Notice A statement on cheating in Elite Dangerous.

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Ok then, I guess you do not read too well then as you are arguing some points I never made. I didn't ever state I have any evidence of anyone cheating, someone else stated that this protestor had been using cheats for months nor did I ever state he was a hero, in fact, I said anyone using cheats should be banned.

I'll try again and maybe typing slowly will help, the claim was made that an individual had been using cheats for months in PVP and it appears his use of such cheats was not discovered until he decided to use them in a very public manner. That highlights that there is either a flaw in a detection system or there is no detection system and FDEV rely solely on user reports to weed out any cheaters. If they are only relying on reports, that would be an awful system as there will always be false reports due to some who will not accept being outplayed.

There is also nothing magical about an algorithm. It isn't hard to program one nor refine as you get more data. You combine that with patching the vulnerabilities in code and hopefully you make cheating too difficult before you lose the player base. It won't happen though as the people paying the bills will not feel it is worth the cost until it is too late.
Well it would be magical if you could do it with a peer-to-peer connection from the Developers point of view.
 

ryan_m

Banned
Haha, a report from a cheater bragging about forcing a ganker to run... i must admit, i did have to smile at that. Running cheats is not right, but giving gankers a taste of their own medicine is rather priceless.

Ahh, yes, it would be priceless to you to have people's legitimate gameplay ruined by literal cheaters. That does fit with the things I've seen from you in the past.
 
Please don't show me stuff like that, I get fantasies you know! :D Like a combination of shadow servers and well known gankers, both could be wonderfully whisked together... 👹

Hmm.. a special mode where all the cheater and gankers get put together. Evil! Who knows, maybe there is even a union between the two sets. Competitive people i think are more likely to run cheats to win i think. I mean, look at PP and the 5Cers and botters that exist. They are doing that to win, otherwise why bother? Its fairly well known a lot of gankers are lacking in skill, so some of them might turn to cheats to give themselves the edge.
 
(Mods - i understand some of the things i'll post here might be crossing the line but not sure. Just edit out anything that is too much please!)

Ok, found the forums where they are discussing.

So i see a report of someone getting a week ban back in March. So FD are obviously detecting things.

Onward, let's see if i can find any evidence of them producing new versions to get around fixes FD are implementing....

Well, at least one mention of needing a new version to make it work, but that could be just general FD updates breaking the hack unintentionally, i won't consider that direct proof that FD made changes to break the hack.

Woah, found the changelog, some of the stuff it enables you to do... these hackers are damn good!

Ah, well, we have something, not what i was looking for. Initial release of this cheat was august 2018. So if the previous version got shut down around November 2017, it means FD stymied these guys for over half a year, that's pretty impressive. Of course, it doesn't prove that there were not other cheats available during that period.

Ok, talk of some unsafe options that are likely to get you detected, i'm not downloading the hack to see which ones are considered unsafe, although from the previous versions i know jumping too far could get you detected. Ah, setting energy consumption is a big red flag apparently.

October 2018, report that its detectable, reply that using in solo and carefully should be no problem.

October 2018 - ohhh, some conflict between the previous devs and the new dev. Spicy!

Ah, a hint there are two versions, one with the original devs (on the Discord that has been mentioned?) and this new guy who is public and used their code to make a new version.

Over to another forum, same cheat....

September 2018, someone reporting they were detected 3 day shadowban.

Using the cheat can cause crashes in some circumstances (possibly fixed in later versions)

Someone boasting that after their ban they could continue using, no follow up ban at the time of posting (just being more sensible?)

Another ban in October 2018 - 3 day shadowban.

November 2018 - someone reporting the version at that time is detectable, several of posters friends reported getting bans.

Creator of the other version reports the creator of this version missed some checks to avoid detection.

November 2018 - trainer not working with current version. Again, no evidence whether this is due to FD making intentional changes to stop the hack or just general patch breaking the hack.

Found Discord link for the original hackers but link expired....

December 2018 - hack stops working again. Update required.

January 2019 - stopped working again.

Feb 2019 - report of someone getting banned for 72 hours despite not using any unsafe options (no indication when this happened though)

April 2019 - trainer not working again

3 weeks ago - panic starts over trainer being exposed on FD forums.

Haha, a report from a cheater bragging about forcing a ganker to run... i must admit, i did have to smile at that. Running cheats is not right, but giving gankers a taste of their own medicine is rather priceless.

5 days ago - report of getting a 3 day shadowban, they suspect from using an unsafe option.

1 hour ago - someone just copped a 7 day shadowban. As far as i can tell, not certain they used any unsafe option.

TL;DR/Conclusions:

1) FD have been taking action against those they detect for a long time.

2) The punishments are weak. 3 day shadowban seems the norm, 7 day ban was the max reported. However, permabans have been noted in the past, specifically in 2016 and 2017. Probably repeat offenders. My guess is its something like 3 days, 7 days, then perma.

