Strong suspicion that this game has a hacker problem
- Thread starter Teljkon b
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So was it Moscow or Kyiv?
Whoops - wrong forum ....
Whoops - wrong forum ....
This was not a regular CG, it was part of an Interstellar initiative. These tend to start and end as the story unfolds.
So, this CG started on a Monday and it finished Friday, late in the evening, around 22-23 UTC if i'm not mistaken.
Now, if you play on some far timezone...
3. That makes no sense.
Kietrax
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To address the OP - there is/was no bug with the CGs as far as I am aware. CGs have a target - in this case 15,000,000T delivered. If they reach that target before the time limit, they end. This is clearly stated in the text of every CG, every time they are active. In this case, there were two active CGs and they were competing. This means whichever completes first ends both CGs. If you want to see the final stats from the goals I suggest you take a look at https://forums.frontier.co.uk/forums/elite-dangerous-community-goals/ to see where things ended up. From what I see there, the Fed CG completed a bit before 11PM UTC (game time) on Friday night. If you went to The Lucent Embrace before that time, visited the mission board and noting was showing under the Community Goals section then that sounds like a bug, however if it was after this and you had not contributed then there would be nothing showing as only active CGs or those where you are due a payout are displayed.
If you want to get more info on participating in CGs there is a community authored guide in the forum linked above, and that is another good place to look for progress tracking, and hints on which systems might be a good place to look for sources, certainly near the start of the CG.
In terms of the process offered post-CG for CG commodities, they will likely drop. During the CG the price is set to a fixed value for high demand. After the CG the demand drops back to it's usual level - often low or non-existant for CGs as the station is usually looking for things it doesn't normally need to achieve the goal of the CG.
I'm not overly familiar with how the supply and demand system in game works so not sure I can comment on that, however this is often skewed by CGs as you suddenly have a mass of CMDRs moving commodities that are not part of the normal supply/demand for a particular system. In particular if you were looking at the NPC traffic data, it is unlikely they would be moving much of the CG commodities during the time it's active because of the huge volumes being moved by players. Highly unlikely that someone managed to hack the servers this is hosted on and interrupt the data ...
He has a dirty router and doesn't know it.
Your suspicion is quite correct. This game has a massive hacker problem.
Unfortunately, I think the issue, as you described it, is likely a bug or timing issue in the bgs servers/instance and not related to human hackers.
Hacking is a serious problem most especially for PvP encounters and strong action needs be taken. I have a good solution to this and will elaborate further in a future thread.
CMDR Gavin786
The Golconda storyline has been going on for two or three weeks and it's not the first CG related to it. Interest is pretty concentrated so I don't think it's very surprising, the mission was just popular. INARA lists it as finished and at that point it disappears off the board.
Comms Panel.
You don't even need to see another player on radar - History tab will show all players currently in the instance. And you can select and talk to them.
Having read a lot now of what has been posted in reply to your post, I have the following comments.
It is really not right all the toxicity you have had to endure, and I totally do not accept it. You made a mistake by thinking that bgs/instancing issues were related to hacking. You said on your post that you were just a casual player. All of the <> you are getting is not right. Just another example of toxicity on this forum. You made a mistake, so what, no excuse for nastiness from those who know better. And we have all been beginners/casual level at one point.
Cant we be better than this, as a community ?
How do you think the OP is going to feel, next time he wants to post something?
Maybe he is going to think twice about it now. Is that REALLY what we want? For voices to be silenced because of all the toxicity that gets thrown around? Because that is for sure what is happening. People need a VERY thick skin to stick around this forum. I know many CMDRs who just wont post here for that very reason, they are fed up with <> that gets thrown their way just for voicing opinion.
Now I am not going to call anyone out, I dont want to embarrass or provoke anyone, and I dont want to get yet another warning for "flaming" aka defending myself when toxicity gets thrown my way.
OP has been put into the "Victim's Dilemma", yet again. Harsh responses elicit both you and toxic get a warning and banned from posting to the thread for 3 days + posts removed. Do nothing and mods will just ignore those toxic comments. Happens a lot in life and I call it the "Victim's Dilemma". Someone does something to you and its not serious enough for authority to care but you do something back then you become the criminal and suddenly whole thing is taken seriously. It is a lose-lose scenario.
So what is the solution to all of this, in the context of the Elite: Dangerous official forum ?
The mods have no will to solve it. One can see on the very first page of this thread comments that are clearly disparaging to the OP and his post, and the next a post in response to this thread by a Mod. The moderation team read this comment yet chose to do nothing. Frontier knows these forums have a bad reputation for toxicity yet choose to do nothing.
