Cheating in Elite Dangerous

[Slange Lands]

Yes cheating is awful.
But how about crimes on?
Healy beams?
Premium ammo?

Hacks and unsportsmanshiplike gameplay will always occur until people learn to:
1. Not ridicule others for being "bad" or for using less skill based tools.
2. Realize it's just a game and that Elite Dangerous has nothing to do with real self worth.
3. Not lionize the talented and skilled.
4. Give each other the benefit of the doubt.

I know that I am being laughed at for writing the above, but everything is cause and effect.

Respect each others' egos.
More fun... less rancor.
Please.

 

[Slange Lands]

Well while this is not the topic of the thread, my Mamba can take it because I made it heavy, its why I am one of the best mamba pilots around.... I fly the Mamba like a clipper and that includes its 6th hard-point.

I would love it if you would stream 1v1s of you vs some of the best pilots in the galaxy, like you vs Ryan M, Rinzler or Yamato. We scrubs could learn a lot, especially if you emphasized that flying well is more important than "winning".

o7

 

[Tikanderoga]

Every game has a certain amount of grind. It's the gameloop. Every game has it.
You said it yourself: "Games are about the journey".
Well Elite is just that. Accept that the journey here doesn't lead to the same goal for every player. Which is what makes it a great sandbox in my opinion.
You know the funny thing? A fantastic game like Skyrim arguably forces you to grind more than Elite does. Because it's a game where the endgoal is to finish the story by defeating the final dragon. You might fool around, delay it as long as you can, download addons that keep you busy, but it is a game that forces you toward a certain outcome.
And that is fine. It's still one of the best games ever in my opinion, but Elite is very much not that.

In Elite you just do whatever the hell you feel like doing. Finish arbitrary goals you set for yourself. And for the life of me, I can't imagine why you would want to use trainers to reach those goals.

I agree - every game has a game loop. Some game loops are fun, chasing USS for some mats are not fun. No matter how you twist and turn it.
In Skyrim, if you need something, you can either buy it or you can forage for it. Hunting for wolves or looking for Iron is actually interesting. You want to go to a mine - have fast travel! The game doesn't force you walk there for 30 minutes.
Don't want to use fast travel? Use a coach! Inbuilt in game, and you can travel to the 4 corners of Skyrim for a modest sum. You are not forced to walk. Whereas Elite DOES force us to do repetitive tasks like jump/honk/scoop (you can skip the honk if you want) if you want to go to Colonia for several hours.

You could argue saying "But it's an MMO and Skyrim is single player". I play in Solo, always have been and always will be. What I do has no major impact on the BGS anyway. So why can't i get a fast travel to Colonia? Been there before, counts as a "discovered location".

And the 90 minutes of "ride to hutton": There is NOTHING about that journey. That's 90 minutes of "I'm going to watch a movie". That's no journey, nor is it experience.

I'm not asking for instant gratification, but seriously, cut the wasting of time.
Instant jump to a station? Go there once, then you can jump in there.

Been to colonia before? Have a Megaship take you there. Or you can hire a big jump ship to take you to places you've been before.

I don't agree with cheating, but some of them, like unlimited FSD range or instant drop to a station does sound like a massive time saver. Especially if you play in Solo only.

Also, to resume the Skyrim analogy: Skyrim has an endgame. Dragons get bigger and stronger, drop better gear. Elite does not have an endgame. Anything you can do in an Anaconda, you can do in a Sidewinder. (Blah blah Beagle point, I know). I was talking in terms of "achieving ranks" or making money. It just takes you longer.

 

[Backelaer]

Yes cheating is awful.
But how about crimes on?
Healy beams?
Premium ammo?

Hacks and unsportsmanshiplike gameplay will always occur until people learn to:
1. Not ridicule others for being "bad" or for using less skill based tools.
2. Realize it's just a game and that Elite Dangerous has nothing to do with real self worth.
3. Not lionize the talented and skilled.
4. Give each other the benefit of the doubt.

I know that I am being laughed at for writing the above, but everything is cause and effect.

Respect each other's egos.
More fun... less rancor.
Please.

