well? For instance.. if i land a few headshots and kill someone and they call me a hacker and im "reported" just how far does SOE have to go to prove that person is either really hacking.. or not? I am curious because I have seen more threads about hackers and people who cheat and yet I dont believe a single one of them. Take the infamous NivX... I know he does not hack from his stream.. he chooses the best action to get the most kills with less deaths but people hate him because he is better than them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority So, how do you determine a real hacker is "hacking"
Not really sure what that proves exactly... First off SOE doesn't have anywhere NEAR the volume of on-duty Admins (which I was for a while) that Steam has. Two... that's a crap hack job in the first place if its DLL hooks were vac detected THAT quickly (again, I once built and ran some shenanigans myself for several months to test their levels of detection and that of my own peers in the admin community .... no one ever caught on ). Three.... well this might be personal experience only, but cheats just make all those games incredibly unchallenging after just a few days and the only exception where using them seems justified is when you're convinced that you'd bumped into another subtle cheater .... and more importantly, you're looking to goad him into going full Rage hacks. Here's the thing. SOE at the start of their "battle with hackers", didn't even have a proper framework. They were pulling up mem dumps from CRASH REPORTS to try and pick out this stuff. Funniest part was that people could just firewall off that send-IP and be mostly immune. And since then they haven't done crap to prevent the wallhacking server-side, and they're doing even less against hit detection fudging & Packet manipulation besides telling their legit customers: "We're really sorry about the Lag!, we'll fix it later ". Anything you hear from them that sounded aggressive against hacking, has always been bluster. There's been the same guy with the most blatant snaps I've ever seen recorded, posting videos to Ps2 communities for months now and he gets nothing but compliments. SOE hasn't bothered with any of the Pro detection methods or even once considered community involvement (spectating) in the process. They're just going to keep managing the fallout instead. (which admittedly isn't even that much anymore .... pops falling every 6 months) Other times they've banned innocent players simply due to /report abuse according to comments I've read elsewhere. No that doesn't mean /report actually does anything for an informed individual player, rather it suggests it's something hooked up specifically to give whalefits a "kick permanently" vote. ...I'm not sure which is worse honestly... Personally I'd much rather see a more open democratic process. That's what Steam Admins generally have to do b/c they're subject to appeals usually. That can also teach people what this stuff actually LOOKS like so they can spot it themselves b/c that IMO is the biggest issue with the community. Almost no one even knows with any certainty the difference... So many times I can't tell either b/c there's no server-side demo / replay available.
I've only been involved with a handful of online FPS games in my time, BF2142, Crysis 2 and now PS2. In my experience obvious 'hackers' are rare. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand people who I have seen clearly cheating. If that's the case then I don't see cheating as a serious issue. In 2142 and Crysis 2 there were people who were plainly cheating - Crysis 2 especially was one of the most cheat infested pieces of crap I have ever played. The devs basically stop bothering after a couple of months. As for cheat detection, I guess they would need real evidence. If they see someone who has a 95% Headshot ratio then suspicions might be raised but they're not gonna start banning people because they managed to get 3 headshots in a row and someone started whining. Years ago there was talk of heuristic cheat detection. This system didn't bother looking at whether system files had been altered. It analysed the performance of each player and decided whether or not it was possible for a human to perform at that level. Similar to how an athlete can be determined to have false started even if they set off after the gun has fired. A computer can detect if they set off in a time faster than a human could actually react and therefore before they had heard the gun. The makers for the game cheat system stated they had over 90% accuracy but I haven't heard about that system since.
The heuristic detection thing sounds nice, but I'm not sure if it works here. Because of the same reasons I'm never sure if someone is somehow cheating or legit - this game has too many bugs and features that could explain it just as well. Dude expected me coming? Might have been spotted by his teammate. Or by an invisible motion detector (I think they don't always render on the minimap). Not really possible to detect ESP imo. *pling* HS from 125 dmg carbine and dead? Hitdetection and ******** lag compensation propably. People seemingly walking through walls and getting in your back? Hell, I KNOW that some people simply appear out of thin air - I have seen it several times. It happens quite a lot to me that I enter a room, check the corners and get shot in the back from the very empty corner I just checked - by a HA. Just yesterday I knew a LA was following me, so I took a gravlift, shot the guy standing up there, turned around and waited for a second for the LA to float up to me. The LA popped into existence 2 m in front of me, on solid ground and crouched, and unloaded his shotgun in my face. I asked the guy whether he took the lift or kinda flew over me and dropped directly in front of me (which might look that way a bit), but he indeed DID take the lift. Used 25 bullets to kill an infiltrator but he didn't die to death? Hitdetection..... Seriously I don't know how I would ever recognize a cheater short of him warping around, or moving at 60km/h on foot, or shooting rockets with his SMG or something like that.
They obviously don't release details, as the people making hacks would benefit from knowing how the system works. In my many, many hours playing PS2 I've seen maybe 2 blatant hackers, and been banned myself once the reinstated with an apology and 1000SC. This leads me to think sufficient reports in a short space of time can alone trigger a ban, though if this is still the case I'm not sure. This seemed a bad policy to me at the time as it would be open to abuse by large outfits. It took a few days for a GM to review the case and reinstate my account. From my own ban, my experience was it happened shortly after I'd been LA in the roof of an amp station, repeatedly 2-shotting people at a sunderer below with slugs. I can only guess, but I can completely see how for the guys below it would look like hacking as they couldn't see me, then were suddenly shotgunned down. It's a sad consequence of the proliferation of hacks that generally people blame hacking for any situation that they're outsmarted or outgunned in, or that are down to lag. I'm not really an expert, but in the post above particularly in any situation where there's vertical movement, e.g a gravlift, the hit detection goes way off - shooting an LA in the air is always harder than it seems it should be. I think this is possibly because they save network bandwidth by sending fewer y-axis updates and having more client-side guesswork based on gravity/floor height, because generally players don't move vertically that much. Or it could simply be that vertical motion, e.g. falling, is often faster.
