What is being done about non-obvious cheats?

...now i'm intrigued - out of interest, what are your opinions the guy in this recent thread ?
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...he-guy-was-cheating-it-might-be-a-bug.255720/

He's not hacking, he's exploiting a known bug. Now the dude is trash and shouldn't be abusing that, but people will be people I guess. When the game glitches me in weird spots or doesn't render terrain properly, I chose to be a man and redeploy, or wait for stuff to render. I don't need to be spoon fed kills other than the noobs that run into my headshots. That said, other opportunists will take advantage of bugs like this they encounter, which doesn't happen often, but should get them banned.

I took the time to look him up, I think it's safe to assume that it was a one-time incident, where he chose to exploit the fact he was glitched into a building to finally get a few kills.

Send that video to CS and he'll be banned. It also doesn't appear that everyone else was cheating, nor that this was a scripted cheat.

Again, there are the occasional cheaters - which is why people record a video once in a while of one. However they amount to an insignificant portion of the playerbase, and and infinitely smaller portion of these cheaters are actually using scripts or abusing something other than the one bug they encounter in their favor.

I feel we've strayed away from the main topic of the thread that was accusing subtle scripted hackers/cheaters to be significantly present in the game.

That's fine - I agree - just wanted to test your moral compass, that's all. There was another thread where someone was shooting people from under the ground and it was almost portrayed as RPGs fault by some...

It's not hard to understand their perspective. There are numerous bugs - some of which have been present since the early stages of the game's development, and have never been addressed. Ofc, it's a tedious task to go through and pound em all out, especially after years of amassing them with little care.

But at the end of the day, we shouldn't have to tell them it's time to clean their room. After years of piling bugs, it's a formidable task, yes. But it's also one that must be done, and will continue to catch up to the game the longer it gets ignored. Players are willing to help point them out, some even suggest detailed solutions for the team.

Personally, I think the fault is in both camps. The cheater is silly and obtains little to nothing in doing so, but it's also partly the dev's fault for leaving so many opportunities unchecked for cheating. Yes, these bugs usually only occur once in a while, but they can be exploited when they do occur, and they can ruin the game experience a bit even for honorable players who do the right thing when stuck in those situations.

I guess in the end it's up for interpretation, but I believe both parties are responsible, one for being naive and the other for exploiting the other's naivety. You can leave all your valuable outside your home. You can blame others for their disappearance, or yours for trusting others. Some laws are created to punish, others to prevent. I think it's better to scare people by announcing you'll chop off the hands of those who steal, rather than to tell people they'll maybe at worst face a few months in a heated room with entertainment, food and a salary. There's nothing right or wrong, it's all up to personal interpretation and different approaches to human nature.

It's a bit of a stretch, but where I mean to get at is that cheaters aren't entirely responsible for cheating. It should also be the dev's common sense to assume there are people who will abuse the flaws of the game and cheat whenever they can (albeit few, thankfully - otherwise we'd all be living in chaos). It's hard to establish tough punishments for a free to play online game, especially with a global reach. I would try to get them to do hardware bans more frequently, since that would really slow down the 2-3 scripted cheaters. Additionally I would work on smoothing out bugs people can exploit, and treats exploits like hacking. Although exploits are a bit harder to spot without player help, these cheaters should also be hardware banned once some sort of evidence is received by CS. That I think would help reduce and deter the amount of occasional cheaters, although we'll never really be able to get rid of the scripted ones (thankfully, they represent basically nothing of the community, and have little impact).

One would think, yes. Problem is it could also be a legit alt of a veteran player. The autobans they tried previously bumped into this.

Planetside 3 must not be 100% free to play. Get it close maybe but not 100%.

It should cost to create a character if not subscription is required.

Exploiting versus Hacking should be clear enough to distinguish however ... Wasn't our famous Wrel himself making videos about climbing vertical walls by jumping frenetically with an high enough FPS?

at the beginning when sony owned it they didn't do much but at least they got some people banned. But, now that there aren't that many accounts playing. I can guaranty you that those that hack if they pay, they won't get ban. Come on don't be naïve.

