Magicka PvP Q&A with Arrowhead

[Al. I. Cuza]

There is no good way to eliminate macros without building a huge background program listening to everything your computer does. And we are not going to do that

I figured as much... Pity. We don't even have a reliable way of discovering who uses macros and who doesn't.

 

[zenstar]

I figured as much... Pity. We don't even have a reliable way of discovering who uses macros and who doesn't.

Macros are the bane of every competative game. Blizzard tries to get around exploits with their gaurdian program that monitors running processes, looking for known hack programs etc running while you play the game, but even then the hackers are continuously finding ways to avoid detection. It's almost impossible to pick up some of the macros too. Some people can manually pull of a sequence of keypresses identically every time and smart cheating macros will put in microvariations on timing so it looks like a good human playing and not a bot.

I remember finding a bot in WoW who was set to run a curcuit and kill, then skin some creatures (basically letting the person gather a lot of materials [expensive materials] while they weren't actually playing). I took great delight in following them around and skinning things before they got to skin them. I also camped another bot doing the same thing but from the opposing faction. Kill, hide, wait for it to return and res, kill, repeat... I think I eventually broke it because it stopped coming back even after factoring in respawn timers.

 

[Al. I. Cuza]

Macros are the bane of every competative game. Blizzard tries to get around exploits with their gaurdian program that monitors running processes, looking for known hack programs etc running while you play the game, but even then the hackers are continuously finding ways to avoid detection. It's almost impossible to pick up some of the macros too. Some people can manually pull of a sequence of keypresses identically every time and smart cheating macros will put in microvariations on timing so it looks like a good human playing and not a bot.

Yep, that's what I meant by pity.

I remember finding a bot in WoW who was set to run a curcuit and kill, then skin some creatures (basically letting the person gather a lot of materials [expensive materials] while they weren't actually playing). I took great delight in following them around and skinning things before they got to skin them. I also camped another bot doing the same thing but from the opposing faction. Kill, hide, wait for it to return and res, kill, repeat... I think I eventually broke it because it stopped coming back even after factoring in respawn timers.

Hehe Exploiting the poor little hackers.