I don't think you know how pistol scripts work, they simply can't be stopped in any case due to completely legal external stuff publically available. And about threads being deleted, they go into our evidence vault and if there are obvious hacks, reported to the developers. We've said it many times before and it's simply a dumb idea to allow naming and shaming, as it always turns into a witch hunt even when the hacking claim is false. So please stop spreading your misinformation and drawing conclusions on things you can't possibly know... It's not a conspiracy, its just common sense!
You're the one who is clueless, NS1 easily removed pistol scripts - just slow down the amount of bullets that can be fired in a certain time. Do you have any skills besides being a moderator? That's great, so the community reports these issues and then they vanish off into an "evidence vault", quite easy to ignore or overlook it from that point on and the community has no idea if any progress is made. You're typical of the forum staff who just want to deny there is any problem and uses a typical cookie cutter "read this thread" answer. We're all here to make the game better, every game is vulnerable to cheating and it does put off the hardcore players.
Cute troll attempt there, or would this be classified as flamebaiting. Might want to use actual facts and twist them around a bit, instead of making up stuff and putting words in someones mouth.
And NS never did away with pistol scripts, a maximum rate of fire set at 100ms per bullet is not the way to "fix" it. It only makes it so it is easily achievable without scripts as well. NS2 has the same 100ms per bullet, but there is something funky going on as well. If you want a 100% fix, you go the autofire route for the pistol like TF2. Good luck with that and the community up in here
I don't think you know how pistol scripts work, they simply can't be stopped in any case due to completely legal external stuff publically available. And about threads being deleted, they go into our evidence vault and if there are obvious hacks, reported to the developers. We've said it many times before and it's simply a dumb idea to allow naming and shaming, as it always turns into a witch hunt even when the hacking claim is false. So please stop spreading your misinformation and drawing conclusions on things you can't possibly know... It's not a conspiracy, its just common sense!
You're the one who is clueless, NS1 easily removed pistol scripts - just slow down the amount of bullets that can be fired in a certain time. Do you have any skills besides being a moderator? That's great, so the community reports these issues and then they vanish off into an "evidence vault", quite easy to ignore or overlook it from that point on and the community has no idea if any progress is made. You're typical of the forum staff who just want to deny there is any problem and uses a typical cookie cutter "read this thread" answer. We're all here to make the game better, every game is vulnerable to cheating and it does put off the hardcore players.
The amount of visibility UWE has as a company regarding their game design/balance and direction is alot more than you would get from most other companies. Regarding what they are doing anti-cheat wise...why would you want that publically displayed on a forum? Anyone that's using cheats can simply go "Oh...best not log on for awhile".
Come on, the amount of work that has gone into this game from an indy development crew, and still continues to evolve...plus their openness to ideas/criticisms from the forums/comp players/pub players in general. I don't really know how you can feel so god damn entitled to demand they basically give you their 'work in progress' files and data sheets.
I really don't think UWE does enough to stop cheaters. Pistol scripts and illuminious player models should be quite simple to fix but they let it carry on for months. These are BIG problems for people who play the game as intended and people abusing in these ways should receive some sort of punishment. It's become such a joke that the pistol is becoming more effective than the primary weapon.
The mods here are a joke when it comes to reporting cheaters, much easier to delete cheater threads than confront the reality. Even when proof is posted, the default answer is ban them from your server - that's nice, what about the hundred others they will go on to abuse. I've seen the game Dayz recently explode in popularity to 1mil+ players and promptly implode back to 25k players when cheating totally ruined the experience.
I doubt that there are hundreds of NS2 cheaters/hacker out there.
The question is, out of the 1.5k - 2k concurrent players (might be out of date on those numbers), what percentage are utilizing cheats/hacks and what percentage are you willing to allow?
Even a single cheater/hacker is ruining people's games and that should not be tolerated.
While I understand that it is work (probably a significant amount of work), I would rather see something done to help prevent cheating/hacking than a new content update.
Obviously cheaters/hacker shouldn't be allowed. I totally agree. But the question is actually, how big of a problem is cheating/hacking in NS2 right now, and how much time should be put into anti-cheat measures in contrary to putting that time to use for other stuff like further content/performance/polish? Personally, I've never seen a blatant wallhacker/aimbotter so far. Have you been experiencing a lot of ruined games because of cheaters?