I don't think anyone considers the jumping maneuvers to be an exploit.

I can't believe there is even a discussion wether there are cheaters out there.

Have you heard of GOOGLE? Or YOUTUBE?

For example:


How about this nice demonstration how its easily possible to stream with cheats on?


Or my personal favorite:
redacted

This is my favorite because it can be so easily explained away by bad internet,
Unfortunately I often put upward of 10 shots into a guy only to have him turn around and ending my life with a single *tink* (as in a single headshot). Most of them are propably OK and I'm being ****** over by having GOOD internet.
But this happens a bit too often to not to be suspicious.

Yes there are cheaters out there.

How many? I don't know.
At least twice as many as the obvious ones.
The obvious ones just want to troll. They want to feel the rage of their helpless victims and enjoy ruining their day. Until their *** gets kicked out of the game. Depending on the mood they will just create a new account and continue though.
Well, some of them apparently also want to advertise the capabilities of their cheatsoftware.

The smart ones on the other hand?
They will not shoot you through walls, from under the floor, from the other side of the map with 100% headshot rate.
At least not in a way you notice.
They don't want to troll.
They want to WIN. They want to show that they are better than other players and be recognized for it. Being noticed cheating is quite detrimental here.
Maybe they even think that everybody else is cheating and just want to level the playing field? Or at least thats what they tell themselves.

Instead they will have a subtle aimassist that makes them good, but not godlike.
Or not so sublte, but in a situation where its hard to notice.
A bit of wallhack that enables them to prefire while you sprint around the corner and take another half a second to bring your gun to bear.
They will lagswitch for a second while opening fire on your ESF with theirs, and when you notice you are under fire you are already as good as dead.
And you will propably think that you were so focused on something else that you noticed too late.
Maybe they will even shoot you through a wall but it is a biolab fight and you will think he shot you through the door or a window when you were running past or weren't looking. Or you got hit in the door and the damage only registered when you were back in cover?

Fact is Planetside 2 has a very awkward (meaning sometimes barely working) hitdetection. It is MMO. It is F2P. And battles can become exceedingly chaotic.
Are there cheaters? Yes.
And I think neither we nor the devs can do anything about it.
CS:GO can't get rid of cheaters, and afaik they have a system where volunteers can watch suspicious gameplay from the POV if the suspect. They often get caught, but they come back.
And PS2 doesn't the infrastructure for something that precise and neither do they have the resources.

EDIT: I removed the third youtube link because it contains a link to the used program.
I thought thats propably not good for the official forums.
It was about lagswitching and should be easy enough to find if you want to search

There are cheaters, yes. However acknowledging the fact there are cheaters shouldn't ease blowing the situation out of proportion. Every game has cheaters, and they account for a minority of the population.

When we talk about people who are actually "hacking" to cheat,, there's even less. A guys posting 3 2-minute videos shouldn't give reason to assume there's tons of cheaters out there. There have been numbers published back when the game had way more players than now, and these cheaters that seemed to be "everywhere" actually turned out to account for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. They were near insignificant numbers, like less than 20 people using hitbox cheat back with the game had 20k players.

They've patched up a few issues to make the game harder to hack, and overall it's not a threat they'll ever be able to deal with, other than continuously ban the 2-3 dudes who still roam around creating new alts to hack and troll people for a few hours.


Subtle cheaters....it's really a stretch. Here we make everything to describe these dudes as impossible to identify, because they hack to play normally, or just above the average. Guess what dude, instead of thinking these are supernatural cheaters, the much more likely conclusion we can come too is that these cheaters are simply normal players, who aren't cheating!

Yeah really, it's obvious to tell when someone is cheating, there's no such thing as a "subtle cheater", because that would go against the very nature of cheating. With the weird connection issues and poor netcode, it's not hard to blame some people for being suspicious, but at the end of the day you should face the reality: encountering a cheater is an extremely rare occurrence. If you think you encounter one (or multiple) in each of your sessions, well I'm sorry dude, but they're not cheaters - you just suck. Most vets will tell you in all their years of play they can count the cheaters they've seen on one hand. Some have never even encountered a cheater at all.


