The cheating was bad, now it's RIDICULOUS..

Ok lets shootdown this idiotic idea of the phone verification, since when phone verification ever works? How the hell someone that is pro at cheating won't simply use someone else's phone to be verified? I mean come on people put your thinking caps on for one minute here, we are talking about professional cheaters who would be easily be beaten by a simple phone call?

No, we'll go back to the security of the software itself, not the players, not any crappy useless and easy to go around from kind of verification. We will talk about the software detecting actively, searching like an automated bot through the data to see where things do no correlate and have humans certify the results that's how you stop many cheaters, not all of them, but a great many of them.

Agree, I feel the same way, it would cause more problems than it would solve. I'd love to see a tribunal system like they have in LOL but am unsure how they would implement it for an FPS, a persistent world FPS at that. Also the problem of there being already very organized and large outfits. Can you imagine a particularly infamous and large outfit simply trolling the tribunal with directed votes, etc?

It depends, some deaths feel like hacking but aren't and then there are deaths that that are hacking. You sorta get a feel for them over enough time with FPSs.

What I was surprised at were the vehicle hacks, but then I guess that was inevitable. There is a very high BR pilot on my server that I thought for the longest time was one of my "rivals" (I had 2). He would always kill me in a single clip without missing a shot and I never saw him coming.

For the longest time I thought he was just REALLY good at ambushing and I actually adjusted my play a bit because of him and made more of a point to ambush myself. Just this Friday I was in another teamspeak as guest/ambassador for our clan and just in passive ambient chatter I hear the name of this pilot and how he is a known hacker. I was surprised and asked them are they sure he isn't just really really good? Many chimed up as with the confidence that this conclusion was well beyond simple suspicion with specifics. I am still not 100% certain as I never witnessed this player hacking beyond me dying to a single mag of rotary. (I like to see hackers kill others to confirm my suspicion).

I hate hackers personally, but I was sad to find out this player was a known hacker. There are no other on his particular faction on the server that come anywhere close to the point of feeling like "A rival".

Then there is InjunJoe, who is just plain good. ;-P (For gods sake, I hope!) Anytime his rusty brown Scythe is in the area I get an adrenaline rush... fun times.

And if you are reading this InjunJoe, you better believe I have the wing prioritize you.

Good aimbotters are really hard to bust by gameplay, they can often adjust the aimbot in such a way that it doesn't look like they are shooting in all directions, headshotting all over the place and make the shot look like they are coming from an average good player, another type of hacker that is hard to bust like that is the wall hacker since it is very hard to know if they just knew your position by other means or really used hacks for it.

With all the whining about hackers at least the game is still only vulnerable for private hacks that are sold for money and not public ones everyone can access. because when that happens either the devs need to fix the public hacks fast or the game is done for.

Something the Devs should do against those private hacks is offer the cheater a second chance when they give up the actual hack to the devs which would give the devs a chance of detecting the hack. The cheater in question will only be allowed to return the moment the hack he send has been made detectable which could take some time, if he however uses another hack later on and get banned the ban will be permanent.

This pretty much describes the game for me right now. The information you get from the map is so ridiculous, especially in comparison to PS1 where the map would show people from your own empire in the area around a base. In PS2 you never know where your squadmates are, where your own zerg is or if it makes sense to deploy at a hotspot or if you are the only guy who shows up in the middle of 200 enemy tanks. If some hacker shows up and spoils the only fight you can find, it is definitely heart breaking.

Actually a vehicle-aimbot cheater from Miller with 42:1 KD ratio (it was even 50:1 over the first 2 months) is on the leaderboard and still didn't get banned. EVERYONE knows him and everyone knows what he is doing, everyone except SOE. It is not a case of stat paddeling where someone kills a guy on an enemy account 10000 times. It is a clear case of aimbot-cheating + radar hack + teleport and so on, just the advanced all-inclusive hacker package that is sold on some dubious websites from Russia. I don't have a problem if cheaters get overlooked, but you can't miss this guy. He shows up on every statistic. He is simply insta-killing 2000 players each and every day since release.

Btw, the guy is from Russia, he plays a lot and he always has the latest hacks, so it is not too far fetched to assume that he is part of the crew who is releasing them. He could be their tester. No proof on that one ofc.

to the people that "have never encountered a hacker" there is much greater chance that you have than havent. the problem is that the person using those hacks is doing a good job to cover it up.

i would say that the population of hackers/exploiters has reached > 40% there are so much people can do which is super hard to determine that they are.

things like bullet sway hacks, wall hacks, certain aimbots, can be close to impossible and in reality some of these people can go months under the radar without being found out if at all.

but me saying 40% of the pop have some sort of hack/exploit would be accurate considering what things can be done with games.

Here is one idea that had been said before...
If someone has been seen Hacking, reported and all that, SoE admits that they are...
Instead of banning them, let them keep playing, BUT their shots actually shoot themselves...

So many level 1's running around with the most uber hacks.

It's like they ban one and two come back in their place.

They are multiplying like rabbits.

Why is there no anti-cheat/hacks built in to the game? Is it too late to add PB or similar?

In 40BRs of playing, i've only seen 1 definite hacker (unclipping through the map as a TR MAX).

However I do still find the odd 'How did he see me?' moments creep up on me - especially when a Solstice is shooting me, without a scope from around 100m away as i'm not moving and cloaked, crouched.

It does seem that the VS weaponry from the videos that i've seen, go hand-in-hand with aimbots, whilst NC and TR seem to attract the speed hackers.


To those saying that they are bored, I doubt this is the case - these are simply kids who are just indulging in annoying others due to the game being free.

