Out of curiosity I looked into this cheating thing and how easy it is. Seems the developers have allowed a can of worms to be opened in this game by poor and cheap design. I can only see it getting worse and the only solution is to hunt down and ban the hackers, FD should give a few players "Sheriff" status, make them gods in the game who hunt hackers in the game and kill hackers. Beat them at there own game and if nothing else they report the hackers to get them banned.
Met My First Hacker Today
- Thread starter Blaeringr
- Start date
hehe player sheriff status, what a fun that would be . But it will not happen I am sure. However still we can report player, but me personally cant report anyone as I play only solo mode, no offense but got killed 2 times by more than one player at once, and both time they was well sinced so it must be they did communicate by TS or ventrilo or whatever. Simple I do play game but from time I got killed last time on that way I even did not loged in to open game , only solo solo and sometimes private group. What I can say 100% , in solo mode you will never face hackers 
Hmm hackers vs Sheriffs...my money is on the hackers i`m afraid,there is freely available software that will block p2p connections so your sheriffs could rock up and poof mr bad guy just vanishes from the p2p connection,its not detectable as logging either as the connection to the main server is maintained..welcome to the nightmare.
sounds like quite (not exactly though) the same what just happened to me, but at me, it was a viper. Looked like a NPC (solid blimp, has a nsme, but no "Cmdr"), but now im not sure anymore. could some1 hack in a way, that he does not appear as a cmdr anymore? paranoid.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=111625
really weird and bad things happen theese days...
Well I am now the Sheriff of Leesti, im gonna patrol he system in search of hackers and will video any illegal activity and show it in the court of public opinion and to the Judges at FD, lets see what happens. If your out there hacker then face me.
For anyone playing in open, the easy way to tell if there is a station camper before docking is to check your radar. A heap of white objects on the radar (which will be unexploded dumbfires) indicates a camper int he station. go solo to dock, or move along. I get the shield cell button ready...
Z...
Z...
The answer to cheaters is not to try and make the game uncheatable. Like network security and data protection that's an unachievable goal no matter how many resources you throw at the effort, irrespective of whether you're on a P2P or client/server model. The trick is to make it almost impossible for the cheater to remain undetected. Make no mistake, it's still a herculean effort but unlike hardening a game against cheats it's one that is actually achievable in practice. A common "cheat" in any game featuring any kind of combat is to freeze depletion of ammunition, effectively giving you infinite rounds, equally common is to reduce the damage taken by incoming fire, if taken to its extreme this is the "invulnerability hack" you find in so many games. In a c/s architecture you address these things by making all the arbitrage of ammo expenditure and damage taken take place server side. If the server says "sorry buddy, you're dead" and to every other player in the game you die then it doesn't matter what your client shows you.
So how to address it in a P2P situation? Well, first off you can't rely on an authoritative server to wield the iron hand of control. To any practical purpose you can't prevent these things happening in real time. But suppose all clients, along with their periodic status updates to the server (such as the ones that ED uses to update your save position every minute or so) reported resources expended, number of hits on other ships (by ship), listed all your kills, listed the number of times you've been hit (and by what from who, plus how much damage it did) and the same for all the hits you made since the last periodic update. This data just needs to be stored, nothing needs doing with it in real time. Periodically, however - maybe daily - an automated process can reconcile it. Doing this as a periodic batch audit process is important, because doing anything else is effectively switching to c/s architecture anyway and throws away all the benefits that FD get from coding the game P2P.
Suppose Charlie Cheater's client has reported expending X multicannon rounds since the last update... Now he's using a cheat designed by a smart coder so his hacked client takes care to never report expending more ammo than he should be able to carry. However, he's claiming too may kills than should be possible with his ammo expenditure even if every round hit... This is just one potential inconsistency. Even if the guy who coded the cheat took care of all the potential inconsistencies (which is pretty much impossible if they are gaining any real advantage from their cheat code) anyone else they shot up who is NOT cheating, well their client will be reporting what IT saw. The periodic update "kill count" doesnt match the "kill count" in their save? Busted. The players they killed report dieing from more rounds than the cheater reported firing? FD know how many rounds it should take to inflict that damage, so once again, busted.
All you need for cheaters to always be caught is an audit trail they can't avoid showing inconsistencies on and an automated process that audits EVERYBODY. THAT is achievable, even in a P2P model. It won't stop folks getting throwaway accounts and "cheating until the ban" then starting over the same way but what cheater is prepared to rebuy the game every few weeks to keep going?
"P2P will always be cheatable" True. "FD can't do anything about it" Not so much.
