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So apparently ANET is being extremely shady
marik_ishtar
Member UncommonPosts: 20
in Guild Wars 2
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marik_ishtar
Member UncommonPosts: 20
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That quote comes straight from the Reddit post.
So he breaks the rules to "try and keep up with his unemployed friends"? quite the lame excuse he used there. He got banned for breaking the rules and now he is grabbing pitchforks to go against ANET for banning people who break the rules.
GG
he is raising valid concerns regarding privacy issues. the data are collected and sent (and likely stored) to anet instead of being locally used and deleted (like other anticheat systems).
not only that, but people get banned for having cheat engines used for solo games because their anticheat method is really weird and bad. i mean just read the entire thing instead of jumping to conclusions.
I know most devs feel they can slip any wording into a TOS and it becomes legally binding,it is NOT,you can NEVER supercede the law for your own personal gains.
Now my gut feeling,which is like 99% right most of the time lol.
I have two things to say...
1 I do not believe Anet is in the right or acting properly or even legally.
2 I am not sold that said person was not actually cheating,i mean cheats in other games but so happens not GW2,i find that hard to believe.
I have gamed online a VERY long time,seen tons of cheaters,especially being around the scene during the very first aimbots in Quake and Unreal.I know the mentality and the persona of cheats,there are VERY few who come off indifferent,or really tough to figure out but MOST act immature and feel nothing about cheating your game,they would as soon laugh at you than care.
I will say this about Anets actions...
i know there is always some wording about personal information used for bla bla bla.However this is NOT personal information released by you this is basically HACKING your system which from where i stand would be legal action.
One more comment...What ever happened with due process,innocent until proven guilty?Example a MMA fighter gets caught,doesn't matter how many samples 3 4 10,he is not officially guilty until a due process is followed with COMMUNICATION.We will gladly take your money with no questions asked but that is where your rights end.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The other is checking on which processes you have running so that they could look for five particular cheat programs. From ArenaNet's statement, if you had any of those five programs running for a "significant number of hours" while Guild Wars 2 was also running, they banned you.
The Reddit thread says that the other thing they did is to check all of the processes that you had running, hash them, and send the hashes to ArenaNet. Presumably that is how ArenaNet looked for five particular cheat programs to check to see if they were running.
He further claims that ArenaNet neither salted nor encrypted those hashes, which would allow someone eavesdropping on your Internet connection to find out what programs you were running. If you want to make a fuss about that, then you'd have to argue that it would have been okay if ArenaNet had merely salted and/or encrypted the hashes. Perhaps it would have been better on privacy grounds if they had, but I don't think many people are going to make that case.
The other way that you could be upset about this is to be upset that ArenaNet checked on which processes you had running. But if they can't do that, then detecting the use of cheat programs becomes impractical. If you want to make that argument, you basically have to argue that companies shouldn't be allowed to ban you for botting.
If their cheat detection is yielding false flags then that's a major issue. Looking at all live processes is also sketchy as fuck, and possibly illegal
I hate how prevalent cheating has become, but that doesn't justify every mechanism developers use to catch them.
That could be a total wind up, but totally believable as I have heard similar nonsense straight from the mouths of soon to be ex-guild members.
However the quotes provided by @rojoArcueid amused me.
I've seen so many excuses and justifications of why botting is supposely a good thing over the years..
"Trying to justify players using cheat engines by saying that the company who made their games and their rules is using an anti cheat system to ban cheaters is a bit over the top."
On our little private server we had a rule that we would not help you if you got "hacked".
Needless to say this was just a phrase to protect ourselves from too many idiots being careless with their account security.
One day I was asked for help because the account owner had fallen asleep on a lan party (that was a thing back then) and his "friend" had checked around the computer and found notes with the log in data.
Personally I feel that guy is scum for backstabbing his friend like this.
He however felt different about that and quoted our rule and told me to face:
"So according to your own rules you have no right to return the account or interfere in any way."
Banhammer hit him with the speed of light.
tl;dr
These people simply have different mindsets than us.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/8c2j0y/a_technical_analysis_of_the_spyware_arena_used/
Guess this is why I don't trust Anti Cheat programs not only are they slowing an entire users system down especially those who run multiple tasks, but they also scan all memory processes for cheats or whatever they define as a cheat that isn't even being used to cheat their game aka Cheat Engine for example or 3rd party mods that are not even for Guild Wars 2.
