What are you talking about guise? Nobody hacks in this game. According to Leber unscrupulous F%#ks have been noodling with this hack for years.

Dirty 'Ore, there's a difference between crying "hack" at every little thing in game that makes you mad (like you do), and clear, observable, verifiable circumventing of the game's normal operation.

Go back to Alex Jonesing with your serco buddies.

like that time you were travelling forward in your rag while Shef and I were in hot pursuit only to see you jump behind us by 2500m followed by a "lol". Fuck you too greenwall. Why don't you just out your smurf friends if you're trying to take the high road? It's only hacking if you call it out I guess.

I'm not your serco buddy!

Being the commander of one of the most dreaded Serco guilds in the game affords me the opportunity to see Itani hacks first hand. Since 90% of the LUA programmers are a part of that spineless nation, it comes as no surprise that we see them as much as we do. I’d be remissed if I didn’t call you all on your BS. So you’ll forgive me when I sound like a broken record but nobody experiences these hacks more than the mighty Big Red ONE.

Unfortunately for you and everyone else in 100, you’ll all have to hear it, which brings the toxicity to the game that everyone sees of late. I don’t deny my part in that.

I enjoy taking the bait as much as you enjoy giving it to me. SUCKIT SMURFS

Dude, the Role Playing forum is over there.
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Also, this bug has nothing to do with lua. People exploited it by using third party software to modify the contents of their ram.

As someone who obviously doesn't code, feel free to correct me in the smarmiest way you know how. I don't care what the mechanism is for how it's done. I've see many serco leave the game because of this and other hacks. So when you're busy sitting in an empty sector spamming 100 with the hopes of drawing out the enemy, know that many have left due to these exploited holes in the game.

Devs, now that Ore has given us a wonderfully satirical demonstration of the kind of inane, baseless, "hack" fear-mongering that can thrive when even just this one bug is known, would you mind cleaning up the obviously-joking off-topic "rage" posts?

Although I do have to immortalize these two gems from the king of ironic comedy, since it's clear everyone in this thread needs a laugh:*

"one of the most dreaded Serco guilds in the game"

The only thing people dread about ONE is how much they'll pollute [100] while refusing to enter battle.
Wait wait,
The only thing people dread about ONE is missing out on an easy kill when they run away
no wait wait,
The only thing people dread about ONE is.....
....
...
..
oh, were you looking for the punchline? Sorry, but it's hiding in a station calling you all hackers

"nobody experiences these hacks more than the mighty Big Red ONE"

It IS weird how nobody but ONE experiences all the hacks and script-cheats that you guys notice. Even other Serco manage to somehow miss it, and EVEN THE DEVS (who as we can all see check in frequently with anything close to a game-breaking bug) somehow aren't taking it seriously. The only logical explanation is that ONE members are all blessed with some extra sensitive hack-detection capabilities in the part of their brain that is usually devoted to PvP but, alas, has atrophied. Like when a blind man gains super hearing, or how a blackout college student gains the ability to projectile vomit!

*(thanks Ore for playing your role and serving it up on a platter!)

[Edit]Also a mod should probably edit or remove Pizzasgood's explanation. It's so disgustingly smarmy the way he uses simple terms to break down the explanation into literally its simplest form to try and help someone who clearly doesn't really know the subject. I want to throw up just reading his hateful language!

Alright Smittens, I'll bite.

First off, its comical that you want me censored. Thanks for that. I fail to see the "rage" in my posts that you're referring to.

I see you also enjoyed the part about the dreaded Big Red ONE. How is your new Serco guild going? Let me break this down for anyone who may have joined that guild.

Smittens feels he could make a better Serco guild, which he will abandon in short order as his main alt is ITAN.

Smurfs don't like opposition so they create new Serco guilds in order to displace Serco to Deneb where they will eventually get bored and either look for a new guild or quit the game.

Welcome to the Serco guild du jour.

Apologies to Rin, my smarmy comment was more directed at the ITAN pedants.

Yeahhh see it wasn't as much about censoring you.... as it was an attempt to diffuse everything and prevent further derailment in an otherwise important thread :P Also I was trying to give you a nice out... but... yikes

I feel like this might not be entirely mass related. If they have patched it so the ship cannot decrease below its base mass.....players would have a hard time seeing such obvious cheating. If players are actually seeing this, something else such as ship engine or thrust could be being exploited.

I do recognize an obvious user of this bug speaking about another player (who's name shall stay unmentioned as I'm not sure about him using and tricks) selling him a trick to "make my engines better". I've heard of a few old Players about a past bug that allowed giving Behemoth engines to Centurion's and the likes but I am not entirely sure if this user's remark is to be considered seriously. I just wanted to mention it in case it may become important.

That's from a long ass time ago when you could equip different engines on different ships.

We have been logging masses for some time, and as of our most recent perusal, have not seen evidence of on-going exploitation. There are a lot of other reasons why people can hop around, issues with latency are pretty well known, and there are some other issues we need to mitigate (which don't involve hacking masses, or engine properties, or whatever).

But as far as people "leaving over exploits", that seems pretty dumb to me. As far as I can tell, there's a lot of rumor, innuendo and panic over these kinds of issues, that are (as yet) unjustified.

Yes, we do take this seriously, and we do want to lock down and minimize any attempts to exploit an advantage in the game, while maintaining the not-entirely-server-side architecture that makes the game scalable to larger numbers of players, and enjoyable on less-than-ideal connections.

It has always been our position to take more of a "monitoring" approach than an active/immediate response. People have cheated in the past, and been noticed by our monitoring (and not the userbase), who were contacted by me on an individual basis and told to never do that again.

