Cheating in Elite Dangerous

[Jpotter]

I would like to apologize in advance if i am not reading this correctly, but the reason we don't have anti cheat is because.... FDev won't pay for it?

It's not they don't have anti-cheat, they are trying to fight the battle in-house with their own tools and dev team. I think Eleris nails the issue at hand (2 pages back) here, he is talking about another franchise, but I feel this applies 100% to FDev and the current situation with cheats.

In the first installment of the franchise, we used what I'd call a "whack a mole" approach to anticheat.
We'd procure cheating tools that were sold for our games, figured out how they worked (most were standalone trainers built with cheateengine and I made a small tool to extract the .CENGINE file from them which I could then open in cheateengine. I could figure exactly which piece of code they were patching and in which way they changed it), and then figured how to prevent them from working anymore

We had an arsenal of tricks at our disposal, one of them was to wrap some values in such a way that they were crudely encrypted in memory, so that finding them with things like cheateengine wouldn't work. We did other things such as randomizing the location of pointers to singletons to try and defeat some tricks used to locate variables on the heap (that didn't have fixed addresses) by following pointers from static variables (which are at fixed addresses).

This approach was time consuming and not very effective. We'd spend days of work to analyze and block some cheats, it then took weeks for the patch to go live, and then only days again for cheaters to find new ways of cheating.

 

[sollisb]

That monitors ED's processes.... you can't disable it without patching the code out (from my understanding when following the cheat forums). Which means if you are running ED without the watchdog check, you are using some kind of tool to patch out that check.... just like said trainer/cheat tool does.

You've no idea what you're talking about.

 

[sollisb]

It's not they don't have anti-cheat, they are trying to fight the battle in-house with their own tools and dev team. I think Eleris nails the issue at hand (2 pages back) here, he is talking about another franchise, but I feel this applies 100% to FDev and the current situation with cheats.

More garbage.

They can't track what they cannot see.

 

[m0rl0ck]

That monitors ED's processes.... you can't disable it without patching the code out (from my understanding when following the cheat forums). Which means if you are running ED without the watchdog check, you are using some kind of tool to patch out that check.... just like said trainer/cheat tool does.

I have a habit of killing unnecessary processes before starting what i think might be a lengthy gaming session and im certain i have killed watchdog before, i have no idea what it does, but you can kill it with impunity.

According to a reddit post i just read watchdog64.exe generates crash logs for frontier.

 

[Sir.Tj]

Notice - A statement on cheating in Elite Dangerous.

Hello Commanders, We wanted to take some time to address some of the concerns the community has raised regarding the use of cheats in Elite Dangerous. Cheating in our game is something that we take very seriously, and do not condone. Using a cheat engine, mod, hack etc. is in direct violation...

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