Circumventing the Anti-Cheat-Protection

[Gandalf Parker]

As a standard rule, and hopefully enforced as equally as possible, information on how to bypass purchasing, copy protections, and cheat detections will disappear quickly.
After all, this IS a computer owned/run by an upstanding games publishing company. Discussion as to how effective, fair, or desireable such things are will have no effect on whether or not Shrapnel should be willing to leave them in plain site on their Boards.

Now if you want to join me in the alt.hacker newsgroup, or my www.alt-hacker.org site, I will be glad to discuss the subject further. (but be forwarned that in those forums I dont have to be so careful about what I might call someone)

[BugRoger]

I just wanted to add that I contacted the devs with the details about the cheat. Hope you guys are still going to play with me...

Huzurdaddi:
Though I used a similar approach to what you described (deleted now) the actual procedure was different. Maybe you also let the devs know how your cheat works...

[Stormbinder]

Gandalf Parker said:

As a standard rule, and hopefully enforced as equally as possible, information on how to bypass purchasing, copy protections, and cheat detections will disappear quickly.
After all, this IS a computer owned/run by an upstanding games publishing company. Discussion as to how effective, fair, or desireable such things are will have no effect on whether or not Shrapnel should be willing to leave them in plain site on their Boards.

Well said Gandalf.

[Huzurdaddi]

I suppose I also should add that this particular flaw, while serious, would still not account for what was found in Norfleet's turn. So there must be something else afoot.

No it totally explains what people think that they saw in Norfleet's turn. There may be additional exploits but this one does the trick.

[Sheap]

How does it explain the large stockpile of bloodslaves that he had?

[Arryn]

Sheap said:
How does it explain the large stockpile of bloodslaves that he had?

Short answer? It doesn't.

It might interest folks to know the following, which is an excerpt from a PM that Norfleet sent me 6 days ago (as one of his few friends on the forum):

The truth is that I was struck with a very bizarre, yet opportune event, which may probably be classified as a bug, although it is not something I had any real control over: On one turn, I suddenly discovered that I had mysteriously acquired a large number of gems by means and quantities that are not explainable by known Dominions II phenomena. Suffice it to say that this story is completely unbelievable, as I certainly wouldn't believe anyone claiming this, and is not apparently reproducible.

Frankly, I don't believe him. Too many people have been reporting too many oddities with games he was in for me to be able to accept his claim at face value. I would not be surprised at all if he used more than one exploit. Norfleet struck me as the type to take losing very poorly, and to not be above using any dirty tricks he could (such as having multiple aliases so that he could pump people for info) to gain whatever advantage he felt he needed to assure his supremacy.

EDIT: furthermore, an honest player would have immediately let everyone know that something very odd had happened and called a halt to the game. From the threads I've seen, Norfleet took full advantage of this alleged bug. Not the sort of action an innocent person would/should take.