So how to address it in a P2P situation? Well, first off you can't rely on an authoritative server to wield the iron hand of control. To any practical purpose you can't prevent these things happening in real time. But suppose all clients, along with their periodic status updates to the server (such as the ones that ED uses to update your save position every minute or so) reported resources expended, number of hits on other ships (by ship), listed all your kills, listed the number of times you've been hit (and by what from who, plus how much damage it did) and the same for all the hits you made since the last periodic update. This data just needs to be stored, nothing needs doing with it in real time. Periodically, however - maybe daily - an automated process can reconcile it. Doing this as a periodic batch audit process is important, because doing anything else is effectively switching to c/s architecture anyway and throws away all the benefits that FD get from coding the game P2P.
Suppose Charlie Cheater's client has reported expending X multicannon rounds since the last update... Now he's using a cheat designed by a smart coder so his hacked client takes care to never report expending more ammo than he should be able to carry. However, he's claiming too may kills than should be possible with his ammo expenditure even if every round hit... This is just one potential inconsistency. Even if the guy who coded the cheat took care of all the potential inconsistencies (which is pretty much impossible if they are gaining any real advantage from their cheat code) anyone else they shot up who is NOT cheating, well their client will be reporting what IT saw. The periodic update "kill count" doesnt match the "kill count" in their save? Busted. The players they killed report dieing from more rounds than the cheater reported firing? FD know how many rounds it should take to inflict that damage, so once again, busted.
All you need for cheaters to always be caught is an audit trail they can't avoid showing inconsistencies on and an automated process that audits EVERYBODY. THAT is achievable, even in a P2P model. It won't stop folks getting throwaway accounts and "cheating until the ban" then starting over the same way but what cheater is prepared to rebuy the game every few weeks to keep going?
"P2P will always be cheatable" True. "FD can't do anything about it" Not so much.
For giggles: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_sucks_or_what_i_.php?print=1
"Third on our list of problems was that we would not have a dedicated server available; we would have to use a peer-to-peer network model. The expense of providing servers with sufficient processing power and bandwidth for our expected audience size was considered unreasonably high. And because of the nature of the license we were working with, allowing gamers to set up their own servers was not a viable alternative. A peer-to-peer system avoids the problem, but it poses a significantly more challenging engineering problem, because each player must communicate with several other players, instead of with a single server. Because the Internet does not have a viable multi-casting capability, sending the same message to three destinations requires three times as much bandwidth as sending it to a single destination...."
This is from what year? Bingo! 99! We're back in the 90s, awesome, those were my best years and I loved the music
Interesting.
I never got around to playing X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter in multi-player.
Was it any good as a MP game?
This would seem to hold out some hope.
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Is there any technical reason why such a system couldn't be effectively implemented, whereby strategic data could be saved client-side, then periodically audited server-side for discrepancies?
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Sad to read this and being an older gamer having played the original I think anyone in our 40’s or 30’s understands your only cheating yourself by doing it and missing out on the experience of actually making it in game. You would have to loose a bit of self respect cheating in games as your simply saying you don’t have the skill and commitment to succeed. I’m sure there is plenty other games to go cheat on and I hope they get bored and move on. It’s the same on Dayz from what I can gather with toothless nobody’s feeling they need to cheat to get one over the other guy without having any skill in game. Maybe those cheating will grow up and start to play the game right I don’t know but I’m sure ED will investigate and I’d hate to be a cheater who looses hours upon hours of achievement by a ban as that has to hurt. Surly there is a record attached to players accounts of actions and if they don’t add up then so long and thanks for the fish.
I find one thing more worrying, though only slightly than these obvious hackers, not to mention the xml hackers that use the firewall rules (have encountered that one as well). The Moderators have put input into this forum for name showing, I'm sure they would have send a message to the devs about this, so the devs must have read the forums, yet there is no post from the devs in regards to this. This really is quite a large problem because it seriously affects the game balance and makes players very very unhappy (loosing a brand spanking new Asp that I worked hard for to this, then being left with no credits, is completely unfair). This game is supposed to be open play, yet these events force players to go solo to survive normally, something that should not be required.
So where is the post from the devs with information about this and what they are going to do about it?
So where is the post from the devs with information about this and what they are going to do about it?
Technically, no. At least (caveat incoming) not that I'm aware of with what I've learned of the ED P2P architecture so far. I don't claim definitive knowledge, just making inferences from what I DO know and 30 years of 'net security experience. It WONT be "easy" or "simple" but unless I'm completely off-base with what I've learned from poking at ED's netcode it CAN be done.
Thing is, as a dev, I wouldn't want to give hackers/cheaters any potential hints on what I am doing and when I am doing it. So, really, to me, it's not surprise, and could be taken as good or bed, really...
