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Comment by acters | Hacker News Reader

The data has to be decrypted and read, so eventually you reverse engineer the client and figure out how to decrypt on the fly, then they wise up and introduce key based signing, which you eventually try to steal from the client and breaking the encryption again, then anti cheat is implemented... thus, the cat and mouse game is born, lol

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Once the siphoning happens on the same machine your client is running on it's easier to detect through anti-cheats at least. If it can run on a completely separate machine it seems like it'd be essentially impossible to detect except through changes in how a user acts like only going directly to the mobs with the juicy loot and ignoring the trash but that's really tough to detect.

Hypothetically the client doesn't really have to know about the juicy loot until it's dropped, right? On a sufficiently fast internet connection, the client doesn't need to know about anything until exactly the time when the player needs to know it, at which point revealing it in a cheating tool is meaningless.

At the very least with everquest (iirc) npcs would sometimes use their loot. I recall tanks occasionally letting the rest of the raid know what weapon drop the boss had on them because they were seeing a different damage type (pierce, slash, bludgeon instead of hit) and the boss was known to sometimes drop a certain piercing weapon (for example).

That being said, I can totally think of a few ways to get around that. It's like you said, the client doesn't really need to know until the enemy is looted.

[Actually, the one exception that I can think of is that rogues can pickpocket certain loot. And while pinging the server to generate loot once the npc is dead feels like it shouldn't be a major problem, having to ping the server to generate loot while the npc is still alive does make the system architect in me feel a bit more nervous ... at the very least for systems as they were when EQ first came out.]

NPCs also gain stat bonus from their equipment. NPCs wear every slot except only 1 wrist,finger,ear. Big difference between a mage pet in full banded vs naked.

Modern games you don't need to unless the boss changed depending on the loot and even then it would be tangential. Don't forget this is EQ2 we're talking about internet back then was sloooooow and online games of that type were pretty new so designs and security were still being sorted out. Now you know from the beginning that any useful information about the enemy and world will be pried out of your game so you go through the whole anti-cheat cat and mouse game.

The final stage beeing the Opt player kill & Bann. Compute a all knowing AI and hold it's behavior against that of players, then cull the closest percentage.

It would also help to not send the high-value information to the client until required. Especially loot drops!

But then you have to pay for more server side compute! Think of the profit margins!

Sending loot on NPCs to every client costs more, not less.

The reason why they probably did it is because NPCs actually used the items. When the froglok King loaded his two handed sword, he was actually using it. And when he didn't load it, he wasn't.

Won't you have to compute it yourself in the server anyway to be sure that the client is not lying?

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