Anti Cheat

Discussion in 'Backers Lounge (Read-only)' started by Gruenerapfel, February 22, 2013.

  1. EdWood

    EdWood Active Member

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    Again,

    there will be UBER servers and they will run with stock game settings...
  2. RCIX

    RCIX Member

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    uhh wait what? What's this shift f6 menu? Google isn't cooperating =/
  3. KNight

    KNight Post Master General

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    It basically opening a little window that let you edit most/all BP fields, so it was great for testing balance without starting new skirmishes and such.

    Kinda moot with /enablediskwatch and a second monitor, but still neat to have.

    Mike
  4. RCIX

    RCIX Member

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    Did you have to do anything special to get it? Because shift f6 won't do anything on my copy of FA =/
  5. KNight

    KNight Post Master General

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    You mean aside of having cheats enabled?

    Mike
  6. RCIX

    RCIX Member

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    Yeah. Alt f2 brings up unit spawn, alt f8 gets me the broken lua debugger which just crashes SupCom, and alt + f11 brings up some sort of FPS counter, but other than that no Shift+function keys seem to do anything.
  7. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

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    People can and likely will try to cheat in PA by messing with the client simulations, but all that will do is mess up what they're seeing, not actually change anything for other players.

    FPS games and MMO games often give clients a lot of authority for movement, shooting, and collision due to the instant feedback requirements of "direct drive" style games. If you press forward on a joystick or WASD you expect the unit under your control to start moving immediately, so clients have to be allowed to simulate this or have some level of authority. That authority opens cheat opportunities.

    RTS games usually don't give players any direct control. You give orders to move to a location and they figure out how to get there, sometimes taking a significant delay before they actually start to move (usually masked with some voice audio or unit animation). This is because units don't move until the command has been sent, verified, and calculated over a network.

    Traditionally for RTS games they're using a peer to peer lockstep synchronous network model. This means clients only send and receive commands to and from other players, but requires all players actually have a full simulation of every unit on the battlefield, which is where the cheating comes in. The game only shows you what units it thinks you're allowed to see, but you still have the data for everyone. The simplest cheat is often just overriding the game's concept of what the player can see to be everything (removing fog of war, etc.).

    For PA and other client server architectures you can change it to only send information about units that player can see. The client authority that FPS and MMO games have aren't required as RTS games are less effected by delayed response times, removing those avenues for cheating.

    If you're running a server locally, you still have the same ability to cheat, but for external servers it's nearly impossible.


    Also, on the performance question, think about the fact that in traditional RTS games every player is essentially running both the client and the server side calculations for every unit. Splitting that up means only one player, or an external server, needs to do that work. In that way the person running a game with a local server (or playing single player) is no different than traditional RTS performance, but other players should be able to run with significantly reduced requirements.
  8. meltedcandles

    meltedcandles Member

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    From the beginning of online games there have been cheaters, hackers, and glitch exploiters. Uber will try hard, but no one can make any game completely hack proof.
  9. Gruenerapfel

    Gruenerapfel Member

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    I think so to, would like to have a cheat reporter, to get rid of theese bad apples.
  10. Raevn

    Raevn Moderator Alumni

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    The only hacks likely to be possible are exploits of bugs in the game, rather than any kind of cheating software. As has been stated, the Server is God when it comes to affecting gameplay. Unless you are hosting the server, your possibilities of cheating only come down to what you can do via the client, and what the server accepts. The forums are pretty good reporting tools, or PMing an Uber employee.
  11. Gruenerapfel

    Gruenerapfel Member

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    still... a build in reporter would be more comfortable
  12. AusSkiller

    AusSkiller Member

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    I agree, some way to report cheaters would be very nice because players will almost certainly be creating their own servers and I think it would be a good idea to warn players looking for games that the host of a game has been frequently reported for cheating. But as the others have said it only really needs to apply to the host of the server since the client will have very few vulnerabilities they can exploit.
  13. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

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    I would say there are two types of reports you guys are really asking for, one to report players for abuse (gameplay or verbal), and another for reporting player servers.
  14. Gruenerapfel

    Gruenerapfel Member

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    I thought what we were asking about is a reporter for cheating(own server, abusing bugs etc.)
    but more features wont hurt
  15. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

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    Cheating is one of many forms of gameplay abuse, but as cheating on the traditional sense should be essentially impossible (though I'm not saying someone won't figure out how) having a system to specifically report "cheating" players would be pointless. Now if a player is cheating with you connecting to a server he is running locally, that might be something we want to track and allow reporting of, though this again might be more in line with reporting abuse rather than cheating.

    I'm thinking back of the world of games like Counter Strike where it was common practice for many of the players to be server admins and use their power frequently. Back then the only "reporting" tool was random forums and personal learning of "ok that clan server I should avoid". If they're openly admins, is it cheating or just abuse? Is connecting to a player run server on us to police, or treated as the wild west, or somewhere in between?
  16. anora

    anora New Member

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    could implement something like warden? it just cheeks to see if data is being put in by other application and if the cods been modified before hand, aka verifying cheek sums basically. and that part of the game can be a file that always re-download from the server if download is not allowed you don't get to play online.

    I know warden dose more than what I said, but I simple gave its more simple function.
  17. Raevn

    Raevn Moderator Alumni

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    This can happen already - the server has to verify all data coming in from the clients - if you modify your client, the server will simply reject it. That's why this form of cheating is almost impossible.
  18. Pawz

    Pawz Active Member

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    I don't think it's your place to monitor or police player run servers in the slightest. It's an additional layer of overhead for you guys, and most of the time would be completely unnecessary, and what are you gonna do anyways? Blacklist the server somehow?

    I think all you need is 2 things - one, some kind of check the master server list does against the server to determine which mods are in use, which is visible to all players. This would reduce the number of times you join a server that is running a mod to make that special backer commander produce a million energy. Not to mention it'd be a great tool to see the current popularity of mods being played.

    Secondly, let players police themselves by giving us a simple blacklist feature to allow players to blacklist server IPs along with an easy way to share this list.
  19. BulletMagnet

    BulletMagnet Post Master General

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    Servers: modded and un-modded. You know what you're getting into that way. If you think there's a problem with an un-modded server (like it or not, it's going to be possible to modify the executable so that it claims it's un-modded), then report that.
  20. Gruenerapfel

    Gruenerapfel Member

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    Even tho its hardly possible to cheat, i dont believe, that it will be completty impossible, and PMing Admins or posting on random forums is much less comfortable than just having it implemented ingame. Also possible, would be and "official" report forum, with voting to get rid of Abuser.
    One hack wich may be possible would be desync to prevent loss of ranked stats.

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