It's sad how egotistical and arrogant the cRPG community is especially on the forum. I've been playing this mod for a while now and I've seen a few threads over that time about people suspecting hacks were being used. Every time someone made a mention of it they got trolled and flamed with comments such as "you're just a noob" or "the other guy is just better than you" or some other sumg / sarcastic reply.
Then these hacks were posted publicly and over 250 people were banned, a SIGNIFICANT percentage of players when you take a look at how few people are actually playing cRPG or Warband. A little bit of common sense would tell you that many people escaped the bans which just further illustrates how wide spread the usage was. Of course nobody went back to those posters months ago and said "wow... I guess you were right and were just a bunch of troll idiots"... no... of course not... because egotistical clowns will always continue to be egotistical clowns and cRPG is the egotistical clown hot-spot.
If you think these hacks just came out in the past couple of months you've got to be really f***ing stupid. The reality is that these hacks have been in the game from the start as any half decent programmer could make an auto-block hack seeing as how the whole auto-blocking system is already part of the game design. So what happened before this hacks became public? Nothing... people were using it and none of you were the f***ng wiser, especially all the admins; some of them who claim to be experts at the game and that it takes an expert to really know if someone is hacking. Well all you "experts" didn't know jack shit until the hack creator got bored with this game and decided to put it up on a public forum for everyone to download. It took well over a year before people started getting banned for this hack, and only after it was posted on a public forum and made about as obvious as possible that a hack does exist. So your comments about how "I could easily tell if someone is hacking" makes no f***ing sense and is just another example of the egotistical clown nature of this community that I mentioned.
Perhaps there is a way to automatically detect this specific hack... there probably is... considering the guy who developed it offered to send the source code to anyone who PMs him. The point I'm trying to make is:
1). That the whole "admin spectating" system of detection is clearly worth jack shit considering how long it took for people to realize the fact that hacks are prevalent in this game, and in the end it wasn't even player spectating that discovered this. The community became aware and actions were taken only after the hack developer put up the hack for public download and offered the source code as well. Yeah... obviously it's going to be easy to deal with once you can easily download the hack, test it out to see how it works, and look over the source code to see how it's programmed.
2). Systems like Steam's VAC or PunkBuster take continual updates to stop hacks as there are many ways to get around detection and it takes a team of people working full time to keep hacking under control in other games. It's not like this auto-block hack was designed to bypass any kind of security; from the looks of it, it seems about as complex as a regular trainer, yet it was being used in the game for so long by a large number of people until the community found out. If you think his hack can't be redesigned with more thought so that it's harder to detect automatically or visually then you're a f***ing idiot.
At the end of the day it doesn't much matter to me as I always play cavalry or archer. Frequent admin presence, public knowledge of this hack, and a super small game population where word gets around has helped keep this hack under control. I still believe this is being used today from what I've seen, but realistically it's probably by 1-2% of the population or less and because of game dynamics (arrows, bolts, throwing, horses, etc), it doesn't have a big impact on the game to the point where it ruins the fun or becomes unplayable. I'm sure if this mod doesn't die down in the next 6-12 months somebody else will get board with the game and decide to put up his hacks for public download. At which point a lot of will think to yourselves "ohh wow... I guess we were wrong and this has been going on for a while" but publicly still maintain an arrogant attitude about how you actually knew about this all along... because... you know... you're such a pro at this game that there's no way anyone could ever fool you! What a joke...
