Who has encountered a cheater using a hack?
- Thread starter Agony_Aunt
- Start date
Or new accounts are cheap and people banned can be back playing within 5 minutes of being banned.
Can these videos of cheaters be posted anywhere else besides Reddit or here? Surely it's not an insurmountable problem.
Not zero likelyhood. All depends on how effective FD's detection routines are and what they have in place at the moment and what extra detection they put in. No cheater should assume they are safe from being detected ever, not matter how little they use it. Early on when FD's cheat detection was more limited, people could make jumps of 100LY with the cheat. FD then added detection for that, and boom, cheaters detected and banwave ensued.
People might think they are safe running things that reduce shield damage if playing in solo, and they might be right (or not), but if FD then can trap that cheat, then they will be caught.
After all, detecting something like that shouldn't be too hard. Someone gets hit, the game engine sends the damage that should be done to the server along with the actual damage actually done and compares. If there is a disparity, there might be a cheat. Enough flags like that, you know you have someone who needs closer investigation. Problem with doing that, you're increasing network traffic, especially considering how much damage is done during combat, so it may not be feasable. And of course the hackers might find ways to change the data being sent so that the reported numbers match... its a game of cat and mouse unfortunately.
I suspect shadow rams are a simple artifact of the game's latency compensation.
All damage is generally done from the damage dealer's perspective, regardless of the real time perspective (subject to latency) of the defender. This is the same reason that two pilots can think they are each shooting eachother from above, or behind, in higher ping scenarios.
Anyway, all the windows need a disclaimer that says "objects viewed through this glass may be closer than they appear".
Someone could set up a sub for it, but they couldn't advertise the sub here or on the main ED reddit sub.
I don't think its a good idea, because its obvious what would happen, witch hunts, potentially against people who haven't cheated, just network goofiness or something else making it look like a potential cheat. And even if its posted with "Possible cheater spotted", you can guarantee some people will ignore the "possible" and go into full witch hunt mode against that person.
How do you know?
That's the thing, it is easy to sound certain of what you believe. That is compounded by the fact that that the only people with the numbers are not telling.
In any case, we know for certain there is a number of people engaging in this conduct. Saying "ït ain't so" just because you haven't seen it happen only helps the cheaters.
This issue requires decisive action and transparency on FD's part regardless of the numbers.
I'm not sure our current situation is preferable.
I have plenty of videos, that lacking context, would appear to illustrate hacks to quite a few people. However, I have no videos of anything I am convinced is a hack.
Lacking the sort of information that Frontier should be collecting, actual proof is pretty hard to come by and would require repeat encounters.
A- It was a small ship
B-15 minutes sitting there doing nothing with a full shield.
No.
If you didn't notice that was a question it had one of these [?] on the end of it! Unlike a lot of people I find the forum of a game a great place to learn from the older players who use it most. I expressed no opinion.
I did however express an assumption that CQC was just another room of the game as Solo is- my bad.
Your statement also makes me "assume" you think that I engage on the forum to much.
I rarely record video because it takes up so much disk space, and Elite's performance nosedived catastrophically after Beyond was launched, but I've encountered three (ever) situations where I didn't know for certain that someone was cheating, but suspected as much.
1
Corvette vs FdL; I was interdicted in my PVE boat and their FdL started shooting immediately with a weird loadout of frags and MC. I'm an adequate pilot at best and so figured I was in for a pretty even fight vs an experienced PVPer, despite my enormous shield and sustained DPS advantage. Anyway, after about 30 seconds I realised I was clearly the better pilot and could just plink away at his prismatics. Now I KNOW you can engineer some pretty ridiculous prismatics on an FdL but I had excellent ToT with this FdL and expected with two C4 MCs and a bunch of beams to be doing at least SOME damage to him. I had a single C1 FC railgun ready for his bank but it never happened. I probably consumed 1250 MC ammo per C4 hardpoint, the vast majority of which hit his shields, and whilst the outer ring faded a little, I would estimate he was still at 75% shields after around 5 mins of sustained fire. As tempting as it was to kill a rubbish ganker who thought he'd 'have a go' I didn't have the time or the ammo to keep engaging them.