Finally, you can keep the links to the "cheats". The devs don't read these forums, and if anyone is dumb enough to try using them they deserve the viruses and problems that will come from downloading shady files (that likely don't even work) from shady websites. Remember cheaters won't usually share their secrets, because they don't want to bring attention to their cheats. IF it's one guy doing a mana turret hack once in a while, it's less an issue than if 10 dudes or 20 do it, which would pressure the devs to actually find a permanent solution against it. So usually if you see a cheater link his cheats, it's either not his or he's trying to scam you!

I guess this is the key point - nobody is claiming that cheaters don't exist, so the question remains, is it possible that people may be using these hacks in a subtle way in order to gain an advantage rather than going full-rambo ?

You seem to believe it's a real stretch of the imagination - personally I do not but that's fine, we just have different opinions.

I base my opinion on the generally available hacks (pre-Battleye) that went to extraordinary lengths to avoid looking too obvious - with a whole gambit of adjustability in order to be good, very good or indeed, full-rambo should you choose.


BUT all said and done - I actually want many (paying) people to believe that PS2 is fair dinkum - that the cheats are all to-the-max a-holes that get removed moderately quickly most of the time - leaving behind a wretched hive of scum and villainy that forces you to be cautious but not suspicious...

This was really blown out of proportion. The numbers SOE published, the lawsuits and the adjustments SOE did for the game based on the whole community screaming there were cheats everywhere really shows how silly it is to spread such rumors. In the end, there were no "subtle cheaters", the amount of people cheating were extremely minimal, and the actions taken by the team to deal with them were a bit extreme, but it was a good way to deter the few cheaters a bit more.

It's also important to note that the hitbox cheats are no longer possible, aimbot is easily detected, no matter how "subtle" it is.

That said, I could pull up folders and folders of rage tells I get in game, calling me a hacker, aimbot, cheaters, whatever. And my KDR is below 1.5 and my accuracy under 30%. Some people are just convinced that anything that kills them is cheating. Thanks to the online nature of the game, it's easy to say "that dude is better than me cuz he hacks". But in reality, there's a huge chance that they've never even encountered a hacker. I guess years of hearing people cry wolf for no reason could also be a reason why I don't believe anyone is hacking unless I see the blatantly obvious cheat.

Also worthy of being said, I am usually the first one to try and bully the hacker away when I see one (thankfully I rarely have to do this)!

I literally died to a guy who ate somewhere between 8-10 shots from a naginata from behind while already fighting a guy.
He snapped around and instantly put a headshot into me with an Obelisk that somehow killed a full health/shields/adrenashield heavy in one hit. And he still had half health.
I don't even know how that cheat would work if it was a program.
But it propably was simply a lagswitch, cutting off his internet, stopping his damage and giving him time to line up a couple headshots who would register as a single shot for me as soon as he reconnects.
Unfortunately it could also be a legit and incredibly fortuitious lagspike.

Another guy killed me at almost point blank with only headshots - by facing away from me.
Apparently he saw me in a totally different spot, didn't stop him killing me though.

A third one ran through my suppressive fire and blocked it with his head, eating propably just short of half a dozen headshots and then got killed with another 10 bodyshots or so, for which he managed to activate his HA shield.
But he was full on sprinting so he never even brought his weapon to bear before dying.
Nevertheless I got hit by enough consecutive headshots to bring my once again full health/shield/adrenashield heavy to just short of dying. And he was the only possible source - the guy who died without raising his gun.


While stuff like the former is really pretty rare, the latter happens to me every single time I play this game. Rarely in that extreme, but there is no single battle where it does not happen.
It is especially jarring to see how fast most BR 1-20 enemies die to my fire while some BR 90+ almost survive twice as long.
And if they kill me, death recap almost always shows more health than the hitmarkers I got should leave.

I know that this is a sign of bad internet.
I sometimes noticed it on myself when the server was basically dying.
It is theoretically entirely possible that there is, a lets say 20%, chance for experienced players to have crappy internet.
I noticed the same guys who tend to ignore damage are also the ones landing almost only headshots.
It is propably also theoretically possible that all of those 20% have godlike aim and reflexe and rarely ever don't hit the head.
But I kind of doubt that.


