Map\Zoom hacking in Path of Exile racing.

Map\Zoom hacking in Path of Exile racing.

The previous post by CWU was removed because of naming and shaming, before many people had a chance to comment. I can appreciate that so this post will be completely naming free. I am going to provide examples of what I think constitutes clear examples of cheating in Path of Exile, along with an email from GGG to me about this very subject.

Map Hacking\Cheating:

Anyone with a computer can find the hack\script that has been available for as long as I can remember for the game. There is really not much doubt at this point that it works, since if you read the forums you can find posts of people complaining that it doesn’t work and then it is subsequently fixed.

I am going to summarize a couple of the quick points for what makes me very suspicious of map hacking being something that is occurring in the game today, and one that while GGG says they take it very seriously, I am doubtful of that.

1. Not a single person has been banned. I’ve clicked on every single account listed in the season 1 points ladder down to 50 total season points, and I do not find anyone who has been banned. There should be at least ONE person who didn’t know it was wrong for PoE and tried it once, been banned for it.

2. Fixed seed races were introduced to the game. This was stunning to me for any number of reasons, and you can take your pick. My feelings are that these would never have been implemented had it not been a perceived problem, true or not.

3. Persons sell their end of season rewards for big in game currency amounts, which at times can equate to hundreds of dollars in the real world currency conversion.

4. Even if you didn’t cheat at the beginning of PoE racing, seeing no one banned and seeing the amount of money these items go for, you’d have to be a fool NOT to at least consider it. The aura of “mystique” about these “methods” that GGG employs to catch people for various nefarious endeavors falls flat when there is little evidence that anything has been done.


Fixed Vs Normal Races – an explanation and comparison.

Some people reading this thread may not be familiar with some of these race modes and how they function so I am going to explain it a bit. A normal race you are on the same footing as everyone else, you are in the “fog of war” and can only see the map when it is revealed to you as you move. Every single instance is unique to the person running it, though there are a limited number of possible spawns for every zone with general rules that you can follow. Some zones have more fixed rules, or in other words if you can ever run south in Lower Submerged passage after you zone in from Mud Flat, the entrance to Upper Submerged is south of you.

In a fixed race, everyone has the same exact map spawn, and the fog of war is lifted for everyone meaning you don’t need to know any of the tricks like the one from above, which work about 80% of the time, and you can just run right to the exit of each zone.

The difference in kill times of important bosses, Brutus, Merveil, Vaal is pretty remarkable between normal and fixed, though only really noticeable in your Vaal kill time. This is because fixed or not fixed, finding an unbelievable drop (Wanderlust, Sadimas Touch, a Weapon that allows your gem of choice to one shot monsters) allows for very fast runs. That being said, in general people are faster to locations in fixed races and under-leveled. This follows because people never go down wrong ways, and in general good racers end up skipping small packs or spelled out: single, duo and triple mob packs because they aren’t worth the time investment. So when you don’t go down wrong pathways AND you farm as you do in a normal race where you do go down wrong paths, you end up under-leveled, there is virtually no way around this when you kill Vaal in a fixed seed race.

This leads into the other component to what constitutes the map hack package. It comes with a Zoom hack, allowing you to zoom out some crazy multiplier from your character, and you can see monsters and everything in the instance you are in (they are created when you zone in the first time). As strange as it might seem, this is the bigger issue in racing right now. People have improved racing and the “meta” to such a degree that knowing exactly where to run in every zone leads to spectacular kill times, but you are not ahead to such an insurmountable degree. So to give some examples:

1. Kills Vaal at 1 hour 10 minutes, Level 21.
2. Kills Vaal at 1 hour 17 minutes, level 23.

These are virtually the same results, despite the incredibly fast Vaal kill because all races end with a “farm” zone. This means that the 7 minutes of farm of say, City of Sarn, ends up equaling the difference in their respective kill times and levels.

The only way to deviate from this rule, and there are a few examples of breaking of the above rule, which happens to occur with a few select people, is you know exactly where to run AND on the way you can see where the densest packs of white or blues occur. Anyone who races likely passes by incredible packs that spawn one and half screens off the road, and therefore never get aggro’d and you miss them while running down the path to the next zone, trying to farm as efficiently as possible.

I can’t go into more detail about the instance where people break these rules, but suffice to say with some research on your own you would find examples of what I am talking about.

Lack of action.

