Punkbuster? ohh no - Page 5

ThGlump · 2012-03-09, 12:53 PM

Originally Posted by Traak

Cure? Money. Hire the cheaters to write anti-cheat coding. The US gov't does this all the time.

Those who you will see using hacks ingame arent those who made it. You gain nothing if you try to hire them.

Atuday · 2012-03-09, 12:58 PM

Punkbuster? Really? I knew sony has a bad habit of being hacked but this is down right funny to me. No one in their right mind would use punkbuster. Have you even seen what it does to a servers firewall? Suffice to say I would not want my account and payment data on a server with punkbuster. It's like driving down the street with a big neon sign showing your social security number to the entire world. Seriously guys don't you dare use punkbuster or it will be a repeat of when Anon took you to school.

shadoom · 2012-03-09, 01:15 PM

Oh noes... Hackers are the reason I stopped playing battlefield 3...

Now imagine what a hacker would do when they get banned for hacking in Planetside 2... Exactly, just register a second account because its free

Bags · 2012-03-09, 01:22 PM

Originally Posted by Atuday

Punkbuster? Really? I knew sony has a bad habit of being hacked but this is down right funny to me. No one in their right mind would use punkbuster. Have you even seen what it does to a servers firewall? Suffice to say I would not want my account and payment data on a server with punkbuster. It's like driving down the street with a big neon sign showing your social security number to the entire world. Seriously guys don't you dare use punkbuster or it will be a repeat of when Anon took you to school.

Uh, punkbuster doesn't protect your account information as far as I know.

MonsterBone · 2012-03-09, 01:26 PM

The best way to get rid of hackers is to be able to spectate and report another player with screenshots. Then IP ban them. That alone would get rid of the hackers.

Xaine · 2012-03-09, 01:27 PM

Hopefully there will be an active GM team that can get on-top of this fast.

Coreldan · 2012-03-09, 01:41 PM

Originally Posted by MonsterBone

The best way to get rid of hackers is to be able to spectate and report another player with screenshots. Then IP ban them. That alone would get rid of the hackers.

A crap ton of people get a new IP by reseting their router, though

Ailos · 2012-03-09, 02:04 PM

PB isn't going to be adequate enough even if it's used properly. I've had a lot of mixed experience with it in all of the BF series.

VAC is marginally better, but its power comes in the fact that ban from one server = ban from all servers. That won't necessarily apply to PS2 though since there won't be hundreds of servers with dozens of players, but maybe just a dozens server clusters with thousands of players. Steam also keeps it updated a bit better than PB is, I feel.

So the overnight way to deter cheaters would be to make the cheating cost money - $10 sticker price won't deter anyone above the age of 11 (basically, middle school up), especially since most games today are $50-$60. However, cheating, getting your account banned and having to pay another $10 to make a new one can pile up after your third or fourth ban. Doubly so if you ban not just the account but the credit card number, too (and if a fake card is being used, then the bank has a major fail).

A more involved, but more authoritarian way would be for your account to have a hardware hash on file for your setup, like someone else mentioned. This way when you ban, you ban not just the account name and credit card, but also the hardware hash. Now, the cheater cannot get into the game even if they pay, unless they spend some major cash ($100-$600, depending on what hardware is in the hash) to get new components. I can only imagine that the number of people willing to dish out that kind of money to cheat in an F2P game must be in the single digits on the face of the Earth.

The way around this would be to fake the hash that is sent to the servers, but you can make that difficult by making that something happens under encryption and dynamically server-authenticated. Now all you have to do to keep up is change the encryption on the server periodically. Sure, some people might slip through, but the number won't be high.

Chefkoch · 2012-03-10, 02:18 PM

Make the game so good that cheaters will have no reason to spoil the fun of other people.

Remove Stats...no epeen o meter less cheaters xD

Markn · 2012-03-10, 03:23 PM

The hardware hash thing is an interesting idea. Most people don't know, but I know games do this by only letting you have a license to install a game on one Hard drive and it updates online. Basically every hard drive is different and will generate a number so SOE can store this for all accounts and ban that instead of just the IP that way if you want to keep cheating you will have to go buy a new HD and reinstall everything on your PC. For those who do not know formatting the drive wont work since it would still generate the same number.

EVEN better is have the launcher scan your computer and get your Motherboard Serial Number which is easily doable by the way. If they're caught hacking ban the Motherboard serial there's so many ways this could work and work in a way that would make it very costly to keep hacking. We send SOE our mac address of our network card/router/modem every time we connect to their games and banning these would also work, but would be a problem for large networks like schools and college dorms you would end up banning maybe hundreds of players for 1 persons actions. You could ban the network cards mac address, but you can just buy a wireless USB adapter for 5$ online whenever you want.