I've told you the reasons to cheat in my post above.
I know it is still possible to cheat. And it is not even hard to do.
Games have died because of cheaters, cheaters try to go unnoticed and Planetside is F2P.
And yet, for some reason, you keep insisting that it is basically impossible for cheaters to exist.
In the past there was a massive crackdown that improved the experience for a lot of people who fondly remember it, yet you somehow claim that it was "blown out of proportion".

Do you know about occams razor?
What sounds like the easier explanation?
That about a fifth of players I meet has a connection thats bad and coincidentally confers them various advandages?
Or that there are players who covet those advantages and will worsen their connection intentionally to get them?

Can I do something about it or somehow distinguish between them? No.
But I have little reason to believe people won't do more than just limit Planetsides network priority if they want to. And that is already bad enough.


Neither can I prove the existence of cheaters, nor can you prove their absence.
But I will never not disagree with claims that there are no cheaters.
Because all evidence, stories, allegations, videos and everything else we might think of aside, If my experience with the internet has taught me one thing, it is that the very thought that there are no cheaters in a free-to-play game is delusional.

No one ever denied the fact the aren't any cheaters. There's a few cheaters out there, they might make up at most a fraction of a percent of the player base. Then there's the cheaters who aren't exploiting opportunists, those "hackers" everyone complains about. Those might amass to maybe 3-4, 5 players out of the entire community? Really, really, really insignificant amounts, that make encountering one extremely rare.


As you mention, most (i mean 99.9999999999999999999%) of the stuff people call out "HAX" for basically amounts to poor connection due to ping/lat and crappy netcode. Props to you for admitting that, it's really annoying to deal with, and there have been times where I've had to log out because most people I was fighting had little to do hitreg, and 1hk lmgs.

There is one misconception I'll point out for you.

Ok maybe 2.

The first one is with lagswitch. I would throw in the lagswitch guys with the hackers, it's really a rare, uncommon occurrence, because you don't need a lagswitch in Planetside 2. There's no region lock. It's quite easy for people to play on servers outside their region, where they can be blessed with a 300 ping/lat advantage. We'll take Connery for example. It's a server notorious for attraction asian players. People from Japan, China, Korea. Some have to use a vpn because their country doesn't allow foreign websites. Needless to say, when they hop on, people notice. There's this peak time where a majority of the asian community on Connery plays, and if you're there during those times....good luck dude, you're basically facing invincible players. None of them have to use a lagswitch, since they already have 100000 ping regardless.

And then the misinterpretation number 2: sure, some of these players might be "good", or whatever. We'll never really know. But most of them are complete trash. Seriously, once you start finding workarounds to their advantages, you realize most barely know how to play. That's why I love to teabag and v5 those players after killing them, it gets them so mad cuz they know its true
What gives you the impression they are landing only headshots and have insane reflexes - is the connection! Basically thanks to clientside extrapolation, all these laggy bois see on their screen is players running in straight lines. As bad as someone is, it's hard to miss a headshot when your opponents are all moving along predictable trajectories. Ad what makes it seem like the damage is instant or that the dude snaps around, is once again the connection. The guys connection is so bad he misses a few tics, and it looks like the damage, movement all happens at onc eon your screen, when in fact he's been shooting you for a good 5 minutes. And the reason he's still half health is because as he's missed the tics your damage practically disappears, or catches up to him - as he's had time to pop a medkit, recharge his shield and press f. And the possibility of experienced players having trash internet is pretty high, considering it's an 8 year old game.

As for occam's razor, I think you've approached the problem backwards. They aren't good players with bad connection. They're "good" players because of their trash connection.

Also I might add:
Is it easier to assume that a fifth of the playerbase runs lagswitches, downloads scripts, proxies or goes through the trouble of coding scripts themselves, and then set limits on these scripts just to avoid getting detected AND that the devs don't ban them?
Or is simply the fact that it's an old game with poor netcode, clientside detection and no ping/region lock that allows for some wonky situations?