3) Detection mechanisms are weak. Some functions unsafe. Some functions fairly safe, although maybe not any more (based on the last report).

4) Patches tend to break the hack. How much of this is intentional by FD making changes to stop hacks working and how much is just due to things changeing due to the patches so the hack needs tweaking (memory addresses etc), is not possible to determine as no direct comments regarding this from the hackers.
You are 'smiling' at cheaters giving 'gankers' a 'taste of their own medicine'? Really?
 

ryan_m

Banned
Hmm.. a special mode where all the cheater and gankers get put together. Evil! Who knows, maybe there is even a union between the two sets. Competitive people i think are more likely to run cheats to win i think. I mean, look at PP and the 5Cers and botters that exist. They are doing that to win, otherwise why bother? Its fairly well known a lot of gankers are lacking in skill, so some of them might turn to cheats to give themselves the edge.

A special mode to put people playing the game in a dev-approved way with cheaters because you personally don't like the way they play. Incredible.
 
A competitive person would be more likely to compete properly, fair and square. Only someone who likes watching things blow up would cheat.

The competitors in Tour de France and a number of other sports would indicate otherwise. I remember reading a story from a guy who said if he didn't take steroids, he would never stand a chance of competing, and that all the top atheletes are taking them. Its not a question of who is cheating, its just a question of who gets caught.

Its nice to think that competitive people wouldn't cheat, but reality doesn't always conform our ideals.
 
NOW we're on the same team! There are enough bugs in this game that Frontier could release a bug-fix patch every week between now and New Era and still not fix them all, which would also reset these hacks. DO IT, FRONTIER, DO IT 😁

This is typical for CheatEngine cheats.

Detecting a running CheatEngine process would be very easy but I would say it would be problematic.
 
Stupid question time:

Could Frontier not bundle the game with cheat detection software like Arma 3 uses battle-eye?

Or how Fortnite uses easy anti-cheat?

Yeah, i've wondered about that myself. Maybe there are compatibility issues, or maybe cost issues? I have zero knowledge of this sort of thing beyond my experience as a player. I've found modern solutions tend to work fairly well (not perfectly of course, but these guys do have years of experience with detecting cheat programs). Back in the day though, the anti-cheat stuff was sometimes worse than the thing they were trying to fix.

I presume FD have at least considered this, but presume they have so far not partnered with such a company for reasons... what those reasons are though, who knows?
 
Those who are already gud don’t need hacks to be competitive. I’d expect it more from the less-than-gud.

Hell, I’m on Xbox, and there are people who are so much better than the bulk of the community over here, that they’ve been accused of hacking, somehow. That, or suspected of running premium ammo/gimbals when using fixed weapons

Some people are just on another level over the average PvPer. They are legitimately talented at playing spaceships.
 
And then people would just look at those connections and allow those through the firewall.
Even if FDEV logged failures to instance, it is literally impossible to know the cause - it could be either player blocking it.
The only solution is a complete rewrite of the networking stack of the game to shift to a client-server rather than peer-to-peer architecture.
Sigh

We see this loudly claimed over and over, and it's just not true. Now it could certainly be the case that this would be hard to do with the network stack we currently have, but we are not in a position to know that short of reverse-engineering. There is nothing magical about client-server vs peer-to-peer, with proper design and appropriate resources roughly the same space of solutions is accessible using either architectural model. And as it happens, we know that the game as it stands now uses elements of both.

Now if you think you or someone you know can do a better job, I expect you'll be excited to pass along this open job listing:

 
Sigh

We see this loudly claimed over and over, and it's just not true. Now it could certainly be the case that this would be hard to do with the network stack we currently have, but we are not in a position to know that short of reverse-engineering. There is nothing magical about client-server vs peer-to-peer, with proper design and appropriate resources roughly the same space of solutions is accessible using either architectural model. And as it happens, we know that the game as it stands now uses elements of both.

Now if you think you or someone you know can do a better job, I expect you'll be excited to pass along this open job listing:


Job listing looks old!

We're expecting Jurassic World: Evolution to continue our story; it's already one of the most anticipated games of 2018

.. given it's now 2019.
 
I sometimes think Frontier forgets its game is an mmo and that it needs more support to mitigate cheating than just some forum posts and 7 day shadow-bans.

If they cant get cheating under control in an mmo then perhaps they should stick to mediocre park sims.

I feel as though they went into ED with both a lack of experience of this and with some innocence. They are obviously still struggling to find a solution 5 years later, and it might be quite possible that a solution is not even possible.

As for mediocre park sims, i think they are pretty good at them. They have experience of making quality park sims since long before they went independent and from what I see, they are light years ahead of most other park sims.
 
That happens, when everyone thinks all others are cheating. This is way more likely to happen in these forums than in real sports, because the borderline of cheating is a lot more blurry here and also more difficult to detect and provide clear evidence I suppose.

So, what i'm hearing is, everyone is cheating in ED! I knew it!
 
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