Quote:
Not banning people for using hacks/cheats is one of the main reasons your community is in the state it's in. However, I agree, 10 years too late to start banning for cheating.
Maybe justify this answer with more information? I'm fairly certain the community is dead because the mod has been pretty played out after 10 years, the only reason I come back is the nostalgia and the ladder resets. The most bullshit things I've personally seen are people who run the servers increasing drop rates and (iirc) someone who patched the game putting in secret recipes. Things like this are truly bullshit, not some random person running maphack, in my eyes anyways.
It's my personal opinion that maphack does nothing. Virtually -every- end game application gives no benefit to knowing exactly where to go, because you already know exactly where to go. All end game farming spots are either scripted(azmodan/belial, samhein), not enough maps that change(nihlthak), or pointless to 'know' where to go because you're there to farm trash anyways(ancients/wsk/tundra). Even if you're doing baal, you're not going to fret over the EXP/drop potential of mobs on the way up, and once you get past a certain point everything is the same way every way.
Certain maphacks like c3p0 massively improve upon the UI of the game, allowing you to easily color code items the colors you want, make certain items not even show up when you hold ALT, all sorts of things that are pretty quality of life. There's a reason most of the private realms allow maphack, even maintain a maphack for their mod, because it's an inevitability. You can't stop people from using it, you will never be able to ascertain if they're using it or not, and most d2 players grew up using it. It's something people want, if you don't like it don't use it, but restricting it is one reason why players don't even attempt the mod.
There are far more bullshit things out there anyways. Ever hear of TMC? Essentially 1 frame cast/attack times on anything you want, completely client side.
Quote:
Keep in mind, I don't care about cheating if we're talking single player, but in my eyes people who bring that shit online, even stuff as "innocuous" as map hack need to be eliminated. (Not that I've done much research, but I'd wager MH usually comes bundled with other cheating tools, what's to prevent people from using other stuff if you leave the door cracked open?)
Knowing there's hackers floating around and nothing being done about them would demotivate me, and I'm sure a lot of potential realm players.
A strong anti-hacking policy would keep more serious players, knowing that their time is actually worth something when they know their fellow peers are also playing legit.
An example of a maphack is c3p0. It'll give you full light radius, vision of the map, projectiles on the minimap, monsters on the minimap, detailed resistances when highlighting monsters, ability to recolor items that drop, fade out items you dont want to see that drop, inspect other players. As I detailed above, none of these are truly change anything that matters. It saves time when you're playing through, but mostly it just provides useful information. There are far more harmful things you'll never detect, the majority of the players on the realm are already closet hacking anyways.
Brute yourself into a private game with multiple characters of the same level, same account. It's not hard, usual passwords are corresponding numbers, q, z, x. I've done it multiple times to find 'big name' players follow botting. Who the fuck cares. Want to make a healer? Good luck ever doing it if you have no one to play with. Most people don't even understand the ramifications of how a followbot works. It's almost always more work than it's worth, but people do it because they love the game, they want to try out new characters despite having no one to play with.
https://gyazo.com/35cafc8cc36cfa3c2a57e7a423fca03f -- this is a screencap of how the realms look all the time now.
Auto party is 99% ATX, which is a follow-bot script used with loader/hackit.