Question about hacking and detection

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Rayden78, Aug 3, 2021.

  1. Rayden78

    Because Vanu had the joy to have a technically superior flying MAX yesterday.

    Why is it so hard for the server to detect a insanely fast flying MAX for several minutes and just kick it right on spot, without even anyone having to report it.
    • Up x 3
  2. DarkSolusX

    I feel you, and for some reason, it always happens to be a VS MAX (no offense, VS mains, but that's a fact). And as for why nobody does anything?

    Mainly because the anticheat is absolute garbage able to be bypassed by a preschooler, there is no human oversight on a half-dead game with barely a thousand people playing at prime-time, and when a ban DOES happen, the cheater just uses a new account and a VPN to jump right back in. Some good anticheats actually log your hardware (CPU/GPU) IDs so that you can't play from the same PC if you're banned, and PS2 doesn't have that, sadly.

    Rant over.
  3. JustGotSuspended

    Yeah I mean why don't the police stop crime before they happen or immediately after it occurs without anyone having the need to call them to report it!

    Solid point mister, hope this gets implemented in literally every single game ever in the future.
    • Up x 1
  4. Rayden78

    Can you read?

    If the MAX is already flying around shooting tons of people from the skies i guess the crime has been already commited.
    • Up x 3
  5. JustGotSuspended

    ofc, my bad, what I meant to say is....oh wait go back to first reply and finish reading the sentence

    :)
  6. Liewec123

    Not really comparable though, sure in real life crimes can go undetected, but this isn't real life,
    Every single action that you do goes through the system and is logged.

    He has a point, there are things that could be done to detect irregularities.
    And when serious irregularities are detected the game could indeed autokick.
    • Up x 1
  7. Mechwolf

    You know what platform doesn't have this problem? PS4.
    • Up x 2
  8. JustGotSuspended


    Which is why people are banned by mods.

    What happened last time they tried making the autokick more severe? Unfortunately it's DBG so we have to choose between overkill and nothing. But considering the extent of the cheating problem, its safe to say it's under control, and probably not worth prioritizing buffing the autoban over deleting more bases and adding more explosions in game.

    Irregularities are hard to define. What are they? How long shot they persist? What if a vet creates a character, and the first person he kills is a dude that's practically afk in cqc. 100% accuracy and hsr. Should he be banned at this point? He kills another noob, still the same stats. Should he be banned? Some sessions I get 70% hsr, 3kpm and 2kdr. Others I get below 30% hsr, and kdr kpm of around 1. Should I be banned during my better session? It seems a little sus right?

    You see regardless, you're still going to have to gather enough data for a decent timeframe before autokicking the dude, otherwise you'd basically be banning alts and/or killstreaks. So regardless, the person's still going to be cheating for a given portion of time. With the modified hitboxes it was up to 20 minutes I think before the battleye banned autobanned. How long should we sample data before auto banning the dude? Let's say 20 minutes, which I feel is still a little short. So that cuts the time it takes to ban someone by about 3? And let's keep in mind that's if they don't bypass the autoban system...which would leave us in the same place.

    I guess if it makes you feel better, but honestly if people stopped spamming reports the mods would only have to deal with real reports, and let's be honest, I'd be surprised if there were more than one a week. It won't really satisfy the people asking for this though, because they are often just angry they aren't doing well, and prefer to blame cheating for their lack of accomplishments. No matter what happens, even if there were 0 cheaters in the game, people would still bring up blow up cheating as a leading issue with the game, even though it isn't.

    If I were DBG I'd publish stats about how many bans are made a day/week/month, how many reports come in vs how many are accurate, and average time it takes to ban upon receiving report. Maybe even how many of the cheaters had the same IP, and the types of cheats they were doing. Educate people and publish evidence about cheaters in this game, so at least when people start making a dozen threads in a row about how massive an issue this is, someone can pull up the stats and say, yeah dude, you're wrong...or right (who knows)!
  9. Rayden78

    I'm not talking about autobanning people who have questionable stuff, i talk about units flying around for 20 minutes which should not be able to fly (and also with higher speed than that unit could ever move)
  10. JustGotSuspended

    that the game theoretically does. People bypass it though
  11. Towie

    Yes they could do 'stuff'' for sure - on another game they implemented a check so that a person being hit with a bullet would be ignored if there wasn't a direct line of sight between the players, this check was removed at a certain battle rank assuming that anyone 'cheating' would have been caught by then and so they allow for the inconsistencies of the engine and the internet.

    The challenge is - what to implement ? The flying ground vehicle appears to be a recurring favorite of the current true hack-maisters (i'm excluding asset hacks or lagswitch or any of the other run-of-the-mill cheats here; i'm talking about something much more sophisticated that plays around with the internals). So what to do about those ?

    Set a height limit on ground vehicles ? You would hurt those who spend considerable time and effort getting said vehicle onto a Galaxy and invariably onto a Bastion. Maybe that's not such a bad thing but one of the beauties of PS2 is the sandbox nature of the game and I would hate to take anything away from that.

    Summary - could they do more ? Absolutely. BUT - it's not so easy and there's always a 'what-if'' scenario. Ask those vets who deliberately got themselves banned with the previous stat-based method.
    • Up x 1
  12. Liewec123

    I agree that it is probably banning a fare few of them without us knowing about it,
    But recently it's became a fairly regular occurrence for a script kid to be flying around spamming headshots for HOURS.
    Last time I played (2 weeks ago) There were 3 of them on Cobalt at primetime.
    And they pretty much killed the primetime by making players leave.
    So clearly, while it might be doing its job for some scriptkids, it's pretty terrible with others and something needs to be added.