2
A gank squad of three interdicted me after a long-ish journey back from Quince or Sothis (I forget which) to Jameson in my 70+LY DBX taxi. I high waked ASAP because the taxi isn't armed, and can't boost more than twice without a nice long rest, but I figured I was safe because I'd picked something too far away from Shinrarta to be followed. Anyway, I was just browsing the right panel in SC to check the damage taken and some of the same gank squad appeared again - FdL and iCutter. Now, we're talking 20-30 seconds since I finished the jump - so less than 90 seconds for sure since they would have been informed of my 'surge detected' hi-wake charging. Now, a stripped-down, lightly-armed iCutter with a 5H guardian premium jumponium could probably manage 65LY in a single hop, so the 20-30 seconds would be believable since that's all it would take to wake-scan, charge and jump after me. The FdL, jumping 65LY in a single hop?
No way.
60LY at best with god-roll legacy mods, guardian booster and premium jumponium used as well.
3
The most recent one was earlier this year in a PVE wing for a BH community goal. I winged up with a random CMDR in the instance and he was being lightly harassed by an iCourier that posed no real threat to him. I lumbered within range to thump the shields off it with with two LR C4 fixed beams and it ran away on half hull only to come back with an couple of FdL friends a few minutes later. I'm guessing my Corvette had about 50-60% shields (~6000MJ effective, so maybe ~3000MJ left) at the time they started firing and I wasn't dumb enough to try and fight a wing of three PVP gankers who had a headstart in an all-beam PVE laserbarge. At least one of them had phasing sequence but I always run with at least an MRP and a couple of HRPs to avoid the sudden death of a paper-thin hull if I do something stupid and lose shields. Off the top of my head, the effective armour against thermal is ~3500MJ) Phasing is 10% penetration I think, so at 50% shields I was expecting the shields taking at least 90% of the damage to give out long before the undamaged hull. Anyway, my modules started malfunctioning immediately (I assumed grom missiles and drag munitions) but I was surprised to see the cockpit go dark and 'eject, eject, eject' when my shields hadn't dropped yet. To this day I have no idea how they did that - perhaps there was a gank fleet of 10+ ships with long-range rails and they all fired simultaneously for an insta-kill, or perhaps there was some kind of super-laggy wing of torpedo boats that had somehow managed to get the 6 torps necessary to take down my generator and also then landed another 3500MJ of hull damage all in the space of one lagspike.
So no, I can't be sure I've seen someone cheating, but even knowing how ridiculous some of the engineering can be in this game, those three situations all defy likely explanations that aren't "cheaters using a hack"
FDL's can't have over 30,000 MJ shields.
FDL's can't jump 65LY in a single hop
Phasing sequence lasers can't do 3500 MJ of hull damage without taking out just 3000 MJ of shields.
So there's three examples where I was extremely suspicious of cheating, but potentially I've been attacked by cheaters and not realised on many more occasions; either dying and assuming I was lacking combat skill and situational judgement, or simply running away to lick my wounded pride.
1
Corvette vs FdL; I was interdicted in my PVE boat and their FdL started shooting immediately with a weird loadout of frags and MC. I'm an adequate pilot at best and so figured I was in for a pretty even fight vs an experienced PVPer, despite my enormous shield and sustained DPS advantage. Anyway, after about 30 seconds I realised I was clearly the better pilot and could just plink away at his prismatics. Now I KNOW you can engineer some pretty ridiculous prismatics on an FdL but I had excellent ToT with this FdL and expected with two C4 MCs and a bunch of beams to be doing at least SOME damage to him. I had a single C1 FC railgun ready for his bank but it never happened. I probably consumed 1250 MC ammo per C4 hardpoint, the vast majority of which hit his shields, and whilst the outer ring faded a little, I would estimate he was still at 75% shields after around 5 mins of sustained fire. As tempting as it was to kill a rubbish ganker who thought he'd 'have a go' I didn't have the time or the ammo to keep engaging them.
2
A gank squad of three interdicted me after a long-ish journey back from Quince or Sothis (I forget which) to Jameson in my 70+LY DBX taxi. I high waked ASAP because the taxi isn't armed, and can't boost more than twice without a nice long rest, but I figured I was safe because I'd picked something too far away from Shinrarta to be followed. Anyway, I was just browsing the right panel in SC to check the damage taken and some of the same gank squad appeared again - FdL and iCutter. Now, we're talking 20-30 seconds since I finished the jump - so less than 90 seconds for sure since they would have been informed of my 'surge detected' hi-wake charging. Now, a stripped-down, lightly-armed iCutter with a 5H guardian premium jumponium could probably manage 65LY in a single hop, so the 20-30 seconds would be believable since that's all it would take to wake-scan, charge and jump after me. The FdL, jumping 65LY in a single hop?
