Cheating in Elite Dangerous

[Phil JMac]

I very much doubt FDEV will reply to this thread - Anything they do will be in house not on public forums

I'd also like to add something to this thread. If you've read this thread and are now curious about the software and think "why not try it? they are not banning everyone - I'll be alright"

When the engineering exploit got exposed in this forum a lot of people had a go at it "just to see if it worked" - I was curious to see what happen but didn't

A week later Frontier stripped all engineering from players who used the exploit and there were several threads from people who had tried it to see what it could do on one module and promptly lost everything they had engineered.

Frontier could wield the ban stick heavily on this (or maybe not - maybe it is too hard to prove, thats not my issue here) - IF that happens they may not discriminate between people who have been abusing this for months and someone who was just seeing how it worked.

 

[Midian Cabal]

Yeah.. they do seem to have a tad of a mess.. but, apart from scale, there's no reason that P2P can't work well. A very very large proportion of console games are p2p and work excellently.

They do? From Elite? Can't use other titles to fund a loss-maker.. at least, not indefinitely. Very bad business practice.

"Elite Dangerous, which launched in December 2014, delivered its fourth year of sustained substantial revenue generation in FY18."

"It is worth noting that Elite Dangerous achieved its highest annual revenues to date in FY18 following a successful launch on PlayStation 4 in June 2017."

"Although it is still early in terms of both Frontier’s financial year and the life-cycle of Jurassic World Evolution, the Board is comfortable with the current range of analyst revenue projections of £75 million to £88 million for FY19 (the year ending 31 May 2019), a substantial increase over the £34 million achieved in FY18."

ED Financial Annual Report

 

[sewerratuk]

...When the engineering exploit got exposed in this forum a lot of people had a go at it "just to see if it worked" - I was curious to see what happen but didn't

A week later Frontier stripped all engineering from players who used the exploit and there were several threads from people who had tried it to see what it could do on one module and promptly lost everything they had engineered....

Pretty sure people only lost the module they 5:1 engineered

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Pretty sure people only lost the module they 5:1 engineered

I think they lost all engineering from modules of the type they engineered, since FDev couldn't distinguish individual modules. Not sure if it applied to specific grades (ie you lost all engineering from class 3 FSDs) or general (you lost engineering from all FSDs)

 

[znôrt]

Yeah.. they do seem to have a tad of a mess.. but, apart from scale, there's no reason that P2P can't work well. A very very large proportion of console games are p2p and work excellently.

that's a bit surprising. i'm not much in touch with console market, could you cite a few? not for counter argument, i'm just interested and would like to check them out to see, first, what type of gameplay exactly they are providing, and possibly some insight into the architecture. i've seen plenty of p2p games but none representing realtime multiplayer action.

of course consoles are more 'hardened' than pc, and that's a plus, but still.

They do? From Elite? Can't use other titles to fund a loss-maker.. at least, not indefinitely. Very bad business practice.

i forgot the numbers but we had some figures a while ago along with their last financial records. what they have cashed in so far is no pocket money at all, and the shop was doing surprisingly well (specially considering how 'meh' (compared to other titles) the offer actually is). actually, i'd guess that elite has funded a big portion of jurassic park.

The basic ship state doesn't change outside controlled environments (ie, outfitting); the key of course would be a private signing-key from FDev and the signing of this data packet would occur on their servers at the end of an outfitting session. Since outfitting doesn't happen often (relatively speaking) the additional server load for this should be minimal.

Every client can now validate ship configurations they receive from any peers they are matched with without having to contact the FDev servers.

Basic ship state is sufficient to be able to calculate what's possible and what isn't. You don't need to know all the possible inputs to calculate the possible outputs - for example, if a ship has moved further than what is possible (max thrust for max time in a particular direction) since the last update, or it's rotated faster than what should be possible, or consistently not taken damage, etc etc etc, then those are all red flags. Having other peers (assuming there are some) in the same instance also performing these checks and you can start having peers creating a consensus on what behaviour is legitimate and what might not be.