Obviously cheaters/hacker shouldn't be allowed. I totally agree. But the question is actually, how big of a problem is cheating/hacking in NS2 right now, and how much time should be put into anti-cheat measures in contrary to putting that time to use for other stuff like further content/performance/polish? Personally, I've never seen a blatant wallhacker/aimbotter so far. Have you been experiencing a lot of ruined games because of cheaters?
Yes, questions about how much hacking incidence there is currently would be appropriate if you already had a baseline anti cheat system. See catch22. It's like saying i don't need to make microscopes or vaccines because viruses don't exist, and i know this because i can't see them without a microscope. And then people may randomly die, it'll be suspiciously unexplainable, but you have no reliable means of detecting or preventing. But oh well, only a few people are dying so its better to spend our time making a new line of lipstick. 'Negligent stupidity' to put it lightly.
It might instead be better to ask questions like this, a. If you can run a texture mod of some kind on basically any server and get away with it without anyone knowing better, why wouldn't you? b. If you could wallhack, aimbot, pistol script and get away with it, even though people are very suspicious of you but can't do anything because they can't easily gather the necessary evidence, why wouldn't you? And even then, the very little risk there is in these extreme cases is further mitigated by the use of free ns2 gift accounts for example. Everyone got 1 free gift.
Basically, there is huge incentive to cheat in NS2, current observable incidence be damned.
As for anti-cheat or content? UWE as a company have both shown and stated in the past that they are not incapable of performing two or more tasks at the same. If it came down to it (although i doubt it), yes i would much prefer anti-cheat to the next exosuit variant.
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Agree with all said about demo system being the backbone. Would also like to add that fixing consistency checks (1st level prevention defence) does not seem to be something that would take alot of time. I don't think it's possible to argue effort to benefit in this case.
Agree with all said about demo system being the backbone. Would also like to add that fixing consistency checks (1st level prevention defence) does not seem to be something that would take alot of time. I don't think it's possible to argue effort to benefit in this case.
Yeah. My guess is that the consistency is where you get decent gain without huge investment. After that it gets a lot harder.
Obviously cheaters/hacker shouldn't be allowed. I totally agree. But the question is actually, how big of a problem is cheating/hacking in NS2 right now, and how much time should be put into anti-cheat measures in contrary to putting that time to use for other stuff like further content/performance/polish? Personally, I've never seen a blatant wallhacker/aimbotter so far. Have you been experiencing a lot of ruined games because of cheaters?
And that's a question that we can't answer because we just don't know. As far as how much time should be spent, if there are cheaters in your game, then it's not going to be fun regardless of how much content you have in it. I can't say how much time UWE should put in because 1) I don't know how much they're putting in now and 2) I don't know how prevalent cheating/hacking is.
I've seen 3 obvious aim-bots that I can think of off the top of my head and I can't say how many smaller cheats/hacks, such as neon skulks, I've seen since they're much harder to identify and differentiate between skill and cheat/hack.
Whenever I find someone that I think might be cheating/hacking, I typically just switch servers. Either 1) they're cheating/hacking at which point it's not even worth trying to fight them or 2) they are just so much better than me that it comes to the same thing.
I disagree with your definition of "cheating"
Cheating is using a "cheat" that is supported and purposefully implemented into a game. Like unlimited ubercharge in a cheat-enabled server in TF2 or getting free resources with a command in SC2
Cheating is breaking the rules... There's really nothing more to add to it, that's the definition. What you CONSIDER cheating, IS cheating, against YOUR rules. THE rules are NOT your rules.
Cheating can never be stopped as friends can join opposite teams and talk to eachother on ventrilo or some other third party app. Two people can also be in the same room and looking at each others screens.
For counter-strike some people would draw a dot in the middle of their monitor and use the auto sniper since it had perfect accuracy and recoil.
there's always lots of ways to "cheat" without "hacking".
The most hilarious 'cheat' I have ever seen happen when i bought one of the very first dual core AMD processors. Whenever i played CS it would make me "speed hack" around the map. I would empty a whole rifle clip in a tenth of a second and be able to reach the bomb site 1 second into the round. I had to download a special cpu driver from AMD to get it to stop doing this...
I really don't think UWE does enough to stop cheaters. Pistol scripts and illuminious player models should be quite simple to fix but they let it carry on for months. These are BIG problems for people who play the game as intended and people abusing in these ways should receive some sort of punishment. It's become such a joke that the pistol is becoming more effective than the primary weapon.