I for one am not going to laugh at you.

However:
1. I don't care who ridicules who. Nothing can validate the use of hacks. Ever.
2. Of course it's just a game. But a game is only worth anything if we're all on a level playing field.
3. ??
4. Of course. I'll give anyone the benefit of the doubt. That only works if there's an authority to keep people in check though..

More fun, less rancor? I'm 100% behind that. But this is not about rancor. This is about people screwing up the game by hacking it. You might not like the people that brought it up, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.

 

[Henri]

after an encounter at the cg with a wing that was cheating (like no fsd cool down)
and other less easy to observe/prove cheats I had a look for myself
and the two bits of code literally took me 5 minutes to find and download.
that's pretty messed up.

 

[WR3ND]

I am particularly in favour of eliminating instance flipping, particularly at places like Dav's Hope. In any multi-player game cheating, exploits & use of unintended loopholes should be taken seriously.

However I don't expect any punishments meted out to be made public (naming & shaming), nor do I expect action to be taken soley on the word of another player or players.

Dude, instance hopping compared to hacking the game data? Please, save that for another thread, this is a whole other level. Instance hopping currently saves FD from having to fix broken manufactured and data mat gathering.

I'm honestly not sure if instance flipping at Dav's Hope isn't intended gameplay, as sorry for the state of things that might be. The meta progression of the Engineers at face value, in my opinion.

But anyway, I'm not interested in game cheats, and seeing as how this is a (theoretically) semi-competitive MMO, eliminating cheats and cheaters seems within the short order of things.

 

[Slange Lands]

More fun, less rancor? I'm 100% behind that. But this is not about rancor. This is about people screwing up the game by hacking it. You might not like the people that brought it up, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.

Sorry I was unclear, I meant that there should be less rancor overall in the game itself. Ryan was absolutely right to call attention to cheating hacks. I did not mean to imply the OP was rancorous. Again, sorry.

 

[Schmack]

Some of these comments are hilarious.

People cheat because they can. They want to be immortal, and they want to be that way in an arena where others aren't immortal. You go into a game you've struggled with, and you suddenly have these abilities that instantly nullify any grind, any engineering, any outfitting or builds or any other META activity. Now you're just using god mode and moving around in the game doing whatever you want to whomever you want, and they can do nothing about it.

Then again, some know this already, and they want to be seen and they want to be reported because they want to shame the game and the developers, maybe because they feel slighted for being punished in the past or being destroyed or ganked. All these new players that get ganked to death by the murder hobos likely produce at least a few who will seek out these things and use them as payback. But most, I think, are either interested to see what it will do or they are collecting salt, just like the other salt collectors. They are just scripting to do so.

 

[Riverside]

Some of these comments are hilarious.

People cheat because they can. They want to be immortal, and they want to be that way in an arena where others aren't immortal. You go into a game you've struggled with, and you suddenly have these abilities that instantly nullify any grind, any engineering, any outfitting or builds or any other META activity. Now you're just using god mode and moving around in the game doing whatever you want to whomever you want, and they can do nothing about it.

Then again, some know this already, and they want to be seen and they want to be reported because they want to shame the game and the developers, maybe because they feel slighted for being punished in the past or being destroyed or ganked. All these new players that get ganked to death by the murder hobos likely produce at least a few who will seek out these things and use them as payback. But most, I think, are either interested to see what it will do or they are collecting salt, just like the other salt collectors. They are just scripting to do so.

I think you make several good points. Still, it should be addressed. In a shared environment it's important that the habitants understand and respect the consequences for breaking the rules so they can make an informed decision.

 

[Micha]

<- EDIT: To provide some context, the point was regarding Reverse Cheating. ->

That is a very scary and interesting point - this is certainly a hard issue to solve and you're absolutely right that the current architecture makes it even worse.

Not really that hard. A potential cheater is flagged. But only if multiple people (or, better, code on peer machines) report a particular machine/account as being a cheater, would action get initiated against that potential cheater.

