An elegant solution.
Sorta like the idea that there should be two leagues for the Olympics, the Tour de France, et al.: one with steroids, one without.
It would be interesting to see which got more viewers.
Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
41–50 of 130 posts
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the votes actually go through on hellbanned users unfortunately.
Hellbanned? what does that actually mean? Seems i missed a lot online since around the early 2000s...
Your account appears, to you, to function normally, but your posts are not visible to any other users.
The rationale is that trolls and spammers will usually register new accounts upon being notified of a ban, but a hellbanned troll/spammer might continue to use the hellbanned account without realizing that their posts are ignored.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#43I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…
At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck. For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the o…
Keep in mind there's another balanced approach: trust the client instantaneously and back-check the game asynchronously. Record replays of every game and re-simulate them using trusted client and server, and note any discrepancies.
Then, one could even have a limited set of extremely beefy full-game simulation machines that run in lockstep against a certain sampling of active game sessions (like 10%), banning a large enough subset of cheaters in real-time to ensure player confidence in the game's anti-cheating system.
I think some recent AAA titles work this way, although I'm not 100% positive as I have no insight into the server end of their systems (and what I observe as automated asynchronous cheating detection could be a vast number of human observers as well).
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#44The article just glosses over the fact that detecting cheaters is far from easy. It just makes it sound as if it's a done-deal, "if you cheat, you're isolated away". Speaking with at least some amount of insight, I can say that cheat-detection in modern networked multiplayer action games is far from easy.
Any anti-piracy or -cheating measure with a false positive rate over 0% is going to meet a shit storm not worth the effort. You have to really know what you're doing.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#45I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…
This sort of cheater purgatory existed even in the later days of CS 1.6 as well. Secure servers were only available from legitimate STEAM accounts but players could create 'insecure' (no VAC) servers that were still publicly listed.
These servers quickly became havens for players connecting using modified software (free clients and so on) and those who had steam accounts which had been "vac'd".
Ironically, included in this list were a lot of servers who hosted third-party anti-cheat software, as it conflicted with VAC - creating unjustified bans.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck. For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the o…
It's an interesting point about updating movement automatically to avoid a bullet. I did consider this possibility before, however I assumed that this would not give you full invincibility because if you are standing in an area and bullets are being fired all around you it may not be possible to move to a position where there is not an incoming bullet in time. Although even with this you could still gain a significan…
>if you are standing in an area and bullets are being fired all around you it may not be possible to move to a position where there is not an incoming bullet in time.
A really good program would then be able to recreate Gun Fu from Equilibrium, or Neo and Agent Smith.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#47I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…
At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck. For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the o…
> At some point you have to trust the client.
I'm not convinced of this, and the general trend of every online game that cares about cheating since at least QuakeWorld (1996) is moving in the direction of not trusting the client for important things.
> Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible
True, but you can get quite far by only giving the client the information they're supposed to have. Wallhacks were originally possible in Quake because pre-QW, the client received the position of every player on the map.
The strongest way to prevent wallhacks is to only tell the client about other players they should be able to see. The id and valve engines do this, for the most part. Again, quakeworld in 1996 severely curtailed wallhacking by only showing the users players that were visible, or "almost visible", i.e. near corners.
Your example of infinite health packs is something that could be trivially tracked on the server side and is, even for games as big as WoW. WoW tracks the current inventory of every single player in game. You can tell because sometimes when there are server glitches, you're unable to pick up loot from dead monsters.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#48I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…
Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days was that me and my friends used to play the game a lot which meant that we were much more skilled than the average player.
That reminds me of how in Mass Effect 2, secret files on the character Legion (a sapient machine, for those who don't know) reveal that he has been banned from several online games for cheating; however in each case he appealed and successfully overturned the ban.
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#49> we're a bit intrigued by the potential for the "Cheaters Pool" to evolve into a new mode of play that some players might actually prefer.
Unregulated cheats and hacks led a friend and I to inadvertently invent a proto-minecraft over a decade ago.
Around 1998, I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight when I started to experience cheats and hacks. Someone taught me how to do it, which was incredibly easy (each weapon file was a text file with variables you could change: projectile=bullet, damage=5, speed=3). Simply replacing the file client side would change the behavior.
When playing around with the projectile=[id] with some ids I found while map making, a friend and I discovered we could modify all of our weapons to shoot out various world objects such as bridges, platforms, doors, etc. We started playing the game almost exclusively this way for quite awhile, going off to separate corners of a map, building things, then comparing our structures.
So, I have to say, great idea on the quarantine, Rockstar!
Re: Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other
#50I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling. After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on. Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days wa…
At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck. For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the o…
>Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible, mainly due to lag the game would become unplayable, and due to having so many variables to calculate there is always something you have to trust the client with (position being the biggest one, you can't take all user input, send it to the server, and then send back where the character should now be).
Why not just take the user input from the client, and send it both to the model of the world on the server, and also to a non-authoritative model of the world on the client? The client is then immediately responsive, as the client model of the world is what is rendered, but if the model of the world on the client diverges from the model of the world on the server, the server overrules it.
This would ensure the client did not violate position rules, while still keeping it responsive, at the cost of an occasional noticable update when models get too far out of synch.
As far as I know many games have done this, since Quakeworld. I might be wrong, my knowledge is a little rusty?
Other issues remain that this doesn't solve (e.g. aimbot).
EDIT - Here's a wiki article this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction which links to this article describing client side prediction in Half Life (so you can presume there is something at least as sophisticated in Source): http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/courses/4513-B03/papers/game...