The mods here are a joke when it comes to reporting cheaters, much easier to delete cheater threads than confront the reality. Even when proof is posted, the default answer is ban them from your server - that's nice, what about the hundred others they will go on to abuse. I've seen the game Dayz recently explode in popularity to 1mil+ players and promptly implode back to 25k players when cheating totally ruined the experience.
We dont delete the treads, we move em to a hidden evidence subforum, where we research and follow up on the proff provided. (ALL REPORTS OF CHEATING/EXPLOITS) are being investigated, and will be delth whit. But just as any other games, banning players universaly isnt a daily occurance. And swinging the banhammer isnt done whitout conclusive evidence. Im sure you heard of the massive banwaves of warcraft players, lol players and other large gaming companies. Its not like they to, ignore all the reports, and then suddenly decide to act upon em when the admin wake up from his slumper.
I can asure you that we are vary much aware of the issues and are being handled, but as a standing policy. We will not name & shame people, post the evidence we have, or keep the info the community provided us puplic. The act of hiding it, is in itself a (small) deterant, and prevents some cheaters/easiely tempted soals to pick it up.
I really don't think UWE does enough to stop cheaters. Pistol scripts and illuminious player models should be quite simple to fix but they let it carry on for months. These are BIG problems for people who play the game as intended and people abusing in these ways should receive some sort of punishment. It's become such a joke that the pistol is becoming more effective than the primary weapon.
The mods here are a joke when it comes to reporting cheaters, much easier to delete cheater threads than confront the reality. Even when proof is posted, the default answer is ban them from your server - that's nice, what about the hundred others they will go on to abuse. I've seen the game Dayz recently explode in popularity to 1mil+ players and promptly implode back to 25k players when cheating totally ruined the experience.
I don't think you know how pistol scripts work, they simply can't be stopped in any case due to completely legal external stuff publically available. And about threads being deleted, they go into our evidence vault and if there are obvious hacks, reported to the developers. We've said it many times before and it's simply a dumb idea to allow naming and shaming, as it always turns into a witch hunt even when the hacking claim is false. So please stop spreading your misinformation and drawing conclusions on things you can't possibly know... It's not a conspiracy, its just common sense!
Pistol scripts can be stopped, just because some dont like the solution does not mean it cant be stopped.
The wider issue of hacking like in all communities needs to be handled maturely, not only from those who have played against hackers but also the mods and the game developers themselves.
Having it publicly acknoiwledged may seem like simple lip service but would go a long way to showing the public stuff is being done.
Instead the public gets to see fluro skulks in the workshop and seemingly no action on hacking.
UWE said they would be using VAC...do we know how many people VAC has found?
We dont need names but if VAC has banned 3 ppl then let us know, if VAC has not banned anyone at all equally let us know (as VAC bans occur at seemingly random intervals).
But what people get exposed to is an assault on their own personal skill by people who say "not seen any hackers so they must not exist, you just go pwned".
People hack, your naive to believe otherwise and UWE is doing itself a disservice by not trying to be more pro-active in atleast talking about what is being done.
A developoer post about how consistency checking is getting an overhaul (even if it takes a while to happen) would do wonders for confidence in the community.
The public see's the actions as simply hiding the truth, we dont need peoples names but we do need to be more engaged and not simply told "trust us" its been too long with seemingly 0 movement.
Well if UWE IS working on some big project to stop most of the existing hacks (and as many as possible for the near future), I don't think it'd be worth showing what they've been working on to block them just to please the public.
I'll allow this link as it is publically available anyway, but just as an FYI, this cheater is not inv. Joe. It's a case of using the nickname to try and discredit someone -Kouji San
^ Yeah sorry, I should've specified that. In this particular case though, surely you will ban his copy of NS2 and every other copy bought with the same credit card? I mean it's not exactly rocket science when the dude himself is flaunting his aimbots and dll injectors.
You have taken the time to think about this issue in depth @Elodea, in return I've written you an in-depth reply:
Natural Selection 2 is an extremely open game. The source code is open, modification of the game is encouraged and actively supported, and tools are provided to assist people in doing so. In this way, it is perhaps a throwback to an earlier time, a more innocent age of gaming. The modern trend in game is certainly to be more closed, less inviting to community creativity, and perhaps less soulful.
