Big Concern: Hackers

[Shogun]

but ps1 was designed 10 years ago. and i guess the data they collected by failing so hard, will be very helpful to a game that is designed from scratch nowadays with all this knowledge that wasn´t available in 2002.

ps1 was a failure because it wasn´t designed to be very moddable even by the devs. now i am sure everything will be build modular and the devs can change everything they want without having to deal with too much hardcoded stuff. this applys to the anticheat system of the game, as well. i hope they will be able to react to new cheats and patch loopholes more or less on the fly.there just needs to be a good dedicated anticheat team at work all the time.
at least all devs have stated, that anticheat has a very high priority, and they know that cheaters can kill a game very fast. so i relax and wait, till i spot the first assheads, to see how the devs can handle it. and i will be looking for exploits during beta to find and report every exploitable bug before release.
that´s all we can do about it.

[Metalsheep]

No matter how much Anti-Cheat you place in a game, Hackers will find ways around it. Usually hackers don't hack to win, they hack to beat the anti-cheat systems. to prove they can. Hackers will always be one step ahead of Anti-Cheats. Anti-Cheats will change to beat the new hacks, then the hackers will make hacks to beat the anti-cheats. Its the nature of the beast.

As long as SoE keeps GMs online to ban hackers that do slip through the system, things should be fine.

That was the big problem with Planetside. It had Anti-Cheat systems, but those who slipped past them were then unopposed by the lack of GMs and proceeded to wreck the game.

[Kran De Loy]

Originally Posted by Metalsheep

No matter how much Anti-Cheat you place in a game, Hackers will find ways around it. Usually hackers don't hack to win, they hack to beat the anti-cheat systems. to prove they can. Hackers will always be one step ahead of Anti-Cheats. Anti-Cheats will change to beat the new hacks, then the hackers will make hacks to beat the anti-cheats. Its the nature of the beast.

Imo those kinds of hackers are the minority. The ones that make the hacks and maybe the people that directly know them. The farther away you get from actually having the drive and knowledge to continually beat a gaming system from a major company that is actually trying to keep you out the less sophisticated the hacking you're using becomes.

Essentially the bulk of hackers are people that use programs and scripts written entirely by different people, as long as new stuff keeps getting shot down before it can get wide spread then I believe that the host company is doing about as well as anyone can ever expect. IE: Best Possible Outcome where actual cases of hacking are somewhat rare.

True it only takes that one guy to ruin everyone's day, but I doubt we'll have that happen more then once every few weeks, hopeing for once every 6-12 months but that's wishful thinking on my part.

[Destroyeron]

Originally Posted by PlaceboCyanide

Read the last half of that sentence

See sig link.

Originally Posted by cryosin

Although I actually like this idea, there are two problems i can foresee with it:

1) Not everyone is willing to give their SSN to sony. I personally wouldn't care, but i know numerous people who would never do it.

2) How would this work for people outside of the US? They would call in and give what information?

I'm not willing to give SOE my SSN. I'd give them my credit card only because there's another company (the bank) that'll help me when SOE screws up and loses it.

Originally Posted by RadarX

Realistically there are folks who feel the need to cheat in every game. Fortunately we have more than a decade of experience dealing with it and systems (including experienced Customer Service reps) will go in place to mitigate it.

In short, it's been thought about considerably.

Except your decade of experience mostly consisted of getting owned?

[Xaine]

Anyone who has ever played an online game knows Punkbuster is fucking awful.

It spends most of its time kicking honest players, and people who hack laugh at it.

If PS2 is honestly going to use PB, we're going to be in some serious trouble.

Its wank, its fucking terrible, please don't use it.

[Shogun]

getting banned without a reason would totally be a dealbreaker. hope they got this under control.

[ITOS]

I don't know much about anti-hacker software but wouldn't it be relatively easy to have the servers automatically kick/ban players who show unreasonable behavior? I mean, a newly registered player running around at the speed of an aircraft, getting nothing but long distance head shots with a machine gun should ring some alarms and be banned in less than a minute.

If the time to set up a new account >>> the time played on the account, it should do away with the most blatant hackers.