If the game was enforced subscription, the hackers would drop off like flies to probably 1-2 per server, which is a whole lot easier to police for the Admins.

^ This, so very much.

Okay we are now following levelcap *dies from invisible guy* respawns *dies from invisible guy*... Well we better goto TB *Gets one shotted* Respawns *see a guy teleporting everywhere*... Okay we better switch to seananners *guys theres a sundie, better go kill it.. wait its in a rock* Goes to C4 it *Dies from someone who isnt rendered*

I think the showdown is going to be great.. Why, it will show the rampant hacking.. Hopefully Smedly will then do something. Also I hope the render distance really messes with the showdown... Have these RP guys dying from invisible people who arent rendered for them but the youtuber is rendered for them... Excited! We may get a fix for rendering issues soon guys! Give a pray it gives the show grief..

Never seen cheats on Woodman. Seen one since launch.

your agreement with SOE says, they can do whatever they want with your account. trustworthy for you? interesting..

I've seen 3. And I suspect a lot of hacking was going on last night (My ENTIRE squad crashed at least 10 times in an hour, as well as at least a couple of confirmed group crashes in other squads of my outfit. All this while our game is usually very stable for at least 5 hours straight).

Hahaha, yeah lol like i said in one of my posts once....
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/a-definitely-interesting-experience.78009/

Why not? Theres what, 10 servers? Hire 10 guys whose job it is to actually monitor each server. Add a function in game that lets people draw his attention to a cheater so he can immediately view the area, investigate and issue a ban if needed. Why cant that work? Sure, he cant be on 24/7 but as long as he is there for server prime time and can investigate backlogged complaints then theres at least a window where cheaters are dealt with.

Of course the best solution is to make the game secure, but theres no such thing as a totally secure game, sadly.

I think the best solution to combat the cheaters is to require ONE of the following:

A.) Phone number required at account registration, which requires a code verification to complete registration (and make the account playable), a code they get from an automated call to that number. Skype and VoIP programs blocked from this service.

B.) A credit card required at registration, with no charge except the *ping* of the account to verify the address and name.


This will stop banned hackers from making a new account and just repeating. Of course with (B) they could just go out and buy a Visa Gift card or something but those are like a $20 minimum and it will still be hurting their wallets especially if they keep getting banned.
This is a system that is already in use by companies like paypal and google

It's a free to play game, banning an account just lets someone make a new one. Two, file freaking tickets if you see an obvious hacker, or use the /report command. They can't act instantly, but they can try.

Vigilante systems tend to crash and burn real fast.

Hacks indistinguishable from high skill are pretty much that. indistinguishable, much harder to deal with, but a fair amount of the time, it's sort of obvious.

Its pretty rampant, I see a blatant hacker (flying, invulnerable, hyper speed, etc etc) at least once every 2 play sessions. Sometimes its 2-3 hackers in a single session. I've played LOTS of MMOs and FPSs in my time and I've never seen such out in the open, uncontrolled hacking as PS2. We're not talking suspicious moments where you wonder how the guy made that shot, its the really raw obvious stuff.

Just 30 mins ago I'm in my dual burster MAX firing at a Scythe literally 30m away just hovering in front of me and he just takes zero damage after a whole double clip. He turns and blows me away with a rocket volley. I'm pretty good with my MAX, I know I was easily scoring with every hit.

As far as I can tell either SOE's anti-hacker GMs/programmers are completely incompetent or they are simply taking us for a ride and there are no anti-hack measures in the game.

People talk about aimbots and immediantly talk about headshots. Which is obviously a red flag if you say had 25k kills and 24,999 of those were headshots. However, in the screenshots that have been posted (tons of them) you see those little things like "target bone" because your avatar has a bunch... I don't think there is any way to see a paticular player has 100% accuracy and never misses a target? So you could argue someone is just very accurate (I guess you'd call that skill) and there is no way to know they are using an aimbot.. unless you can get to their computer (as another player anyway).

There isn't really any way to know that someone is using radar like esp... unless they keep going directly to players they could have never seen. However, quite often a player will become visible (red name appears) that you shouldn't be able to see... so it makes it very murky for a player to detect a radar user... as another player. (a GM for example likely has tools to see if that player ever became visible to you or if you just by magic knew exactly where they were).

Speed hacks are about the only thing easily noticed and then it depends on if the player is flying or not. I'm not sure I could tell someone in a smaller plane was speed hacking (I play ground most of the time). Perhaps if I had another aircraft to reference speed by... However, when I see a HA suddenly run off at warp factor 10 becuase they started taking fire... well there is no warp factor 10 cert for HA's...

Then of course the people who "flicker" and bounce all over.. people tell us that's just lag. I've shot people who were moving just fine until shot... and back in the Ultima Online days (aka 1997'ish" we had people who flickered just exactly like that but it was due to a speed hack oddly enough... not lag. Can't say its not lag because even back in DAoC a lot of casters had things setup to turn off their connection for small period of time and that was called "lag caster"... couldn't shoot the guy cuz he was 3x bow range away.. but was casting on you and you could see them rubberband. Here some people who flicker don't seem to be doing it for any advantage.. others are actively attacking or going into places they shouldn't and its difficult as hell to target them. Yet because you don't have access to server logs to see the connection data etc... you aren't ever really sure on that one.


So ya.. it could be pretty tough to spot a "cheat" depending on how subtle they want to be about it.

Tell me about it, I saw a BR1 just standing there and I emptied two 100 round clips into him and he still didn't die and he started to move and shot me in less than a second, his health and shield was 100% so I reported him.