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.
Originally Posted by Ensu
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