In the reverse-cheating case, a target person is only "cheating" when playing against a small subset of aggressors. And it's likely the aggressors are reverse-cheating other people as well. So it's actually quite easily possible to work out the reverse-cheaters and ban them.

The basic premise of security in a peer-to-peer network is voting. The assumption is that a small percentage of nodes is cheating, and the majority are clean. Every time a node enters an instance, it is peered with other nodes, some of which may be cheating. Each node contains code to detect and report cheating automatically. If enough -different- nodes report a particular node as cheating, that node is flagged as a potential cheater and investigated more rigorously.

But if a node is only reported as cheating by a small subset of nodes, and not by the majority of other nodes, it's more likely that the subset of nodes is a group of reverse-cheaters than that the reported node is only cheating against that small subset.

All of this cheat-detection/anti-cheating code can, of course, be compromised by an attacker as well which is why it's important to use a voting and reporting mechanism and only start action once a node has been reported often enough by a large enough group of other nodes. It would also be important to not only report "cheat" nodes, but also "clean" nodes. That way groups/networks of cheat nodes can be identified which work together to keep each other "clean" and report others as "cheating".

Of course nothing is fool-proof and there are well-known ways of gaming such a system as well, but it gets progressively harder and more effort to do so. In most cases security is not about absolutes but rather about making it inconvenient enough that the vast majority won't go against it.

[E: And looks like someone else already mentioned this rather more succinctly:

Exactly the sort of nightmare that distributed consensus mechanisms were developed to overcome,

/E]

 

[BirdWisdom]

I wish ED had permanent hardware bans one day as other games has

 

[Micha]

That's a very dangerous idea. "Flash Mobs" came to my mind. Imagine, a small group of friends somehow don't like Harry Potter (happens). Then all they need to do is to reverse-cheat HP and stop there - mission accomplished, never doing it again. What now?

Re-read my post. In your example it would have to be a very large flash mob, and would have to be active for some time, in order to outvote all the other nodes which are reporting "Harry Potter" as clean. And even then all that should happen is that it flags FDev to investigate the targeted person; it should not be an automatic ban.

But yes, it's a potential issue; again, something I mentioned in my post. Block-chains are vulnerable to this sort of attack too, and there are a lot of whitepapers around not only these potential attacks, but also on how to mitigate against them. Seems to work as BitCoin, for example, is still viable, and it is a far more attractive target than a computer game! Ultimately, as I said, the approach rests on the premise is that the vast majority of nodes are "clean" with only a relatively few bad actors.

 

[mant3z]

What's funny is that you think this team actually exists.

Yes they exist

 

[znôrt]

The basic premise of security in a peer-to-peer network is voting

people just can't accept the fact that p2p networks are collaborative in nature, and hardly suited for anything realtime.

and now we're going blockchain? what next? secure logs? tpms? this is all bollox

 

[Morbad]

people just can't accept the fact that p2p networks are collaborative in nature, and hardly suited for anything realtime.

In the case of cheaters, you don't need to be real-time, you just need to be able to see that they've cheated so you can ban them before they do too much damage. Attrition will do the rest.

 

[znôrt]

people just can't accept the fact that p2p networks are collaborative in nature, and hardly suited for anything realtime.

that's a compromise (to opt for mitigation instead of proper security) i personally would not like to have to make. i wouldn't have to with a properly suited architecture.

further, every node would need full information about every other node just to check 'plausibility'. if 'rogue peer' says he has 8k shields, how would a 'good peer' assess that without complete loadout information (including current pip state). easy? well, what about agility? should every peer constantly compute every trajectory of every other peer just to make sure the pyshics are sensible? okay. let's each get a second dedicated pc just so frontier can do without a server then again, how can i trust the information from any peer? oh, we could use something like blockchain to validate, after all we have extra cpu power now.

siriusly ... it's not that complicated.

 

[Micha]

Running servers costs money. Lots of it. Especially high-bandwidth realtime gaming servers (as opposed to the non-realtime transaction servers). It's hardly surprising FDev chose P2P for a kickstarter niche game they had no idea how popular or big it would get. I don't know many other games which offer free access to realtime gaming servers without having significant revenue streams; whether through microtransactions, subscription fees, ads, or similar. And if ED had any of those, I'd never have bought into it.

