on its own based on known cheat memory signatures. This is better what we have now, player reports only.