Wrongly banned for hacking/exploiting. SOE, you need a policy rethink.

Lolwut?

PS2 is obfuscated and like most games you have to rewrite the structures by hand based on disassembler output. Back in the alpha it was pretty easy since they left debugging symbols in but when doing hacks you don't really need the source for the whole thing, just the relevant structures and their addresses.

You saying SOE is using an exe packer? Lolwut?

Closest thing I know to encryption is this:
http://recon.cx/2008/a/craig_smith/Neohapsis-VM-101.pdf
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-24861-0_12?LI=true

And that imposes a massive performance penalty as well as potentially breaking any nifty optimizations you have. Also makes crash dumps useless.

Encrypting everything with a master key is useless as either you'll have the key locally or receive it anyway. However you could pack parts of the code and send keys from the server as needed - which is I think what Ubisoft did with Orbit.

The one place encryption is actually used, you missed it. A separate proxy machine that injects packets would be the ultimate hack, but it's too much hassle to set up. Cheaters stick with simple single-machine clientside hacks. And even then once you have your super man in the middle proxy you'd use a render hook to have some UI, and you're back to square one.

Computer Science education sucks, I guess?

Anyway, for those interested in how the PS2 anti-cheat detection works, head on over to unknowncheats, there's an analysis of the (edit: not very complex) anti-cheat used. Won't post the link, but anyone who can use that knowledge and intends to has already seen it.


All that being said, I'm not in the cheating business, though I try to follow the progress of the never-ending battle of gamedevs versus the cheating industry.

A few of those are blatant stat padders.

You can't gather information as nothing is sent to you, what you are describing is nothing but best guess which in my eyes is not hacking, reverse engineering or anything else of the sort.
Some inside information would be needed for it to function properly as the banning system could change on a daily basis.
If it is also an anti-cheat that SoE created for the sole purpose for PS2 then no one would actually know how it works.
The anti-cheat could also go past just checking for cheats, but also modified files. You wouldn't know this without inside information, unless you do nothing but guess work which would be long, boring and pointless as by the time you have created a working and sustainable cheat SoE has created a whole new anti-cheat.

Also, forgot to mention: http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/14nliz/psa_calm_yo_beards_soe_aint_gonna_ban_you_if/

PS1 grief system did do automatic three day suspension's, but only if you managed to rack up grief points. You would weapon locked at 1000 grief, if you managed to 1600 it was a automatic three day suspension.

1) I work primarily as a reverse engineer and network security consultant for hire. I've in the past for money, written hacks for games like WarRock and cracked various software, before I went white collar.
2) Planetside is not obfuscated as seen by the thread I maintain in my signature. There are also still debug symbols everywhere in several of the .dll's and planetside2.exe

This has not happened to me, but i saw it all the time with my old outfit. As soon as one person got mad at someone from another faction for killing him, etc.. he would tell his whole outfit to /report that player. Everyone would do so without question... If there really is a system of banning people based on a number of reports etc, then the system is broken..

SOE is a tight spot;

They need to be thorough on ban's; as a handful of hackers can cost them serious revenue in the long term; and is one of the driving reason I loose interest in online gaming and go back to getting my but kicked by AI instead.

The other hand i was wrongfully vac'd in counter strike source; was using Linux and WINE / crossover; before steam support linux natively. Steam basically told me they don't care; as nicely as possible of course. Avoided all steam games for about 2 years; wrongfully thrown to the curb for a product you purchased is truly aggravating.

Mistakes do happen; there cheat detection software can have bugs; but the alternative is much worse...
ie: cs 1.6 and css used to be only fun after a major release and the cheats were down for a day or two.

Not sure there is a good answer; counter strike private servers where the best solution; not applicable to massive multi's...

Maybe have more active DEVs in the game? Doing real time detection/banning?

I like this idea. Have 'manned surveillance drones' secretly staffed by trustworthy volunteers from the community with the ability to teleport from area to area and auto-track players visually.

They would have a script reporting any uses of the word 'hack'/'cheat' and its variations and can teleport to that player, scan the chatlog, and trail suspicious players for a few minutes (invisibly).

They would focus almost solely on the larger firefights; locations with the highest player death rate, because that would be where the negative impact of hackers would be felt most by the community.

Players who are clearly hacking get weapon locked or have their client purposefully crashed via the crash report tool, meanwhile a video would have alreay been recorded, and then sent off to the Nanite Systems Security Council for confirmation of banning.

I would not trust players to do this. Power corrupts.

Paid staffers have to answer to a boss.

After some of the BS I have seen in game from some of the so called community ie outfit leaders, no thanks!

I tried to get this game working for more than 5 minutes with Advanced System Care. Almost immediately after deploying I started getting messages stating that Im on my way to get banned. Oh well, crashed in 5 mins nevertheless.

If it's what I'm thinking they send that message to everyone regularly on some days. I don't know what the hell they hope to accomplish by doing that stupid **** but you have nothing to worry about. As long as you're not hacking, anyways.

Yes it is possible. Things like these are called "sanity checks" in the programming lingo. They are basically checks that the server makes once in a while to verify that things that should not be possible to happen are not actually happening - such as a player moving at an impossibly fast speed.

It would be a bad idea to autoban for it however as technical bugs and other issues can easily provide a false positive and it is very hard indeed to make absolute certain that this never happens (and you have to be fairly sure people are actually hacking before you ban them obviously). It is however very useful to have such checks for the purpose of flagging characters as "suspicious" for later manual investigation or coroboration by other data.

You could also do this for checking for players inside inaccessible geometry (noclip hacks, which I've seen used several times) and aimbots (statistically anomalous periods of aiming that are far beyond the normal curve) and so on... if SOE does actually have some automated systems to flag potential cheaters then it is almost certain that they have some sort of checks like these running some of the time at least. For performance purposes you don't really want to be continually running a dozen of such checks for thousands of active players, but you don't really have to do that in order to get plenty of flags to work with to weed out the problemmakers.

-Stigma