Infinite Speed, Flying in No-Fly Locations, Trivializing PVP/Gold-Farming-The Power Of Lag (Guide) (Patreon)

The manipulation of lag is incredibly useful to a hacker or exploiter. It is a rare example of something that is both easy to do, and has gamebreaking applications-players can literally fly indoors or in no-fly zones, move at ridiculous speeds, trivialize pvp and even create dupes and other advantageous situations. Best of all, it is difficult to track and impossible to fix.

Recently I have had several discussions with some very advanced exploiters/explorers - these are people capable of discovering unique and innovative plays of their own, and it became apparent despite the huge knowledge base they possessed that some details of how lag works and can be exploited in wow and other mmo's was mysterious to them.

If this was a revelation to these people, some of the best in the world, then it seemed to me that it was very likely many patreons would benefit from a guide to the subject. I have covered lag-based strategies before on Patreon, but mostly in the context of some specific exploit. 

What Is Lag?

What is lag? The dictionary definition is simply "a period of time between one event and another". In warcraft it is a delay between communication between your client, the program that you downloaded from Blizzard that exists on your computer, and the server, the software which exists at Blizzard's end and dictates what happens in the game world. Lag happens naturally when, for whatever technical reason, communication between your computer and Blizzard's server becomes poor or fails altogether.

 Exploiters typically induce lag deliberately to manipulate the game to their advantage. 

How To Induce Lag?

The simplest way is to just unplug your computer from the internet. The problem with this method is that it is a physical method, that, depending on your exact set-up, may be impractical. It also targets every online function your computer may be performing, not just
the running of warcraft.

An alternate method is to use a program such as Netlimiter. ( https://www.netlimiter.com/ ) . Netlimiter is a general purpose internet tool designed to control the speed of traffic generally-it has nothing specifically to do with MMO's. While it is mosty self-explanatory and gives you a great deal of control, it isn't an ideal application for the purposes of game manipulation since it isn't really practical to micromanage with it in-game, it is too slow and cumbersome. It can be useful for extended offline play (see below). 

A third method, and the one I generally use in-game, is the lag switch. This is a specific programming application which handles the flow of traffic. Here is a link to the program I use which is called lag7 : https://files.fm/f/tss4krxt . Although I have used this program for years without any known issues patreons are encouraged to scan for viruses and quarantine this or any program they may download (note: scammers are especially keen on attaching viruses to video game hacking applications). 

A lag switch allows the player to bind a hotkey and turn the flow of traffic off and on at will. Many things can be done with a lag switch which cannot with other methods.

Temporal Lag Vs Offline Mode

Those seeking to induce lag artificially generally wish to do so in two ways:

Temporal Lag: induce lag for a short period, generally around eight seconds (your mileage may vary if you have an exceptionally fast or slow computer). During this time, crucially, the player's location at the end of the period of the lag will persist as the connection is restored. So, if a player induces lag and runs up a hill in eight seconds, they will be at the top of the hill after eight seconds if they restore the connection. 

This is the primary method of lag induction we use as exploiters.

Offline Mode: This is when the player has no connection with the game world but has not disconnected. This is very useful to explorers.  In offline mode there are no players, no npc's, no game objects. There are also no teleport fields, death fields, or anything interactive at all-this enables player access to normally inaccessible locations.  

Players generally enter offline mode eight seconds after lagging. The player location will not be restored when they reconnect. If a player runs from Elwynn Forest to Westfall when they close their client (you cannot escape offline mode any other way, logging out does not work in this state) and relog they will be in Elwynn Forest. 

Why Use Lag?

There are several major gamebreaking applications for lag purposes.

PVP: Using Lag in pvp is similar to using stealth in that the player's location is no longer tracked by the server, which means it isn't communicated to other players. Moreover, the speed of the player is snapshot: so, for example, the effect of rocket boots will persist for a full eight seconds of lag even after they were about to expire. In practice this means that lag can be used like a stealth/speed hybrid hack-it is incredibly powerful and virtually guarantees a win in carry-the-flag battlegrounds. 

Gold-Farming: Lag for gold-farming purposes is mostly restricted to instances where the purpose of farming the dungeon is to kill a specific mob that is not near the entrance. For example, in Uldaman the chest at the end of the dungeon can contain items that are potentially worth millions of gold. You can use lag to enhance speed-increasing effects and run through the dungeon in less than a minute with practice. 

Exploration: With offline mode death/teleport fields do not operate as they are server-side interactive effects. Any temporary effect is permanent with lag: some flying methods work for a second or two in no-fly zones before being cancelled by the server and these have been used with lag to fly around these areas. 

Dupes: This is a highly advanced subject that even the most sophisticated players only have a vague understanding of. But, it is possible to use lag to create dupes and other weird effects. Very roughly speaking the principle here is that dupes are generally caused by a confusion between two conflicting game states - often very precise timing manipulating some spell, item or whatever at a given moment can cause the game to break. With lag these moments can be extended making the exploiter's task much more easy to accomplish.