White Hat software

[Udnknome]

Given the recent post about the BF3 hacker who described how he was separating the closet Hackers from the real good players. (see Link)

http://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield3/comments/t7201/im_a_hacker_and_i_have_some_information_for_the/

You'd think someone would invest in some white hat software that empowered the community base. Something that could see enemy realtime stats. Like.. Dude run's past you a little 115% pops up at his feet, or.. maybe a guy is sniping you with an MCG at 700 yards, and it gives the shots/sec and number of hits/ misses. Or creates a background log of this that can be pulled up at a later time.


The primary difficult part I see about this would be giving tools to see other people's stats without giving them an advantage in game play. There are far more players than GMs out in the world, and the "bubble" netcode really makes it hard for devs to see anything realistic unless they witness it themself.

This idea is very early in my mind and not quite developed; which is why I brought it to the community.

[psychobilly]

The primary difficult part I see about this would be giving tools to see other people's stats without giving them an advantage in game play. There are far more players than GMs out in the world, and the "bubble" netcode really makes it hard for devs to see anything realistic unless they witness it themself.

This idea is very early in my mind and not quite developed; which is why I brought it to the community.

I liked the reddit read.

Is SOE still talking about using punkbuster as their anti-cheat? That would be like putting up a big neon "HACK ME" sign at the login page.

Hacking is my biggest concern about planetside 2, as the game looks great. If it gets bad - I'm all for vigilante white hats hunting down hackers and making them rage, though.

Hopefully the GM staff will have the necessary tools to see what's going on, but it's a cool concept.

[BlazingSun]

It's unbelieveable what these hacks can do ... also unbelievable is the amount of people who feel the need to use them.

About Punkbuster: It's a bad joke ... I still remember one incident of playing BF2142 and encountering a very obvious cheater. I lost my temper and got banned from the server by PB for swearing in the chat, while nothing happened to the cheater.

About the topic at hand: SOE needs to implement some decent anti-cheat measures themself! But make sure they don't deliver false positives (again). Test them diligent this time around and don't ban hundreds of legit players again.

[basti]

Unessesary.
SOE can already put everything they want into the game, and pull all data they want. Theres no need for the community to be able to see such stats.

[Udnknome]

Unessesary.
SOE can already put everything they want into the game, and pull all data they want. Theres no need for the community to be able to see such stats.

Not to step on a moderator... but it seems from your statement that SOE either can see stats and doesn't look, or knows and doesn't do anything about it.

The goal is to give the community a reliable tool that can focus the GM investigation. To monitor everyone's stats at all times and review occasionally is unrealistic.

[Kipper]

Unessesary.
SOE can already put everything they want into the game, and pull all data they want. Theres no need for the community to be able to see such stats.

Agreed. Waste of resources to go after indivudual hackers, its the hacks themselves you need to go after.

Individual hackers can be flagged up by other players, but i'm sure very few of them would have actually created their own exploits - just acquired them elsewhere.

[Johari]

Punkbuster is just ONE of the anti-hack/cheat measures they are using so calm down. They will have other ways of detecting and dealing with them not putting all of their eggs in one basket.

[Gonefshn]

Agreed. Waste of resources to go after indivudual hackers, its the hacks themselves you need to go after.

Individual hackers can be flagged up by other players, but i'm sure very few of them would have actually created their own exploits - just acquired them elsewhere.

though I don't necessarily fully agree with the OP.

I think there is some value to going after individual hackers as well as the source. The people who use the hacks to me are almost worse than the people who made them because at the very least someone who made a hack has some technical genius I can admire (though they waste it).

My point though is going after and banning hackers is much scarier to a potential hacker than them losing their ability to use a hack. If people are getting banned left and right, as they should for hacking, people will be less inclined to risk it.

The big problem is this game is F2P and F2Own so with multiple accounts it could be messy.

Encouraging White Hat software to aid players seems like a desperate solution to me though. Let developers do this exact thing in their own game and police it for us. I just want to play not constantly run other software and play vigilante.

[xSquirtle]

I stopped reading after this

The hack works by injecting some code into the game as it launches. As such, no files on your computer are altered in any way. I don't have a mass of technical knowledge, but I know this keeps PB and DICE/EA from being able to detect it. The executable for the hack doesn't even exist on your computer: You use a java applet to log in, and it loads it directly into memory and you launch the game afterwards.

This guy has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Code injection has been around for-ever, and every anti-cheat has some form of application analysis in order to fight off the hackers.

Back to the subject, this whole empowering the community has been tossed around for years. The problem is that it could easily become a popularity contest and or a means of punishing a good player, who simply owns noobs.

[Kipper]

I think there is some value to going after individual hackers as well as the source. The people who use the hacks to me are almost worse than the people who made them because at the very least someone who made a hack has some technical genius I can admire (though they waste it).

Let me clarify - of course hackers themselves should lose their account (including items purchased and unlocks earned etc); but to do that, you need to catch them. If you identify the hack, you'll hopefully be able to identify anyone that's installed/used it from how the files/memory/whatever looks rather than Avignon to look at individual cases and use stats to determine if you think they were too good to be playing fairly or not. That could result in genuinely good players losing out.

Not that I'll have this problem if my usual skills are anything to go by - I'm usually mid-table average :)

[Gonefshn]

Let me clarify - of course hackers themselves should lose their account (including items purchased and unlocks earned etc); but to do that, you need to catch them. If you identify the hack, you'll hopefully be able to identify anyone that's installed/used it from how the files/memory/whatever looks rather than Avignon to look at individual cases and use stats to determine if you think they were too good to be playing fairly or not. That could result in genuinely good players losing out.