The reason why we do this, is that an immediate response (like dropping a connection) will cause a player to continue try and find the limits of the automated anti-cheat system, where a "dark" monitoring option will keep them from being certain of the extents of what we know, all the while being aware that their account and characters may hang in the balance. In our experience, a player who is warned that we are aware, and may ban them if they cheat again, is unlikely to do so again.

When a new potential exploit case pops up, we add more and different monitoring, as we did in this case. It's not the end of the world, and ram-editing is possible with almost any game, to some extent. The only "total solution" is to do all simulations on the server, which would make a realtime twitch-combat MMO basically unfeasible.

If people are concerned that someone is cheating, and want to bring it to our attention, please do so via the ticket system. That's part of what it's there for.

But, let's dial down the drama over theoretical exploits, that one guy did once, that we fixed and are now watching more closely.

Arf/Sieger: Is this in regards to my boasts on 100 about how Samoflange can turn your centurion into a centaur? Because if so those are entirely factual claims that Smittens' Samo Store stands by 100% and we'll sue you if you say otherwise!!

Incarnate: I, and I think most PvPers, would completely agree that leaving or fighting less because of an exploit is dumb, unfortunate, and counterproductive, especially since you guys are so good about taking any combat-affecting bug very seriously.

But the fact is that currently the "most active" Serco guild refuses to fight, in 1v1s or group battles, because they are so convinced that all their opponents hack and this is the only reason they die

You can see some of that misinformation in this thread, as well as TRS' ridiculous posts in the "Kill Smittens Pool" thread on the RP forums. Thankfully the game has more active players than ever before, so there is still fighting to be had, but the few Serco that do turn out are pirates/independent, because [ONE] is doing such a good job at convincing itself and, more alarmingly, any new & prospective Serco that there are tons of hax and all the Itani use them.

That's why I was hoping to keep this issue in the public limelight, in addition to the behind the scenes ticket system. This thread may have gotten a bit.. ah.. too public, but I'm desperately trying to think of ways to calm what you rightly identified as "rumor, innuendo, and panic over... issues that are unjustified"

When I first resubbed and began to notice this unfortunate state of affairs, I tried talking about it out of character, player-to-player, with some of the more maliciously rumor-spreading Serco, and their response was basically to spit in my face and reiterate the tired rhetoric about how laggy players have some distinct advantage (lol) and also all LUA users are hacking the combat system (ugh)

If it's alright with you, I think everyone could really benefit from an open discussion with you guys about the perceived hacks. Not to say that you guys have been secretive or anything like that, but right now it's the same pattern over and over: a bug thread regarding a specific 'hack', some players claim it's not fixed/is more prevalent, others claim it is, etc etc.... What we really need is a thread where the frustrated players can lay out all their issues with hacking/lagging/etc, and as a community, along with your dev insights, maybe we can hash it all out and get back to what this game used to be, where everyone looked FOR fights instead of running FROM them

Because right now, PvP is broken. Despite all the awesome things that have been added (skirmish, dents), and the constantly growing playerbase, all things that should make for more frantic and prevalent PvP, instead this panic over intangible and largely made-up issues like "hacking and lagging" has led to 1/3rd of the universe refusing to play.

Sorry, that rambled a bit. TLDR;

"But, let's dial down the drama over theoretical exploits"

But this is the larger issue, at the heart of why PvP is so color-imbalanced right now: players refusing to dial down the drama-- in actuality, they are actively feeding and inflaming it.

The most active Serco guild refuses to fight because of the perceived exploits. This wouldn't be a great loss in itself, but their "veteran" players are telling NEW serco that these exploits exist and that all their opponents use them.

This is certainly a more difficult issue than a bug that could be fixed; it's a perception issue, and it has been growing over the past few months (maybe years? ARF or others will have to weigh in) as the players who believe in this voodoo continue to attribute any defeat or misfortune to exploitive behavior.

I think another topic is called for (in Bugs? Suggestions?) but I think we could all desperately use a thread, with dev input, addressing the core concern: not any particular bug, but the larger and more misguided perception issue that is hampering combat across the galaxy

Dude, some people are going to bitch no matter what you do.

I get accused of "hacking" just for using my own turrets, which is a game feature... The only plugin/script involved here just lets you bind keys to select them, and I released it publicly over a year ago.

Definitely, Arf. Any MMO will have accusations from a small minority of disgruntled players, but these are usually never enough to actually affect or derail gameplay.

But this... what is becoming an institution of hysteria that's not only preventing one of the few "opposing forces" from PLAYING the game (like, at all), but is also being passed along, as a fact about the game, to all the new players of that faction.

If it were just one crop of bad apples, I'd say wait for them to rot away. But these apples insist on staying in the bunch with the rest of us, determined to keep rotting when there is no real reason to, and (worst of all) tell all the promising young apples about how rotten everything is when they themselves are creating 95% of the problems.

..ok this wasn't my most foolproof analogy, but the point stands!

[edit, to clarify] Anyone who has been here longer than [ONE] can verify this. The game used to have multiple groups that frenemy-hated each other, and would always come out for big battles. That is not how the game is any longer. To dismiss the current panic-mongering as just another standard part of an MMO is dangerous and ignores the history of this very game, where for the majority of the time this wasn't the case. Furthermore, it will do nothing to heal the huge and concrete divide between how many Itani, UIT, and Pirate players do PvP vs. how many Serco do (or rather, don't)

Yeah, they're being pretty excessive. You could file abuse tickets, in fact; they've been at this smear campaign for long enough that it's a pretty clear RoC violation.