Rifleman Archive

I'm working towards rifleman/2-H swords right now and I wanted to know if any of the skills in the rifleman profession alow you any kind of stealth in PvP.

I'm not sure what conceal shot, sneak shot, etc. do, but they sound like they're some kind of stealth skills. Do they work in PvP/

It would make sense to have a skill that would take your dot off the radial map untill you fired a shot. You could sneak up on some place like anchorhead and the only way you would be noticed is if you were in viewing distance.

I think this move would have to take a large amount of Mind points to make it fair.

Anyways do any of the rifleman skills perform to this effect?

the reason the radar is there in the first place is so **edit** cheaters don't make up their own client side radars and have an advantage over people who don't. So yeah, while it kills surprise, its better than me having the element of surprise, but Johny h4x0r not having it.

I'm not saying get rid of the map. I meant that there should be a skill in the rifle profession which when used, removes your dot off of others' map untill you engage in combat. I don't mean take away the map, I mean take away the color dot which represents my char on the map.

thats exactly what im talking about. The reason they have a radar that shows everything is so hackers who make their own don't have an advantage. The information about all the players and stuff in the areais given to you in chunks by the server. I think its either 128,192 or 256. Anyway, past that range, you dont know whos there. This information is everything.. what the terrain is like, what items and npcs are there, etc.. So the person's computer knows about you, and if there was a special rifleman ability to hide himself from the radar, everyone else in the 192 or whatever meter range is still aware of you because they have to, they're the clients and are supplied by this info from the server. So all someone has to do is make a little client side program, his own little radar, that showed him the location of the rifleman on the radar.

To answer your orignal question, the "stealt" skills don't work in PvP.

Stealth

Give us a *expletive* Edit button Sony.

There has to be a way to prevent that from happening.

I remember hearing about a trojan horse on the release of the original decent game in the early/mid 90's. I heard that if you were playing it at midnight on the day it was release (some friends had pirated copies), it would scan your system, find your modem and dial up the software piracy people, showing them the game's exe file on your hard drive.

I know what you're thinking: what a load of *&(%- so I 'm sure you can imagine my suprise when I noticed my modem lights coming on at 12:01 am that night. I jumped for the phone jack and unplugged it...sneaky bastards.

Anyway, the point is: if they can do things like that, they would have to be able to block certain packets of information....or even better: make it display that information innacurately. >:-)

Here are a few ideas.

When the client launches it scans for popular hack programs, after a while most of them become available to the DEV. I think EQ did some of this.

Put a new REPORT feature in game, not unlike the one that is available in Americas Army. If you suspect someone is cheating, report them and a special DEV / HELPER can shadow the user.

If someone is caught, ban them, no second chances.

Now I know there are sophisticated end users out there that will find ways around the precautions but a majority of the "plug this software in and cheat" applications can be weeded out. If these actions reduce the number of cheaters by 50 percent then I would be happy. Out of the thousands and thousands of players.... how many will risk loosing their account?

Hide our blip on the radar until we take that first shot.

V'Losh Nadir

counter-strike had the same thing. the developers were constantly trying to patch in cheat fixes.. but in the end it was a joke. They just couldn't keep up, new hacks kept getting released. There were several big cheat websites like ogc-cheats.de and stuff, and they just kept making new hacks. Valve, the game designers had an entire team devoted to it. Do you think SWG's devs would have time adding new stuff, fixing tons of bugs, and at the same time handle the detection of new cheats? In counter-strike only the simpler hacks were direct client side things. I don't know very much about this stuff, but as they got more advanced they used a "hooking" method where the hack DLL (which was outside of the game directory) hooked on during the game.

yes but this is a game where much of the game is run by a remote server we don't have any control of. And it's a tad more sophisticated when we're discussing servers that support thousands of players vs dozens.

Also, the CS people didn't have anything to risk. Why not try? who cares? But with an account that has a character you've spent countless hours developing......

Finally, why not just make ALL the information encrypted and unreadable so that the server doesn't send out anything someone can just scan?

All of this has been tried in other MMORPGs.

Scan for cheat programs? Just move the packet sniffing software to another machine on the network.

Encrypt the packets? Well you can't have a very strong encryption considering the SWG client is going to have to encode/decode on the fly. EQ tried doing this, the ShowEQ people found the key. EQ tried changing the key every so often. The ShowEQ people programmed the software with Brute force attack to rediscover the key every time it changed.

Eventuly EQ started limiting the amount of information they would send to the client program. In the early days EQ used to send out Hitpoint informaiton on every creature. Now it just sends updates to the client aboutthe precentage of the health bar left.

The fact is anything that is sent to the client can and will be seen by someone on the client end. The only way to protect the data is to not send it.

So the only solution that would work would be to have the stealth skill actually have the game server stop sending out information on that character to the clients of other characters. Not sure what other problems this might end up causing...

Well you must remember, that animals show up on the radar red as well. You can always have multiple covert, and one overt. But, when you see a red dot on your radar, do you think automatically its a NPC, or do you think its a Player?

Hmmm... well I still think deleting chars and accounts of those caught cheating would discourage enough of the losers that I'd be willing to live with it.

They could even extend it so that the name on the billing information wouldn't be allowed to purchase another acccount. that way, stupid little cheating 14 year old johnny won't be able to use his mom's credit card again to simply start another account.