I’ve waited a very long time to post my concerns since I was told by GGG that they were handling it. This is the email exchange between me and Qarl. I haven’t posted my original email since it contains names, but suffice to say it contains a TLDR of some of this post (at the time, fixed seed races hadn’t been implemented I do not believe).



Edit: Scroll right to see the dates on the emails.


In fact I just spent time finding the first fixed seed race, which was posted by Qarl on April 30, 2013.
This forum was created April 30th, 2013 by Qarl “purpose of this forum”. This is almost a bone thrown to the racing community around the same time they threw us the “see how much better results will be in a fixed environment”.

Conclusion:

For me I am just disappointed in GGG and how this has been handled. If racing is a large part of the game, and continues to be going forward (which is an assumption I make given Descent), I feel like it needs more attention than it has received. Many times when people post “we want pants” or “want XYZ” Chris responds how if you have 300,000 for him, he could make that happen. To me this says Descent cost them a fair bit of money, which means racing is viewed as that integral piece of what makes PoE, PoE.

Someone from GGG moving CWU’s thread to an internal investigation thread did not seem to amount to much when I raised my concerns to Qarl in April. If end of season rewards continue to be so valuable in the community, this needs to be more seriously addressed after open release.

#fixedseedsigseason5

too bad theres still the zooming

Great post. I agree and hope this issue will be on top of GGG's priority list before and during the next season.

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janimauk wrote:

#fixedseedsigseason5

too bad theres still the zooming

Knowing the general layouts of maps and recognizing patterns is a skill aspect of racing that shouldn't be removed. Fixed seed is just an easy way out that ruins a part of racing.

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Condemned wrote:

Great post. I agree and hope this issue will be on top of GGG's priority list before and during the next season.

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janimauk wrote:

#fixedseedsigseason5

too bad theres still the zooming

Knowing the general layouts of maps and recognizing patterns is a skill aspect of racing that shouldn't be removed. Fixed seed is just an easy way out that ruins a part of racing.

+1

First time I've heard of zoom hack. I hope they can figure out a way to fix it.

With fixed seed, the problem is that they continue to preserve the seed throughout the season. I don't see any problem with each race having a different fixed seed. The advantage is that everyone gets the same seed, not that everyone knows what that seed is. In terms of map reveal, I like it but it's not crucial. I would be OK with removing it, too.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

First time I've heard of zoom hack. I hope they can figure out a way to fix it.

With fixed seed, the problem is that they continue to preserve the seed throughout the season. I don't see any problem with each race having a different fixed seed. The advantage is that everyone gets the same seed, not that everyone knows what that seed is. In terms of map reveal, I like it but it's not crucial. I would be OK with removing it, too.

zoom hack is honestly the main problem

Zooming wouldnt work for the most part if the map seed code was properly implimented and only sent local (visible) information to the client. Fix one and the other should be mostly fixed along with it.

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KoTao wrote:

Zooming wouldnt work for the most part if the map seed code was properly implimented and only sent local (visible) information to the client. Fix one and the other should be mostly fixed along with it.

Except this would likely cause too much loading lag as the player moves around.

I told Chris a 2 liner code months ago. If those 2 lines get implemented in the Client bam 100% accurate bannings.

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Zooming wouldnt work for the most part if the map seed code was properly implimented and only sent local (visible) information to the client. Fix one and the other should be mostly fixed along with it.

It is implemented that way, even D2 rendered only 2 screens distance+ mobs.
The only difference are rendered tilesets, but seeing 2 screens further is still a big advantage.

Even cheaters don't use the given theyand rewrite an executable/library, detecting a zoomhack is trivial because it needs far more ressources than PoE normally would use by rendering more tiles.
Unless PoE is horribly written there can't be any false positives.


A proper fix would be to remove Zooming at all and instead of Zooming players get a View character Mode in the login Screen.

Another possible fix would be to make all races fixed mob and mapseed while placing magic mobs only close to uniques such as Kuduko, Ironpoint Chatters.

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3. Persons sell their end of season rewards for big in game currency amounts, which at times can equate to hundreds of dollars in the real world currency conversion.

Speaking of experience?

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Knowing the general layouts of maps and recognizing patterns is a skill aspect of racing that shouldn't be removed. Fixed seed is just an easy way out that ruins a part of racing.

Hitting me 2 screens away in a CT Race with Icespear is also skill?

oh hilbert... xD