How is cheating possible?

[The Panther]

*if* there is cheating going on then it is best to have the methods in the open thus everyone knows what can happen and they look for evidence. Further it stimulates patches.

Although *if* there is cheating *and* it is caused by most of the checking being done by the UI and not by the server then that could mean a lot of work for IW.

I must wonder, are you Norfleet under an alias? I mean, *if* there is cheating? I know you read the other post about cheating because you replied in there. I am sure that you therfore must have read the post from Kris about all the stuff Norfleet had in that game by turn 23. Even if you totally ignore Storm because of supposed sour grapes, you still cannot discount Kris. 18 hammers? 46 dusk elders in addition to many more summoned commanders? Two queen of airs? 35 clams? Wow, even. That is not even remotely feasible.

Come on, Huzurdaddi, *if* he was cheating? Of course he was! It looks to me like, on average per turn, he *gave* himself some 200 gems of mixed types and at least 500 gold above what he leagally earned.

That is cheating in my book, no matter how he acomplished it. He even mostly admitted to it in those Last two puzzling Posts before he claimed he was gone forever.

[Zapmeister]

I must wonder, are you Norfleet under an alias?

Coincidentally, this was the exact question I asked myself (fruitlessly trying to get more information by looking at their profiles) when Huzurdaddi defended Norfleet, rather lamely I thought, in Stormbinder's original thread.

But as has been discussed before, it's not something that can ever be proved either way, so speculation will always be unproductive and frustrating.

[Huzurdaddi]

Coincidentally, this was the exact question I asked myself (fruitlessly trying to get more information by looking at their profiles) when Huzurdaddi defended Norfleet, rather lamely I thought, in Stormbinder's original thread.

Wow. Well mark me up as always on the side counter to you from now on that's for sure. You could have cleared it up by looking at posting history, but I *really* doubt that you are at all concerned with the truth.

The truth is that Norfleet consistantly kicked your *** and you whined and whined about it and now that you *think* that you know something you scream it at the top of your lungs.

Quite pathetic, honestly.

All I know for 100% certian from the Posts is that:

1) stormwhiner attempted to setup Norfleet in a game where he had allied before the game started with all of the other players. A clear indiction of a pathetic coward.

2) Norfleet had an insane number of gems in the game in question. I have no idea how he got them.

3) you are someone who has gotten beaten consistently by Norfleet as evideniced by your "no norfleet" games and have a vendeta again him.

4) someone who made entertaining Posts, who was insightful about the game, and who shared *some* of his knowledge about the game is probably gone from the community due to a vendeta.

The programming facts are that assuming that IW did their job correctly then the only real way to hack the game ( which is supposed to be the topic you started ) is through access to the files on the server. However it is possible that they made some mistakes as I covered above.

[Zapmeister]

you are someone who has gotten beaten consistently by Norfleet as evideniced by your "no norfleet" games and have a vendeta again him.

I think the only useful response I can make to this rant is that I have, in fact, never played Norfleet. I Banned him from my games because of his earlier unethical behaviour, and only recently lifted that ban.

[Sheap]

I'm thinking that Huzurdaddi didn't pay enough attention to who he was replying to here.

1) stormwhiner attempted to setup Norfleet in a game where he had allied before the game started with all of the other players.

Even if this is true (I do not think there has been real evidence or anyone that admitted to this) the thread is about Norfleet, not Stormbinder.

2) Norfleet had an insane number of gems in the game in question. I have no idea how he got them.

I think the means is pretty apparent.

4) someone who made entertaining Posts, who was insightful about the game, and who shared *some* of his knowledge about the game is probably gone from the community due to a vendeta.

So you are saying that Norfleet's admittedly helpful forum postings justify his cheating? I don't think you can argue in this case that you have to take the bad with the good. No one has a responsibility to be helpful and answer questions, but everyone has a responsibility to not cheat. There are other people that know the rules and tactics and I expect they will help out.

And I think that Norfleet left because he was caught cheating, not because of a vendetta.

[Stormbinder]

All I know for 100% certian from the Posts is that:

1) stormwhiner attempted to setup Norfleet in a game where he had allied before the game started with all of the other players. A clear indiction of a pathetic coward.

ROFL. Small tip Huzzur, why don't you at least use "IMHO" word instead of "I know for 100% certain", when you make such a statements? Trust me, it will make you look better at the end.