As I said, the clients already have to do most of this simulation anyway for normal gameplay so the overheads should be minimal.

you still have to factor in fuel consumption, ammo left and, speaking of ammo, supervise synthesis (oh, and maybe the amount of mats left in the magic container? yeah, ok, fd signed it again the last time you scooped up some selenium). also, current prediction is distorted by connection speed and hickups. that's no problem if you just can re-render the view and get over it, but in this case you would have spurious looking data that's actually legit. probably some extra heuristics required. damage spikes same thing. i really doubt the overhead would be small although we can't really say without more insight about the extent of the simulation, there might be a lot of stuff optimized away that should be taken into consideration in this new scenario.

see, i'm not denying it is theoretically possible, just saying that it is impractical. and even less to retrofit into the current model, no doubt there are lots of factors they would need to revisit. of course if frontier were able to manage to patch it in this way, maybe not most of it, but the worst offenders, then yeah, that could be great. i still think it's the wrong direction, and that that ship sailed but we'll see!

 

[znôrt]

FD doesn't really need to do anything except contact EAC or BattleEye and let them set it up. It works on P2P games and it is extremely effective and brutal against MP cheats. EAC would destroy this plague in few days as users log on and use it and suddenly BAM, your acccount is banned. One after the other.

thanks for the pointers to read. i'll dig into them but i had a first glance into BattleEye and it does not really look good, doesn't seem aimed at p2p at all. of course this is all bizz talk, need to find something a bit more technical about it:

• Fully fledged proactive protection system completely blocking the vast amount of hacking and going further than most other solutions without bothering the player
• Fast dynamic and permanent scanning of the player’s system in user- and kernel-mode using innovative, sophisticated specific and heuristic/generic detection and cheat analysis routines for maximum effectivenes
• Secure (unfakeable) global banning system that can be SteamID/account-based and hence provides the same or an even higher level of effectiveness as/than e.g. VAC bans, because (unlike with VAC) Steam-global bans are possible (performance: over 150,000 bans in 15 months in ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead)
• The BE Server is keeping full control over the game server, enforcing quick and constant responses from all BE Clients and instantly kicking violating players
• Communication happens via highly encrypted packets through the game’s own network connection, not requiring any additional port/firewall forwarding
• Secure auto-update system, working very reliably and bandwidth-friendly without disturbing the player
• Fully customized solutions as needed for every game it supports, e.g. a very effective script detection in the ArmA series

 

[Robbie84]

thanks for the pointers to read. i'll dig into them but i had a first glance into BattleEye and it does not really look good, doesn't seem aimed at p2p at all. of course this is all bizz talk, need to find something a bit more technical about it:

What do you think ArmA 2 was? It had dedicated servers sure, but BattleEye there supported P2P no problem because ArmA 2 supported it.

But research into these AntiCheats is not the point. This stuff you listed are just selling points. Rest is "secret" so bypasses are hard. Any modern AC system will support P2P because it is still quite dominant.

And besides, P2P is NOT the issue here no matter what anyone says. Modification of Client memory is. And all AC systems support detecting that. Especially things like CE...

P2P is just a networking model. Not ideal solution but this plague is LITERALLY changing the running memory of a process and injecting custom code to do various actions. It doesn't alter network traffic in any way. Why do you think you cannot alter credits, alter data or materials or such? Cheat doesn't have any network capabilities.

ED needs a AntiCheat system just to detect Client modification (code integrity, checksums, asserts, etc...). And problem is solved.

 

[babelfisch]

You sound very confident here about actual bans have happened. If that's the case, from what sources do you know it? Or even better, do you have any evidence? I doubt you or anyone else has ever got a clear statement from FD about names of banned players. The only possible answer coming off the top of my head would be that you personally know the banned person(s).