Oftentimes, people will equate the locking down of games as being only about Digital Rights Management (DRM), that is; an attempt to stop your hard work ending up on the Pirate Bay. A certain recent big budget game from a particular big publically traded publisher is perhaps a shining example of this. This equation is however a simplification. There is another motivation for locking down games: Cheating.
Closing down a game, narrowing the avenues for people to engage with it in non-standard ways, eliminating entry points for modification, regular authentication from a third entity: These serve both DRM and anti-cheat purposes. By not engaging in 'closed' development, UWE has not only fostered wonderful community engagement, it has also left the door slightly ajar for unscrupulous individuals to damage the play experience of others.
NS2 currently raises several defenses against cheaters. In order of effectiveness:
Manual banning: Through the provision of SteamIDs and proof of hacking, people may be banned from official (but not community servers, where most people play.) This method is labour intensive for UWE and suffers from having a 'small antenna' for receiving information.
Consistency checking: Simple verification of the integrity of crucial lua files. This level will top only the most amateur and poorly motivated of cheaters, but is nevertheless important.
VAC: "Valve Anti-Cheat." Periodically, known NS2 hacks are entered into VAC and those that use them end up losing access to the Steam account they are hacking on.
Target size NS2 is a small game with a passionate community. There are no in-game valuables for people to steal, no persistency stats to pad, no currency for people to defraud, and few tangible benefits for hacking. Crucially, many large hacking vendors have chosen not to offer hacks for the game, evidently as the return on their investment would not be competitive.
Openness: What is NS2's weakness is simultaneously its strength. By allowing community server operators to modify their servers as they please, the community can effectively protect itself. Where a large AAA title with locked down servers may leave players helpless, in NS2 they can fight back. Collectively, server operators and players can modify the game in ways that give them better tools for fighting hackers.
No one at UWE pretends that these defenses are, in aggregate, capable of preventing cheaters. Several areas in which we could do better are
- Default tools for players in servers without an admin present, such as votevick/voteban.
- Universal NS2 IP/SteamID banlists for proven hackers, allowing us to ban players globally independent of VAC
- Improved demo recording functionality
No doubt this list could be expanded with many an excellent suggestion from you, the community. There is however a limit to how much engineering time UWE will devote to preventing hacking in NS2. An equilibrium must be found between programmers playing the hacker's game, and those hackers being given free reign.
Whatever UWE does, however many systems are implemented, and no matter how much time we spend - NS2 will always have hackers. It is a universal truth of all games and it will always be true. As a community, you should consider just how good you want NS2 and future UWE games to get at beating hackers. The path towards a 'hack-free' experience is a path of locking down the game, restricting modding freedom, and certainly no open source game code.
That is not a path anyone at UWE wants to go down. We will certainly explore all reasonable options available to substantially reduce the incidence of hacking ruining games for players, short of walking that path.
At this time, hacking does not appear to be widespread or consistently detrimental to the play experience of most players. Other issues, such as performance, balance, gameplay mechanics and ancillary game features would appear to UWE to be more relevant to the in-game experience of most players. That does not mean hacking is not on our radar, nor that anti-cheat efforts are not being actively worked on. It just means that we are not about to declare that the sky is falling in and that tools must be downed in an effort to fight a mild case of a disease that infects all games, everywhere, to some degree.
Very detailed and informative post, this should at least calm people down a bit when they realise that UWE probably COULD stop a lot of hacking, but almost all modability would be removed from the game. It's not worth it for the small amount that do hack (with aimbots/chams).
VAC: "Valve Anti-Cheat." Periodically, known NS2 hacks are entered into VAC and those that use them end up losing access to the Steam account they are hacking on.
Entirely untrue. The only thing an NS2 VAC ban will ban anyone from is NS2. You don't lose your Steam account from hacking in one game.
I don't think you know how pistol scripts work, they simply can't be stopped in any case due to completely legal external stuff publically available. And about threads being deleted, they go into our evidence vault and if there are obvious hacks, reported to the developers. We've said it many times before and it's simply a dumb idea to allow naming and shaming, as it always turns into a witch hunt even when the hacking claim is false. So please stop spreading your misinformation and drawing conclusions on things you can't possibly know... It's not a conspiracy, its just common sense!