Lol @ the person in the comments section that admitted to using hacks in planetside 2. Apparently they are disabled and need the hacks to help them play.
That's a big part of the problem. There's so many significant lag and rendering issues in the game that it's often next to impossible to tell if someone is cheating, and very easy to falsely accuse someone if you aren't aware of how frequent lag and rendering issues are.
In the beginning they had lots of live admins/mods that would ban people frequently. At the same time they were building their anticheat system. Now they seem dependent on it and the reporting feature. . Since I don't see as many people using obvious cheats I would guess that the anticheat is doing it's job...to an extent. I say 'extent' because I saw a player teleporting all over the map yesterday. And I first started seeing that about 6 months ago. Also, I suspect that the not so obvious cheats, like aimbotting and heating are being used by some players in this game. . As for the reporting feature, I'm guessing that they have some query or report that shows the players who have been reported most. Then read what people are reporting about them, check their stats, and make their decision accordingly. But, if your a legit player and someone reported you because they were butt hurt, I wouldn't worry about it.
I'm fairly certain of a few things: 1) Anyone that's intentionally blocking crash reports from being sent back to SOE are going to throw up a red flag 2) Attaching a debugger is going to throw up a red flag 3) Legitimately skilled players are not getting banned for hacking
I remember watching a video once that SOE has the ability to re-create every battle with every player via server logs if they want/need to. It wouldn't surprise me if there's overwatch software that reports a suspected hacker and then a mod can just do a battle recreation for the suspected player.
Since Beta SOE and specifically Planetside 2 Developers have mentioned (and it's common knowledge throughout the community) that ANY third party program will be treated as a Hack, and you will be banned no questions asked, and you may not appeal it. Thats unfortunately what needs to happen in a F2P game - they need to make as an effective system as possible. That's also unfortunately why you see literally zero modifications to UI/functionality/music etc in-game, because SOE would ban you accidentally (though fully justifiable), for having your UI modded a little bit. If it's not supported - don't run it while PS2 is up. Recursion Stat Tracker is the exception as they sought out Dev support and acknowledgment that RST is not malware or game altering in any way.
It detects third party programs modifying your game (eg. an aimbot or really any cheat program) and does two things (from my understanding): -blacklists the program -bans the user Apparently whatever they are using is custom and highly effective, considering there is only about one hack site left that still supports PS2 hacks (and its paid, and they may have gone out of business for PS2 hacks, idk). It usually takes a few hours for them to be banned, and from what I understand the first ban is an account ban. If you make another account and hack again you get an IP ban or HWID ban. Maybe both idr. Its a pretty great system, beats pretty much any other system I have seen or used before. The report system is still there, but I don't think it actually does anything against hackers (however I believe it does kick you if a certain number of reports are filed against you). Idk what actually happens with reports, I assume CS or the GMs read them and do stuff based on them.
I would assume its a 2 phase process. (inb4 soe stuck in phase 1 jokes) First is probably flagging players through automated anti-cheat and /reports. Players using hacks that get detected are probably just instantly banned. Players who gets flagged as suspicious or gets a bunch of /reports are most likely sent to a GM that uses logs/recreation and spectating to determine if someone is cheating.
As a developer let me give you an example, if someone use an hand gun and literally send a shoot command every 0.10 second when you substract his ping and is using a gun that can shoot at this pace optimally, they could log it server side and if it happen 100% of the time over a long period then it would be really suspicious, they could also implements this logic client side and send it to the server when it happen but it would be less safe. Sorry for my bad English, this is just an example. But by logging on server side suspicious action that should not occurs or certain action that shouldn't occurs 100% of the time, they can find out. But this is SOE, I don't know if anything like this is implemented. There is a lot of different strategies to counter a lot of hacks type.
I wouldn't be so sure about that one.... This only works when they've back-engineering a program they already have access to, and often only the most up to date one. IE: they actually have to procure the working program from the hack maker to know what memory signatures to scan for. A number of hack writers only share programs with people in their outfits or tight little circles so they will NEVER be detected. Those guys do not advertise. It's a huge waste of resources IMHO to even go through all that, and there's a reason that programs like Overwatch are better in the long run for an educated and well equipped community. I have a feeling that has more to do with how poorly managed this game's combat -vs- netcode really is. Too many deaths just feel needlessly punitive or frustrating. ...like not even compared to Halo or Tribes, but like, worse than any UnrealTourney game ever made. Granted they've messed with this TTK tweaking in some encounters such as Vehicle VS Infantry. But that's not even really where cheats are the most practical (unless you're an Airhammer junky I guess). This kind of buttresses with that article's apologeticism towards bad matchmaking. ....Except in PS2's case, a lot of that is the result of a bad meta & redeployside & just badly implemented spawning & pop/directives incentives & XP farming in general. They could fix so much of it if they'd just immediately get to putting some of Wrel's ideas into practice. But no they won't do that, they're going to push this "Cert economy" thing instead that the exploiters will just find a way to abuse before it even leaves Test server....