Ah. Yes so we basically think the exact same thing then :p

Not that I'll have this problem if my usual skills are anything to go by - I'm usually mid-table average :)

Join the club friend.

[Tikuto]

wizardz?

[Sabot]

I wonder how much it would cost to have the CIA on retainer as anti cheat enforcers... that should discourage any cheating tbh.

But in the realm of possible solutions... I'll get back to you on that.

[The Kush]

They should be able to come out with a system that can detect hacking. Also have an in game report system for the players. The hacking system could analyze real time data (on a different server) only valid information could "funnel" through this system ie a specific range of data from a really bad player to a really good. If someone is off the charts their information doesn't funnel through the system and their account is flagged and passes on to further review or banned depending on how accurate the system is. This also works for simple things like run speed, auto aim, ect.

[Biohazard]

What if they could tie together a server-side battle-recorder mixed with the league of legends style reporting system?

You think playerX is hacking so you report him. That report automatically get's a time stamp.

playerY logs into planetside2 to evaluate some reports, and reviews the report of playerX.
The server retrives a portion of the recorded activity, showing a first person view from plarerX's perspective starting one minute prior to the report.
After viewing this, playerY feels that playerX was hacking and votes yes. 70% of other players agree, so playerX gets a strike (1 of 3) and playerY gets some planetside-bux for being right.

The system could modify the amount of payout based on the demand for reviewers to better incentive.

From there maybe playerX is moved to watch list and the server more closely records his activity, so that a tech guy can figure out how he is hacking?

[basti]

Not to step on a moderator... but it seems from your statement that SOE either can see stats and doesn't look, or knows and doesn't do anything about it.

The goal is to give the community a reliable tool that can focus the GM investigation. To monitor everyone's stats at all times and review occasionally is unrealistic.

unrealistic, and not needed.

ITs easy to filter out automaticly.

Take that aiming thing for example that shows how well someone aims. If someone has a unrealistic high % of good aim, like if he manages to aim for more than 1 sec directly onto the head of some foe, then flag him for monitoring.


Let me tell you something: Im a cheater. I cheated in pretty much every FPS i ever played, including Planetside. Not for my personal enjoyment or just to farm people, no, just to figure out what exactly is possible within a game, and what benefits it gives. This way its actually possible to know if someone is cheating or just good at the game. Means, i know stuff. And while getting rid of every single cheater is impossible, its goddamn easy to get rid of most of them rather quickly, as long as you have a team that knows what to do. And apperently, SOE got that.

Now, onto cheating: Punkbuster can just kick out every known cheat right away. If PB knows about it, its useless. Thats whats PB for, nothing else. It doesnt magically find cheats it doesnt know, thats what people have to do.

If SOE did it right and can track all data, they can easily find aimbotters, wallhackers and whatever other cheat may come around (cloaking gamma hack anyone? Every cloaker knows exactly what i mean. ;) )
How? As said in that BF3 post, aimbotters have a unusual % of perfect aim. This can be tracked, and they can be flagged for monitoring.
Wallhackers tend to be more difficult to track via stats monitoring, but are also less of an issue. Yet, you can track them. If done right, you can track if there is a wall or some obstacle between two people. If you have that, you can also track if anyone manages to unusually often fire at the guy that he didnt see before right away. Its far from perfect, but filters out a whole bunch of people. Then you just need a GM go into first person spectrate, turn on his own Dev Wallhack, and see if the guy manages to aim directly at his foe even before he sees him. If he does that quite a few times, and always has unusual good aim, use PB to check is memory. If somethign fishy comes up, pull the hack out of his memory, add it to the PB DB, and what every Wallhacker using that hack get banned.


Thats how you do it.
Identify the hacker, confirm the hack, take action. Something that EA/Dice doesnt do with BF3, and thats why its swarmed with hackers.

One more nasty thing they can do: Pay $ cash each month to have a subscription to those hack selling sites, add those hacks to PB right as they get released. Bang, the hack market is done for. And then its just a tiny bunch of people left that are capable to write their own hacks. And for those you have the above mentioned monitoring.

[velleity]

I used to run Q3 and RTCW/ET servers in the day. Punkbuster is probably more complicated then most pub server admins can handle. There are a number of things it does or can be set to do, most of which are not done in that setting. I doubt SOE will have a problem from a technical perspective. Also, it didn't used to run as a service with system privileges, which is why players are kicked 90% of the time.

The base of punkbuster is a memory signature scan for known common hacks. This is like anti-virus in that it can only protect you from what it knows. It is however effective with those hacks and the UID ban is permanent.

There are also other features of the software that few use. Among these a check sum of loaded files in memory compared periodically every 30 seconds to a minute to detect injections into graphics libraries and other files. This is quite effective. but seldom used since its usually way over the head of the server admin to configure or explain to peeps "standing up for their hacking bros rights".

The software can be set up to take in game pictures and give real time views of the questionable parties behaviour. This is also never done and is actually fairly useful.

But at the end of the day, any software that runs on your own machine can be taken over, which is why I also had players who were either CAL/TWL refs or A ladder players as admins. Not saying I never had dubious players regularly on the server, but they weren't a problem since these weren't provably obvious. Also, always beating someone you think is cheating is kind of amusing.

Last, if players are being kicked for swearing that is not actually punkbuster. That is usually a game function, that is sent to punkbuster to do the job of kicking. You should be bitching at the server admin, not punkbuster in your ignorance. In fact, in game voting kicks are usually handled by punkbuster just because that is the easiest way to do it. But that isn't punkbuster.