It's really not that difficult. Go to Google, type in some relevant keywords and you'll find a forum where people complain about getting banned by Frontier after using an earlier hack that now gets detected by Frontier.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Can I use it to fill material cargo? I'd be interested in that.

 

[znôrt]

And problem is solved.

oh, i see. magic!

 

[babelfisch]

I wonder why some people are still claiming that Frontier is unable to do anything about it while evidence shows that they already did something in the past about a very similar hack.
It takes some time to update their cheat detection methods.
This won't stop people from cheating though, someone will just create another hack, people will pay for it and a few weeks / months later it gets detected and they get banned again. This is completely unrelated from P2P, fighting cheats has always been cat and mouse, for every game. The network architecture just determines which hacks are possible, not if hacks are possible.

 

[babelfisch]

oh, i see. magic!

No, not magic at all. If a cheat modifies your memory this can be detected by looking for certain patterns. That's how several anti cheat tools work and I believe that's also how Frontier successfully fought the last trainer. There is no reason they can't do that again, it just requires some time.

 

[S3B4ST13N]

Publicly, no, I doubt they would say anything for obvious reasons.

I prefer it when companies are open about these things. Like, "we banned n amount of accounts this month" or, even better:

This week, a player named DarkSide was caught using a cheat program to teleport into buildings, kill powerful characters and make off with all the loot. When other players complained, some of them capturing video of the crime taking place, developer ArenaNet stepped in. Security lead Chris Cleary took control of the character in-game, stripped off all its valuable armour and then forced the avatar to run off a bridge, plunging to its digital demise. The player was then banned.

or

Earlier this year, Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar found that some players of GTA V were exploiting a bug that allowed them to access a powerful vehicle in the online multiplayer mode that was only supposed to be available in the single-player campaign. The studio then patched the game so that the car would explode if used online.

 

[NULUSIOS]

OK, so in which pages are Frontier's responses so that I don't browse 28 pages?

 

[Rob At Work]

OK, so in which pages are Frontier's responses so that I don't browse 28 pages?

We're not there yet my guess is around page 40

 

[babelfisch]

We're not there yet my guess is around page 40

Probably 35 because the media is already talking about it. This gives Frontier responses a 5 pages buff.

 

[mant3z]

OMG I can't believe this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <more then three means that I'm psychically unstable>
Frontier respond to DavsHope thread but not here

dav's hope gone!

Visited Dav's Hope this morning and gathered resources. Jumped out and visited a station in another local system. Thought I'd revisit just now to see if resources respawned and all planets have disappeared! Hyades Sector DR-V C2-23 is now a planetless binary system. Anyone else experienced this...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Game is doomed!

 

[babelfisch]

OMG I can't believe this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <more then three means that I'm psychically unstable>
Frontier respond to DavsHope thread but not here

dav's hope gone!

Visited Dav's Hope this morning and gathered resources. Jumped out and visited a station in another local system. Thought I'd revisit just now to see if resources respawned and all planets have disappeared! Hyades Sector DR-V C2-23 is now a planetless binary system. Anyone else experienced this...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Game is doomed!

Would you be happy when Frontier responded to this thread with: "Please submit a report when you believe other players are cheating."?
If not, it's pretty much irrelevant what or if they post on another thread.

 

[Vorxian]

Just out of curiosity, if someone is limited to solo, and cheating, isn't it just on them? When someone mentions BGS, I'm as emotional as new mown grass smells wafting over from 4 doors up.

Maybe I'm unique in this, but, cheating in PvP is one thing, messing about in solo is only affecting the player doing it, and if they want to nut the game experience for themselves, then that's their choice.

 

[Rob At Work]

Just out of curiosity, if someone is limited to solo, and cheating, isn't it just on them? When someone mentions BGS, I'm as emotional as new mown grass smells wafting over from 4 doors up.

Maybe I'm unique in this, but, cheating in PvP is one thing, messing about in solo is only affecting the player doing it, and if they want to nut the game experience for themselves, then that's their choice.

Incorrect