    One solution I've made before which doesn't rely on anti-cheat software is to add a /superreport option (for br40+).
    Which temp bans someone for 24 hours if they get enough superreports, and a gm can check it out at a later time,
    And as I said last time, there would be a big warning/confirmation when you use /superreport that a false report
    will cause a week temp ban and 2000 cert loss, and several false reports is a permanent ban.
    (the br40 limit prevents throwaway accounts from trolling with it,
    and the heavy cert penalty and week/perma bans prevent active accounts from trolling.)

    But you responded to that last time by saying that "BR doesn't matter" which I'd disagree with because br40,
    while not incredibly high, still requires a fair amount of time and investment.
    Not really worth 20 guys throwing away a few weeks of their time just to troll one guy for 24h.

    And you also tooted your own horn and said you'd probably be a victim to the false reports because you're so good,
    But again this would require a decent number of people who have put time and investment into this game to risk
    heavy penalties for false reports, this isn't the option that you use when you 'think' something is suspicious.
    This is the option that you use when there is a max flying through the air spamming headshots in every direction.

    I feel that it is a pretty foolproof system and would eradicate the script kids who ruin primetime for hours.
    • Up x 2
  13. JustGotSuspended


    I don't know, it doesn't seem like a good system tbh. Imagine you're just sweating around, playing the game as always, when suddenly you're banned for 24H because a team of zerglings decided you were there worst enemy. It's super easy for the zerglings to say "Oh well we didn't know he wasn't cheating it really seemed like it tbh" since there's no proof or anything it was done with malicious intent. And I mean imagine banning people and stealing their certs for making a report that could genuinely have been done with good intent. Even if a dude is flying around and acting like a human banshee, I'd still think twice before submitting a report that could cause me to be banned and lose certs. I'd just think to myself, I'll let someone else handle it.

    I'm not very good but people still get mad at me. Not even because I'm good half the time, for stupid reasons like killing them with a flare gun or playing heavy. There are a few "enemies" I have that have also gotten people I know renamed and banned for toxicity.

    I mean I guess it's one of those options that wouldn't take too long to implement (hopefully). It's not that bad an idea. Although idk how DBG is going to feel about banning people before proven guilty, but whatever.
  14. MonnyMoony

    I know right - it's getting so bad, flying VS maxes are even able to shapeshift to look like a TR max

    • Up x 1
  15. MonnyMoony


    It can't be beyond the realms of possibility to detect if somebody is cheating though.

    Since the game must necessarily know where units are and how they are moving in relation to the game world for the purposes of collision detection, hit detection etc, there must be forbidden zones where you'd never expect to find a unit type under normal circumstances.

    Surely it must be possible to write a script that detects if a unit is exploiting a forbidden zone - like gaining kills whilst the unit is below the ground or moving in a manner that is inconsistent with the unit type such as hovering 50m above the ground whist in a Max suit.

    Could the game designers not implement "out of bounds" rules for various unit types like what happens when you move off the edge of a map. Hover as a unit that should not be able to hover (e.g. Max, HA, Medic etc) - you get a 10 second countdown then die. Clip underneath terrain, same thing.
    • Up x 3
  16. Liewec123

    thats fine, we will!
    i think you can feel pretty confident you won't receive backlash for reporting one of those flying players.

    there wouldn't be communication, they wouldn't have the chance to BS,
    if you (and 19 of your friends) falsely report someone and they aren't cheating, you get the penalties.
    if 20 people feel like losing a collective 20 weeks and 40,000 certs with the risk of a permaban
    just to give one dude a single day ban, then screw them, they deserve what they get.

    if less than the required number of players report, then nothing happens,
    the player doesn't get banned and noone who reported them gets the penalties.
    so if a few people get salty and do decide that it is worth screwing themselves severely to troll one guy for 24h it wouldn't work.
    i've had hackusations before too,
    but i wouldn't worry about being banned through this system because it would just be the occasional report.
    to get banned through this system you'd need atleast 20 people over the BR threshhold to all report you in a short span of time.

    and again, this wouldn't replace the normal /report function which you could still use when you're suspicious,
    this would be for those times when someone is really being a noob and breaking out the scripts,
    the undeniable cheaters flying around murdering everyone.
    and it would work great for getting rid of them. (atleast at primetime)
  17. JustGotSuspended

    Solid suggestion, I don't see why no one thought of it before. Now I just hope I get to see the dude's face who gets auto-banned/killed because an OS blasted him too high up, or because he gal dropped from above 10m. Or the vehicles with turbo lol.

    This dude wouldn't stand a chance.

  18. LordAnnihilator

    Evidently we need SOMETHING, because now people are blatantly spawning teleporters, Infantry Terminals, and VR NPC Targets. Its getting a bit out of hand, so DBG kind of needs to either do something or make a clear statement about it before it gets much worse.

    Regarding Liewecs idea, I think it's a pretty decent idea, but it kind of replies on people being able to check the ban. Based on the fact people keep cheating, I'm not sure how good DB is at actually checking this stuff without someone on hand or with video evidence like cheater@planetside.com. The stats probably would give it away, but still, it might be possible to abuse with such little oversight like there is now.
  19. JustGotSuspended


    I mean I'm pretty sure the devs said the /report function doesn't work, only submitting actual CS tickets through the site, which got too annoying so they added 2 emails. So yeah, definitely won't replace it.

    Idk dude I don't see how anyone would be able to prove/disprove that someone knowingly abused the super ban feature to 24h ban a legit player.

    Oh well.
  20. JustGotSuspended

    True, especially if an exploiter that's not technically manipulating anything, video/photo evidence definitely would save some time I think.
    • Up x 1