I am your canary in the coal mine

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by Kedric, Dec 27, 2012.

  1. Kedric

    I have seen trends in games in the past and it's easy for me to tell now when a game is going to be successful or not, and whether or not a game has competent management running things.

    The current handling of exploiting/cheating in this game is abysmal, and it can and will utterly train wreck what little credibility SOE has left with the wider gaming community. As in, PlanetSide 2 could end up a permanent ghost town just like PlanetSide 1, and even seal the fate of SOE's F2P business completely if not this branch of the company itself.

    Right now PAYING CUSTOMERS who have much to lose are being punished unfairly with permanent bans for doing silly stuff like making enemy faction characters to duel with or test game mechanics with. What makes this particularly offensive is the fact that this game is FREE TO PLAY, so the very people who have the most to lose and can thus be kept in line with a simple warning are instead punished the most severely.

    This offends me so greatly because of the attitude that it demonstrates on behalf of management. Since management cannot - with their current methods - permanently eradicate the griefing scum who mass kill people with teleportation / god mode hacks, the management instead takes out their frustrations on the very people they should be protecting. This kind of attitude is utterly ineffective and is a clear indication of poor problem solving skills.

    Please note that I have no stake in this issue other than my wider concerns for the game, as my account is in good standing and no one I know personally has been banned.

    Now let me further cover the major issue of rampant cheating/exploiting that will kill this game and its business model outright if not addressed promptly.

    1) Deliberate mass crash bug/exploit.

    Currently, there is a bug in the game that can mass crash players in a given area.

    This is now being exploited on many servers by many outfits/platoons to take out enemy forces in preparation for an invasion to easily secure the base.

    The use of this exploit is reaching epidemic levels on Connery server in particular, and is one of the main reasons I am here posting on the forums instead of enjoying the game.

    If exploits of this degree of severity are not fixed in a timely manner now and in the future, then PlanetSide 2 is over. Stick a fork in it, it's done. I've seen bugs and exploits on this level before, and they kill games in their crib when the dev team ignores them.

    My entire outfit is pretty upset about this exploit, and now that they know it is 100% a repeatable exploit that is being used to deliberately swing battles in enemy favor they are beside themselves with frustration.

    Let me repeat SOE, this will kill your game if you don't fix it ASAP. PRIORTY A-NUMBER ONE.

    2) Deliberate mass kill griefing with god mode / teleportation hack.

    I'm not talking about the occasional punk who is cheating to win or padding his stats. I'm talking about people who have absolutely no intention of hiding their cheating or operating under a pretense. These griefers are here to do one thing and one thing only: kill people until they quit the game out of frustration. I would not put it past SOE's competition in the MMO world to be deliberately building hacks and trying to ruin their business model. After all, who better to program and use a hack but game creators themselves?

    These griefers make explicit and obvious use of teleportation hacks and aimbots, including even god mode now. There is nothing a player can do to respond, you can't kill these punks even with C4 and tank explosions in their face. It is classical God Mode, it is literally that bad. You can even be hunted down in the safe zone / pain fields and killed repeatedly until you leave the continent or log out of the game.

    Suffice it to say I have personally experienced this on more than one occasion now and it is rapidly destroying my interest in this game. If you have not yet experienced this behavior yourself, then be thankful, because it is utterly demoralizing to be a paying customer in a game and be relentlessly griefed by a cheater who you cannot retaliate against without any customer support for over an hour on end.

    I place this issue as priority number two only because it has not yet reached the widespread epidemic levels that the crashing exploit has. But make no mistake, failing to respond to this issue in a timely manner will most certainly kill PlanetSide 2 and even SOE's entire business model for this game just as assuredly.

    Conclusion

    It's time to get on the ball SOE. It's make it or break it time, and I'm not going to say this again. Solutions exist to these problems - many of these solutions being posted in this very forum. You need only read and implement them. PlanetSide 2 is an epically wonderful game and I have already given you folks nearly $100 in membership / Station Cash purchases. I feel that this is money well spent even in spite of the current state of the game, because I've enjoyed hours of excellent gameplay already far beyond what any single player game can currently deliver. That said, my continued financial support of this game and indeed any SOE ventures in the future hinges entirely upon your prompt and immediate attention to these issues. Hire people if you need to, fire people if you need to. Get the job done, because there is precious little credibility left for you in the community and these sorts of issues will be the nail in the coffin for your reputation if you don't handle them now.

    And that would be a tragedy, because games like PlanetSide 1 and PlanetSide 2 don't come around often.
    • Up x 9
  2. Big Cyz

    Counter-strike has had countless hackers for nigh on a decade and it's going just fine. Quit your crying.
    • Up x 2
  3. Maer

    I've only run into 4 blatant cheaters/hackers. 3 of which haven't logged in since being reported for a few days. One is much more recent.

    I agree that action needs to be taken to actively patrol the big battles and check out areas where there are a lot of reports.

