The Mana World Forums

no, i'm not looking for one, but there definitely is at least one out there. either that, or the player "pete" has ninja-like mouse skills - he easily kills 10 big maggots/second!
now, if he wants to ruin the game for himself, fine with me, but it kinda sucks when he just passes by and afterwards there are zero monsters left to hunt forppl that actually play the game

edit: oh yeah, of course he's got auto-pickup too, stealing everyone's stuff.

edit2: he admitted it. and though its not completely automatic, it's still unfair against the other players. Duck.

off topic: could be a cool concept for a new kind of botwars though; i've seen core wars, 3d-shooter-, 2d-tank-shooter- and racing-botwar-programs, but no rpgwars yet. as long as it diesnt get mixed up with actual human players...

Ive requested elven to give me admin power's but he has not been on. Once i get them i will be warning people with bot's to please not use them and if they continue they will be kicked. There isnt much we can do right now since the game is in pre alpha. Hopefully once more thing's are done and the new server is out more thing's will be done about these type's of problems.

Magick wrote:There isnt much we can do right now since the game is in pre alpha

even worse, it's open source. really not many ways to keep bots out that way.
oh well, i wasnt really looking for someone to punish him anyways, he'll lose interest soon... must be pretty boring "playing" that way...
but should the problem become serious at some point: the cube engine uses a quite clever approach to keep out bots/cheaters - they use a different set of control packets for the official builds than what they got in public cvs, so ppl with modified clients cant play on official servers

expect to see more "anti-cheat" stuff in the new server.

I was online while pete was online.... amazed to see someone actualy kill spiders in 1 hit..../alot at a time atleast. I threatened to kick him if he was botting, however he answered me...

So its not much of a bot, but a third party trainer

a hacked client, actually. attack all monsters in range in a 300ms intervall, same for pickups. the latter works *everywhere* on a map, due to there being no range checking, so if your stuff just "magically" disappears, you know he's on the same map as yourself...

Bear wrote:So its not much of a bot, but a third party trainer

He has bots too. They are running around, killing monster and if you stand they are talking something like "bla bla blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa blah"

if so I would ban this guy... show people cheating wont be tolerated

Currently there is no protection for automating attacks -- except you cannot pick up objects that are not on your screen (the client only knows about objects which would be on your screen). I know, as i wrote an auto-pickup patch for someone who played with a game pad. I havne't looked into really fast attacking though, but its probably a problem with eAthena and its lack of restrictions on attacking. Its also not very hard to make a "bot" client (all the functionality is just waiting for them to implement simple deterministic AI for walking/attacking).

he was in my clan, I told him to stop. But obviously that dident work. For that I am gonna have to say ban him too

Those issues are all related to eAthena, since the client shouldn't care about them. Probably later versions than the current one we're using could be more secure in this way. If we find some spare time or someone willing to help we could probably think on updating our server. I could maybe ban that player pete, but this won't be effective as well since he can create register a new account, so I guess you have to live together with that for the moment. Always remember that this project is in pre-alpha stage, so the official server is most of all a place to test things more than a place to play. Once we will introduce the new server, security related issues will be considered critical of course.

nym wrote:Currently there is no protection for automating attacks -- except you cannot pick up objects that are not on your screen (the client only knows about objects which would be on your screen).

havent looked at that part of the code, but if there really is no bounds checking on pickups, couldn't you just iterate trough x=[0..map_width] and y=[0..map_height], issuing pickup commands for every square? it definitely happened to me that items disappeared from right under my nose, when nobody else was around.

btw, what use are bots just killing monsters? does he do it for the items/money? it's not like there is anything good to buy, anyways...

concerning registration, how about including mail addesses/account activation (shoud'nt be too hard as athena's already implemented it anyways), this would make it easier to spot multiple registrations by a single user (unless a bunch of different accounts at e.g. hotmail is used, of course)

also, why ban? just reset all characters associated with his person to n00b status

does eathena have some kind of "min distance between packets" implemented? if yes, it shouldnt be too hard to count the number of attacks/packet and set off some kind of alert ("cheat suspect flag" on accounts, maybe?) if it goes beyond a certain threshold, say 2 or 3 atacks/packet.
if there's no min distance (i hazily recall it's implemented *somewhere*, i just dont know if it was the client or the server...) he could just send 1 packet/attack, of course, making that method useless...

(btw, is fiddling around with eathena okay, or do you rather want everyone to fully concentrate on the client & the new server?)

botting was always done in ragnarok not mattering on the server.

about the killing all monsters on the map or whatever I never once heard about that from an eathena server.

When pete is on, you cannot use keyboard arrows keys to move around.
Please ban his char. At least make him start over every day with lvl 1.