Dealing with Hackers ?

Fascinating post, Notturno. Thanks for the read.

Gets me to wondering if cheating was much of an issue in Rift. I didn't notice it back when I played, but I could've just been oblivious.

I'm pretty oblivious to most cheaters/hackers until someone says something, then I watch like creeper, waiting for the right time to kidna... Uh I mean report that cheater with solid hard evidence.

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Originally Posted by Ensu

Fascinating post, Notturno. Thanks for the read.

Gets me to wondering if cheating was much of an issue in Rift. I didn't notice it back when I played, but I could've just been oblivious.

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Thanks! I appreciate that.

Honestly, I'd peg it as an extremely small issue. Cheating is more prevalent in shooters because player skill plays an enormous factor in how effective you are. In RIFT, success is more about game knowledge and time investment. The only things you can really game in RIFT are botting for experience and gear. That's not really something you can do in instances or PVP for the most part, since human tactical decisions are often required to succeed in those areas. While AI could certainly accomplish some basic feats, I don't think it would do well against coordinated players in RIFT.

The only major cheating issue RIFT saw was a problem on Trion's end. There was a client vulnerability that allowed nefarious individuals to log into any account they wanted by altering a variable. That variable was an account ID; so by cycling through random numbers, your account could be compromised by no fault of your own. This was an on-going issue that resulted in many players losing access to their accounts for many weeks at release, and took a while to have their gear restored.

Despite the above issue, I don't really think cheating was a major issue in RIFT. There were bots for sure, but not a horrid amount. The bigger issues were related to gold farming and regular players abusing game systems, like AFKing in PVP. All those were fairly quickly dealt with by Trion, though.

I think a forced server-side reticle would be nice.

Im going to assume the same ant-cheat systems used in rift will be used in this game as well. However report those who cheat in any form if seen ( Glitches count people!)

Well hope that people report the hackers and keep em clean unlike most FPS games (APB etc)

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Originally Posted by Notturno

To answer your question on a very basic level; yes, Trion does have anti-cheat measures in place for Defiance.

However let's not glorify this. It is not “hacking” in any way, shape, or form; these people are purchasing programs from developers for money, then using them to cheat in-game. They are cheaters, plain and simple.

As for cheating itself, it's such a complex subject that you simply don't get to hear much about. The game developers are quiet because talking about it poses a risk to the cheat developers circumventing their protections. The more sophisticated cheat developers tend to hide behind pay walls that stop the general public from getting any information about their programs. Point being, it's kind of a misunderstood existence, but hopefully I can shed some light on it for the sake of general understanding.

Most “anti-cheat” systems in place actually don't work as well as you'd like to think. At a very basic level, they will stop any third-party software that's trying to hook into the game client by flagging the connecting account. This generally only stops very basic cheating programs, which tend to be the free ones. At a slightly higher level, you'll see anti-cheat systems that will flag accounts based on anomalies; anyone with a particularly high accuracy percentage, someone who moves too fast, someone who has a high percentage of headshots, et cetera. Beyond this, anti-cheat systems will have flags for any other applications the developers have identified as cheating software and stop it. However, this is often a game of cat-and-mouse between the game developers and cheat developers; the cheating software will change with every release, negating the anti-cheat flagging in place. There's obviously more sophisticated elements to it than this, but this is anti-cheat systems on a basic level.

Now, I'm sure there are some people asking why they just don't get access to the cheating software, figure out how it works, and stop it that way?

Well, to put it bluntly, you can't.

The way the more sophisticated cheating communities work is based on a seniority and “wave” system. What happens is that blocks of subscribers to the cheating service are placed into groups, a wave of people. There will be many of these waves of subscribers, and each group will get a different version of the cheating software. When someone from that wave is banned, or if the entire wave itself is caught cheating, then you know you have a mole in that particular wave. That mole is someone who works for the game developers usually, and they add a flag to the anti-cheat system to ban accounts who connect meeting certain criteria under that program. The other waves remain unaffected, since their version of the cheating software was not detected. If the mole cannot be detected, then they just keep making new waves of subscribers. Eventually the moles disappear, and waves become insulated to the point where you just won't even get a copy of their cheating software.

The only way you can stop these more sophisticated communities is by incredibly competent anti-cheat systems that look for certain behaviors these programs exhibit, or manual detection by a support team.

This is by its very nature a reactive process. The cheat program releases, and the game developers react to try and stop it. There are obviously proactive measures that can be taken, such as:

• Checking for anomalies in accuracy percentages.
• Not trusting the game client with anything. Player locations, ammunition counts, game variables, nothing.
• Only allowing the client to send control inputs. It should not be altering critical database information (scrip counts, items, et cetera).

More often than not the cheat developers will find ways to circumvent the protections. Some of the programs are pretty damn sophisticated too. One community I am aware of has a base program the developer users to hook into your computer's GPU and pulls textures directly from it for cheating purposes. It uses that texture information to aim at particular in-game objects, detect where players are, et cetera. On top of this, they have adjustable controls on their cheating programs; you can dictate how accurate you are by percentages, how quickly you acquire targets, how often you get headshots, and so on. Point being, these are very sophisticated programs that are not easy to detect.

The fact of the matter is that we'll probably never know how prevalent cheating will be. You probably won't hear much about bans either, most game developers do not utilize name and shame policies. We basically just have to continue demanding protection from cheaters as customers, and Trion will respond simply because it makes good business sense to stop it.

So yes, there's probably plenty of anti-cheat measures in place, but don't expect that to stop every cheater. They will happen, it's just a matter of how quickly and efficiently they are dealt with.

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It's a conspiracy >.> <.<

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Originally Posted by ThanatosPa

So community self policeing will be needed

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Please no, cause there will be people who report everyone who's better than them.

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Originally Posted by Psyqhical

Please no, cause there will be people who report everyone who's better than them.

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^ This.. People tend to blame hackers when they just play bad.

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Originally Posted by HansKisaragi

^ This.. People tend to blame hackers when they just play bad.

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Was playing a competitive pvp match in the past beta weekend. Someone in voice chat starts complaining about one his opponents saying he couldn't believe speed hacks were already in the game. The "speed hack" he was complaining about was someone using the Blur Ego Power which increases your speed by 50%. So ya...