Its time to Have an Ingame player GM

yeah we already heard the whole story of not giving Game master powers to the wrong person ETC or whatever BS story from the past you conjure up. theres no need to spit the same reply off every thread.

the anti cheat clearly doesnt work, the same hacker is getting around whatever tether you all are trying to prevent him from coming back again and again, unfortunately it isn't working.

past 3 days the same dude has been running rampant at large fights hacking and killing everyone.

its clear his motives are to kill the game.

his most recent name "Picardsendshisregaurds" mocking the R18 Leader is obvious this hacker used to/has an legitimate ingame main account, for all we know it could be an R18 player or just another R18 hater.


with the current state of the game and the server merge is just going to feed the hacker more motivation to kill the game and do everything and anything in his power to ruin every fight.


if this continues the game will definetly die quicker than expected due to this hacker.


its time to have ingame GM's that can delete this kid on the dot.


***** Obviously, don't give these powers to anyone who will side with his friends, or even has friends to begin with in this game.


how this will be done i dont know. but what i do know is if someone applys for this they must have full monitoring of them using it over the course of their application before considering they actually get it.


making a post about this announcement if there ever would be one, reddit wouldnt be a good place to even consider as there are many manchilds on there who will use it on ill will.

OR simply hire somone to do it themselves while working at the department.

whatever way there is, it needs to be done already. ive played many games that were in its dying stage and its when the hackers are the most prevelent to kill the game, and its clear that is the motive of this dork who has been currently doing it. the hacker has suprisingly hasnt killed me, i havent been killed by a hacker in months, maybe because of what i do in the game and stay on the outskirts of big fights, but like i said, ive seen this same scenario in other late stage games like this and its just another one of those, if nothing is to be done about it.

but if you aren't trying to save the game so be it.

in my perspective based how bad this community is towards the devs its the equivalent of people who hate cops calling the cops when they need them and they don't show up, and frankly, the community deserves it but there are people who dont deserve to deal with this either.

I would do it for Cobalt and Miller.
Only Problem: Semester started and so studying is THE priority.

I saw that character and several others either speed hacking, shooting through the ground and walls and killing players in droves in the spawn tubes. So far it’s been mostly on Emerald and starts around 9 pm Pacific standard time.

I don't trust anyone who would volunteer. I trust automated detection.

What needs to happen is the automated metrics detection needs to be tightened up. A legitimate new player is not going to trigger a metrics-based detection system. A veteran player who creates a brand new account and goes on a tear while pretending to be a new player should be caught. I have no sympathy for vet players who create new accounts and get banned. No one has ever been able to give me a legitimate reason why they need to create a new account.

So dial up the automatic metrics-based detection and catch cheaters faster. Force them to make new accounts every 5 minutes. The detect the source of the account creations and ban at the HW and IP levels.

It wasn't that it existed at all, it was that the people who created the automated system had no idea what was possibly of good players and had a whole bunch of terrible mechanics attached. It also wasn't just new accounts, and it also wasn't just new characters.

This (and the linked threads in this link) go into more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside...ear_up_any_confusion_here_is_a_brief_rundown/

For this first part, there are valid reasons, including not being able to be alt-tracked by other players. It was known even back then that directive score and cosmetics can be tracked by account, and this was also back when people took the game far more seriously and would go on vendettas/mass reports/3rd faction TKing/borderline stalking & harassment against people.

Doesn't hold as much weight today, but there was a reason back then.

In some past post I discussed the idea of GMs.
My only concern is who do we grant the power to?
Obviously, you want to give it to the players with most experience because they know how far can they (the best) push the game to its limits. However, you don't want a single player to make the decision as to whether someone is hacking and then perma-ban them. I brought something to the effect of: Hacker is on team "X", "X" is currently duking it out with "Y". The players on Y's side notice or suspect that somebody is hacking. Players on Y need to report the hacker such that GMs are notified. Need a GM who primarily plays the X faction and another GM who primarily plays on the Y faction to show up with some kind of auditing tool.

If both GMs from X and Y conclude that the hackused is cheating (i.e., blatant no-clip, exploit, flying, teleporting, shooting from underground, etc.,) then they can permaban.

Less obvious forms of cheating like Wall hacks or Aimbot are trickier. Why? Because there are vets who have higher game sense or such perfected aim that the newer players cannot distinguish their performance from the aforementioned cheats. On these forums, there is a guy that goes by "elusive" who is really good with Bolt-Actions (search him). I can only assume that he gets hackused for Aimbot all the time. I'm from Connery and have been on both the side of and side against to a guy that goes by "Shawty" who is also a god-like Bolter. I can only assume he gets hackused for Aimbot all the time.

I have been hackused by the lowest denominator of players (people who chain pull Hornet ESFs from player-made bases and bail as LA or who chain pull Viper Lightnings from those same bases and drive as Stalker infiltrator) for scoring satisfying airshots on their ESFs or catching them with the darklight flashlight on my NS Baron. Make sure that whoever is the GM, they can tell which complainants are little-@#$%^ and which are the legitimately concerned planetmen.

There should be a way for GMs to compose a report where they state their consensus. Examples. "This player is suspicious but we cannot ascertain whether they are cheating"<- Let go, or "this player has been wrongly hackused now and in the past" <- Let go. Or "this player is leveraging an exploit"<- suspend.

Obviously, opportunities to appeal should the system somehow fail.

In game, player driven and provided policing has never worked well. Here's some good articles on the downfall of Overwatch's In Game Reporting tool that relies on community voting/reports.

