Humans are fallible. They'll cheat IF they think they can get away with it. The devs taking a Xmas break are well-deserved for them. This break also allows those lame-*** cheats an opportunity to exploit the game and run amok briefly. Know what's going to happen after the New Year? A LOT of banning once the devs sift through the data and see that Joe Blow, who had a KDR of .46 (which is close to mine) all along, suddenly managed to get 5.47 over Christmas. I'm confident that the "January Juice-Up" that the devs promised will result in better gameplay overall as well as a reduction of the cheaters.
Except all the crap that happens right now, during the holidays where they could be making the money, is putting a horrible taste in the mouths of people who otherwise might stay on playing the game effectively being the content for those purchasing skins and guns.
If they cared they would have replied by now, I'm done with this game, I'll only play it on and off to see if things have changed for the good, until then, waiting on the only pc game that holds hope for pc gaming, Star Citizen, if that does not deliver, I am done with gaming.
Hey man you can't just get in here and be all logical I have so far seen 1 person, since I started playing in august, whom I was 100% sure was hacking and that was in beta. The only other people I have seen that might be "hacking"/exploiting are people who could just have a bad connection (ie. they're laggy). As for the mass-crashing one, the most logical and probably real reason is server issues. I find it hard to believe someone found a way to crash the game for some people in an area, rather than crashing everyone.
It doesn't, it's just that the people doing the crash have teammates waiting in the next hex to rush in after everyone goes down.
this is exactly how it happens. yesterday afternoon on genudine, we attacked tawrich from blackshard and took tawrich tower. then suddenly, crash, log back in later within a minute, and tawrich tower was swarming with VS again. either the mass crash exploit is real, or roughly two dozen men disappeared in a puff of smoke for no reason.
I've been hearing friends( i have been crashing, but it's been only me, not others- so i havent run into this yet on jaeger- though i hear it's happened) say something about bugs and crashing I did some digging- and it has something to do with "Blockade Armor" -according to the digging i've done. If there's a bug- it needs to be reproduced- because if this exists , then it has, for sure, been a bug since they added...whatever they added, when double XP started At this point we can invoke reasonable disclosure and need to post the details about the bug- the faster it's known to the devs and checked out- the quicker you can zero in on it in coding. This goes for stuff that I code as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure anyway, if i had to put two and two together- i'm guessing someone has to put C4 on a Sunderer on wherever the blockade armor is - and then ...either placing it on that spot causes it, or detonating it does. I imagine this bug- if it's as simply as tossing C4 on vehicles- has been done by accident and IS related to the last patch update - anyway, i guess blockade armor or the way it's implemented- it's interaction with C4 might be bugged. Dont remember if there were any changes to c4 in the last patch. And i have no clue how it'd cause everyone in a HEX to crash. Or close to that. It makes me wonder at how hexes are done in-game..........
Exactly. It is incredibly annoying that people cry that the end is nigh for every single game because of "rampant cheating." Yes, there is a lot of cheating and just like trojan developers who make good money off of people wanting to spy on their friends, cheating developers are making good money off of people who want to cheat at online games to gain an edge or just be a nuisance. Cheating detection isn't now, nor has it ever been, entirely trivial, however. You can easily catch a lot of bad apples by some easy means -- and I'm sure those are implemented -- but the better authors of cheating tools, just like the authors of trojans, have adapted quite well in the cat-and-mouse game that is cheating detection and even high profile, actively developed, franchises like the Battlefield series can go months without being properly fortified against exploits completely ruining the game. This isn't because developers are usually lazy, disregard the community or are bad at what they are doing, it is because of several fundamental game design considerations that are not trivial to modify. It is also due to the fact that, like all security measures, cheating detection isn't something you speak about much, nor do you report the amount of people you ban or who are even suspected based on whatever plausibility checking or automatic detection you do. You'll also have to consider that odd things tend to happen -- a lot. A little bit of lag, a random lucky shot, and someone goes "that guy obviously hacks, I'll report him!". I would wager, from experience as a server admin as well as someone who has written anti-cheat software, that the number of people reported as cheating who actually cheat is below 1:10, substantially so for a multiplayer FPS of this size and type as well as demographic. Does that mean there is no cheating? No. There is cheating, and it is a massive issue, but it is not one that is easy to solve by waving a magic wand. It also doesn't mean that all developers, or even the PlanetSide 2 developers, necessarily care about their community, some developers don't for various reasons and let games wane and die. Nevertheless, the important thing to realize is that both users and developers are in a very difficult to mediate situation: as a developer, you're constantly berated by people because they think you do too little even though you usually work quite hard but can't really talk about it; as a user, you feel like the developers do nothing because they don't tell you anything.