And NS never did away with pistol scripts, a maximum rate of fire set at 100ms per bullet is not the way to "fix" it. It only makes it so it is easily achievable without scripts as well. NS2 has the same 100ms per bullet, but there is something funky going on as well. If you want a 100% fix, you go the autofire route for the pistol like TF2. Good luck with that and the community up in here
VAC: "Valve Anti-Cheat." Periodically, known NS2 hacks are entered into VAC and those that use them end up losing access to the Steam account they are hacking on.
Entirely untrue. The only thing an NS2 VAC ban will ban anyone from is NS2. You don't lose your Steam account from hacking in one game.
Oh no, someone made a mistake, seriously Farknut are you just lorking on a clorf, just to try and swoop down to point out someone's mistake?
Oh no, someone made a mistake, seriously Farknut are you just lorking on a clorf, just to try and swoop down when someone makes a mistake?
Just making sure people are informed with the correct information. He's given this wrong information before and been called out on it previously (by someone else). Unless you are against people making decisions based on accurate information then I don't see a problem with pointing it out. I'll keep you honest.
Oh no, someone made a mistake, seriously Farknut are you just lorking on a clorf, just to try and swoop down when someone makes a mistake?
Just making sure people are informed with the correct information. He's given this wrong information before and been called out on it previously. Unless you are against people making decisions based on accurate information then I don't see a problem with pointing it out.
Nope I have no issues with it, just making a casual observation *sitting on the same clorf kicking himself for missing it*
VAC: "Valve Anti-Cheat." Periodically, known NS2 hacks are entered into VAC and those that use them end up losing access to the Steam account they are hacking on.
Entirely untrue. The only thing an NS2 VAC ban will ban anyone from is NS2. You don't lose your Steam account from hacking in one game.
I believe there are actually different types of VAC bans, one will ban you from playing on any game supported by VAC on that account. It will never delete/block your account though and you are free to play unVAC games.
- Default tools for players in servers without an admin present, such as votevick/voteban.
Before you implement that we need better verbosity on player joins/quits and name changes. That "invjoe" impostor was comm griefing on the Team 156 EU server a few hours ago and since he could just change names and teams without it showing up anywhere (no "x is now known as y" or anything) he got into the chair/hive like four times in a row and proceeded to sell everything/waste all the res. So you can imagine the confusion if you'd add votekick to that.
EDIT: Very detailed and informative post, this should at least calm people down a bit when they realise that UWE probably COULD stop a lot of hacking, but almost all modability would be removed from the game. It's not worth it for the small amount that do hack (with aimbots/chams).
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that the open Lua code/modability isn't even really relevant to aimbot type hacks, which are gonna be separate pieces of code injected directly at runtime.
I think he meant their account gets banned from ns2 (meaning they would need to get another account and purchase ns2 again to play)
Good post, and again being honest I still haven't run into any cheaters, I'm not saying there are NONE, I'm just saying I haven't seen any (which is great) and if someone was cheating, it would be very blatant for the type of game this is
Also I don't think we've seen any type of cheating in the competitive play (minus macros/scripts which we wouldn't be able to tell) which is even better, look at a game like counter-strike and you'll see main and intermediate players being banned (which means they've played entire seasons possibly knocking teams out of ladders while cheating) thus ruining the game at a competitive level for many teams!
This is one of my favorite games, and I really love the developer team! So many recent fps titles I've played where I've posted numerous suggestions, heck even fixes to issues and they went ignored! Not to mention the games being so closed that I don't even want to touch them. All this openness to modding is great, I got an awesome custom crosshair, a custom alien vision, and well that's about it but still just those things alone are a big improvement to my game experience
EDIT: Very detailed and informative post, this should at least calm people down a bit when they realise that UWE probably COULD stop a lot of hacking, but almost all modability would be removed from the game. It's not worth it for the small amount that do hack (with aimbots/chams).
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that the open Lua code/modability isn't even really relevant to aimbot type hacks, which are gonna be separate pieces of code injected directly at runtime.
Well yeah, of course it's injected, but it helps a lot when developing these kind of hacks if you have access to the source, since you know what you're trying to work with and can see weaknesses.
If you are VAC banned in Natural Selection 2, you will no longer be able to Natural Selection 2 on servers that have VAC enabled. There's no real reason to not have VAC enabled on a server though (and we made it the default), so this should include most servers.
