Recently I was made aware that certain people were "spec cheating" on TA, I wont name names of people that do it now but what's stopping other people from doing the same thing. Is there anything we can do to stop this epidemic?

HAHAHA lion you noob

no spec games ...

Newbies must spec before to learn so it is not a good idea.

actually, it should be reasonably easy to cut out ~50% of the speccheats currently, by simply dropping any spec who has the same IP addr as one of the players.

This will not stop proxies, of course, but I am sure that not every speccheat knows where to get a reasonable proxy, which will not lag out and be 10 minutes behind the rest of the game.

There is also, of course, the issue with the fact that it is reasonably easy to code up a speccheat, where all units will be displayed on the battlefield for the player (without the need for the second pc/second process), but there isnt such hack in the wild for now.

overall, dropping the spec with the same IP/subnet as any of the players should be less than a day's work for lobby devs.

is the effort going into this in manhours in a halfway decent ratio to the manhours nessesary to circumvent it?

Thought so. Dismissed. Next!

Thats silly.. just ask friend and chat on mumble..
only way to prevent it is to blocking all specs.

You gotta have friends for that though :D

How come spring ba-dsd is so leet and still this leet is in dire need of spec-cheat?

While LOS gives you an advantage, if the player really has to resort to cheating, they're not going to be the best, and there will be someone out there better than them despite that advantage.


It's not fair, but it doesn't have to be a game killer

you can kick all specs if you want to have real competition, or you can acitvate globallos and even the field.. hell someone could write a widget, that could detect a spec-cheater just by searching for sudden cameramovements and comands to fog-of-war-areas were enemy movement occurs.

Also a problem if one ally dies on a team game, where one team is on a LAN. The dead player can now see the whole map, right?

Yes, kicking all specs would have to extend to kicking players when they lose. This can be worked around if individual players could never really be defeated.

Anyway if someone wants to cheat with an accomplice what is to stop them from playing on separate teams and feeding information? If they're cheating already they're not playing so I don't see it as a large extra step.

I play 1v1s with an accomplice and have him tell me where all his units are. Then I hunt them down and crush them!
50 1337!

if you dont have gum on your specam, your partner is going the get the rAIDS.

guys, there are easy enough ways to see whole map without having any specs ingame, so I would not worry about specs.

It's easy enough to be the best by cheating if you're already good.

If you're already good then there's not much satisfaction from cheating

You should check at lion's replay while he is congraz himself and asking his own stats :D
Some poeple have get a lot of satisfaction with this...

oh?

Yep, the whole data is synced on your machine, all it takes is changing code to display those units, instead of hiding them. (since all players process the whole gamefield at the same time, instead of actual server-client comms as in FPS games).

The question is if there is already this hack in the wild,

@AF if you resort to speccheat or any cheat for that matter, it does not make you bad. There have been a number of such cases, where best/most trusted players ended up being cheaters.

Just at some point the game becomes more social and less competitive, and pro guy gets tired, but feels requirement to stay on top of everyone else.
Alternatively, you just get a very smart one, who feels that the effort to keep his cheat quiet is less than the effort to learn to play pro to achieve his goal of being best in the game.