The problem with a public "teaching" of what hacks are and what they look like is that it won't do much good either. At least it's a two edged sword. I actually think the "oblivious" community is the preferable one. Because it's never completely "oblivious".
The main reason being that, with "public education" everybody thinks he suddenly became a cheat expert because he read forum post or saw a video on the latest hacking-flavour of the month and starts reporting everything that he thinks is suspicious. We had that situation in Counter-Strike and it was awfull. It created an environment where everybody reported everybody for everything. Lost a match? Reported for maphack. Headshotted? Reported for aimbot, etc.
I don't doubt that there are people who are able to detect this stuff with a higher success rate as I have spend quiet some time analysing CS demos within an anti-cheat team. But the problem is that even then to
proof it properly you need more then just one fishy situation, and this is where the SOE/P7G mods come in to file the evidence. And when everybody reports everything they get overloaded with reports and can no longer do their work efficiently. Even today I highly doubt that most of the reports are all too helpfull. And, from experience, I doubt that trying to educate the playerbase will change it for the better.
One could argue that within PSU we surely have a lot more people who could benefit from that, but PSU is also read by a lot of "randoms" and those will simply carry the info to the official forums and then the whole idea will go down the drain.
We as players have almost no way to actually proof that a player is hacking because we simply lack the tools. The only ones who have a slight chance of catching a cheater/hacker are those who capture all their gameplay. But those are what, like less then 1% of the playerbase? And even then, to ban someone, I would argue, it needs more then one fishy scene from another persons point of view, if not incredibly obvious. And don't underestimate hackers. The "hardcore" ones know how to hide their hacks pretty well. They are incredibly hard to catch. The "script kiddies" and their public hacks will be out of the game pretty fast. But the "true" hackers, with custom written hacks, are a totally different kind of breed.
It might sound strange, but you need a large percentage of players to not care about hacks or at least be very hesitant with what they report. Simply because a large percentage of public reports will be dead wrong, even and maybe especially when they know which hacks exists.
Taking too much about hacks creates an environment where everybody thinks that cheating is rampant and everybody cheats. In the end this will hurt the community more then it helps.
I think it's good to talk about hacks in a more confined space like internal forums or teamspeak/mumble severs. But public posts and videos do no good to the game (and this has nothing to do with "turning a blind eye")
If too many public reports come in (because everybody now suddenly sees cheats everywhere) public report systems fail to work. And that's also why in competive gaming to file a proper report requires a large amount of work (uploading the demo, writing a detailed timetable of which scenes are supposed to show which hack) and several people on a team coming to an unanimously decision that hacks were used.
I would very much welcome such a system in PS2, but I doubt that we will ever have the tools. Especially because it would require us to be able to record from another persons point of view. Recording first person is nice, but it brings the problem of not being able to access all the information required and leaves the door open to a large margin of error.
Originally Posted by jboy
Could they not just block the account, but the IP address as well?
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Wouldn't work. Many to most EU countries use dynamic IPs.
But as far as I understand the banning mechanics are pretty solid, to what is technically possible. It still can be circumvented, but it requires some more work then just creating a new account.
2013-05-19, 09:48 PM
) keeping in touch with SOE about it seems a good solution.
And what about all those that visit this site that are not searching for hacks but find it here and get tempted?
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