Originally Posted by
JamesRo
I've just noticed I can't edit the fist post - Fuck!
Then I'll have to employ my kludgin' abilities now:
AE security measures
Of course, Artix Entertainment wasn't totally oblivious about the rampant cheating going on their game. Their first solution(called 'Zhoom Auto-ban Hammer') was had dubious functionality, as it often banned legit players. It was basically a packet filter that checked if players sent some of the flagged packets to the server. People just scanned the new packets and their ban hammer was done for xD
The second one relied on the respawn timer - if someone respawned before the 10sec timer was over = insta ban. Needless to say that lag banned hundreds of legit players, and botters just included a respawn timer and AE's second system was rendered useless.
The third one was really ingenious and relied on the simplicity of botting programs: due to the nature of those applications, the most common way to get a item drop was to send packets. That's were their system kicked in: if the getDrop packet is sent but there's was no drop on the screen, the game will disconnect the player. That can be worked around by scanning the game's drop stack to check for new drops and only send the packet's when the item is actually on the screen. To date, most botting programs still haven't bypassed this system.