Bliz's stance on 'key repeating'

[Kaetzchen]

So, here's a post from a few months back courtesy of Cauthon no less! Just thought it'd be of interest to anyone that's either doing key-repeating or has considered it. (I was pondering such, and came upon this in my investigations.)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=6762551711&sid=1&pageNo=1

[3ldrad]

This has always been kind of interesting, mostly because, how can they possibly enforce and police this? Can warden detect that the keypress actions arent being sent by a hardware contact, bu instead by the g15/what have you software? Or do they just see exact intervals between packets from your client, and wonder "how does this guy hit his macro exactly 1.0000 seconds apart every time for 4 hours?".

[Kaetzchen]

3ldrad wrote:

This has always been kind of interesting, mostly because, how can they possibly enforce and police this? Can warden detect that the keypress actions arent being sent by a hardware contact, bu instead by the g15/what have you software? Or do they just see exact intervals between packets from your client, and wonder "how does this guy hit his macro exactly 1.0000 seconds apart every time for 4 hours?".

Okay, depending upon how the keyboard sends it to the computer, there could be no way for any software to tell technically. If they keyboard is actually translating the macros internally, then there'd be no way to tell definitively... But most all of them have macro control software active on the computer that would be visible on a process list. Most obvious, however, is as you state - the precision/spamming rate is kinda a dead giveaway, and that kind of 'monitoring' can be entirely local. If someone is using hardware/software to spam a key every 50ms, then it's -quite- obvious due to the fact that, well, hitting a key 20 times in a second is kinda difficult

Really, it's another of those things that it's doubtful they'd actually do anything. But like it or not, it's in the same category as running an automated bot, so not really a 'good' idea.

[Perdrix]

What Blizzard looks for mostly(or rather what their software looks for) is viewing, and attempt or act of altering their packets. Other then that, they just act on the suggestions of other players. There is just so many players that it is impossible for them to watch us all the time, and they rely heavy on the reports of players to keep the game regulated. Once they are watching a player, it is easy for them to spot repeated button macros, and gliders.

[Kaetzchen]

Exactly, they don't really want to do anything to alienate monthly fees after all It's one of those things where it's quite unlikely that Bliz would ever take action, but whenever they feel like it, they can.