How many of you.... have actually had to deal with the Administration end of Hack-Users?
I have, and let me tell you, Aimbotters are not difficult to spot. Especially the ones using "NoSpread". The only ones that are hard to deal with are the ones using Angle-Clamping and Aim-smoothing & sometimes (if it's common enough in the game), Prediction for those games with Rockets and longer "bullet times". (Even TF2 has weapons that
can be botted this way and almost no one else on
most forums except me ever seems to know it). In all cases... as long as there's a first-person view of the cheater with their Aiming Vector available to spectators ... it's really easy to tell as their screen will "jitter" around in the last ~100ms before a shot is fired.
It's a pretty simple process so long as all of your "GM's" or w/e you want to call them are properly trained to spot these things. Unfortunately that's not what I've heard to be the case at SOE. They apparently have mostly general "Service Reps" ... not even comparable to net-nannies, infact I'd compare them more to Walmart stockers who aren't even required to speak english & know where every piece of merchandise is in their own departments and there's only a couple of them in the entire store (server). This became more or less public knowledge when one player reported a really obvious Aimbotter and the GM had to go find someone with the expertise and server tools to deal with it.... (...lol,
"let me go ask my manager")
On private servers with Volunteer mods, you'll typically need 10-15 of them recruited
per server and even more for the really busy ones (connery, mathers, briggs, etc = really busy) just so that you're covering both teams in the fight from the perspective of the opposing team around the clock (not just peak hours). Obviously SOE would never field this kind of manpower for a F2P game nomatter what sort of histrionics we see 'teh Smed' engaged in everytime hackers threaten his latest cash cow. (and I don't want to sound like a hypocrite about this, YES, it's really thankless drudge-work in general yet if they challenged me personally to do it for them, I'd probably take them up on the offer even if it was only for minimum wage).
Then there's another problem under this layer of the onion:
ESP /w Tracelines. This is by far the most common hack in PS2 right now mostly b/c of the hilariously short TTK. In the long term, this is actually a much
better "hack" for anyone who can aim on their own (instead of risking it with a Bot that's just going to "Snap" between targets until everyone on the server reports them finally and they get banned again). ESP is a lot more subtle than botting and gives a veteran player about 2-3x as many advantages while also taking 10x as much "investigation time" to prove they're using it (unless you get lucky and their Injector is so old that it gets "detected" by your game's mostly useless "Anti-cheat" code/checksums). The best part, even most trained Administrators just plain suck at detecting ESP. Partly b/c they've never used it themselves or know what "warning flags" to look for...
...but also b/c way too many appointed "Cheat Detectors" tend to be really good players in general who automatically rationalize excuses for why a certain player would know to be aimed right at that guy's head near chokepoints as he's coming around that corner despite obvious exceptions where the target is either jumping or crouching as they're coming around it. And despite the knockdown drag-out arguments I've had with people like this, they really do have my sympathy b/c I know they really really want to do the right thing and be really really sure that they're Not unjustly banning an innocent player. So I don't hold any personal grudges against them when they let the perp off even though I've gotten confessions out of those perps months down the road that they were indeed ESP'ing.
<--- the only way to really fix this is with Server-side scripting that calculates all Geometry-based player Occlusion for every player before any Vectors are ever sent to the client.
And the last layer I hesitate to speak of... is the 'Triggerbot'. What's so devious about these is that there's a real person aiming them, AND they may not even require direct injection in to the game's DLL's. Some of them can function just fine using nothing more than Direct3D calls or graphics memory monitoring. I've tested several myself in a variety of games without ever being detected or spotted by other admins. This is b/c the only way to catch it, is for the Anti-cheat software to act like spyware and invasively report resources that no studio with the exception of Microsoft itself has a justifiable warranted right to dig into unless the user expressly signs away that right (IIRC, punkbuster usually requires some kind of confirmation along thee lines but I wouldn't define it as legally binding per'se).
So there's the problem in a nutshell. There's always going to be too many hack-users because there's always going to be real shortage of people equipped to completely
deal with them. Unlike a hacker.... 1 Mod/GM who gets a black mark on their record for a questionable/overturned ban will be impacted for YEARS while a cheater who gets caught will only be inconvenienced for an hour or less. In addition to the point I just made above that pretty much the only people both willing & prepared to deal with the cheaters are "Whitehats" and they're as rare as it gets in this industry. Someone who already HAS the experience to identify every kind of cheat out there (or better yet, make their own!), is much more likely to remain a blackhat instead b/c they then retain the power to deal with other cheaters INSTANTLY by gradually turning their own hacks up until they're dominating that other hacker so bad he ragequits. Why would a pro blackhat do anything else in an industry so entirely dedicated to instant gratification? You'd have to be suffering from achievemephobia to consider any other approach. ...or already
matured out of the "gaming phase" in your life to the point you don't even care about gaming anymore in which case you'd just be a really bad/unmotivated employee in general.
Another point I have to address before closing: A lot of people believe the myth that if you bind accounts to Creditcard/paypal numbers that you'll stop them, this of course is also complete horseshit (for many many loopholes, including how easily you can buy prepaid online checking cards at the grocery store) and if it worked every studio would have done it by now. And we'd only be wasting more time than than we ever saved by trying to
criminalize hacking. Right now the only chance at a government level would be to require precedent in Civil/"Tort" law for Studios to sue not the hack makers.... but the US offices/servers of Financial support networks that deliver those transactions to the hack makers. (this is the ONLY point to cut it off at before it reaches international jurisdictions)
-Hope this helps to dispel some of the misinformation or naivete that far too many people seem to have when it comes to "hacks".
2013-01-03, 11:27 PM
When LE runs out of MLATs to process for child pornography and financial instrument theft, I'm sure they'll call us looking for work.
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