The Hammer

Many of the most important and traditional Starcraft hack sites have gone down recently, and from the looks of it, none have showed up again. Ashur shares with us a bright future, and explains maybe why. The shadowalker has been walking more in the light these days than in the dark and thus his pale coloration, and no, it's not the beer and vodka from Rymarov.

A long time ago in the dark reaches of the net, far away, there were some persons without morality and with no sense of fair gaming. These persons developed cheat tools for our beloved game. The challenge and mischief from the experience in the development of these tools is the main thing that kept them pumping their evil deeds. One day however, the party, their community was split apart due to their endless quarrels. From that day, we all got to know mineral hacks and other evil tools that poisoned public gaming for a long time. There are also many private cheats, that were not yet revealed to the public, because some of the hackers are clever enough not to show or even speak about them.

Imagine however for a second you are Starcraft hack maker, your sole purpose is to make tools for cheating, to ruin game play and to satisfy the never ending appetite of cheat tool users. You own the most evil of all evil nests, every hack ever made can be found and is offered at this nest. But your visitors are for the most part newbies or people who rather cheat than play the game honestly, that ask and demand everything. Mainly through personal messages over and over enough to make one go mad. You have to reply many times a day, say where to download a hack and explain how to use it. And all this without having to deal with all the forum spam. Sounds like fun, right?

How long would you waste your time with such an activity? But this is not all you have to deal with. You also have to pay for your site, just like everyone else, but it does not end there. Then your site has to defend itself against a barrage of DDoS attacks that occurred many times in the past. Your host gets angry, because a web server has other customers and DDoS attacks affects everyone, even other legit costumers sites. So you are going to pay money and switch to another provider. And again, you will get DDoSed. Other cheater sites have similar problems - its a war. Still interested?

Patch 1.14*? Soon the hammer will fall!

Back to reality, many evil nests are gone. The major Starcraft hack seeding sites are all down or dead, at least of course the most popular ones, the ones that offered the latest. You can say, who cares? Maphackers still get their cheats and there are tons of bugs in StarCraft. I agree, but the Hammer 1.14 is being forged as we speak, this hammer that should once and for all take care of cheaters for a long a healthy period. And it will hurt them, it will really, really hurt them. In this eternal war against cheaters the tide is turning against them and for a long while, there will be light again.

And now think. No evil community, no mass spreading of their cheats. And a big red hammer. These three points make a confluence that will push our dream of a hack free Starcraft a little more on its way to reality. A clean ladder on Battle.net for a long time. That is of course until they strike back, but we will be waiting too, rested and ready for warfare.

//Written by Ashur, translated by Bonglar, edited by yours truly.

*We had to buy the translation and the right to publish this small essay from Ashur. It cost us exactly the value of 5 litres of beer, to be paid in beer, and in person at WCG2006 with a promise to drink at least half.