So, yesterday I delved a bit into the world of reading process memories, and for a brief time I looked into Elite Dangerous due to the lack of events for shield and hull impacts (we get damage threshold effects in the player log, but not individual impacts, which is what I need).
Now, I know Frontier doesn't allow that and I was just poking around without plans to actually add that to EliteDMX. Pure curiosity. And I found that not only did Frontier start their anti-cheating efforts during beta, but actually kept up the fight into 2016, actively changing stuff, obfuscating float values, using decoy functions, swap stuff around, and specifically keeping boobytraps around to catch people who use old cheats on newer versions. Really quite interesting stuff technically, and it shows that FD is very much monitoring the situation and working to counter cheaters. I was positively surprised.
And then I found various forums (which I'm not going to link) with detailed discussions about how to cheat in ED. Various exploits were apparently used for a long period of time. For example, an exploit which essentially did AFK combat zone farming for you, with your turrets single-shotting all enemies within range. I was only interested in reading data, they were interested in writing stuff and modifying values such as shield strength, weapon energy, weapon damage, etc.
They were also desperately trying to find ways to update the credit balance with a fantasy value, but found that there's lots of serverside checks going on. The good news is that most of the working exploits were countered by Frontier. The bad news is that some things are pretty impossible to solve, in particular an exploit that allows cheaters to combat-log immediately. There's also a damage exploit floating around which seems to be used in PvP, but not shared outside a closely-knit group of cheaters.
The people who create these exploits do it for fun and because they like solving puzzles, but there's a more sinister thing going on as well. In particular, I noticed a group of users of these exploits who go in to the game with the sole purpose of causing mayhem to other players by any means necessary. Their excuse for doing this is: "Elite is a boring game, so I'm cheating against other players because it's more fun".
Specific hints are given to avoid detection or suspicion, for example to never interdict a player who's in a wing because wingmates may observe abnormal performance, or to only use the biggest ships like corvettes when using damage cheats because otherwise it's painfully obvious that there's foul play involved.
So.. yeah. Unfortunately, cheating is a fact. There are people actively using them, either to farm credits in solo mode, or to simply grief (=joining the game with the sole intent of causing damage and frustration to other players, using everything including cheating) other players using an unfair advantage. And when cornered, they will use Logoffsky or similar things to minimize the credit damage to them. The Sidewinder reset is also a commonly used tool to wipe the slate clean, as it were.
To me at least, it was interesting to see this written black on white, including people bragging how they're successfully derailing discussions on this forum about antisocial behavior within the game. It made me see the whole debate about "emergent gameplay" in a different light...
Frontier can not win this fight on a technical front. However the bounty and credit management seems to be safe on a technical level, so I think the only way they can make griefing less enticing is to make sure the consequences don't get wiped so easily. You probably won't be able to curb the afk credit farming or combat logging, but there have been several suggestions for changing the bounty system so that deaths only reduce your bounty, not wipe it clean. They do need to go hand in hand with a profit boost in piracy. These people are not interested in spending time scooping up cargo, they just want to kill you right before you can sell that exploration data, or drop off those modular terminals at the engineer base. Make successful theft of property reduce the bounty and they're no longer interested because that's "boring" to them.
Keep up the efforts FD. There's plenty of times when an update threw them off for considerable amounts of time, and their list of "ABANDONED" and "DO NOT USE" exploits is growing longer with every patch
The fact that Frontier is not just issuing temporary bans, but actually closing accounts is also encouraging.
Note to mods: I purposefully don't provide links or googleable quotes, but if this topic is too problematic please let me know.
Now, I know Frontier doesn't allow that and I was just poking around without plans to actually add that to EliteDMX. Pure curiosity. And I found that not only did Frontier start their anti-cheating efforts during beta, but actually kept up the fight into 2016, actively changing stuff, obfuscating float values, using decoy functions, swap stuff around, and specifically keeping boobytraps around to catch people who use old cheats on newer versions. Really quite interesting stuff technically, and it shows that FD is very much monitoring the situation and working to counter cheaters. I was positively surprised.
And then I found various forums (which I'm not going to link) with detailed discussions about how to cheat in ED. Various exploits were apparently used for a long period of time. For example, an exploit which essentially did AFK combat zone farming for you, with your turrets single-shotting all enemies within range. I was only interested in reading data, they were interested in writing stuff and modifying values such as shield strength, weapon energy, weapon damage, etc.
They were also desperately trying to find ways to update the credit balance with a fantasy value, but found that there's lots of serverside checks going on. The good news is that most of the working exploits were countered by Frontier. The bad news is that some things are pretty impossible to solve, in particular an exploit that allows cheaters to combat-log immediately. There's also a damage exploit floating around which seems to be used in PvP, but not shared outside a closely-knit group of cheaters.
The people who create these exploits do it for fun and because they like solving puzzles, but there's a more sinister thing going on as well. In particular, I noticed a group of users of these exploits who go in to the game with the sole purpose of causing mayhem to other players by any means necessary. Their excuse for doing this is: "Elite is a boring game, so I'm cheating against other players because it's more fun".
Specific hints are given to avoid detection or suspicion, for example to never interdict a player who's in a wing because wingmates may observe abnormal performance, or to only use the biggest ships like corvettes when using damage cheats because otherwise it's painfully obvious that there's foul play involved.
So.. yeah. Unfortunately, cheating is a fact. There are people actively using them, either to farm credits in solo mode, or to simply grief (=joining the game with the sole intent of causing damage and frustration to other players, using everything including cheating) other players using an unfair advantage. And when cornered, they will use Logoffsky or similar things to minimize the credit damage to them. The Sidewinder reset is also a commonly used tool to wipe the slate clean, as it were.
To me at least, it was interesting to see this written black on white, including people bragging how they're successfully derailing discussions on this forum about antisocial behavior within the game. It made me see the whole debate about "emergent gameplay" in a different light...
Frontier can not win this fight on a technical front. However the bounty and credit management seems to be safe on a technical level, so I think the only way they can make griefing less enticing is to make sure the consequences don't get wiped so easily. You probably won't be able to curb the afk credit farming or combat logging, but there have been several suggestions for changing the bounty system so that deaths only reduce your bounty, not wipe it clean. They do need to go hand in hand with a profit boost in piracy. These people are not interested in spending time scooping up cargo, they just want to kill you right before you can sell that exploration data, or drop off those modular terminals at the engineer base. Make successful theft of property reduce the bounty and they're no longer interested because that's "boring" to them.
Keep up the efforts FD. There's plenty of times when an update threw them off for considerable amounts of time, and their list of "ABANDONED" and "DO NOT USE" exploits is growing longer with every patch
The fact that Frontier is not just issuing temporary bans, but actually closing accounts is also encouraging.
Note to mods: I purposefully don't provide links or googleable quotes, but if this topic is too problematic please let me know.
