Auto Kick for hacks is BS

The hackers if they are smart enough will not play like they are hacking they will do a few kills then die ! to keep from being spotted! I believe you need a better anti cheat system. As well as i hear guys talking how they are running aim assist on comms in game! and showing there streaks to be high!

Sim, that's what reporting is for, to catch the hackers, and do you REALLY think a mod a just teleport and ban someone easily? There is a process to be followed, and automatic anti-cheat might not be perfect, but it works, however, some hacks still get past often, and some good people are banned, no anticheat is perfect, but the devs strive towards it. And BTW, killing yourself and resetting death count does NOT reset the anticheat, probably, it should still track it.

Also, please add grammar, I can barely read what you are saying. This looks more of a ramble with ill content.

The system works for hackers.
Hackers are lazy people (except maybe for the creator), that's why they use hack! They want to have an easy time doing their stuff... So they don't want to go through the effort of having this amazing hack only to have to die on purpose every X kills.

Even if smart hackers did do this to avoid the system... Wouldn't you think that this system at least improves the game? Without the system hackers would hack at will, with this system they suddenly need to die on purpose every X kills to not be found by the system! That's a victory in itself.

I could run a slight aimbot or wallhack and no one would ever know, as long as the system can't detect the hack itself. The only ones who get caught are the ones who make it super obvious, and even then they don't always get caught. I've run into this guy multiple times in the past week. He's and obvious aimbotter, and I've reported him, but he hasn't been banned by the system: https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/5428381682173033409/

He rolls with this guy all the time, who is probably a hacker too: https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/5428077650427157521

It's a joke.

I've gotten over all the frustration with hackers years ago. It just can't be completely stopped.

I remember back in BF1942 my brother's outfit competed in the CAL league and other sanctioned matches which were 3rd party monitored for hackers. Even though every player Knew they were being monitored there still was an average of somewhere around 30 players per week caught/banned for hacking lol...
My brother became a fairly good acquaintance with someone on the PunkBuster team and they basically admitted they had for the most part threw their hands in the air after PunkBuster2. They just could not weather the onslaught of people writing hacks and the people willing to use them.

If it makes you feel any better at least you know that whatever YOU have achieved ingame, it was earned fairly. They on the other hand will have to carry the stink of shame upon them, long after they log off. I can't imagine it's a good feeling to walk around knowing you lack the character to earn things through effort, and that everything is built on a lie. That can't lead to positive affirmations of one's self...

No system or program will ever catch all of them all of the time.
I agree with Demigan

Better to catch some than none at all.

Of course the system doesent catch all hackers, but it does get some.
And that makes it worth it.

Honestly I'd be surprised if there has ever been ONE subtle hacker banned because of /report.

I've put in reports with ridculous killboard screenshots, full discriptions of the behaviour and absolutely nothing was done.

The report function is IMO a pure placebo.








They should have more effective auto-stats though, for example, when a guy kills 5000 people with normal accuracy, normal amounts of headshots and normal to low amounts of infantry K/D ratio.

Then suddenly goes to 90-100% headshot kills with an infantry K/D of well over 8 to 1 that should flag up with big red lights! (especially when he can headshot people within their spawnroon).

As a general rule, hackers are not subtle.

I've always said that PS2 should be $10 to buy, with 1000 DBC included in the account and no monthly fee (unless you go member).

Right now people get banned and then start another free account. Sure why not? That $10 up front will make most of them reconsider.

Not true at all. Some are, but theres been at least one high profile scalp on miller taken for using ESP. Im damn sure there are others still in game with slight "enhancements". Hell ps1 had loads of cof hacks on some characters for years.

Free to play especially will always have more hacks than not, but you just gotta report them and move on. The majority of players are decent people playing to have fun, the overall number of cheaters (don't say hackers, that is giving people who know how to hack any kind of system a bad name!). Even when Planetside is long gone whatever games are out there will have cheaters.

Hehe I think you under estimate how obvious a hacker appears in their statistics. I mean, when you break it down and put all on a bell curve, hackers stand out like a sore thumb.

Statistics is the most transparent science there is. It is impossible to fake legitimate data. Illegitimate data will be always be revealed, either in the sampling (play behavior) or in regression calculations, both perfect tasks for computer analysis and auto-kick.

That's why they tell you NOT to do things in order to trip the auto-kick. Play normally. Hackers won't stand a chance. The more player data it analyzes, the more accurate it will get. If Daybreak does this right, they'll make a lot of cheating heads explode.

Uhm.... thats not how statistics work.

First of all your data set doesn't tell you anything about the circumstances when certain feats were done.
And if it did you'd have to evaluate all of those separately.
Secondly, statistics only tell you if somebody is performing above or below the average. You can never prove something with statistics.
Last year I accidentally connected to a CS server that belonged to a clan. I thought I landed in cheater hell, until I noticed that it was a clanserver and all my opponents basically had a ping of 20 while I was at 200. Statistically I was performing at 10% of them. They weren't cheating though, they were simply extremely good, well trained and had superior equipment and connection.
Your approach to the problem would basically kick everybody performing above a certain value from the game.... thus lowering the average, thus kicking more people who now perform above the new, lower treshold....

I don't think he was referring to game stats but actual statistics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance

Use of this with current statistics would be helpful but is lacking in that you don't have the context in which it was attained. Or base size how many people in territory. The devil is in the details.

That still wouldn't prove anything I think.
It would only show that there is a high propability of cheating going on. Even if you take that as certain, and ignore the possibility that you might simply be seeing a small part of the community one could call 'semi-professional', you would still have no way to figure out which extremes are caused by skill and training and which ones deviate from your expectation due to cheating.
Or the short version: You still have to watch and get proof manually.

