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It would most likely be a FEDERAL authority breathing down your neck DavyT. I'm pretty sure that if Blizzard can find people who use hacks, Microsoft can also. But the most that would probably happen is a cd-key ban =P

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problem with that is, that there is no cd-key in freelancer, and there are aswell progs already arround that generate you a new mp identity key.
which means, it takes you about 10 seconds to come back after a ban. and another 10 seconds to max out.

and btw aswell something like the fbi will laugh in your face if you come to them and tell them ip x.x.x.x is cheating on your server. heck, if you get catch stealing something small the cops will llikly bring you not court cause the vaule is to low.

but well, the money cheating and getting best ship is anyway not a real problem (you can have this anyway in 3-5 hours), but unlimed shilds and adding "super weapons" is, cause you can nothing do about it and stand no chance in pvp.

That wont stop an ip ban though...then generating new player keys wont work. Only drawback is that the server has to be moderated basically.

I come across other players so rarely on the servers I'm on, that it's never been an issue. No one has even shot at me yet.

What I meant by federal is that if you hack over state lines, it automatically becomes a fed issue. Not that cheating would bring that stuff up, but "hacking a server" just may...which is what the guy DavyT responded to was worried about.

Edited by - Aerundel on 13-03-2003 02:33:20

its not very fair to ban anyone at lvl 38 with a sabre/titan because what if they just happen to spend a ton of time on such a thing and they got everything legit and then all of a sudden you get banned. so far ive never seen a cheater online yet and yes i have seen people put a lot of time and effort into this game thus giving them a lvl of 38 and a sabre and class 10 weapons etc...

Dynamic IPs and having various isp accounts get past that

Well if you get everything legit, you probably don't have to worry about anything because "legit" = "TIME". Getting everything maxed out take a respectable amount of time to do. Cheaters will be very obvious in this case.

A problem though is that some people might pass money to their friends if he's introducing him to a server that he's been working on. Maybe even a few hundred thousand or million.

I've seen a cheater before. It wasn't money, it was a speed hack cheater =P Like
he'd hit tab and zoom he'd be flying at 900 (whatever the speed unit is) or something cuz he was mad fast and hard to hit. And even harder for him to hit me Hopefully few of these people will show up, but worst than cheating is dock camping booooooo you know who you are.

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Well if you get everything legit, you probably don't have to worry about anything because "legit" = "TIME". Getting everything maxed out take a respectable amount of time to do. Cheaters will be very obvious in this case.

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if you call 30 minutes till 3 hours time .... you need about 20 minutes to reach freeport 9 in a starflier, if a buddy gives you there some money, your on your way to get nomad weapons a few moments later.

If your on you own, you need 3 hours, to get the money first.

All you need is the INI decompressor and in about 2-3 minutes you can have any amount of money you want and no one will be the wiser unless they are obsessed with looking at everyone's ranks.

Set a basic, cheap commodity to sell for 1-2 mil a pop or more ,doesnt really matter. Change whatever ship/weapon/ect you want to be in any base.. it ONLY effects your client.. it has nothing to do with hacking anything.

The server only handles the character records and maintains the connections, which it seems to do pretty well.. My limited experience with flying with other people has been quite nice and blows holes in the rationale of the makers of E&B and other such games why real ship to ship combat can't work. It's probably more to do with directplay9 than anything else but.. That aside..

Multiplayer is quite worthless unless you are just looking to kill time and don't want to be restricted by the SP limitations regarding rank.

Amazingly disappointed overall. I expected much, much more from this title considering the background and time in development. Makes one wonder just what they were doing all this time as there isn't a whole heck of alot to it. This isn't something that a small team couldn't whip together in less than a year.

Maybe a patch will add more things to do.. maybe a patch will allow us to add an iota of depth or point to MP but I honestly doubt it. Maybe if this was 8-10 years ago I would be more interested and less disappointed but I think MY desires are a bit more refined now.

Well I personally think it's a joke that they thought ahead enough to store the characters on the server yet every single aspect of gameplay nearly is edittable on the client side. You don't NEED to touch the character files to make yourself as uber as the game allows. You can do it right at manhattan for that matter. But as someone pointed out after playing for 1 day I can have a titan and full class 10's if I'm lucky enough to get to the wrecks first when a server comes up. After that this game in MP is generally over besides PvP which nearly all servers seem to frown about even the ones I've been on that have PvP enabled. Or they say you can only kill someone 5-6 systems away from Liberty ...yeah you see all of what 1 person per 5-6 hours that far out with a server of say 20 people? This game is massive ...and most servers only support 20-30 people. With the number of systems you might not see anyone for hours thats far out enough to attack.

This game has the potential to be great but I think it's honestly gonna fall short. I know alot of people that started using speeds cheats just cause they got tired of taking an hour to cross the systems to meet up with friends so they could go do something together. One day you get as bad ass as you can get and then you realize there is nothing left to do in the game without getting banned off servers but pick on crap npc's in the different systems (as anyone knows once you have a titan or even a saber with class 10 shields and weapons you are virtually indestructible by most npc's save maybe the nomads. So people use stuff like speed cheats to make the game fun again so they don't have to waste time. I don't agree with people cheating and picking on newbies. That is just downright wrong. But I don't have a problem honestly with my friends speeding around the game so they can meet up and do something fun together like have a big duel or the like.

And I really dislike people who whine about people giving themselves money at the very beginning. Did it ever occur to you maybe these people HAVE gone through the game in MP legitametally and had the best weapons/ship only to have their server come down and they loose everything thanks to microsofts shortsidedness? Can you blame them honestly for not wanting to waste a whole day of their time to level back up and get all the best crap again? From someone who has got a titan like 3 times on different servers and full class 10 weapons let me tell you I'll be DAMNED if I will do it again cause some software company is shortsided and releases a half assed game.

n0s

"Can you blame them honestly for not wanting to waste a whole day of their time to level back up and get all the best crap again? "

um...yeah...I can. They do it because they can get away with it, but they should be ALLOWED to IMO. There's no way to verify if they really earned all that stuff...for every 1 person that did, there are 20 who are just cheating. Having actually played the game normally, I know how difficult it can be to get that stuff legally.

If the server goes down, my impression is that the character data is saved in a file server-side...therefore they wont "lose" anything when the server is restarted. I've played on crashed servers and my character is still there when they come back up.

There is no way to stop the cheating for now, so we have to live with it. But I hope DA/MS resolve this problem. I only play on servers now that actively discourage cheating (by banning accounts or whatever). It's a bandaid fix, but it's better than nothing. I dont get what the appeal of cheating in a game like this would be, short of adolescent ego, and even then, whats the point? Anyone can do it.

The game is still fun though, so I dont care. I'm sure they'll fix it eventually.