[Rumblepit]

i have voiced my op about punkbusters many times since i found out they mite be using it. i hate it,but this made me feel much better when i saw it.


best part about ps2 is its in the hands of passionate gamers.....

we all " fucking hate hackers"......

[Stew]

Originally Posted by cryosin

After playing Blacklight: Retribution, i am deeply concerned about hackers.

That game uses punkbuster, the same anti-cheat system that planetside uses.

I was in a server where at least 3 people where blatantly hacking. Others might have been too, but these guys where completely obvious.

Speed hacks, instant headshots across the map(with a full auto rifle), teleportation.

One guy was literally invisible to other players.

I mean it was bad, real bad.





Punkbuster has never been a powerful tool. Even valve had to create their own anti-cheat because punk buster did not suffice.

With the ability to just register and create a new account, i am deeply concerned that hackers will run rampant and ruin the experience.

LOL Black light retribution have Cloakers Cloak bailitys so of course some people can be invisible !

For aimbo hack yeah there will always be a cats and mouse game on pc for hackers aim bot users But most of ur complain seams to be only LAG and misconception of the BLR game !

[Blackwolf]

Could some computer whiz answer something for me?

Would it be at all possible to encrypt whatever code SOE is using for programming, using a constantly shifting key?

Seems like the problem is that hackers learn the program code being used by the programmers, and can manipulate the game any way they want to with outside mods. Possible solution, as I see it, would be to make the base language something that changes easily based on a key, like a cipher.

[Tasorin]

If the hacking is as bad as APB then SOE is in real trouble. I personally don't think it will get that bad, but there is your data point on the epic fail barometer.

Punkbuster is beyond terribad and most gamers who have been around since Battlefield 1942 know the deal and why its bad. The point is, PB isn't going to be the only layer of security. Think of PB as the stale sprinkles on the triple layer cake of win. What PB will catch is blatant script kiddies who are trying to muck with the server side client or packet sniffers using latency. It's the obvious cheats that PB will mostly catch, and (fingers crossed) hope it's the other layers of SOE proprietary security, along with an active community that will police the rest down to a enjoyable level of game play.

@RadarX: I am going to recuse myself from directly trolling your post about more then 10 years of doing this and amazing community help. Some of us here have been playing with SOE for a long time and have been front row for the successful times and the utter fail times. SOE has the POTENTIAL to be what you expound upon, it all comes down to dollars and executing on your promises. The proof will be what happens in the first year of live launch.

[Kran De Loy]

So SOE knows the general view of Punk Buster and how well that works, but aren't about to go an annouce the other forms of anticheating methods they'll be using since it would likely compromise them. Safe to say then that everything that can be done about it on the community's end has already been done. At least we should wait until beta and launch before we start bringing it up a lot, imo.

Originally Posted by Stew

LOL Black light retribution have Cloakers Cloak bailitys so of course some people can be invisible !

For aimbo hack yeah there will always be a cats and mouse game on pc for hackers aim bot users But most of ur complain seams to be only LAG and misconception of the BLR game !

I'm glad to see that you still haven't bothered to try and learn from the english posts you seem to be reading all over the place, Stew.

I still can't understand 80% of what you say.

[Baneblade]

if the packets are encrypted, it could reduce server performance by as much as 50%.

[Blackwolf]

Originally Posted by Kran De Loy

I'm glad to see that you still haven't bothered to try and learn from the english posts you seem to be reading all over the place, Stew.

I still can't understand 80% of what you say.

He said that Blacklight: Retribution had a cloaker class that could be invisible, and that players could teleport or move at insane speeds due to lag, latency, or ping rate or whatever. And that aim bots were pretty much the only potentially legitimate "omg hax" claim made by the one he quoted.

Personally I think that he wasn't there, and therefore has no right or room to comment. Then again neither was I.

[Hamma]

Realistically it's IMPOSSIBLE to make cheating non existent. You guys need to realize SOE hates Hackers as much as we do and will do everything in their power to remove them and use whatever systems at their disposal to get rid of them.

But hackers are persistent and will always exist. We just have to hope they are mitigated.