FYI I didn't even know any of the players before the game, except Cohen. Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game. I never spoke to any of them about any in game alliances before the game. And I din't even send any in game message to any of them until about turn 10, when I got the message from Arco (or Jotuns, don't remeber) asking me if I want to ally with him against Ermor, since Ermor was starting to grow very powerfull by than, based upon graphs that were visible to everybody.


You can go and ask any of these peoples yourself if you want to, they all are forum members.


So unless you intend to accurse all 5 of us of lying, I suggest you take your words back and next time try to think, before you post anything "with 100% certainty"

Stormbinder

[Sly Frog]

Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game.

Beautiful. This is just the way to draw more people into a game that is hard to easily get into but needs more blood to keep the games fresh.

Yes, I'm sure that people cheating, or even power gaming in general is the way to bring new blood into the wonderful game that is Dominions.

If it isn't absolutely, positively clear already, let me make it clear: I'm not blaming Stormbinder for that, just the morons who need to damage the integrity of the game, and in front of first time players no less. For a game like Dominions, which needs to intrigue and entice all of the new players it can because it is a niche game and the pool of players will naturally shrink over time, this is defenseless.

[Molog]

It is obvious Norfleet was cheating if you look at Norfleets Posts and his sg empire in the game provided.

[Stormbinder]

Beautiful. This is just the way to draw more people into a game that is hard to easily get into but needs more blood to keep the games fresh.

Yes, I'm sure that people cheating, or even power gaming in general is the way to bring new blood into the wonderful game that is Dominions.

If it isn't absolutely, positively clear already, let me make it clear: I'm not blaming Stormbinder for that, just the morons who need to damage the integrity of the game, and in front of first time players no less. For a game like Dominions, which needs to intrigue and entice all of the new players it can because it is a niche game and the pool of players will naturally shrink over time, this is defenseless.

You are absolutely right Sly Frog. Cheating can easely turn off new players from any MP game, especially from such a long and complex game as Dom2.

Fortunately these particular three new players were not turned off by these events. Once we established contact in the game I've created mailing list for them, that we used to communicate with each other, and I've send several dozens of emails to them, (probably 20K-30K text total ) giving them a lot of advice amd tips on what are the effecitve tactics for their nation to do in our game, as well as general game tips and advice, and answering their questions. From the personal game-wining point of view that was probably not the best course for me to do, as Norfeet wrote in our Ermor's game thread, if he would be me "he would wipe them all from the map immideatly, and wash his shoes after it". However I didn't want to go this road, and instead chosen to cooperate with them and educate them. During the game and especially after the game was finished, they all send me a lot of emails, saying how gratefull they are for all advice they got, how much they learned about about this game and how excited they were to participate in the alliance against Undead Legions. One even said he is saving all my emails for personal archive for studing and references later on during his future Dom2 games.

All three of them are registrated forum members now, and you may already seen some of their Posts in this and in other threads. They are starting a new game now, and all are very excited about Dom2 as far as I can tell. So I am glad to say that at least these three people were not turned off from Dom2 because of the blatant cheating that they were unlucky to encounter in their first game.

Regards,
Stormbinder

[Huzurdaddi]

ROFL. Small tip Huzzur, why don't you at least use "IMHO" word instead of "I know for 100% certain", when you make such a statements? Trust me, it will make you look better at the end.

FYI I didn't even know any of the players before the game, except Cohen. Which is not suprising considering the fact that for all of them it was the first MP game. I never spoke to any of them about any in game alliances before the game. And I din't even send any in game message to any of them until about turn 10, when I got the message from Arco (or Jotuns, don't remeber) asking me if I want to ally with him against Ermor, since Ermor was starting to grow very powerfull by than, based upon graphs that were visible to everybody.

Well that sure contradicts what you said in the thread. You said: "I have been receiving all of their gems since the start of the game."

Bummer. You should not have let that slip.

Anyway on to the topic of the thread. I was silly. Why attack the encryption/hashing of the turn file when there is a perfectly servable program which knows exactly the way to encrypt and has the file: dom2 itself. I was thinking more like a programmer than a hacker.

If I ever get home before 10 PM I'll write up somethig that injects some code in to the process and see if I can find the parts of memory and edit then and see what happens. I'm praying that it will get caught.

Of course more 3137 dudes probably have some memory hex editing programs already and don't need to know ( or want to know ) how to inject code and they could probably do it faster, but it's an interesting project. I'll post the results ( but not the method ).

Hopefully it's already taken care of. Let's keep out fingers crossed.