Nobody is envious of you. Cheaters are like children who need training wheels on their bicycle. They aren’t good enough nor skilled enough to do anything on their own.
You’re falling into the same trap as I did. Arguing on the internet is one of the sure ways to lose your mind. I’m learning with my toddler that the more you pay attention when they scream, the more it encourages them to scream. This guy is the internet equivalent of a toddler. Ignore him and he will eventually learn that making a scene and pissing himself won’t actually get him any results or respect.
Time to move on.
Honestly, if I knew exactly how the “sandbox” works so I knew I wouldn’t miss any features, and I wouldn’t want to just cheat and deprive anyone ELSE of rewards/points on my way to getting sandboxed, I might ASK to be sandboxed, I enjoy playing a lot more than I enjoy competing v 
v
You’ll be thrown into the sandbox quickly. If you have a old phone sitting around root it when there’s an event. You’ll be thrown into the sandbox quickly way before the event ends and you won’t be screwing anyone out of points etc.
The only benefit to it is that you can test chars like BP when they come out to see if they’re worth leveling up for you.
This is my favorite prank game devs pulled on hackers:
http://www.gamezebo.com/news/2013/05/01 … ting-games
It’s really fine as prank but more than lousy as simulation. After all these years we still have no evidence whatsoever that presence of piracy actually impact the bottom line negatively, and there are good hints for the opposite – IF the product is actually any good.
Certainly if you sell mediocre stuff it will go down faster as people learn that fact from pirated copies, it really hinders some “take the money and run” tactics. But for that I say good riddance.
The game itself beats any outside cheater. See how entry rosters skyrocket into t10 leaving established player behind, fighting 200+ mobs?
And more interesting question is why on earth a server-based game does not even the basic steps to prevent the client-cheats contaminate the real game state.
Yeah, no problem with letting the play along in the sandbox. But before that D3 allows ruining other people’s play – see the recent post in the elite tournament’s topic with the 5 wins in 2 minutes with the no-team. As a fellow programmer I feel shame for such utter incompetency is allowed to thrive, and not even show signs of want to get better. 
And a correct conclusion they arrived at too.
From what I can tell in D3’s system, you can still attack anyone in a PvP because whoever is attacked do not even see you or the result of your attack (but you still get points). You still have a placement in the bracket but no legitmate player is aware of your ranking. If you finished first there will be a separate first place in whatever bracket you’re in. Same logic applies to PvE as well.
It might not be a bad idea if you can just be temporarily sandboxed and make no character gains while you’re sandboxed. I can certainly see it as a far more relaxing pace compared to the ‘I just lost 150 points in the last 5 minutes!’ competition.
What you do with cheaters is a totally different issue with trying to detect cheaters preemptively. Short of rather draconian methods you’re not going to prevent all the damage done by a cheater before they’re caught (you’d basically have to be spying your users). If you don’t spy on your users you’re always limited in how well you can prevent cheating. That’s why it’s a good idea to focus on how to deal with the fallout assuming the spying method is out.
One topic said they even open tokens on the client and send in the “result” rather than post a transaction for open and get back the new account state.
Also the server is happy to accept payment form the HP and ISO amount stored on the client rather than knowing how much you actually have.
With just the most basic steps all the client could do is hack himself fine screenshots. Or play offline games.
What draconian methods? All you need is the server keeping the state. For this game setup it’s actually easy as pie. We even had several topics where peple described to almost bit and packet level how to do it.
Other games provide poor comparison, each have different data flow and threat models. Here the server side enjoys all the possible benefits. Leaving room only to play aids – but those are hardly a noticable threat and if one happened to write a good AI would be better off launching it as a product beating PQ for good.
I’m pretty happy with the current state of cheaters and how the devs deal with them. Sure, I bet there’s more that can be done on the server side to prevent even more, but I’ve seen dozens of people rocket up the leaderboards and then drop off to sandboxville. Enough that I feel like my competitive experience is being protected.
Nothing can protect you from someone using the fat pockets hack, however. 
It’s actually because this game is very easy to hack that it is also very easy to catch cheaters because since all you have to do is tell the server "I got a billion HP and iso’ and the server will happily accept that, it’s also very easy for the server, who is actually keeping track of the HP/iso you ought to have, to realize that you are cheating.
If you have a more rigorous model, people would just find out more complicated methods to hack. The arms race game is rarely in favor of the game company. Cheaters are very resourceful and it takes something on the level of spyware to actually stop them, because unless you’re secretly hijacking the player’s computer to see what they’re doing behind your back, you’ll generally lose to the cheaters.
Right now the game is so easy to cheat that anyone can do it, and if it’s so easy that anyone can do it, it’s also very easy to catch anyone that’s cheating because nobody’s going to bother devising sophiscated methods of cheating when it’s so easy to cheat.
Is the latter interesting to protect against? I play the game for free and some of the joy comes exactly from that fact: I can fare okay in the fiels where many people use outside assistance. Some to a really huge amount.
A few times I was thinking up that buying up a few blues for spidey, mags would grant me a huge advantage. Yeah it would. But would also nuke the remaining challenge. It would be even less effort to just declare myself winner and go on.
Meanwhile the broken scaling an related issues really bug me a lot, the structure is far from healthy.
I’m sorry to call BS
the same logic could be applied to your home banking system, right? If the server knows you’re about to spend money you don’t have on the account, there is exactly zero reason not to apply cheater terms immediately. What arm race where all you can hack is the requests? Any sensible setup considers the client untrusted, able to send whatever composition of bits at any time. And you certainly can make your central component to sort out legit ones.
More just making a silly comment. Whales are a necessary thing in this sort of economic model; I’m happy to see people dropping loads of cash on the game, as this means the devs can afford to keep creating content and adding features. I’ve spent about $60-$65 in total on MPQ over 4 months, and I consider it to be in line with a subscription fee for something like WoW. $20 of that was for ISO during the V-Day sale, which didn’t really help my roster much at ALL, but I tend to want to support stuff I want to see stick around.
The F2P model needs all kinds to thrive - free players to ensure a large player base, hybrid players like myself who occasionally spend but aren’t giant revenue drivers, and big spenders to fill the coffers and tempt hybrid/free players to drop some of their hoarded HP on stuff when they see the whales with a maxed 141 Panther (SO JELLY).
Not to mention, a Pay2Win player usually has a sizable disadvantage against a non-paying or low-paying player with a decent roster, as they haven’t learned all the tricks and strategies necessary that make a huge difference in these events (ex. How to maximize rubberbanding, how to tank, etc.).
There are three primary ways to fight off dubious activities:
- Spend a ton of money.
- Spy on your users.
- Inconvenience your users.
#1 is pretty self explanatory. A home banking system would be using this since it’s a lot more valuable than MPQ too.
#2 would be like WoW, where if you are searching “WoW hacks” on your browser while you’ve WoW open they could ban you for being a cheater, because they’re spying on you. This works if you’re Blizzard, but anyone else will get sued for privacy violations.
#3 could be something like two-factor authentication or just slowing things down in general. The reasoning being if you make everything hard to do then it’d have to slow down the cheaters as well. The problem here is that you’re also getting all your legitmate users. For example, if you try to log into Steam from another location it’d ask you to verify at your email address who you are. You could apply a similar logic like whenever they see anything remotely suspicious they can suspend your MPQ account and ask you to verify with a D3 representative that you’re indeed not cheating. But this will also get plenty of legitmate users. Depending on how important something is to the user, it may work. Your Steam account is probably worth putting up with the hassle, but your MPQ account is probably not.
I am going to call up the institute of Jelly right now, mmmkay?