It is up to us, THE COMMUNITY, to do what we can to solve this problem of chronic toxicity, and what I propose is this :
1. SPEAK UP. If you see someone being denigrated, tone policed, baited, insulted or any of the other words that just mean using words to hurt another person then : SAY SOMETHING. Say it is not right and that you do not agree with it. There is a massive difference between disagreeing with someone thence attacking the premise or logic of their arguments and attacking THAT PERSON as a person. They are alike, yet not alike. Confuse them not.
2. NO NAMING AND SHAMING. This does absolutely no good and just causes fights/flame wars. Dont do it. People might also have a good motive and just made a mistake in their wording, you dont know. Dont call people out, it is just repeating the whole cycle we are trying to break.
3. GIVE THE REASONS WHY TOXICITY ON THESE FORUMS IS A BAD THING
3.1 It is discouraging people from having a voice. Many people are thin skinned and end up banned or just leave these forums because of this. Every voice adds value.
3.2 It is giving these forums a bad reputation. People prefer to post on reddit or face book rather than here and who can blame them? We should be an example to other communities. Compare and contrast to Kerbal Space Program official forums.
3.3 It is causing a lot of anger and bad feeling. Many people who aught be fast friends because of strong shared interest and passion are falling out or getting enmity.
3.4 It makes the forums a generally nasty place, one must always wonder when posting how someone is going to attack, knowing any defence of oneself is likely to elicit a warning
3.5 I know most people dont give a dam about anyone but themselves. But for the odd few who are the exception, knowing the toxicity is upsetting people and making others unhappy aught be reason enough to want to clean these forums up.
3.6 And probably many, many other reasons, I leave it to the ingenium of the individual to work out, state of affairs is good for no-one.
And I know many people will say it cant be done, the will is not there, we wont get everyone on board, etc, etc. It only takes a few respected CMDRs to consistently lend voice when they notice toxicity for things to change for the better. As it was rightly said "One carat of diamond is worth several tons of sand; we dont need the majority". We should be an example in space sim community, not a toxic cess pit.
CMDR Gavin786
EDIT: Sorry this got poseted accidentally before I finished writing
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Actually we told him what was wrong, and he refused to listen and started insulting us instead
Well I hope you had fun typing that, but doesn’t really apply here. OP was rude and made unfounded accusations.
he literally says that he doesn’t care to pay attention and then went on to act like a know-it-all. That’s not a recipe for positive interaction
I do hope he reconsiders what he did.
He did not get ridiculed before he started to thrown accusations around. Several people concluded that it did not sound like a hack, and the so called evidence for a hack was basically nothing, it was nothing more than big speculation by a player that does not appear to understand the the game mechanics, and how game hacks works...
It has not been uncommon for community goals to end before the set deadline, as many (most?) community goals usually ends when the goal is achieved... I remember that FDev have had to extend some very popular community goals to allow more players to participate.
So let us entertain the notion that the game was hacked... and the hack was that OP was not able to join the community goal, the mission was missing.
This hack appears to only have affected one player at this moment.
Mission are generated on a mission server and sent to the logon servers, that players connects to. Since it is doubtful that the hack happeneds between the mission servers and the logon servers, as that most likely is on a protected network, and if hackers had access to intercept traffic there, there are much more lucrative thigns todo than messing around with a single player. Filling mission boards with custom missions that pays really good comes to mind...
So next target, logon servers, these are the servers we connect to. This traffic has no reason to pass by other players, it is a direct connection, so game mode, instancing, and other players should not matter in this case. So to mess a around with this traffic, we need to be able to intercept traffic between OP's computer/console and the FDev servers. Which is pretty hard thing to achieve... but if they could, there at much more lucrative things todo than to "filter" out a mission on a mission board.... steal OP's credentials to web-services, like this forum, bank account details etc, etc. and this is normally called man-in-the-middle attack, there are basically 3 places where this sort of things can easily be done,
1. OP's home network, OP's family/friends etc messing around? unsecured/hacked wifi and an intruder on OP's network, etc, etc, most likely place.
2. ISP can intercept traffic and re-route traffic. Now that an hacker works at OP's ISP to mess with OP playing Elite Dangerous seems highly unlikely, as the reward is non existent.
3. Amazon can do the same as the ISP but on other end. Also highly unlikely they have a hacker doing this to target OP.
So we are now looking at the prospect that OP has a "hacker" in his home network that can intercept and change his traffic. And the only evidence of this a missing mission on the mission board. This does not sound very plausible.