Massive crackdown that banned 19 individual IPs who were abusing of an issue where hitbox files could be modified if you had the old files. Also forced legit players to post videos and streams of their sessions because the community couldn't tolerate them not getting banned. Surely if they have a better KDR than me and aim for the head they hack! I guess a benefit of that is that most of the great players have YouTube channels where they dump clips from time to time. Maybe some players will learn from watching them...?

Everyone cried about, everyone saw hitbox cheaters everywhere...SOE spent months investigation, doing this "massive crackdown", even taking a few cases to court. Result was the game files are automatically validated constantly and hitbox files locked behind bars.

You're going to have a tough time explaining how you even noticed that 19 players went missing, or that your experience magically improved overnight, in days where the game had 20k players.

I think there was already threads about this, and YouTube videos, but yeah, if you seriously noticed a difference with those "massive crackdowns"...well props on you dude, you've got talent.

And while planetside 2 is free to play, that doesn't mean masses flock towards it. I can hack age of empires 2 or exploit some bugs in Nintendo 64 games. Who cares? Cheaters want validation that they are better than others, or simply want people to troll. Planeside 2 no longer has a proper community for that, and people are super aggressive against cheaters (being able to tk helps).

Few people are going to bother visiting a game like Planetside 2, instead they want to hack the newer titles, be good on the hyped games (that doesn't mean those games are infested with cheaters, again, few people cheat). Especially in a game as uncompetitive as Planetside 2. Who cares about KDR when you can sit in a banshee and farm unchallenged, or where terrain and bugs will often kill you.

Yeah, that explanation is actually rather easy.
It was the introduction of Battleeye, not the crackdown and I confused those events.

And you are right, since I haven't yet sunken so low to disconnect or slow my internet intentionally to get myself an advantage I may have misconceptions how it works exactly.
But I don't really care HOW somebody cheats.
Lagswitching is not a so called third-party programm, but it is nonetheless an unfair advantage.
And really, I end up far too often on the receiving end of it for not at least a part of it to be very intentional.

Again, what did battleeye do? Apart from the rush of good player who created alts and started farming super stats to see if they would get banned (which they did, then complained to the devs, who loosened the restrictions), there's not much impact it had. Again, it's more of a placebo than something that actually produced tangible, concrete results. It's hard to produce visible results when all batteleye is doing is blocking my onedrive sync and trolling the sub 0.5% of the playerbase who cheats. "Hackers", which btw, can bypass the program anyways.


Lag switching is easily detected. Both people who use programs or hardware to lagswitch are detected and banned. After all, it's not hard to identify players artificially manipulating their traffic, and it will get people banned. It's also not very common, and the amount of players that would even attempt to use one is...minimal, to say the least. And anyone under suspicion of using a lagswitch is subject to being banned.

As I explained before, it's highly unlikely you're encountering cheaters, that includes those using a lagswitch. And I and countless players have explained countless times why this happens, and why it's perfectly normal in this game, and there's 0 cheats involved with this. Why don't you show us some footage of your sessions and people you're accusing, so we can crackdown on what the issue is.

I used to be a bf3 admin. The subtle cheaters are the worst. Yes a horrible spamcheater can empty a server but tool like procon etc can deal with them automatically. The issue is the subtle ones, the ones that cheat to be good but are smart enough to be sneaky about it. We had great community websites that helped us make informed decisions about these players. All kinds of stats. But in this game, there arent GM's at least not on that scale and no communitytools like that so they neither can nor will spend time and money on it. It's really unfortunate but it won't change.

Uh, case in point:

https://ps2.fisu.pw/player/?name=tankyoumuch

Reported multiple times, but he's still happily shooting up the server. I noticed him because he stands off at extreme range, and never misses -- which even for the pros, requires some "walking in" of shots on distant targets. There's incidentally an entire outfit of tankriding cheaters on Emerald (not this guy's outfit), which I'll leave you to guess.

The real non-obvious cheaters stick to vehicles, or sniping. Much, much harder to prove. Typically only noticeable because they are always moving, and they never miss.

Foul