Natural Selection 2 contains one additional "anti-cheat" mechanism which Hugh didn't mention. We release updates much more frequently than most games. Some trainers aren't too sensitive to this, but for others it renders them worthless unless they are updated.
We check out all of the published cheats for Natural Selection 2 and almost without exception they contain some sort of malware with them. If you are using these things, not only are you a jerk, but you may be getting more than you bargained for.
Comments
And NS never did away with pistol scripts, a maximum rate of fire set at 100ms per bullet is not the way to "fix" it. It only makes it so it is easily achievable without scripts as well. NS2 has the same 100ms per bullet, but there is something funky going on as well. If you want a 100% fix, you go the autofire route for the pistol like TF2. Good luck with that and the community up in here
Do you even know what's going on or..?
Come on, the amount of work that has gone into this game from an indy development crew, and still continues to evolve...plus their openness to ideas/criticisms from the forums/comp players/pub players in general. I don't really know how you can feel so god damn entitled to demand they basically give you their 'work in progress' files and data sheets.
Damn.
Obviously cheaters/hacker shouldn't be allowed. I totally agree. But the question is actually, how big of a problem is cheating/hacking in NS2 right now, and how much time should be put into anti-cheat measures in contrary to putting that time to use for other stuff like further content/performance/polish? Personally, I've never seen a blatant wallhacker/aimbotter so far. Have you been experiencing a lot of ruined games because of cheaters?
Yes, questions about how much hacking incidence there is currently would be appropriate if you already had a baseline anti cheat system. See catch22. It's like saying i don't need to make microscopes or vaccines because viruses don't exist, and i know this because i can't see them without a microscope. And then people may randomly die, it'll be suspiciously unexplainable, but you have no reliable means of detecting or preventing. But oh well, only a few people are dying so its better to spend our time making a new line of lipstick. 'Negligent stupidity' to put it lightly.
It might instead be better to ask questions like this,
a. If you can run a texture mod of some kind on basically any server and get away with it without anyone knowing better, why wouldn't you?
b. If you could wallhack, aimbot, pistol script and get away with it, even though people are very suspicious of you but can't do anything because they can't easily gather the necessary evidence, why wouldn't you? And even then, the very little risk there is in these extreme cases is further mitigated by the use of free ns2 gift accounts for example. Everyone got 1 free gift.
Basically, there is huge incentive to cheat in NS2, current observable incidence be damned.
As for anti-cheat or content? UWE as a company have both shown and stated in the past that they are not incapable of performing two or more tasks at the same. If it came down to it (although i doubt it), yes i would much prefer anti-cheat to the next exosuit variant.
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Agree with all said about demo system being the backbone. Would also like to add that fixing consistency checks (1st level prevention defence) does not seem to be something that would take alot of time. I don't think it's possible to argue effort to benefit in this case.
Yeah. My guess is that the consistency is where you get decent gain without huge investment. After that it gets a lot harder.
And that's a question that we can't answer because we just don't know. As far as how much time should be spent, if there are cheaters in your game, then it's not going to be fun regardless of how much content you have in it. I can't say how much time UWE should put in because 1) I don't know how much they're putting in now and 2) I don't know how prevalent cheating/hacking is.
I've seen 3 obvious aim-bots that I can think of off the top of my head and I can't say how many smaller cheats/hacks, such as neon skulks, I've seen since they're much harder to identify and differentiate between skill and cheat/hack.
Whenever I find someone that I think might be cheating/hacking, I typically just switch servers. Either 1) they're cheating/hacking at which point it's not even worth trying to fight them or 2) they are just so much better than me that it comes to the same thing.
Cheating is using a "cheat" that is supported and purposefully implemented into a game. Like unlimited ubercharge in a cheat-enabled server in TF2 or getting free resources with a command in SC2
Disclaimer: I do not endorse cheating in anyway.
For counter-strike some people would draw a dot in the middle of their monitor and use the auto sniper since it had perfect accuracy and recoil.
there's always lots of ways to "cheat" without "hacking".
The most hilarious 'cheat' I have ever seen happen when i bought one of the very first dual core AMD processors. Whenever i played CS it would make me "speed hack" around the map. I would empty a whole rifle clip in a tenth of a second and be able to reach the bomb site 1 second into the round. I had to download a special cpu driver from AMD to get it to stop doing this...