No way.
60LY at best with god-roll legacy mods, guardian booster and premium jumponium used as well.
3
The most recent one was earlier this year in a PVE wing for a BH community goal. I winged up with a random CMDR in the instance and he was being lightly harassed by an iCourier that posed no real threat to him. I lumbered within range to thump the shields off it with with two LR C4 fixed beams and it ran away on half hull only to come back with an couple of FdL friends a few minutes later. I'm guessing my Corvette had about 50-60% shields (~6000MJ effective, so maybe ~3000MJ left) at the time they started firing and I wasn't dumb enough to try and fight a wing of three PVP gankers who had a headstart in an all-beam PVE laserbarge. At least one of them had phasing sequence but I always run with at least an MRP and a couple of HRPs to avoid the sudden death of a paper-thin hull if I do something stupid and lose shields. Off the top of my head, the effective armour against thermal is ~3500MJ) Phasing is 10% penetration I think, so at 50% shields I was expecting the shields taking at least 90% of the damage to give out long before the undamaged hull. Anyway, my modules started malfunctioning immediately (I assumed grom missiles and drag munitions) but I was surprised to see the cockpit go dark and 'eject, eject, eject' when my shields hadn't dropped yet. To this day I have no idea how they did that - perhaps there was a gank fleet of 10+ ships with long-range rails and they all fired simultaneously for an insta-kill, or perhaps there was some kind of super-laggy wing of torpedo boats that had somehow managed to get the 6 torps necessary to take down my generator and also then landed another 3500MJ of hull damage all in the space of one lagspike.
So no, I can't be sure I've seen someone cheating, but even knowing how ridiculous some of the engineering can be in this game, those three situations all defy likely explanations that aren't "cheaters using a hack"
FDL's can't have over 30,000 MJ shields.
FDL's can't jump 65LY in a single hop
Phasing sequence lasers can't do 3500 MJ of hull damage without taking out just 3000 MJ of shields.
So there's three examples where I was extremely suspicious of cheating, but potentially I've been attacked by cheaters and not realised on many more occasions; either dying and assuming I was lacking combat skill and situational judgement, or simply running away to lick my wounded pride.
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I’m not sure if I encountered a cheater but just a few days ago I was interdicted by another commander so I just throttled down to submit and expected to engage in some fun role-playing. Well the very second I was pulled out of supercruise, I got hit by something fired at me and covas told me I was overheating warning. Within lass than 1 second I exploded and was done. It was a ganker, of course (which is part of the game imo) but I didn’t even have a chance. Instant death. I haven’t experimented with all the weapons so assumed it was legit but to destroy my fully engineered ASPx almost instantaneously seems a bit of an unfair advantage, doesn’t it? Was this person cheating?
Hacking has suddenly turned into a very widespread issue. I just saw a video go up a few hours ago in Discord of a particular player well known in the PvP community as the guy who got banned from Twitch. He called me and a few others the n-word after killing him 7 times in a row. He gets into a duel with another player, while using shield hacks, and almost loses to phasing before he alt-tabs to enable his armor hacks at 48% hull. Suddenly, he can't take hull damage anymore, proceeds to get hammered with another 16 plasma volleys. His numbers didn't change at all.
Discord video channels are getting overloaded with cheater footage and I'm running into cheaters on a daily basis.
Discord video channels are getting overloaded with cheater footage and I'm running into cheaters on a daily basis.
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Hermione Granger
Banned
Ran into another cheater today... and there is a video of a well known PVPer using hacks now.
The only cheaters using hacks are these moderators that keep deleting my trolls and useless replies and the threat of banishment skills.
LOLOO
LOLOO
Plasma accelerators have a minor thermal load attack effect, irrespective of mods.
How tough was your Asp X? 'Fully engineered' doesn't say whole lot without more specifics.
Would it be possible for you to PM me a few links?
Consider yourself fortunate.
I'm certainly not saying cheaters aren't out there but his encounter with SevonOfNine (the pilot with all the cool Adder vs videos on YT) using an Anaconda on a new account shows that even experienced can mistake a good player as a hacker.
The point is, as several have mentioned, a player will rarely be 100% sure of hacking or there would be videos finding their way into Discords etc everywhere and atm there just isn't any evidence of that.
As for the nuanced cheaters only tweaking their values slightly, the one's who never go into Open and the botting that plagues the BGS, while we can all draw our own assumptions on how widespread thw issue is, FDev are the only ones capable of detecting them for sure.