So there's no sense crying about spilt milk (lack of central server) repeatedly, but there is some sense in discussing how to mitigate issues with the architecture we do have and are highly likely to be stuck with (who knows, 2020 might be a surprise..).

I also never said the game should implement blockchains. I merely pointed out that similar attacks (and mitigations) apply [E: in a p2p network of untrusted nodes].

As for "full information", there's hardly that much state about a ship, something which could be easily signed so it cannot be forged. Since your client already has to simulate p2p ships to some extent in order to mitigate lag (and NPC ships fully) there's not going to be many additional CPU cycles required to check whether the peer-ships behave in a roughly expected manner or not.

 

[znôrt]

Running servers costs money. Lots of it. Especially high-bandwidth realtime gaming servers (as opposed to the non-realtime transaction servers). It's hardly surprising FDev chose P2P for a kickstarter niche game they had no idea how popular or big it would get.

afaik they asked the backers. obviously, it included a subscription. they voted no subscription. buy cheap ...

but it's still a technical decision and falls squarely on the technical folks. they though small? bummer. in any case what you have now is a disfunctional system (for this specific requirement). and it's not like cheats are the only problem, they just became trending topic now. performance in instances is far from stable, peers even get out of synch, and this problem gets worse exponentially with number of peers. also damage and shield values get multiplied by the number of peers, and that's clearly a bug, but could help to show how complex this mess is to manage for them.

I don't know many other games which offer free access to realtime gaming servers without having significant revenue streams; whether through microtransactions, subscription fees, ads, or similar.

they do have significant revenue streams, so that's no problem. probably most of current aaa titles in the genre do that. discount the few uber greedy ones. overwatch e.g. has impressive performance, and only charges for cosmetic lootboxes which are completely optional. it's a solid business model.

I also never said the game should implement blockchains. I merely pointed out that similar attacks (and mitigations) apply [E: in a p2p network of untrusted nodes].

i know, this was just me going berserk

As for "full information", there's hardly that much state about a ship, something which could be easily signed so it cannot be forged. Since your client already has to simulate p2p ships to some extent in order to mitigate lag (and NPC ships fully) there's not going to be many additional CPU cycles required to check whether the peer-ships behave in a roughly expected manner or not.

there is A LOT of state. ship loadout is not state. bullets are. thrust vector and attack vector are. they change a few times every second. unless you want to run the full simulation on every single peer in the instance, you will be exchanging state deltas non-stop (which you somehow will have to validate) between all peers. neither is good. this is already a problem.

also, signed with what key? remember this is some random peer talking. ok, we set up some handshake, generate transient keys, exchange them ... uh, should i create one for each peer? see? sounds good but the more you dig it gets better and better.

ok, i might come across be a bit negative, that's just the hour of day (and the sheer amount of times i've been told ideas like that about this, i reckon yours are probably making the most sense of all of them) but i'm just not seeing this.

 

[znôrt]

So there's no sense crying about spilt milk (lack of central server) repeatedly, but there is some sense in discussing how to mitigate issues with the architecture we do have and are highly likely to be stuck with (who knows, 2020 might be a surprise..).

oh, this. i'm just ranting. i already said several pages ago frontier won't do anything about this (and i actually pointed to a hypotetical solution like you suggest):

changing that means a significant redesign and rewrite, there would be 2 opposite paths:

• change the architecture and have instances governed server side
• implement protocols to safeguard that information client side.

option 1 would be sensible, but expensive. option 2 is equally expensive and most likely means suicide. they will chose none of them and go with option 3:

• do nothing

 

[mant3z]

I sat and watched it. Not my job to run around gathering evidence. His choice to use it.

You know nothing so please log off of this forum as this is troll behave.
We (members of mine squadron) did a few copies of his mamba based on everything we could get from streams and Inara.
There is absolutely nothing suspicious in it, mamba is just awesome if you build it correct.
With proper skills awesomeness is growing up, most probably in your hands it dramatically decrease it.