Z...
Some people game to try and crack the codes to gain all sorts of advantages and abilities, it is their fun, and unfortunately not all keep it to themselves, but will inflict their "fun" on others.
Its unlikely we'll hear much from the dev's, although maybe we'll hear something from Michael soon enough.
Oh and not everything is on the client anymore, during Alpha/Beta when a lot more cracking was in the open (and not punished, obviously) code was moved from the client to the servers (and one of the reasons offline was pulled), so its not being ignored by FD.
If true, I am not entirely sure how this could be done.
I have given this 2 min thought and still can not see how?
I and many others have said that an update auditing system would stop much of the issue. An update once a second or every 5 would not add too much cost and even the amazon servers could handle it, this would also get rid of the bounty bug and explain many of the odd shop destruction reports that appear so often...
the data needed is actually very minimum, the fact that any such data could be hashed and salted would avoid any legal issues. It would be less than 1kb per sec... Or 5.
The audit trail would be mostly automated, flagging up any strange issues not only picking up cheaters, but also the many bugs that haunt the game...
Dude it has gone beyond that stage, there is also worse to come.
Failure to disclose would be an awful decision in terms of customer trust, FD would not only lose respect in the industry despite many graces. It would become a laughing stock to its own customers.
The the more serious issues need patching fast...
Though if the cheating is allowed to spread it would ruin the entire image of the game.
I never played planetside, though we all know it as a cheat fest... Though some say that much of this has been dealt with. Yet the damage is long since done and few PC players will go back, new players won't even try it.
Many ED players don't bother with the forums, like many other games... but they do use TS. So this needs dealing with before "wings" or the cat will be totally out of the bag.
Imagine 20-30 guys at a time being wasted by a cheater, whilst able to discus it live...
Join any TS channel and ask around, many players have already quit (Or they are taking a break) Some over content, some over the way ED handled the over nerf of the python (Many are upset about FDs focus on a certain player type*) Though many did not at first believe the potential for cheats in the game. They at first think ED would be so easy to ruin, yet day by day more are realising the cheat fest this game could become. Guys who only a month ago, said such cheats could not be possible assuming FD would have had some amazing system to sort it, now embarrassed over their naivety. Ask how many stick to groups or solo...
Soon the posts will become commonplace as more and more choose to cheat, the logoffski scandal may pale into insignificance the failure of FD to even comments fanning the flames more and more...
Again FD need to comment ASAP before other media start to make hay with this.
First it may be the Register
Maybe a few other gaming sites
Then the live twitch showing the stupidness of it all.
The twitch griefers showing how to hack...LIVE...
Then the army of you tubers all laughing at FDs failure...
I am a fan of Elite.
I want this to be a success.
I even bought a a joystick over £100 and I am a cheap git...
*
Disclaimer,
I am always suspicious of harsh nerfs in response to knee jerk reactions. I have seen too many games focus on a particular groups wishes and lose huge chunks of the player base in a matter of weeks. Maybe I am bias, but I played BSGO and saw the onset of the "striker elite" aka "viper elite" and bigpoints short sighted attempt to placate them. I was shocked that they nerfed lied and failed every other player group, I was amazed that the firm literally chased away the "whales" . Many of whom switched to ED SC at the start of their kick starter campaigns.
Having seen how bigpoint chased the mainstay of their income into the arms of rivals and mods and even ex staff break ranks to out the problems, still to be ignored and silenced. The entire forums closed and replaced to hide negative comments. It was strange to see a company stubbornly refuse to admit the mistakes.
It was so surreal to see the same firms refusal to explain decisions honestly cost them the "game of thrones" franchise (imagine a firm losing that potential market, because they could not explain lack of action or silly decisions to the chaps who held the license)
So yep, I do worry about FDs support of the viper elite, as in the long run, this could really hurt the game.
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Please see post I left yesterday in relation to this...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=42372&page=8&p=1731703#post1731703
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=42372&page=8&p=1731703#post1731703
These "personages" will only do damage in the popular systems, so that they can cause as much chaos as possible. Apart from rasing a ticket there are two options: solo mode, and moving to a less populated area. I know this is a sticking plaster not a solution, but dont see any alternative until they are bought to book.
Oh Dear,
I had heard rumors but seeing this confirmed as a reality is worrying to say the least.
After reading this I am no longer going to play open until this loophole is closed and FD have officially told us that.
Bad news indeed
I had heard rumors but seeing this confirmed as a reality is worrying to say the least.
After reading this I am no longer going to play open until this loophole is closed and FD have officially told us that.
Bad news indeed