On WoW’s teleport hack and how to resolve it

There is currently an on-going World of Warcraft (WoW) exploit that concerns teleporting and the MMO video game’s macro. We’re pretty sure some of you have used this before but don’t worry, we won’t tell Blizzard Entertainment. But the thing is, this creates an unfair advantage for the others.

To those who have been playing it fairly and have no idea what exactly this exploit is, here’s how it goes: When you write and spam this certain macro, it will ultimately confuse the computer of anyone standing nearby because it will assume that the “spamming-macro” character has lagged out.

So attacking that character will do good because in truth, he is not there anymore. He moves, spams the macro, stop moving, spams again, and so on. Pretty neat, really, but just unfair. According to one article from gaming site Play No Evil, this is actually an abuse of the WoW‘s synchronization and synchronization recovery process and there are ways to prevent this from happening.

The safe solution is to put the virtual world on hold until everyone is synchronized. But this is quite problematic as some players may actually leave the game. Play No Evil added that the best way to handle this is to use the server smooth/server authoritative model. And this is how that model works:

When a player resynchs, he resynchs to the server view of the world, not his. If the server model of a player’s behavior is good enough, and the dropped connection is relatively short, their will be little perceived difference. The design challenge comes out of helping transition the player to the server’s view in as quick and smooth way as possible.

Some players mentioned – obviously those who have been attacked with this and not the ones using the teleport hack – that Blizzard has apparently known about this since the introduction of Warsong Gulch. But until now, nothing has been done about it. They fear that this can be used during matches in ranked PvP arenas.

There is currently an on-going World of Warcraft (WoW) exploit that concerns teleporting and the MMO video game’s macro. We’re pretty sure some of you have used this before but don’t worry, we won’t tell Blizzard Entertainment. But the thing is, this creates an unfair advantage for the others.

To those who have been playing it fairly and have no idea what exactly this exploit is, here’s how it goes: When you write and spam this certain macro, it will ultimately confuse the computer of anyone standing nearby because it will assume that the “spamming-macro” character has lagged out.

So attacking that character will do good because in truth, he is not there anymore. He moves, spams the macro, stop moving, spams again, and so on. Pretty neat, really, but just unfair. According to one article from gaming site Play No Evil, this is actually an abuse of the WoW‘s synchronization and synchronization recovery process and there are ways to prevent this from happening.

The safe solution is to put the virtual world on hold until everyone is synchronized. But this is quite problematic as some players may actually leave the game. Play No Evil added that the best way to handle this is to use the server smooth/server authoritative model. And this is how that model works:

When a player resynchs, he resynchs to the server view of the world, not his. If the server model of a player’s behavior is good enough, and the dropped connection is relatively short, their will be little perceived difference. The design challenge comes out of helping transition the player to the server’s view in as quick and smooth way as possible.

Some players mentioned – obviously those who have been attacked with this and not the ones using the teleport hack – that Blizzard has apparently known about this since the introduction of Warsong Gulch. But until now, nothing has been done about it. They fear that this can be used during matches in ranked PvP arenas.