We dont delete the treads, we move em to a hidden evidence subforum, where we research and follow up on the proff provided. (ALL REPORTS OF CHEATING/EXPLOITS) are being investigated, and will be delth whit. But just as any other games, banning players universaly isnt a daily occurance. And swinging the banhammer isnt done whitout conclusive evidence. Im sure you heard of the massive banwaves of warcraft players, lol players and other large gaming companies. Its not like they to, ignore all the reports, and then suddenly decide to act upon em when the admin wake up from his slumper.
I can asure you that we are vary much aware of the issues and are being handled, but as a standing policy. We will not name & shame people, post the evidence we have, or keep the info the community provided us puplic. The act of hiding it, is in itself a (small) deterant, and prevents some cheaters/easiely tempted soals to pick it up.
Pistol scripts can be stopped, just because some dont like the solution does not mean it cant be stopped.
The wider issue of hacking like in all communities needs to be handled maturely, not only from those who have played against hackers but also the mods and the game developers themselves.
Having it publicly acknoiwledged may seem like simple lip service but would go a long way to showing the public stuff is being done.
Instead the public gets to see fluro skulks in the workshop and seemingly no action on hacking.
UWE said they would be using VAC...do we know how many people VAC has found?
We dont need names but if VAC has banned 3 ppl then let us know, if VAC has not banned anyone at all equally let us know (as VAC bans occur at seemingly random intervals).
But what people get exposed to is an assault on their own personal skill by people who say "not seen any hackers so they must not exist, you just go pwned".
People hack, your naive to believe otherwise and UWE is doing itself a disservice by not trying to be more pro-active in atleast talking about what is being done.
A developoer post about how consistency checking is getting an overhaul (even if it takes a while to happen) would do wonders for confidence in the community.
The public see's the actions as simply hiding the truth, we dont need peoples names but we do need to be more engaged and not simply told "trust us" its been too long with seemingly 0 movement.
Here you go: http://www.twitch.tv/invjoe/b/387935264
I'll allow this link as it is publically available anyway, but just as an FYI, this cheater is not inv. Joe. It's a case of using the nickname to try and discredit someone -Kouji San
^ Yeah sorry, I should've specified that. In this particular case though, surely you will ban his copy of NS2 and every other copy bought with the same credit card? I mean it's not exactly rocket science when the dude himself is flaunting his aimbots and dll injectors.
Natural Selection 2 is an extremely open game. The source code is open, modification of the game is encouraged and actively supported, and tools are provided to assist people in doing so. In this way, it is perhaps a throwback to an earlier time, a more innocent age of gaming. The modern trend in game is certainly to be more closed, less inviting to community creativity, and perhaps less soulful.
Oftentimes, people will equate the locking down of games as being only about Digital Rights Management (DRM), that is; an attempt to stop your hard work ending up on the Pirate Bay. A certain recent big budget game from a particular big publically traded publisher is perhaps a shining example of this. This equation is however a simplification. There is another motivation for locking down games: Cheating.
Closing down a game, narrowing the avenues for people to engage with it in non-standard ways, eliminating entry points for modification, regular authentication from a third entity: These serve both DRM and anti-cheat purposes. By not engaging in 'closed' development, UWE has not only fostered wonderful community engagement, it has also left the door slightly ajar for unscrupulous individuals to damage the play experience of others.
NS2 currently raises several defenses against cheaters. In order of effectiveness:
Manual banning: Through the provision of SteamIDs and proof of hacking, people may be banned from official (but not community servers, where most people play.) This method is labour intensive for UWE and suffers from having a 'small antenna' for receiving information.
Consistency checking: Simple verification of the integrity of crucial lua files. This level will top only the most amateur and poorly motivated of cheaters, but is nevertheless important.
VAC: "Valve Anti-Cheat." Periodically, known NS2 hacks are entered into VAC and those that use them end up losing access to the Steam account they are hacking on.
Target size NS2 is a small game with a passionate community. There are no in-game valuables for people to steal, no persistency stats to pad, no currency for people to defraud, and few tangible benefits for hacking. Crucially, many large hacking vendors have chosen not to offer hacks for the game, evidently as the return on their investment would not be competitive.