Skitrel · 2012-03-10, 03:34 PM

Originally Posted by MonsterBone

The best way to get rid of hackers is to be able to spectate and report another player with screenshots. Then IP ban them. That alone would get rid of the hackers.

This is by far one of the worst ways. A hacker attempting to look legit is almost indistinguishable from simply a good player. I get banned from tonnes of servers all the time in almost every fps because of retard admins banning because the difference is almost impossible to tell.

As for an anti hack that takes screenshots, PB does this, it's really easy to intercept and either black screen, or disable the overlay and re-enable it unnoticably to the player for the split second the screenshot occurs. Or alternatively, hacks can be run entirely stealth without any overlay at all.

The only thing spectating is good for is catching the obvious hackers that aren't trying to hide it (and thus don't actually care whether they get caught or not), hackers trying to hide it aren't catchable in this manner.

Markn · 2012-03-10, 03:36 PM

Originally Posted by Skitrel

This is by far one of the worst ways. A hacker attempting to look legit is almost indistinguishable from simply a good player. I get banned from tonnes of servers all the time in almost every fps because of retard admins banning because the difference is almost impossible to tell.

As for an anti hack that takes screenshots, PB does this, it's really easy to intercept and either black screen, or disable the overlay and re-enable it unnoticably to the player for the split second the screenshot occurs. Or alternatively, hacks can be run entirely stealth without any overlay at all.

The only thing spectating is good for is catching the obvious hackers that aren't trying to hide it (and thus don't actually care whether they get caught or not), hackers trying to hide it aren't catchable in this manner.

Sorry, but a speed hack or aim bot are VERY easy to see happening when in spec mode.

The thing is when you report its not auto ban it sets your account up to be reviewed so CS/GMs go into the actual game logs and see whats going on. MOST hacks will show up in logs that its obvious what you're doing hacks cant hide this fact because for an aim bot to work you have to be sending commands to the game and them commands become repetitive and obvious and if the CS/GM sees this you get banned. Remember any real Aim Bot has to interact with the game client and once you do that you're open to game logs on the server side showing exactly what your client is doing.

Conq · 2012-03-10, 03:42 PM

This is why there -must- be a buy-to-play model. Otherwise it doesn't matter how many times a player is reported or banned. They will just make a new account and be back in the game within a few minutes.

Just came from a BF3 match, one single guy auto killed everyone as they spawned through walls. By the time everyone realized what was going on and stopped spawning he already had several hundred kills. Now that isn't a big deal, I just picked a new server but imagine that happening during a major base raid in PS2? People would quit the game.

It's depressing, BF3 has a hell of a lot more money than PS2 ever will and even they can't stop hacking.

Markn · 2012-03-10, 03:51 PM

Originally Posted by Conq

This is why there -must- be a buy-to-play model. Otherwise it doesn't matter how many times a player is reported or banned. They will just make a new account and be back in the game within a few minutes.

Just came from a BF3 match, one single guy auto killed everyone as they spawned through walls. By the time everyone realized what was going on and stopped spawning he already had several hundred kills. Now that isn't a big deal, I just picked a new server but imagine that happening during a major base raid in PS2? People would quit the game.

It's depressing, BF3 has a hell of a lot more money than PS2 ever will and even they can't stop hacking.

EA has no motivation to stop hacking you already paid for the game.

SOE makes nothing from you unless you play the game and buy stuff if you play for an hr and see so much hacking you quit SOE makes nothing. There is way more motivation for SOE to stop hacking in PS2.

Also this is still an MMO that will most likely have updates to fix stuff every few weeks while FPS games get updates what 2-3 times a year ?

I would argue buy to play games have less motivation to actually stop hackers because you already paid for the game you ain't gonna spend 60$ and just quit.

Kriegson · 2012-03-10, 05:38 PM

It really comes down to how hard the devs crack down on botting, and how often ban waves go out.
If they expect PB to do all the work, they are sorely mistaken. But if they have GM's roaming and a decent reporting system that can help distinguish between whiners and legitimate complaints, they could make some decent progress.

It is not impossible to tell a smart botter from a good player. Good players occasionally miss, and they have bad streaks. Botters will almost always turn on the hax the moment they start losing, or are fighting someone more skilled than they are.