Will guild wars have hackers like diablo did since its a no pay game?

I played diablo for 3 years, when it first started it didnt have many hacks but as i played on it got worse and worse till i left, the whole game was ruined because of hacks. Im just wondering if guildwars economy will be ruined with hacks like diablo?

there will always be those who try and hack but wit the streaming technology by arenanet tey will be abl to catch any hack almost instantly.

Just because its free monthly doesnt mean noone cares about hacks. When infact these guys probably have the best ideas to date.

Yeah, I doubt there will be any hackers.

Yeah. It's amazing how people get paranoid when something doesn't cost as much as another similiar product. Monthly fees will have nothing to do with getting hacks. It's all about the technology the game uses, in this case streaming which is a very good thing, and how much information is stored on your computer and how much is server based.

I don't know that streaming alone protects you from all cheating. I'm sure someone out there has already hooked up a packet sniffer and is looking at how the state of the world is sent back to the client. And even without the streaming technology as long as all rules are enforced at the server there's alot of cheats that can be prevented.

I have a request though, on any game when someone is cheating please don't call them hackers. At best they are just script kiddies who have no skill so the only way they can hope to compete is to cheat...

Yeah, I'm still not sure if the streaming technology alone will mean an absolute protection from hacking. Just look at CS:Source(at least they're finally having a vac to wipe out every *cheat* with it's user). With Counterstrike having so many issues with cheaters I'm not sure even with streaming technology if the game will be essentially immune to cheats. On the other hand Guild Wars' streaming tech is a different setup than CS so I'm going to remain optimistic that ArenaNet will be able to handle any cheating issues.

Diablo's problem with cheaters had nothing to do with the fact that it was free. It had everything to do with the fact that character information and anything else important was stored on the user's computer, not Blizzard's servers. With all of that in easy reach, it was very simple for people to hack it.

There's no such thing as complete protection from cheaters, but here's the best way to look at it: Guild Wars is probably better prepared than any other online game on the market to deal with them. Not only is all of the important data being stored server-side, but their streaming technology allows them to deal with cheats immediately, without even taking the game down, rather than having to put together a patch.

I have no doubt that people will create cheats for GW. The question is, how aggressively will the GW people combat the cheats?

Diablo 2 turned to rubbish because Blizzard didn't care if people cheated. In fact they awarded prizes to the players (i.e. cheaters) who got to lvl 99 first. Blizzard only reacted to cheating that was catastrophic.

and hopefully if we report those that we have reason to believe are cheating, hopefully the people at arena net will take care of it.

To my knowledge, ArenaNet will be the first company ever to keep hackers out constantly! They've already stated that the way the game plays will keep people from camping and all the other gay stuff that killed the fun times in Diablo and other games...

One of the big selling points of the game is the small 96k or 128k client. Not alot of files to work with on your system if the information is in play, constantly inside the network control with an insane amount and number of verifications. I don't know the horsepower of the Arena.net host but I am sure the bit count on the prime seed is so high an amd 64 would be crunching for at least 3 years to reveal it.

Uh, the client *installer* is only 62k or whatever, but you do actually store a lot of content on your machine.
My Guild Wars folder is currently 232MB and I haven't even played in a BWE yet.

Expect over 2 gigs; my folder at 1.4 currently.

Well if Blizzard didn't want hackers in D2 there wouldn't be any, Neverwinter Nights had all the character informations on your computer too and I've seen several servers with a "Character-Ban-Function" if the characters stats were unrealistic, same for the weapons/armor. I think Blizzard just didn't really care about hacks and cheats on Diablo and I bet ArenaNet will do everything against that!

EDIT: This is ArenaNet's very first game, they'll want it to run PERFECT so people will want to buy their next games too!

CS:Source doesn't have streaming technology... At best there is one update a week, and even then it doesn't ever stop hacks (just exploits or glitches).

Quite frankly I hope that they did a better job on ArenaNet than they did on battle.net because there were too many exploits. I am sure there will be tons of BOTS for this game tho. Especially because of that technology that was being used on Diablo 2 where it didnt send packets direct, it physically moved your mouse. I don't see how those could be stopped since they are pretty undetectable. Bots are really what ruined Diablo 2 because of the influx of rare items which caused a breakdown of the trade economy (once the bots went mainstream). Also their fix to this which put an end to "baal runs" was pretty destructive as well. (I am referring to when they cut the amout of games you could make in succession)

I think bots could be a problem for Guild Wars too since there's no way to find the botters and report them, they're just botting in their own quest-map...maybe ANet will find a way....then I'd love them even more than I already do

Well here is the thing. Some bots are way easier to detect than othres. Many of the Diablo 2 bots use some kind of hack/exploit/whatever to send packets are a much faster rate than normal. They cut casting delays to essentially zero and added whole GUIs to the game. These would be easier to detect becuase of the sheer rate at which the packets are sent.

Other bots use a client-side program that works with a specific resolution and moves the pointer to designated locations. They detect enemies by putting color boxes over them and when there are no more boxes it means the enemies are dead. The thing about these is they have IDENTICAL movements when reaching a specific location (e.g. it could be detected by the fact that you are always sending packets for an identical location).

Still more bots use logarithmic randomizers that make it so identical packets are not sent to the server. Combine these randomizers with the afformentioned technology of moving the mouse point rather than sending packets direct and you have yourself a pretty undetectable bot. Hopefully they can come up with a better system of cutting out bots, but since I just got the preorder box I have not seen how the game works so I have no clue how it would go.

if anyone can bot the quests ive been on in GW, ill take my hat off to them.. i dont see it happening.

To be honest,

I really do not think that 'bot'ers are going to be a big problem. Getting exp by just killing mobs is much slower than doing the quests and missions-so, that rules out getting exp by botting. Don't get me wrong, I am sure theres going to be those people using macro type programs to collect items; I hope they may have some way to detect that but for getting exp It simply is not worth the time. The person going out to hunt using a macro or any other bot type program is simply going to be left in the dust while other people are questing and doing missions. I hope botters just stay away from Guildwars, but- theres a lot of people out there.

I had made a suggestion one time (in a totally different game) that It would not bother me if I had to type in a random four letter or four numbers when zoning in or out of somewhere. Much like you have to do for almost all forums now to prevent auto signup scripts. Just a randomized 'are you a real person?' check would keep a majority of scripting fools and tools out of the game. Since I sent it to the game developers and never got a response... what do you guys think?