I'm sure you never cheated outside the game. And I'm sure you never downloaded anything on a torrent. And I'm 100% sure you have a legit Windows and Office versions installed on your PC. I'm also sure you pay for all the movies and episodes you download or watch online directly.
I'm sure you're one of the 0,0000000001% of the human race, who never cheated or broke the law. And therefore I'm also sure that you are not an egoistical prick, who don't care for others, simply because you're currently not amongst them.
If you did something wrong, you should get punished, but by the right person.
In this case, quite a few players got banned for having something running on their PC that wasn't really affecting GW2. Yet, due to ANET's back choice (once again), instead of using more resources to investigate those accounts and check for any abnormal activity on them (not hard to do), they rather simply banned everyone, since it's cheaper and faster.
Well, the user who wrote the long post pretty much reveled their shady business and ANET already started trying to control the damage.
Sadly, it was too late, since the news is out there and once again, they fucked up.
Sure, players did bad things and ANET decided to punish them (regardless if it was relevant to them or not), but at the same time, in a dramatical turn of events, ANET also did bad things and now is being punished.
Clearly, many posters disagree and are all for letting corporations raid your computer. Facebook loves you.
Facebook has all my information but the information they have is completely false. I cannot understand why people would share accurate information with these types of sites. The only time I have ever been truthful is to government bodies. Every other site deserves my false information.
A cheater gets banned from the game, and tries to generate outrage that Anet had to spy on them to find out they cheated.
Anyone that would quit a game over that, wants cheaters in their game, and deserves their cheat infested hell hole to play in.. as for me..
While I think Anet has been doing a lot of things kinda wonky, this is something I support them on.
Oh I am sure those players running hack programs in the back ground where running them for other games.. Not GW2.. I am sure those players who download hack programs and cheat for other games played totally legit in GW2.. Like.. oh.. absolutely 0% of the population.
And No.. I don't cheat in games. I play games for fun, I cannot fathom what level of loser someone would need to be to cheat on a pointless pastime. I mean, really, do you just suck that hard at playing? and if you do.. find some other hobby.. like.. sitting in the corner.
Anyway.
I support Anet on this one. Those people deserved to get banned, and the people crying that Anet needed to spy on them to find out they were cheating, is bullshit.
If it upsets you, please quit the game, and go to whatever hack infested shit laden hell hole that will gladly let you use whatever to break their game, as that is the only kind of game you deserve to play.
Except for a weekend or two when I rented Game Genie from our local video store during the NES era, or occasionally using baked-in Easter eggs such as "/laiamlame", I have never cheated in a video game.
If a corporation is sniffing around my hard drive in places other than their own client without authorization, that seems like a good reason to never use another one of their products again.
I mean, 'company uses spyware to catch cheaters' is still 'company uses spyware...'
/2c
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
better to design your game and servers so you do not need to rummage through your customers pc's.
I've never cheated in an MMO before though, wouldn't even if I could. I also play GW2 quite a bit, but if Anet looks for open processes, they'll never find cheatengine running, because I have no reason to keep it open outside of the intended game(s) I would ever use it for.
NE Ways, I pretty much agree with what quizzical said, there are finite arguments you could truly make, and while cheating in one game, shouldn't completely ban you from another, I feel quite different about online games than I do when I "cheat" on my single player titles that affect nobody aside from my personal experience.
If you're cheating to give yourself an advantage in an online game, and that includes aimbotting in shooters, even if you aren't aimbotting in the current game you're playing, you do deserve a ban, at least from the online portions of the game. Fairness matters especially when playing with others, and that includes GW2.
However, you have to be smart about your usage of cheat programs. If you're not cheating, don't make it look like you are. Don't have cheat programs that could allow you to cheat in online games running while you're playing those online games. That's what got people banned in Guild Wars 2, and even if they weren't using the programs to cheat at the game (which most of them probably were), they still got banned for being stupid.
ArenaNet wasn't combing through your file system looking to see if you had cheat programs installed on your computer. They checked to see if you had programs that could be used to cheat at GW2 running at the same time as GW2. And even then, the ban was only if they were running concurrently for "a significant number of hours". So even if you did cheat outright for 5 minutes, that wouldn't have gotten you banned.