All the other peer-to-peer (p2p) aspects of this game concerns player to player interaction, I jump into a system, and you are already present here, the game servers tells my client that I should contact your client as you are already here, and you becomes the "instance" master until you leave the instance, if I am still left, I become the new instance master. and so on, until there are no more players in the instance, and then the instance dies. No difference if this is in supper cruise, normal space or on a planet. So in this scenario it is not to hard to think about I can hack the traffic between me and you, for example, if you decided to shoot at me, and then I simply tells your client, I have full shields, no damage done, this would be pretty annoying for you, as you will soon realise that I still have full shields despite the fact that you have shoot at me for several minutes.... Depending on what information is sent between players in this p2pp fashion, that sets the limit on what a hacker can abuse. But loading the mission board is NOT part of the p2p traffic.
This is why most games employs encryption to the traffic, to avoid having "hackers" snooping on the traffic and modify the packets, or simply generate their own packets.
We also have the option that OP's computer (consoles are very unlikely here) have been hacked, and someone is simply messing around with stuff on OP's computer. But I fail to see any vialable reason for why someone that have hacked anybody's computer only doing minor stuff like this. and if this was the case, then OP would be way worse off, as his computer is now controller by a 3rd party, that can do anything they want to it... spending alot of time removing removing a mission form the mission board in a game does not really fit what hackers do with hacked computers. way to much effort to mess around with a user with this specific thing in mind. if they are hacking for the fun of it, then messing around with the desktop, and/or the web browsers gives far more effect with much less effort.
So conclusion, the alleged hacking suggested by OP does not make any sense. It involves several steps of highly technical skills stuff to do, and as it only appears to be targeting OP, the effort vs the reward does not make any sense. Who would benefit for this? what was the gain? to deny a player from participating in a community goal in a game? to mine salt from the player? if so then some sort of gloating needs to be present, gankers thrive on players sending them angry messages about getting killed, but here, what was it to gloat about? what was achieved?
So with all the lack of evidence that OP was hacked, it is much more likely that OP limited knowledge about Community Goals victory conditions is to blame here, as we know that community goals can end prematurely when the winning condition is achieved. In this case, we have two competing CG's, and one of them did achieve their victory condition at around the time OP complain this happened. So that makes it much more logical that OP was to late to join the party. and instead of being a casual player that do not fully understand how things works, he OP jumped to conclusion, the game was hacked. Then when he posted this people did not really believe this as this makes no sense, and OP gets defensive and starting to lashing out, a terrible thing to do in a forum if you want to have god replies, as that is a sure way to trigger community members to mine salt by lashing back at OP. adn then we have you, that defends OP and ignores OPs own behaviour and goes after the others... now stirring the pot to make this another bad thread... did you even apply your won "rules" to your own post?
I have seen several thread where a frustrated player create a thread to went some frustration, and in many cases, they get the fact wrong, and people point it out, and depending on what the reply they get, it either goes way worse, since the poster is frustrated and simply lashes out at just about anybody that do not agree, this then escalates quickly to be really bad... but I have also seen alot of moderation and warnings going around in those threads and if the poster do calm down, and stops alienating them with the rest of the community, it can as quickly turn into a helpful thread to actually help OP or atleast explain what most likely happened. And the friendliness you promote goes both ways. if people start out being unfriendly it takes ALOT to be friendly back...
So why should the community be all lets all be friends here when someone "joins" and the basically tells everyone off that do not agree?
Save me a seat.
fyi, yes, the game has hacks. particularly the game client's security is much like this:
basically, there is at least one known 'trainer' to, e.g., make your own ship invulnerable or jump impossible distances (that's obviously against the tos, mind you). yes, multiplayer combat implementation in this game is a joke. otoh hacking the server side mission board, or hacking another player's client to hide a mission would be a first. no one has even suggested that in 5 years, let alone demonstrated it. not that that would be impossible at all, of course, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you didn't bring up the faintest of it.
as i see it, you had really wrong assumptions, and quite striking ones for people who could have laid them out for you, and the first responses you got were not clear and comprehensive enough for you to dispel those and maybe contained a bit of skeptical humor. but, really, unless you have new information the thread contains everything you need to know. instead of that you just doubled down on your position, which comes across as really irrational.
i hope that clears it up a bit.
This whole thread is soooo stupid
Strangely, this thread is not erased but ajaa devs are still asleep in their sleepless sleep ?
I remember when this game started with engineer but many have been to lazy to grind or against it so I fully engineered many of my ships and thought it was interesting but one day I was ganked and I beat the s*** out of them with my Corvette, could you imagine what they said to me then, They told me I was cheating. Then i told them I had a full engineered ship then it was quiet, Today almost everyone have full engineered ship in open and those who cant keep up I wonder what they do
I remember when this game started with engineer but many have been to lazy to grind or against it so I fully engineered many of my ships and thought it was interesting but one day I was ganked and I beat the s*** out of them with my Corvette, could you imagine what they said to me then, They told me I was cheating. Then i told them I had a full engineered ship then it was quiet, Today almost everyone have full engineered ship in open and those who cant keep up I wonder what they do
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