Cheating detection has always been trivial. The problem is that cheaters implement sophisticated countermeasures and that the people responsible for anti-cheat software are very, very lazy or very, very incompetent. Creating a simple cheat like some basic ESP is very easy - anyone with no knowledge of programming could do it in a week. Equipping the hack with countermeasures to evade PB detection makes this more difficult. No, it's because cheating hasn't hurt the publishers bottom line - the old world model of boxed games means the publisher gets his cash anyway. This doesn't apply to F2P games. I wrote a utility to crawl paysite subscriber/registation count. In some cases I had to guess. The results were as bad as they seem - 2-3% of players online were using paysite hacks. I won't say which game it was in particular. If you've written AC software you know how horrible PB is and that the only solution unfeasible to break for the mainstream cheating crowd would be hardware-based (TPM, dongle ect). The other option is purely software-based but would be nightmarishly complex - starting at the bottom up with a custom secure bootloader and a patched kernel... Yes, it is easy to solve it with a magic wand. Hardware-enforced anti-cheat. We've been over this with satellite TV cards and we DID find a solution that is unfeasible for the average user to circumvent, and that's because it hit the bottom line - bad. If we had one third of the people and budget working on anti-cheat as we do have on ludicrous DRM we'd have a rock-solid solution and cheating would be an urban legend.
I guess it depends on what you mean by that. On a fundamental level: yes, you're right, I should have been more precise: cheating detection without a substantial risk for false-positives is non-trivial, even at the surface level. It's obviously trivial to spot most D3D-based cheating, even though you could conceivably inject malicious code via a patched overlay. However, even without sophisticated countermeasures, cheating detection tends to become non-trivial in cases where it's more low level, especially if you want to absolutely minimize false-positives. That is certainly part of the reason. Hm, that is about the number I would have guessed, that is, I would have assumed that aversion to cheating and exploitation is normally distributed amongst gamers with a slight skew towards acceptance of cheating (in the sense that most people don't mind minor exploitation) and a slight bump because there is a certain step between "doesn't mind cheating" and "willing to pay money for it." However, two standard deviations from the mean sounds about right. That's not too bad, given Most of these solutions, I would consider unacceptable because they'd likely harass legitimate consumers substantially -- see below. Exactly.
Something will be done soon hopefully, because once I saw one of my teammates countlessly shooting and not having to reload. I can't stress how many people I have also seen randomly running in place, floating, obviously showing that they disconnected possibly by the mass crash bug. If there's one thing I've learned the first time I started gaming, is that hackers learn through disassembly, and they won't stop until they know everything of the depths of gaming destruction, so SOE must do everything in their power to get those hackers and make Planetside 2 playable again!
The more red flags you raise the more data you have for statistical analysis. Use the wide pass for analysis and manual banning and the narrow signature matching for automatic bans. Some anti-cheat programs work that way, however you can't have an universal wide-pass that works across all games - and devs don't have the time to figure out what constitutes a probable but not confirmed cheat. Which is why I'm happy SOE uses their own anti-cheat. DRM's intrusiveness comes from the fact that it is logically impossible to make it work for single-player games, which is what publishers are insisting on. A single-player game shouldn't, by definition, require any external content from a server. The recent always-online DRM with parts of the game logic stored serverside and downloaded on demand are an attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole. But that is a superficial limitation, the gamestate is still on the client and the missing code can be retrieved, saved and then passed on by a server emulator - which is how Ubisoft's dreadful Orbit DRM was defeated. I understand your concern and I hate DRM as much as you do, but there are two points I'd like to address: 1) We're being harassed by hackers already. Worse yet, they're making a small fortune selling cheats so other people can have enjoyment at our expense. And at the expense of the developers as well - why buy a marginally better gun when the paysite devs can make any gun the ultimate harbinger of doom? If I have to make a choice of being harassed by devs or clueless cretins who buy cheats and then taunt on chat, I'd rather go with the former. 2) There is no technical reason why a properly designed anti-cheat has to be intrusive or in any way malicious. Valve managed to make their DRM and anti-cheat into something that's actually fun and attractive. My idea is of a hardware dongle with an open API. Security through obscurity never ever worked. Here's a quick diagram I mocked up a while ago: The basic idea of this is that you use an optimized algorithm to calculate a unique checksum based on a nonce. The dongle is considered secure and records the start and end time of the checksum. The server checks the checksum's value and time to complete - the clever trick here is that if you patched the code you can't return a valid checksum and do it as fast as the non-modified algorithm. You have to modify the algorithm, which will take an abnormally long time to complete, or you return a bogus checksum. Or you precompute those checksums for all the nonce and retrieve it from a 50tb rainbow table. Here's a DEFCON lecture on the approach: Each dongle would have a unique set of keys for public-key crypto with the server and the only way to get those keys would be to physically probe the chip inside - which should be made difficult enough to be impractical. There's no reason this should be marketed or seen as a DRM/anti-cheat device either. Taking a page out of Valve's book think of it like a tangible gamertag that allows you to take your games and progress with you, regardless of computer.
But no really, why IS the title "I am your canary in the coal mine"? Is it just a lure for people to click on the forum to see what it's really talking about?
I'll have to think about that for a bit, but it's a pretty interesting and thoroughly thought out idea.
The thing I'm concerned about is that hacks may simply dump the process image before injection, hook the startChecksum function and once it fires restore the image to it's original form from the initial dump. Then restore hack functionality on an external timer. That's a possible vector of attack and I wouldn't like to use weak technical countermeasures like virtualprotect.. any ideas?
