Hacks on FFXI

[Terikan]

movement based hacks are the most common in mmorgs. the reason why is that most mmorpgs allow the client to determine the movement of the characters. Why? Because lag is often unavoidable, and if you relied on the server, the client and server would constantly be 'syncing' up with each other, causing what is called the 'rubberband' effect. Shadowbane and project entropia both use server based movement, and players complain about the rubberbanding a lot.

[Bishop]

I'm pretty sure movements in ffxi is controled by client side in ffxi since SE has been boasting about how they optimized their new mmorpg for 56k users also, they wouldn't want to lag them too much. I remmeber when I tested project entropia b4, there was little lag but thats just me. Plus project entropia is a game based off real currency, they won't want to take any chances, thats including mvoment hacks.

[Masa]

Hacks in MMORPG is rare. Most of the time people cheat in MMORPG by exploiting bugs.

[KamuroIshigami]

How much you can "hack" an MMORPG on the client side depends upon how much the developers decided that the client should do the calculations. In DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot), a lot of the target line-of-sight and range checks where done on the client side and the client controlled whether one person can hit the other or not. This led to a lot of problems as people would hack to client to bypass the check or modified it.

So, if FFXI has none or very little client side calculations, there isn't many functions or actions you can hack. As to how much calculations the server or client should take depends upon how much server load and security the development team wants. The more security they want, the more load the server takes as they will have to move all the calculations and verification over to the server side.

As for the speed hack of FFXI, it is very possible and likely because the FFXI client has a buffer to store all the user's action requests. This is very apparent when you disconnect your computer from the network, deliberately, and you notice you are still able to move. And just as the network meter hit 10%, you plug it back in, you resume the game as if nothing has occured. With that, I am tempted to say that the movement check is on the client side.

However, for combat weapon speed, I discover that to be on the server side, as I have seen the enemy's HP bar go down several times without me performing any striking action or message due to lag (deliberate). So, speed hack is very likely. Collision detection is also on the client side, as I have ran through several of my friends online without a delay as they have yet to appear on screen. But once they appear, walking through them causes a delay of shoving.

[Bishop]

Ya know, client side hacks aren't the onyl hacks around. Even though client side hacks are fairly easier to manipulate than any other hacks, I still think there are other ways. Packet editing for example, but then of course its most likely ffxi has encrypted packets or the packets can do next to nothing even if edited since its checked on server side. Plus as mentioned earlier, diablo2 was hacked later on and in the beginning people dubbed it "unhackable."

[--Amun-Ra--]

whats funny is people are talking about "Hardcore hackers" hacking into ffxi if they really wanted too..... well the fact of the matter is that all the "hardcare hackers" wouldent waste there time hacking into little video games... the hackers you see here are some fairly smart people getting around doing real work in games..... but, i must say, there are some talented people hacking into games now a' days...why? maybe practicing, or even bored. Well these are mt thoughts at least, i could be sadly wrong.

[BlackJade]

well hacks are a very funny thing and i can see why this game would be hard to hack because its updated so frequently that it would take more time to make a hack then the time between updates.

[Bishop]

some things like movments don't change unless someone did find a way to abuse it. When SE updates, they don't update everything so IF there was a hack, there is still a possibility that it could still be used after an update.

[--Amun-Ra--]

but it also may attract hackers, because of its difficulty

[Gadianton]

hehe, I don't mean to be too rude here but I suspect alot of people who are posting in this thread pretending they know what they're talking about are really just picking things from their head that they heard here and there.

The idea that square hired proffessional hackers to hack the game is stupid. Professional hackers wouldnt be screwing with packeting a game and checking memory locations. It is more likely they hired hackers to test the security of the servers themselves, but thats not what you said now is it.

Whoever said that FFXI is diff than most online games as it stores everything serverside is also pretty ignorant. Pretty much all MMORPGS store all character info ect server side, it would be absolutely MORONIC to store it client side (ever try Open B.NET for d2?). This doesn't make hacking FFXI that much harder however because like people said, there is always interaction between the server and the client through packets and given enough time somebody could sniff and decode the packets and use that to exploit the game in any number of ways.

Diablo 2 online (official servers, not open) stores everything server-side and look how many hacks and exploits there are for that game. Why? Because there are TONS of people who play it and they put the work into developing programs to sniff packets and referenced them in forums for people to work on.

If you don't think this type of thing will be happening or isn't already happening in FFXI then maybe you really are naive to how far people will go to get ahead in games like these. The main motivation behind hacking in these games (as in most things in life) is money, over the past few years more and more money has been made through online gaming and as such as long as there is potential for monetary gain there will always be people pushing to exploit these games.