taavi

After the effort of making my post, this is the first response I get... How saddening. Well, since you clearly feel it's such a bad idea to have private shards with admins actually enforcing the rules (did you notice the word "private"?), could please hand out some constructive criticism on the matter? How should we deal with hackers ruining the game with impunity using hacks that even a scanner anti-cheat such as BE cannot hope to stop?

Speaking of which, I don't doubt you're working hard around the clock. And doing as much of a good job about it as possible. A hacker free environment, however, is not possible without a human element which in this case would be the mods/admins on server able to access records of player activity and ban players based on reports as well as some auto-detection methods for checking player speeds when not in a vehicle state etc. The mod was pretty much saved by the private hives and whether you like it or not it will be the same for standalone. Also Sable, I have a DIRECT question for you, maybe you can answer? In the August 14th update devs said the following of private shards: "Can not operate any 3rd party “Admin tools” aside from the approved BEC (BattlEye Extended Controls)" So what do those approved BE controls entail exactly? Is it possible for admins to investigate cases of players using a speed/flyhack? How about hacked mags? Ability to see player movement history and statistics in order to see the possibility of ESP use? I have no doubt BE is as much on top of the hacker situation as possible. Same can be even said of Valve. What I'm really worried about is Bohemia... I'm not sure they fully understand the seriousness of the situation. There are now lots of hack users who acquire their hacks directly by coding them by themselves or having access to someone else who does. The end result is that BE does not have access to the hacks (such as paid hack forums where anyone can buy access) and update their memsigs for detection. To give you some idea: I was today killed 3 times by speeding/teleporting hackers at NW Airfield (Used to be free of hackers, but they're migrating north these days). The last guy simply appeared behind me and handcuffed me before I knew what was going on. I then asked him how much he paid for his cheat and his answer stunned me. "I didn't buy any hacks, my friend made it and just lets me use it". So I ask him how many times he's got banned and his answer? Not once. According to him, he has about 400 hours of playtime over 8 months without a single BE/VAC detection and I don't doubt him. I actually make the distinction between paid and private cheats: BE can easily deal with the public and paid hacks and they're doing a very good job. But especially in a game like DayZ you need the human element to deal with those who use private hacks not available in any forum or website that's open to just about anyone. The human element needs to be introduced as a second line of defense against cheaters ASAP. No way around it. The DayZ community has known this for months and the question is, when are we going to get an appropriate response from the developers. It's been 10 months and we're still waiting...

Problem is not that Battleye is ineffective. Even if it's just banning known memory signatures of hacks, it's dealing with 95% of potential hackers simply by forcing paid hacks out of business. They simply detect the hacks so often cheaters stop paying for the software and cheat coders stop making hacks for the game. All of the guys running with hacked mags, camping inside walls of ATC and so forth, all of them would be most likely using hacks if it wasn't so cost-prohibitive. The problem is the "remaining 5%" who are not deterred by Battleye. A surprisingly many cheaters are now making their own simple hacks that cannot be banned by BE. Why? Because their hacks are fully private and BE never has access to the cheat and thus cannot include the hack signature to their checks. Also there are people who can afford buying dozens of copies and go through the hassle of reinstalling the game every time they get banned. The latter are very rare though, not because of the expense but because of the hassle. The bottomline: Battleye is very good, but it's only the first line of defense and there is no second line of defense at the moment. That would be server admins with the power to enforce a level playing field, meaning access to player logs for items, movement, kills (distance, weapon, victim) etc. plus ofcourse whitelisting, which alone can deter almost all of the "blatant" hackers because they know that the hassle is not worth getting banned 15 minutes later on server. History gives us the good lessons. In the mod, hacking was rampant on public hives even after BE went into serious-mode, because there were always plenty of script kiddies running their private bypasses for scripts and hacks. The salvation came in the way of whitelisted and well-administered private hives. Some of them were horrible and full of abuse, but the better hives could even deal with the more subtle forms of hacking, such as ESP only. The standalone does not support scripts anymore, but you can still do some nasty stuff with memhacks and abuse the trust that server places on the client. So the question is, do the upcoming private shards actually give server admins the possibility of log access to player information in order to actually enforce rules such as "no hacking" and "no bambi kill" etc? If the answer is yes, then hackers will become much less of an issue, especially to the enlightened players who are smart enough to migrate on to those well administered private shards. Otherwise we will have no choice but to wait until Bohemia allows for fully private hives with the same freedoms for the hive owners as was possible in the mod. And that could be still a very long and painful wait.