New character wait period to queue/teleport

[Henhouse]

Hey everyone, I have something I want to mention that we'll be doing soon in efforts to prevent mindless BG bots, force-start BG queuing, and more recently: repeated BG hacking.

It is worth noticing the recent issues that have arisen in battlegrounds are primarily the sole actions of a single individual that has been changing his IP and making accounts for the past several days because we can assume he has nothing better to do with his life at this point other than waste it doing that. We do have a Warden system in place which utilizes the built-in feature Blizzard created that detects anomalies in your WoW.exe's memory addresses. Common hacking programs are instantly detected by this feature, and the player is disconnected from the server. We choose this option, at this time, over implementing a solution like AntiCheat which can often cause an undesirable playing experience with glitches that tend to arise with it.

I briefly discussed with the staff earlier today an idea of a decent way we can thwart these issues altogether. I've proposed having a 15-minute check on queuing for anything, and attempting to teleport to the dueling area. This will simply check if you have 15 minutes played time, and if not return a message that says something like "You do not yet have 15 minutes of played time. Please spend a little more time setting up your character. You may check how much time is remaining by typing: /played"

I believe this system will have a decent impact and be quite effective in securing a safe environment for not only battlegrounds and arena, but also places like the dueling area which has been victim to faction hacking in the past. It's possible a hacker will waste an entire hour of his time to hack a maximum of 4 times in an hour, but I feel like at that point it will become so tedious they'll quit, or at least it will become very infrequent.

Let me know your thoughts on this plan. I hope to implement something soon.

[Horrorfever]

May even make it more than 15 minutes, sounds like a good idea, too.

[Apuclevercow]

The idea seems great and these 15 minutes are fine, more than 15 would be annoying if someone wants to reroll fastly.

[Balls]

15 is fine. More than that and it'd feel tedious if you want to make an alt for whatever reason and had to wait it out after setting up your stuff. Less than 15 mins would be pointless.

[Horrorfever]

If I was a hacker, I'd wait 15 minutes - make it a hour, let them suffer.

In that one hour, new players that aren't actually hacking but here to play - they will actually have time to socialize with our glorious community on our mature LFG chat while having a whole hour to explore stuff around and what Smolderforge has, instead of asking stupid questions.

They may even visit the forums, pshh.

Make it a hour.

[Henhouse]

System is now in place.

[Horrorfever]

But.. this...

f I was a hacker, I'd wait 15 minutes - make it a hour, let them suffer.

In that one hour, new players that aren't actually hacking but here to play - they will actually have time to socialize with our glorious community on our mature LFG chat while having a whole hour to explore stuff around and what Smolderforge has, instead of asking stupid questions.

They may even visit the forums, pshh.

Make it a hour.

[Deems]

An hour would be idiotic.

[Wacco]

I totally understand this prevention, but it's also easy to work around if you really want to rage hack or abuse.

15min would be fine and a good time for a new player that comes here and accidently have EMUhacker or Maelstrom on. But if you want to make a dead account for fragments in WSG or just get hated and having a good time from the ruiners perspective 15min is nothing. Create 10 accounts and log 10 chars and idle for 15min after you equip some gear and spec from the "welcome to sf" NPC.

What I want to say with this post is that in my mind this would just fix a small part of the hacking problem that involves speedhack, flagcaps, and rage hacking, maybe that's good enough. Some people aren't that patient.

[Wacco]

8. Being caught cheating during a game is grounds for an instant loss.

(anyone?)