Wrongly banned for hacking/exploiting. SOE, you need a policy rethink.

It's more than that... it's how many kills... vs how many deaths...over what time period... and I'm guessing that when folks get reported that Devs begin tracking the ratio... or search your history to see how consistent its been. Someone who is struggling then suddenly becomes an Ace is highly suspicious...regardless of how you did it.

If you find an 'exploit' and don't report it... just as bad as a hack. That might be what happened to poster. He discovered something that was missed in Beta that he ''thought' was OK and wasn't... and because he capitalized on it instead of sharing with the Devs... he's gotten the boot.

Yeah, I don't discount the possibility of exploits either.

Maybe something caused them to change their mind?

Vyxia looking into your ban appeal right now - sorry for the delay. I see your ticket in the system and you will receive a response there.

Yet so incredibly fitting when you think about it.

Many thanks - I recently received this, as per my promise to post:

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Greetings Vyxia,

This is Lead Operative Toxotai writing in response to your petition. I have thoroughly reviewed the circumstances surrounding your account's termination and I have come to the conclusion that you were indeed not hacking. I apologize for the confusion, but I do thank you for your understanding. And as compensation for the mix up, I have also add on some Station Cash to your wallet so you will be able to purchase and item on me in-game. I hope you have a happy holiday and please let me know if there is anything else I can look into for you.

Sincerely,

Lead Operative Toxotai

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I would like to thank both CS/Veratu/etc. for correcting this error during the Christmas break, and the people who took the time to add to this or the Steam thread supporting me.

For the people who decided or accused me of hacking/lying/etc., whilst apologies would be nice, I don't expect any, since I know that statistically, people who go to forums to complain usually *are* hackers.

Whilst the station cash is certainly appreciated, being exhonerated is worth far more to me, and I look forward to killing more NC and TR scum from the roof as Vyxia on Miller. Hint - look upwards in future before you /report

And, moreover, whilst it did suck to be banned by mistake over Christmas, it is great to know SOE are actively hunting down the hackers.

Thanks again to the people involved at SOE, happy customer here.

Now they need to get to my account. I'm still banned and still never hacked.

You should make your own thread. You are hijacking someone else's thread and your posts are getting lost in the shuffle. State the facts and bring your case to the attention of the courts!

Its against the forum rules to discuss bans here, that's why I never created a thread. I think the devs are capable of reading the whole thread? I shouldn't have to do this anyways. Thanks for the suggestion though, I will consider it.

EDIT I just messaged Mutato directly. I already messaged some SOE people here but apparently not the right guys.

First off, good on you for your attitude about the whole thing. Mistakes were made and fixed by SOE and I agree with you when you say "... it is great to know SOE are actively hunting down the hackers."

I got a real kick out of this "..whilst apologies would be nice, I don't expect any, since I know that statistically, people who go to forums to complain usually *are* hackers." The first time through I read it literally and found it hilarious. I assume there is an implied "about bans" after the word complain, but I like the idea that you are suggesting that all people who come here to complain are hackers

Either that or people that cheat don't offend you as much, and don't ruin your game enjoyment as much, as they do me, which is probably a more realistic assumption for us both to make, if assuming things is what we need to reduce ourselves to.

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You're doing it wrong.

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What does that have to do with anything at all whatsoever?

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Then you make such invasion of privacy optional, and focus other anti-cheat resources on those that don't opt in.

because trivializing the effects of allowing and supporting cheating is so helpful...

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You are grossly ignorant of what reverse engineers are capable of. Find me a piece of software that has not had its copy protection broken and you have found a metaphorical needle in a haystack, for example. SoEs secrecy works against the honest players, not the dishonest ones.

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because most people that even get banned in the first place ARE cheaters, why even post?

Or your perhaps one of those players that does not understand things like lag, bugs and game mechanics, and assumes any time something isnt working as intended, its a hacker. Perhaps your one of those guy's who just thinks they are the best... just like everyone else, so anyone hitting you from far away is a hacker. I'll bet those assumptions are even more accurate.
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And exactly how much expierence do you have producing a MMO? Have you ever even worked at a company that produced one? i'd love to hear your numbers and what net architecture you used... what you programed a game in. I highly doubt you have.
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Because 11 hours a day means you are either a kid, or a guy who doesn't have a job. Both are natorious for crying and complaining with very little merit. Ya know, the type of guys who call everyone a hacker, and whine saying its pay to win if the game has a cash shop, reguardless of how its structured.

There are these things called laws. Every country has them, and they differ from country to country. Some laws make it so that reguardless of how you "opt in", its still illegal. For instance, if i sign a contract that states i will be someone's slave for 1000 bucks in the US, it will be unenforceable (meaning i wouldn't be a slave). I can appreciate that you would happily subject all your information thats stored in memory to the whims of any SOE program or employee while they are scanning it, I however can not legally allow that, and neither can anyone who has patient confidentiality, privacy policy's or agreements that have them legally protecting information. I get it, you don't own a company, and you don't have responsability's outside of yourself so you don't think about these things. When i was a kid i didn't either. However keep in mind not everyone else is where you are in life.

I don't think anyone has trivialized it, i think its more often then not a want for reasonable policy's. Kinda like an easy way to make sure a school shooting doesn't happen again is to close down all the schools. Sure there will be no more school shootings, but then again, there will be no more schools.
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metaflix, gator (spyware), record4u, diablo 3, All multiplayer games on xbox 360, most indie games, etc.