Openness: What is NS2's weakness is simultaneously its strength. By allowing community server operators to modify their servers as they please, the community can effectively protect itself. Where a large AAA title with locked down servers may leave players helpless, in NS2 they can fight back. Collectively, server operators and players can modify the game in ways that give them better tools for fighting hackers.
No one at UWE pretends that these defenses are, in aggregate, capable of preventing cheaters. Several areas in which we could do better are
- Default tools for players in servers without an admin present, such as votevick/voteban.
- Universal NS2 IP/SteamID banlists for proven hackers, allowing us to ban players globally independent of VAC
- Improved demo recording functionality
No doubt this list could be expanded with many an excellent suggestion from you, the community. There is however a limit to how much engineering time UWE will devote to preventing hacking in NS2. An equilibrium must be found between programmers playing the hacker's game, and those hackers being given free reign.
Whatever UWE does, however many systems are implemented, and no matter how much time we spend - NS2 will always have hackers. It is a universal truth of all games and it will always be true. As a community, you should consider just how good you want NS2 and future UWE games to get at beating hackers. The path towards a 'hack-free' experience is a path of locking down the game, restricting modding freedom, and certainly no open source game code.
That is not a path anyone at UWE wants to go down. We will certainly explore all reasonable options available to substantially reduce the incidence of hacking ruining games for players, short of walking that path.
At this time, hacking does not appear to be widespread or consistently detrimental to the play experience of most players. Other issues, such as performance, balance, gameplay mechanics and ancillary game features would appear to UWE to be more relevant to the in-game experience of most players. That does not mean hacking is not on our radar, nor that anti-cheat efforts are not being actively worked on. It just means that we are not about to declare that the sky is falling in and that tools must be downed in an effort to fight a mild case of a disease that infects all games, everywhere, to some degree.
- Hugh
Then you just awesomed this gem:
Entirely untrue. The only thing an NS2 VAC ban will ban anyone from is NS2. You don't lose your Steam account from hacking in one game.
Oh no, someone made a mistake, seriously Farknut are you just lorking on a clorf, just to try and swoop down to point out someone's mistake?
Just making sure people are informed with the correct information. He's given this wrong information before and been called out on it previously (by someone else). Unless you are against people making decisions based on accurate information then I don't see a problem with pointing it out. I'll keep you honest.
Nope I have no issues with it, just making a casual observation *sitting on the same clorf kicking himself for missing it*
I believe there are actually different types of VAC bans, one will ban you from playing on any game supported by VAC on that account. It will never delete/block your account though and you are free to play unVAC games.
Before you implement that we need better verbosity on player joins/quits and name changes. That "invjoe" impostor was comm griefing on the Team 156 EU server a few hours ago and since he could just change names and teams without it showing up anywhere (no "x is now known as y" or anything) he got into the chair/hive like four times in a row and proceeded to sell everything/waste all the res. So you can imagine the confusion if you'd add votekick to that.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that the open Lua code/modability isn't even really relevant to aimbot type hacks, which are gonna be separate pieces of code injected directly at runtime.
Good post, and again being honest I still haven't run into any cheaters, I'm not saying there are NONE, I'm just saying I haven't seen any (which is great) and if someone was cheating, it would be very blatant for the type of game this is
Also I don't think we've seen any type of cheating in the competitive play (minus macros/scripts which we wouldn't be able to tell) which is even better, look at a game like counter-strike and you'll see main and intermediate players being banned (which means they've played entire seasons possibly knocking teams out of ladders while cheating) thus ruining the game at a competitive level for many teams!
This is one of my favorite games, and I really love the developer team! So many recent fps titles I've played where I've posted numerous suggestions, heck even fixes to issues and they went ignored! Not to mention the games being so closed that I don't even want to touch them. All this openness to modding is great, I got an awesome custom crosshair, a custom alien vision, and well that's about it but still just those things alone are a big improvement to my game experience
Well yeah, of course it's injected, but it helps a lot when developing these kind of hacks if you have access to the source, since you know what you're trying to work with and can see weaknesses.
Natural Selection 2 contains one additional "anti-cheat" mechanism which Hugh didn't mention. We release updates much more frequently than most games. Some trainers aren't too sensitive to this, but for others it renders them worthless unless they are updated.
We check out all of the published cheats for Natural Selection 2 and almost without exception they contain some sort of malware with them. If you are using these things, not only are you a jerk, but you may be getting more than you bargained for.