So I found out something interesting today after I installed cheat engine. For those of you who don't know it allows you to scan memory in a running process and modify the memory. For my purposes, I use it on some of the older games I still play like Civilization 2, Star Wars 2, and Emulators for things like PS2, etc. Needless to say, I suddenly found myself banned after attempting to launch a single player game on voobly and given the message I must uninstall cheat engine.
Now, you may be asking yourself why would Voobly ban me for having a program installed? Cheat engine can also be used to create hacks for AOC. Using cheat engine to manipulate values of course will cause the game to sync so cheat engine as a means to cheat in AOC is useless. Instead you would use cheat engine to find pointers for AOC which could then be used in a hack later on down the line.
Now, first, forcing someone to uninstall cheat engine is just stupid if you use a little common sense. If I want to write a hack, I could just unisntall voobly, or do it on another computer, or if I was really feeling motivated, I could just modify how cheat engine installs and then Voobly wouldn't be able to tell it was there anyway. Even if Voobly was being super intrusive by scanning for actual files and then examining them for a signature, it would still be possible to elude it. How do you think viruses do it? Obviously Voobly isn't doing that deep a scan or your game would take 15min to launch every time.
Which of course makes this whole scanning for programs thing completely useless. It's incredibly intrusive, raises all kinds of security flags, and yet has absolutely no effectiveness whatsoever. Even powerful anticheat programs that MMOs employ don't scan your computer for installed programs, or even running programs for that matter. If you're resorting to something as ineffective as scanning for installed programs, how effective is anti-cheat really?
Regardless, do you want Voobly scanning your computer every time you launch a game? What else might they be scanning? Since the scan is running every time you launch, what kind of performance overhead is being incurred?
Now, you may be asking yourself why would Voobly ban me for having a program installed? Cheat engine can also be used to create hacks for AOC. Using cheat engine to manipulate values of course will cause the game to sync so cheat engine as a means to cheat in AOC is useless. Instead you would use cheat engine to find pointers for AOC which could then be used in a hack later on down the line.
Now, first, forcing someone to uninstall cheat engine is just stupid if you use a little common sense. If I want to write a hack, I could just unisntall voobly, or do it on another computer, or if I was really feeling motivated, I could just modify how cheat engine installs and then Voobly wouldn't be able to tell it was there anyway. Even if Voobly was being super intrusive by scanning for actual files and then examining them for a signature, it would still be possible to elude it. How do you think viruses do it? Obviously Voobly isn't doing that deep a scan or your game would take 15min to launch every time.
Which of course makes this whole scanning for programs thing completely useless. It's incredibly intrusive, raises all kinds of security flags, and yet has absolutely no effectiveness whatsoever. Even powerful anticheat programs that MMOs employ don't scan your computer for installed programs, or even running programs for that matter. If you're resorting to something as ineffective as scanning for installed programs, how effective is anti-cheat really?
Regardless, do you want Voobly scanning your computer every time you launch a game? What else might they be scanning? Since the scan is running every time you launch, what kind of performance overhead is being incurred?