NCsoft just shut the door on Lineage 2 hacking, at least for now. The latest Lineage 2 patch, sent out last night, included a copy of GameGuard. The anti-hacking program does a quick check when you try to log into the server and if you re planning running any hacks or bots in the background it won t let you in.

I had a quick chat with Aaron Rigby, NCsoft s North American producer for Lineage II, this afternoon about the new program.

Rigby said the biggest problem Lineage II was having was with people who use programs to automate their characters in small hunting areas. These bots would sit in a cave or along a forest path killing all of the creatures respawning in the area. The problem was, he said, that if you happened by, you became the next target.

Player versus player is fine, he said. But you don t have a chance against a terminator.

These bots would sometimes hunker down in crossroads critical to traveling in the game, in essence bottlenecking the game. Rigby hopes that GameGuard will put an end to that, and as of this morning it seemed to be working. Rigby hopped onto the game and checked out some of the regular bot haunts and found them free and clear.

One thing GameGuard won t do, Rigby added, is autoban peoples' accounts.

It s not about auto-banning the accounts, he said. It s about making sure that players are going to run Lineage II without a hacking program running in the background.

Not that NCsoft is opposed to banning people who fragrantly cheat or harass other players. Since the Lineage II launch in North America, about 4,000 accounts have been shut down and a team of NCsoft gamers are constantly hunting down cheaters and hackers.

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