gummy52

Yeah, how fucking dare I challenge their questionable decisions.

Are you seriously unaware of how easily a binary can be manipulated? I seriously fucking hope that Bohemia Interactive is not stupid and foolish enough to do anything OTHER than host ALL of the servers. Letting players with deep pockets host their own server community makes sense in a MOD, but if this is going to be a serious MMO, you can't even consider it.

Yes, please elaborate.

The only thing I've done is mention that "I would say 1 out of 3 players hack", and it took place in a different thread that asked how bad do people think the hacking will be in the standalone. There is absolutely no reason to be lecturing me on the theory of statistics. This wasn't even the point of my thread before it was merged with another. There is no reason to discredit what I have to say, unless you think cheating will go away if we close our eyes.

What the flying shit does your comment contribute to this conversation? There are several topics about hacking on a daily basis and you opt to claim erring on the side of caution questionable?

From one website among many. You're trying claim that hacking is not common. It's incredibly easy to do right now and from the looks of things it won't be any harder in the standalone. What's stopping everyone from hacking? Their good will. Wake up.

Teleporting, running for vehicles the moment they spawn, etc Here's some data for you. From a forum more active than this one, right off of google, you can find a thread titled "DayZ Survival Hack v3.3" with 70,565 views and 891 replies. Now I want you to google "dayz readprocessmemory". It's a serious issue that's over shadowed by kill commands and item spawning.

I thought the same as you did until I saw it for myself. It is a serious problem that will stifle the enormous potential of this game.

I would say 1/3 are cheating, 1/6 at the absolute maximum. On several, more than five, populated (average of more than 20, peaking 50 players) whitelisted servers I have observed a staggering number of players blatantly using means for detecting where enemy players are. Roughly a third of said players have kill commanded me in retaliation to being ganked. I would certainly say at least half of the people I claim to be using location hacks are using location hacks. You claim that you play on a "medium-sized" server. If you play on a server that averages 10 players, then that does absolutely nothing to disprove what I am saying. I would certainly hope that the retail release does not have server averages of 10 players. To that effect, many players do hack to gain advantage. Not many people are going to find it fun to cheat on a server with only 9 other players. Spawning items and god mode are only possible because ArmA 2 a client side game that tells the other clients how the world should look. Stopping those from happening is automatic if the game-play is server side. In other words, stopping god mode and spawning items has nothing to do with stopping hacking. Those are bare minimums for programming a persistent online game.

That is a complete contradiction.

They are. Write a program that reads game memory and go to any white list server. The more serious the server is, the more people pretending to be legitimate. Chernarus is only a handful of kilometers wide. Are you implying that being able to know and see everything within a quarter of the world is not wildly advantageous?

<post from another thread> As it stands, when the standalone arrives, you should expect after the first week that 1 out of every 3 players is cheating by using an undetectable program that reads the game's memory for object locations. In addition to that, there will still be advanced users completely bypassing VAC and using wall hacks (or something to that effect).

Assume the absolute best case scenario, and modifying the client in any way becomes impossible. That's a perfect result for VAC. So we assume that to be true, but there exists another problem. The screenshot below is an example of what at least a third of all players would have and use instead of using wall hacks. http://i.imgur.com/T7YUq.png The topic is not "Is VAC good enough to do what it's designed to do". The topic is "What about other vulnerabilities that VAC is not designed to protect?". VAC is not designed to (it does not attempt to) prevent memory reading. There are implementations that do. That is the issue that needs to be addressed.

All MMO's are server side and VAC is not an obstacle. I mean that in literal terms. VAC is not designed to care whether or not a program scans a game's memory. Anti-Virus programs already do just that.

Not many people are going to wall hack on a server that gets bombed by a kill command once every 2 to 4 hours. I make my claim based on what I've observed using my own memory reading program. Do I have a prepared spreadsheet for your viewing pleasure? No. Do I play on whitelist servers? No. Wana know why? At least 1 out of every 3 players on whitelist servers are using some form of location hack, and I would say that EVERY home clan is either location hacking or is in VOIP with someone who is. This is not a FPS and retail is a different beast than modding. You can not simply write off the abundance of advantageous hacking as an unfortunate constant in an MMO. There needs to be a serious risk to reading memory, and a near guarantee that most (nearly all) people modifying memory are caught. You are blind if you think that this is not feasible.

The reality of the situation is that many (most) players are content pretending to be talented by using things like location hacks. Hacking is actually even more common on `whitelist` servers where server bombs and god mode is uncommon. Incentive is key. What separates DayZ from something like Counter-Strike is that this is more akin to a MMO than an arena shooter. Games like All Points Bulletin suffer the same fate that I fear for DayZ.

You are right, there is no checkmate that developers can implement. To combat the issue the developers need to be relentlessly proactive. The goal can't be to block/prevent any hacking, the goal needs to be silently catching the tricky ones and banning them at future intervals. The question isn't 'does BI know a super secret way to prevent hacking', the question is 'will BI do a good job fighting against it'. The fact of the matter is simple. "There will always be hacks" is not an excuse. If there is one person who can consistently hack as easily as he wants to, then anyone can, because that one person will post his hack for the masses to use. It certainly helps if that program he posted becomes obsolete 24 hours later. As for memory editing; Bohemia Interactive seems completely complacent relying on VAC. Suffice to say, we may as well consider the client defenseless from being completely modified. I think that this is a topic that needs to trump every other discussion. Yeah, sure -- a server side implementation prevents server bombing and god mode. Those are just about the only things that will improve. I'm deeply concerned that hacking will drown this game if it's not the absolute prime focus of the entire Bohemia Interactive company.

What will be done to prevent programs from using ReadProcessMemory on the game? All of your effort will be for nothing if hackers are still able to detect everything the client program has in memory.