I'd be OK with this if current players F2P or no, stay in for free.

i said in another post that 30 reports from players above BR20 should result in a ban,
the GM can then come along after however many hours and investigate what went on,
if he finds that the player was wrongly banned and that the 30 people were just trolling, then those players should get fairly meaty temp bans and the unjustly banned guy gets unbanned.

this solves the issue of relying on a computer to detect hacks and also prevents people from simply reporting people they don't like to ban them.

obviously you could throw in more limitations, but honestly i think this would solve the issue of having a hacker ruin the game for hours before a GM shows up and does something about it.

For every 1 blatent hacker toon there'll be anything from 10 to 1000 toons that have used subtle hacks (ESP/Wall hack, aim assist/de-tuned aimbot, no-recoil hack, no CoF hack, Autohotkey/Script abuse, low % speed hacking, packet throttling etc. etc.).


The problem with subtle hacks is that from the player perspective it is near impossible to tell them from really good players.





ESP/Wall hack, for example, gives a ridculous advantage yet for most users they'd never get banned for using it - interestingly when on my server a few high profile players were actually banned for using ESP/wall hack totally "coincidentally" a lot of other high profile players magically got significantly worse for quite a while (until I assume they decided it was safe to use it again), also the outfits the banned player were in also got a lot worse in general.

Or the dude I mentioned above, he clearly player normally for 3-4 months before suddenly becoming uber..... but he'd never have come to my attention (or anyone else's, I think) if he hadn't headshot me inside my own spawn room and then proceeded to clear the spawn room of other player with nothing but headshots. Once he did that and I started watching him it became clear he was hacking, but subtley, he wasn't killing 100's of people an hour, just he was never missing headshots (and, of course, could shot into spawn rooms as well) and suddenly very rarely dying too.

That can't really happen in PS2 though.

Your example is like not realising your opposition is world class or has some inherent advantage, the reality is in PS2 even if you ARE world class you (should) still face the same limitations as everyone else and there is no real way to get an inherent advantage in PS2 outside of doing something shady.

For example you will still die randomly in PS2 no matter how good you are, you will still miss headshots.

If for example someone plays for 3 months in an average way, then suddenly starts getting 90-100% headshot kills, that standouts out like a watermelon on a lemon stall statistically. I don't think auto-ban is the way to go in those instances, but being looked at carefully by a GM when playing? They certainly should do that.

The data set doesn't need to tell you anything about the circumstances, because the larger the data set the more accurate the expected value (Greek character mu, aka average) is. The accuracy of the average is even greatly reinforced when you add in a dataset specifically sampling cheaters. Put those figures all on a curve and the cheating player will have a specific signature that the computer can identify with increasing speed as sample size grows and the expected value is further cemented.

In other words, with a large enough data set on game performance you can in fact narrow down unaided human performance at even its absolute best levels. This technique helped nail Lance Armstrong for doping. It revealed that if a player really is doing too good to be true, the odds of it being legit are so small they approach zero.

Now, you mentioned ping. Ping and its influence can be ruled out completely by recognizing that a lower ping player performs better than a higher ping player for obvious reasons (sounds recursive, I know but bear with it). In your example you were performing poorly, and you thought you had landed in a group of cheaters. To the computer analyzing all the data--data you didn't have access to--you were just a low outlier, and the computer is aiming for high outliers. So, you get ignored by the computer.

The rest of the normal (low) ping players, however, are performing well around the expected value because there are so many more of them compared to lonely high ping you (large sample), and so are also ignored by the computer. Even exceptionally high kill streaks will fall around that expected value when the sample gets large enough, so even the best players will still be average. I know that might not make sense, but it holds true even in professional sports. The very very best players may be--comparatively--well above the average of some lower skilled players, but taken as a whole the very very best players aren't really that far above average. Since we're a mix of casual and professional players the tolerances will naturally be wider than you find in professional sports, but no less defined.

Now, enter the cheater.

The cheater augments their natural talent--or lack thereof--with code that aims to cheat the game's rules. As a result their performance will immediately be above average, and not just above average, too far above average. To the computer the cheater will be effectively out of bounds on the bell curve, and be kicked.

But there is a problem with your example from Counter-Strike.

Your example from Counter-Strike, despite my attempt to illustrate, really doesn't fit here because the sample--while relatively large in local terms--is actually very small. Counter-Strike is played on smaller servers, with smaller groups of players, and no anti-cheat sampling can account for every Counter-Strike player. However, in PlanetSide 2, we can account for each and every player that currently plays, or has ever played the game, so our ability to gather statistically relevant samples is for all purposes perfect. We can build a statistical model that takes into account professional level play, and thereby establish--with extreme certainty--the cheat threshold.

But, what if the cheater only cheats intermittently?

As our sample grows our ability to place players on the performance curve will become so precise that we will even be able to track how that player moves along the curve from moment to moment. A player who exhibits wildly high performance (too far beyond professional averages) for even but a moment can be identified and dealt with... when we get to that point, but not yet. We need more data.

So, the devs are asking us all to play normally, and begging us not to intentionally try to trip the system.

On the surface this sounds like we're ruling out exceptionally skilled players. We're not. What we're doing is recognizing that there is in fact a performance cap. Legitimate players--regardless for their skill--can only play so well. They are human. And being human means having limits, and we want to identify those limits and then rule out anyone outside them. Cheaters, however, are augmented and--at least in performance terms--not human.

Even Bobby Fischer had his best day.