Key takeaway: With hundreds of thousands of reports, automated systems are required to parse and automate the adjudication of reports. The process relies on frequency of other players. Which means false reporting with a group of malicious actors could easily and successfully punish and bully other players.

A Case Study in Abuse Reporting Systems: Overwatch | by Randi Lee Harper | Medium
Blizzard Announces Changes To 'Overwatch' Reporting System | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
Overwatch One-Trick Exposes Broken Report System (noobfeed.com)

He's on AlbatrossofTime at it again tonight. Just insta-killing everyone through the ground and walls with turrets and ****. t's sad that literally one person can ruin this game to the point that it's not worth staying logged in.

Could maybe give the job to Mithril,
instead of sculking in the shadows looking for forum threads to lock and comments to delete we could give him an actual job.

Stopping scriptkids should be a top priority for DBG because it is one of the things that makes people not want to play
So i dont get why DBG think they have the cash for a forum sculker but they cant get a GM?!
Serious mismanage of priorities.

Not sure if you noticed, but game updates are being posted by Mithril now in Wrel's absence. Certain that DBG is extremely short on personnel.

Ooo posting brief patch notes several times per year! Intense undertaking!

My point is, if they can afford a dude to shut down conversations on the forum
and post occasional patch notes, they can afford a guy to do a REAL job.

I'd be happy to do the job is they paid me in OS's to nuke armor zergs with.

Great idea, anyone that asks for it is the very last person to be granted it....

I'm well aware of that post. I read it when it was first posted. Long story short: A bunch of clowns decided to test the autoban system. They f**ked around and found out.

The devs had (have) a VERY good idea of what a TRUE NEW PLAYER was capable of. And creating a new DBG account qualifies as falsifying information and is a violation of Rule #3 of the Terms of Service:

"You represent and warrant that any information you provide in connection with your access to and use of any Daybreak Game(s) is true, accurate and complete, and that you will maintain and update such information as needed, such that the information remains true, accurate and complete."

This was my stance then and is to this day.

If I recall correctly, it was ONE legit old account that got flagged. There's NOTHING wrong with that. A small number of false positives is absolutely acceptable and preferable to allowing cheaters to run rampant and only detecting "blatant rage cheaters."

If you are being harassed, there are legitimate means of dealing with that. Creating new accounts is not a legitimate way of dealing with it. This same behavior is used by cheater who get caught cheating and spin up new accounts to circumvent those bans.

Bottom line: NO ONE from the community can be trusted. I'd rather have a bot that occasionally false-positives than have a human that has all of the problems that come with human frailties.

It wasn't only new characters or accounts, and even pretending it was, the fact is that it isn't against ToS to create multiple accounts or characters on existing accounts, which, ONCE AGAIN, were both triggering the ban.

And no, the devs have never, and still do not know jack **** about how this game actually plays. Not a single one of them was good, the only one who came even remotely close was Drew.

Did you mean to link a different section? That is about valid account information, it has nothing to do with owning multiple accounts.

Only one that was in that thread, of which, there was only like four or five different players named. It wasn't just those players triggering bans, they were just the ones to be named.

1. As above, not against ToS to own multiple accounts nor to create new characters constantly.
2. You can't hide your online status.
3. You can't avoid players 100% of the time while playing; if they want to find you, they will.
4. Ignore only stops text.
5. Reports take a while, and people would use multiple accounts.
6. A cheater (or even griefer/harasser) does a lot of things legitimate players do, it's a false equivalency.

I largely agree, just stop using those ridiculous claims and faulty reasoning.

Meanwhile P99 has been running strong with community GMs.

You people saying "no one can be trusted" are being overly ridiculous.

Yes everyone knows that a MMORPG is directly comparable to an FPS game.

They're not. For FPS games it's a lot harder to tell if someone is actually cheating unless they're blatantly shooting people through walls and that in games that are way less buggy than Planetside where shooting through walls is just normal gameplay thanks to the game being clientside.

i too would offer to do it for Cobalt when i'm online,
believe it or not there are people who won't just ban anyone they don't like.
there are some people on Cobalt who i despise, but would i ban them for cheating? nope.
there's a guy who spends all his time trolling around in a magrider ganking sunderers and killing fights,
it is literally all he does, even in off hours, i hate his guts, but he isn't cheating and i wouldn't ban him.

the people who take on the role should be high level with thousands of hours of investment,
and they should agree that if they abuse their power they can be subject to account termination themselves.
people like me have spent a decade of our lives on this game and thousands upon thousands of £,
i wouldn't throw it all aways just to temporarily ban someone i dislike.
i am HEAVILY invested in PS2 and my account (which is why i can often speak "passionately" about bad game changes.)

also people with thousands of hours know the "planetside quirks" that newer players might mistake for cheating,
like getting shot when you've ducked in cover (latency),
getting shot through a crate by a distant sniper (the crate hasn't rendered for them),
seeing an AP tank round fly past you but kill you anyway (it hit you on their screen) etc.

i remember a few years back we had some guy playing GM who clearly wasn't a player
because he banned a guy for using an ant in a biolab (he didn't know about anvils or ant turbo),
we don't need noob GMs like that.

i would absolutely take on the GM powers in order to stop the flying aimbot script kids from ruining my sessions.
(we have oshur for that.)

Don't hate on Oshur ❤

I'd be up for it too if given the chance. Ban the flying **** and get back to playing like a regular player

Just stopping by to remind people this was kind of tried with a youtuber and there was absolutely no controversy around his use of those powers in a live server....