    There's no reason they can't hire some people to teleport around to questionable situations and flag people to be monitored or deal with the situation directly.
  4. Elapid

    Agreed 100%. The mass-crash exploit will kill this game if it's not fixed ASAP.
  5. Almost

    Leave the kiddie server and come play on Miller.
  6. Ghstmarauder

    Its been worse because of the break and the lack of GMs on. But watching a VS player fly around the map, shooting reavers and liberators with his Decimator, and then teleporting behind players and tanks killing them as well, and then flying back into a mountain so he can't get shot is pretty annoying. I never realized the crashing bug was an exploit, but it happened maybe 10+ times at Rashnu the other day I can believe it.
  7. Calahagus

    There are hackers? I haven't seen a single one.
  8. P0INTMAN

    Name and shame these ********.
    • Up x 1
  9. MurderBunneh

    You must believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny too.
    Every game in history that could be hacked and cheated has been. Now do you really believe that a game this big with this many players on at one time and has multiple hacks that are free to DL and undetectable is not being hacked?
    As long as you are not blatant with your use of the hacks you can do it with impunity right now. And even if you are blatant it still takes days to be reprimanded.
    • Up x 1
  10. ArielFox

    I believe this trick is known as the 'Titov' as a means for either 1. Encouraging the said banned to buy new stuff or 2. Somehow magically scaring the hackers into not doing it any more.

    Can't say I see it working long term but that's decision by committee for you. :p

    Oh dear; was that too snide? Fine. I'm sure it's potentially viable.
  11. NDroid

    I thought the mass crashes was a server issue, it never occurred to me the game may exploited to such a degree. You say it's possible to reproduce it? Then it's definitely a top priority.
    I play on Miller and my outfit has encountered this issue several times in the past week so it's not limited to any particular server.
  12. THUGGERNAUT

    most of the OP is hysterical and over-the-top, but the mass crash exploit is indeed real. entire battles can be shut down by exploiters. don't expect a fix until after new year's day, most of the devs are probably on vacation.
  13. Dovahkiin

    PS2 has 2000 players per map, quit your acting as if it's fine.
    • Up x 1
  14. MagnumOpus

    I'm being serious on an internet forum just to say yes this mass crash bug has got to get solved. It is incredibly disheartening to have otherwise great fights ruined in the first couple minutes, and the rate at which it is occurring has been increasing daily. Our outfit has got to the point where we expect it to happen and are surprised when we have a large fight where it doesn't.

    That said I'm not yet convinced it is an exploit. Everyone who claims to have knowledge of how it is done keeps framing it in vague terms like "it involves a specific loadout of Sunderer" and "the C4 has to go on a specific spot" so until we see some videos reproducing we should probably withhold judgement. Our experience on Mattherson has been that it occurs with frequency early in fights where we are defending solidly against a large force and while that could obviously lead to some conclusions those conditions are also likely the most taxing for the code or servers. Anyone's guess at this point until we see some proof.
    • Up x 1
  15. SiosDashcR

    Lost all your credibility right there.

    If you're going to support people exploiting game mechanisms to boost up your stats, exp - then.. lol.
  16. Badname3529.

    Counter-strike only needs a minimum of eight players for an interesting game. If you think anything less than 200 times that amount would yield the same results for PS2, you are a fool.
  17. Skadi

    Killed in the spawn room? Try the warpgate.
    Thank god that was fixed...
  18. Big Cyz

    Not sure what that has to do with hacking.
  19. Suien Reizo

    Counter Strike gave server owners and selected moderators of their clan or frequent players the ability to kick or ban script users/hackers, this isn't something that we have in PS2 since the game lacks a passive detection system or active moderators reacting to /reports.
    • Up x 1
  20. sagolsun

    There is currently no testing server. That is no excuse for boosting.

    It's a degree of collateral damage I am willing to accept if it helps keep the playing field level.


    I monitor cheating forums and I have yet to come across any mention of a zone crash exploit. Unless you have proof of concept code to show for it, or a link at the very least, I must assume this is a random bug and not deliberate.

    No, there is no big conspiracy. There's a very strong, multi-million dollar cheating industry responsible for this. For a lot of people creating cheats has become their primary source of income. The obvious cheaters are trolls.

    SOE is currently on holiday so actions taken against cheaters will be slow. It'll speed up January. SOE can download the cheats and patch their home-brewed anti-cheat to mitigate this. Based on analysis floating on the web it's pretty basic, but gets frequent updates.


    I believe SOE knows this. For a F2P game cheating is an order of magnitude more of a threat than for a boxed one.


    Most of the solutions posted here are frankly pants-on-head retärded. Software measures may make cheating incredibly hard, but they'll also practically lock down the game code. Hardware-based measures are much more cleaner and don't rely on obscurity and complexity, (and present a practically insurmountable entry barrier for mainstream cheaters) but are a logistical and financial nightmare. Authentication-based solutions like cell phone/credit card auth are some limited defense and are the best option I can see right now.
    • Up x 1