I have played many games out there with game guard, the most noticable one that I can remember off the top of my head is Phantasy star universe, Ask anyone in the PSU forums and they will tell you how PSU got hacked, and went from having about 8000 active players daily on the pc/ps2 servers to its current population of about 600. This as soon as the hacking started and it took less than 2 months to bring the population from 8000+ to around 1000. (Last 400 or so took a while to leave).

Reason I know it was not natural players leaving a boring game is the Xbox 360 servers which is only one console have over 6000 active players daily right now. while the PC/ps2 has at peek times 400 and daily around 600.

Now this did not all happen due to hacking, but hacks such as room hacks, inventory hacks, PM reset hacks (Basically  your craft got re set to zero) as well as other advantage hacks like duping of items and so on happened under the watchful eye of game guard...

Im not to confident in this program to keep the game safe from hackers at all. hopefully NCsoft team here in the US will do a better job to take care of everything like that beyond just Game guard.

Hacks are going to happen no matter what. Having GG at least reduces the amount of them and allows for a decent avenue for the devs to track some of them.

Anyone can write a "personalized" keyboard driver, so the keystrokes don't come from a real human but from another program. 

Hell.. if that where unabled, somehow....  a hard hack would be to fake a keyboard so the PC will detect a keyboard, but on the other side of the cord where other PC. 

There are no hacking systems. Any anti-hacking system is snake-oil, or to stop trivial hackers / make hacking slighty boring.

note: What Lynx say.

Also to add that you gotta pay for updates for the gameguard. Meaning a lot of older games you know don't be paying for their increased protection. I can let NCsoft slide, they got money, but games like Rohan and stuff be on the old version that can be bypassed by some programs. Honestly I wouldn't worry about this for a game that hasn't been released yet. Also to add bots and hacks that makes it gets caught in the end. It's how anti programs get stronger. People find the holes, makes it obvious on the other side and it's patched up. People can't sit here and expect a program to be superstrong from bots n hacks.

As all said above...

With that, every program gets hacked sooner or later... As long as NCSoft keeps updating GG, you have little to worry about.

With that, as player you have an obligation too... Don't use RMT services. These are the start of botters (they normally bot), report bots (you have a special button for it in Aion, like in L2).
Also, devs / GMs should be quick to respond to bot reports.

If we all do our work, botters don't have a chance.

Too bad, there are always ppl who're too lazy to actually enjoy the game and want to max out ASAP to PvP... You always have those ppl in every game (then again: bot-button)

Gameguard is liek DRM.... Its meant to stop hackers but it doesnt even slow them down, instead it screws over legit players who try to play the game fair but cant because of all the bugs that come with this so called protection.

I spend 3 days trying to figure out why aion was crashing when i first installed it, until some phantom gameguard file that didnt uninstall properly with another game was found and removed.

I dont give a shit about botters, people cheat, i usually expect it, and decide ahead of time if i want to deal with it or not. There really is no difference between some guy who bots to max level and someguy who does it naturally to me, especially in a pvp game.

I hope that Ncsoft has a team dedicated to stoping all the hackers, and whoever might try to ruin the game for the legit players.

Ill be the first to admit I have not played all my mmorpgs the "legit" way per say. When I care about a game like I do about Aion I do want it to be safe. , I really do hope that it does well, and is protected. This is not a F2P Korean crap fest game with nothing but "kill 500 Black hogs" quests. Sure there is grinding, but the quests are well done as well as a immersive storyline from what I experienced in the beta. I hope that NC keeps this game safe.

Im not aware of a mainstream title who's devs aren't actively in hack-prevention mode.  And regardless of the title,every game will be hacked.

Originally posted by Conq

Im not aware of a mainstream title who's devs aren't actively in hack-prevention mode.  And regardless of the title,every game will be hacked.

^^Agreed.  This is what some other posters are alluding to as well - that just because GameGuard is running doesn't mean that they're just sitting back and saying, "Well, all of our hacking problems are at an end!"  The contrary, GameGuard will be a supplement to the anti-hacking devs scouring the servers for offenders.  At least, that's the way I understand it.

I just dont buy/play games that use GG. If the developer wants my money they will invest in the creation of their own secure code.

And here I thought I saw all the escuses in the world not to play Aion.  Next post I predict will be, "I won't play Aion because it has 3 vowels in its name."