New RMT?

[Sove92]

Their syching with the client really isn't very good.

For the most part, the server believes the client if the client says it's in position X,Y,Z. There's a few checks for client modifications, but it's not very great.

The reason behind why MMORPGs tend to trust the client when it comes to movement is simple. It takes a lot of CPU power to track the movement of hundreds to thousands of players in a 3D environment. It's trading security for reliability and convenience.

[Kosmos992k]

The reason behind why MMORPGs tend to trust the client when it comes to movement is simple. It takes a lot of CPU power to track the movement of hundreds to thousands of players in a 3D environment. It's trading security for reliability and convenience.

Indeed. But I have never understood why SE cannot parse the logs, off-line, for suspect accounts to detect invalid movement, teleport or other problematic client side requests. The load of adding this kind of validation in real time would be too much without doubling the server capacity, but you could easily parse the logs for suspect (reported) accounts off line to detect obviously bad behavior.

So even adding in invisible walls and telling the client/server that players aren't allowed past certain X,Y,Z coords wouldn't help?

No, because the server would have to do coordinate checks on each and every position update, which, as mentioned by Sove, SE doesn't do so much. You can actually find specific locations on some maps where you can fall through ("glitch") the landscape and end up under the landscape. The server doesn't object despite your z-axis coordinates being clearly wrong.