Also your confusing yourself again. There is a difference between deciphering code on a MMO and a stand alone program. They have these things called updates, they can change what the "reverse engineers" are capable of. Also, they are not "reverse engineers" they don't break down the game code, they mearly find packets the server is sending and exploit them, or inject new ones. One of the ways they do this is by hooking into directx, or the game itself. Yea, i would love for SOE to be a bit more open about this stuff, however they won't.

And most people who go to jail are murderer's and killers.... and most who say everyone is cheating are cheaters themselfs. Most christians hate gays, most republicans believe the earth is 2000 years old, and most liberals think everyone should pay for them. Yea, i can make blanket general statements with no basis on fact to! Tell ya what, why don't you pull up some numbers, or anything objective that would prove your point. I do remember BF3 banning half there player base, and the same arguement was said... until BF3 admited they banned almost all of the legit players.... Also if someone is posting "hey, why is my account banned?" chances are they didn't do it. If they did they would of already made a new account and started leveling up with whatever cheat software they got.Thats from my personal expierence with combat arms.... great read... if you actually read stuff and don't just make stuff up.

You the cheaters (not accusing the OP, just in general) should be more worried about your personal information stored away somewhere now and possible ID theft in the next few years as opposed to getting back a fake K/D ratio on this game.

As far banning based off good stats - I highly doubt that. There's are two on the leaderboards with a K/D ratio of over 50...

If your story is indeed true then it is an utter disgrace and an OUTRAGE.

To falsely ban people after a pathetic and limited investigation when real GRIEFERS are mass crashing and mass killing entire TR offensives on Connery is INSANE.

This game has weeks to live - maybe just days - if these policies and responses from SOE continue.

I cannot express the urgency with which these issues must be resolved. The fate of the game and SOE's business model is at stake.

Good to know! I love your attitude, I would have been rubbing the fact that their face.

Diablo 3 has been cracked for non-multiplayer.
Soft Modded and Mod-Chipped Xbox 360's can use ISO loaders and there is a large community for ISOs. Lots of Indie Games do end up on torrent trackers. Gator/OfferCompanion was designed by a reverse engineer.

They can't change what reverse engineers can do. Reverse engineers take things apart. The only thing that would be different is the memory addresses, but even then most of the time we aren't working with those but rather the disassembled assembly of a program. There is no need to work with packets at all. Hmm changing packets by hooking into directx. that alone shows your ignorance of reverse engineering. If they wanted to change the packets they'd just need to write up some code that used winsock or winpcap or find some packet editor. A reverse engineer wouldn't hook into directx, though someone writing a wrapper for say chams or aimbots will. Want to know how they do the other things like say, no fall damage, or teleportations? That's done by disassembling the code and looking for functions and pointers like OFS_X and ServerPointer then fed into a single line in C/C++ with either a float or a dword which can then be toggled on/off or set static.

@vanon actually there is a major cheating problem, no really, we aren't making it up.
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I have no experience producing a MMO, thats not relevant. I saw an mmo publisher thwart cheating by simply hiring a small army of gms to shadow and replay players, combined with locking out entire countries from which negligible revenue was coming from.
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On hours played, this one you missed my point, I was pointing out the redunancy of the post, thats all
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Regarding privacy issues, I'd be interested in hearing more on what you are saying, which countries dont allow people to waive their privacy rights? I play on the NA servers.

Reverse engineering something that you have (the EXE or dll or anything else) is one thing, but knowing how a system works is another. You can not touch nor control the banning process, so keeping it secret would be the best method. You can't reverse engineer something you can't control without information on it.

Information is gathered via deduction through trial and error. Inside information is not required.

Diablo 3 was designed to be online, now sure, you can say they have cracked it because they emulated the online connection, but the server side AH, and various other things are not accessable, so it's not like your playing the whole game, its like your playing a shareware version. Now the 360, same argument. you lose the ability to use any of the games multiiplayer capabilitys, as you can only get a loader to last about a day online, now if you play offline then games like modern warfare 2, BF3, AC5, etc either lose the main game modes or are totally useless. It's one of the reasons now a days they designed so much for online use, because magic disk / iso in the PS2 days made it so a 15 minute installation made all your games free, and burnable, back when there was no online console mode.

Gator wasn't reverse engineered.

Your talking decompliers. Yea, they exist, and usually don't work. To make it work you generally have to break through some type of heavy encryption, and all your going to get most of the time is garbage.

I'm curious, if your not using packets at all, how are you communicating with the server? a point to point link? Are you physically connecting an RJ45 to there rig?

Personally i think your attempt to snow me is cute. However your intro to C/C++ class failed to explain how winsock works. First off its an API, not a replacement for packets. Second off, the api uses protocols to control the packets (TCP/IP)

No engineer in the world would decompile millions of lines of code, look through it, then reprogram a point to a function. If they did, windows would be open source by now. Not trying to be a dick here, and i heavily encourage having knowledge of programing and computers (to many script kiddies who know nothing) but i'm not sure you fully grasp a few of the basic's that would help you better understand more advanced concepts. After this little forum stupidity is over, i would seriously study network theory and packets a bit more, it will help your understanding and programing dramaticly.

Thats the reason they are called "hackers". Cause they hack at it, until they get it right.