White Hat software

[basti]

Originally Posted by Udnknome

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.