Cheating

Various common cheats have caused Cipsoft to revise Tibia to eliminate some cheating. Some of the more prominent examples are listed below. It is widely accepted that the wide spread use of 'light cheats' (brightening the entire screen so as to remove the need to use torches, candles, casting light spells or any other method of produce light) caused the introduction of the Ambient Light feature of the client. This appears to be because proving someone was using a light cheat was near impossible and CipSoft have then adopted the idea that it is better to remove the illegality of this cheat by effectively providing their own version of it (this is similar to a common argument in favor of the decriminalization of drugs). It's also believed that the widespread use of macros lead to the introduction of 'object hotkeys' (such as the much famed UH Hotkey). Again, this appears to be an indication of CipSoft's unwillingness to police such matters and instead make their own legal version of it. This update however hasn't stopped people macro fishing or macro rune making, amongst other things. Other anti-cheating measures introduced to Tibia have had no or negative impact from a functionality point of view. Such measures include the sounds made when consuming food or liquids, which are in place to allow Gamemasters to observe people macro eating/drinking. When initially introduced at the Christmas update 2006 this feature was not welcomed fondly, however seems to have attracted more support as more people accept that it won't be removed and learn the reasons why it was included. Similarly the limitation of the amount of magic that can be cast in a given period of time was introduced to stop players using cheat tools that could cast spells or using runes much faster than a player not using a cheat tool could respond to them. This has occasionally been called a bad feature as it can prohibit the amount of healing that can be used in quick succession which may cause a player to die.

Examples of Cheat Tools

In update 8.4 Cipsoft introduced the anti-botting monsters that can be randomly found at hunting places wandering around. But as a difference compared to normal monsters they cannot be killed and they often have such special abilities like turning Invisible and Self-Healing. In a later update Cipsoft realised the issues that arose from this and reduced the power of these monsters after innocent players were killed by them. They maintained the same appearance as normal monsters, and could go invisible, but they had skills, and their skills incremented the same way that a players would (except much faster), this resulted in complaints by several players and the measures were reversed. In another later update Cipsoft implemented yet another anti cheating measure which automatically detects players who are found to be using cheats, though the operation of this system is a mystery and is not understood by anyone except those at Cipsoft. It is suspected that this system works by looking for patterns, as cheaters will often use tools which do things very methodically (e.g every 100ms walk 1sqm, or every 180 seconds exactly cast a spell, and so on). Cipsoft has announced, in yet another update, that complaints about this type of banishment are in vain, and all accounts which are detected in such a way will be deleted automatically. On several occasions, however, Cipsoft banned several people who in fact had not cheated, and reversed the banishments, adding premium time to compensate for any lost days.

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