The hacker issue: what's going to be done about it?

[joerivdvelden@gmail.com 6]

Yesterday I've had my first encounter with a hacker. He teleported me to himself, then shot my nearly-month-old character to death. The server (NL 13) drained soon after, since he was doing it with pretty much all players. I tried to report the guy on the server hoster's forum, but apparently they can't get a killer's name out of their own server log, nor did I have any means to identify my killer at all.

I took a quick look: a simple google session will give you the tools to ruin the game for everyone without BattleEye lifting a finger. Spawning weapons, vehicles, teleporting players or causing other types of havoc.

Rocket himself said that cheaters are probably the largest threat to his game right now. The original Arma 2 was, from what I understand since I wasn't around back then, much more close knit, much more oriented around clans and groups of players. That lack of social control and the fact you're mostly on servers full of strangers, means there's a sharp rise in the amount of cheaters who are just out there to spoil other people's fun.

Cheating is relatively easy because Arma 2's networking is client-authorative. The client says he does something (say: "I want to spawn an tank"), and the server accepts that (in things like website development this is a big no-no, hence the saying "never trust the client"). This does have its perks: servers can host huge groups of players with processing time to spare for other things (which I guess DayZ happily uses for zombie AI). Server-authorative engines, such as Source and Unreal, are much more secure but it also makes them limited (player counts beyond 32 makes things unstable and laggy).

So I'm left wondering how this is going to play out. What measures is Rocket going to take? What measures can be taken right now? Is the upcoming stand-alone version of DayZ going to change anything? Is it going to allow us to physically punch cheaters in the face over TCP/IP?

Cheaters are a serious gamebreaker for this mod. More so than in any other game. All your progress, all your effort, all your fun, all down the drain because of one asshole.

[peke_kantsi@hotmail.com 36]

1. DayZ Staff cant to anything about the hacking.

2. Arma 2 devolopers didin't expect so much popularity with skids with scripts so they didin't make a "perfect" anticheat, but battleye has already banned so many people and it will continue banning.

3. Battleye is doing it's best to catch all the script kiddies.

4. The change of anticheat is out of questing, because it would take ages.

In my 5 months of gameplay I only managed to meet 2 hackers and the other one wasn't a douche, instead he just made everyone dance and gave 12 satchels :D

Edited July 26, 2012 by korppi300

[aeterna 39]

In my 5 months of gameplay I only managed to meet 2 hackers and the other one wasn't a douche, instead he just made everyone dance and gave 12 satchels :D

I think cheaters found a big exploit in battle eye recently. I faced 2+ cheaters on different servers in one evening. One of them was IDDQD and didn't get down after 15 5.56-rounds, other one was using non-dayz weapon. We shoot him and got nice loot/

Edited July 26, 2012 by aeterna

[yevano 5]

I assume there's only so much that can be done without engine changes. The teleportation/speed hacking would actually be really easy to combat, I think. The server can simply check if a player's position is too far from the position during last game tick, and not move the player in this situation (there is a Minecraft mod that does something like this).

I'm not sure if weapon/vehicle/npc spawning would be so easy to stop, as I don't know how the cheat clients make the server think it should create new vehicles.

This is just from my limited knowledge of game networking, so I could be wrong. Anyways, if the game ever goes stand-alone, hopefully rocket will make sure the engine keeps hackers in mind.

[S1ippery Jim 139]

The same thing Activision did with World at War, MW2 etc...F all. And those are billion dollar games, this is a free mod.

Battleye only bans after they have hacked, rather than preventing the original act of hacking the game. Unfortunately games are always playing catch up with the hackers. This is a major issue which can completely destroy the playability of games, is incredibly hard to prevent, time consuming and costly.

[S1ippery Jim 139]

I think cheaters found a big exploit in battle eye recently. I faced 2+ cheaters on different servers in one evening. One of them was IDDQD and didn't get down after 15 5.56-rounds, other one was using non-dayz weapon. We shoot him and got nice loot/

Be careful looting hackers, if you pick up any non-DayZ weapons it is logged on the server and can get you perma banned yourself.

[Grimlok (DayZ) 134]

Something has already been done about it. There was a mass ban of a lot of hackers, someone in the forums posted up proof but took it down. So its safe to say its being handled.

[aeterna 39]

Be careful looting hackers, if you pick up any non-DayZ weapons it is logged on the server and can get you perma banned yourself.

thx for warning. But i know this. I told my teammate not to pick up weapon, only such things like gps\rangefinder\NV goggles\ammo.

[joerivdvelden@gmail.com 6]

I know that automated measures will always be one step behind. BattleEye is pretty much the best they can do with the current engine. However, it'd be nice if the reporting system could be streamlined. That players can identify hackers and report them instantly (in Battlefield 3 for example, I can just pop onto a cheater's profile and click the report button). That server owners can actually see what's going on in their server logs (the server owner I talked to said the game logs were way too cryptic). I know that other things have priority in this phase of development, but a growing cheater population is going to ruin the game's reputation, and the willingness of any victims to keep playing.

[Longs 42]

Yesterday I've had my first encounter with a hacker. He teleported me to himself, then shot my nearly-month-old character to death. The server (NL 13) drained soon after, since he was doing it with pretty much all players. I tried to report the guy on the server hoster's forum, but apparently they can't get a killer's name out of their own server log, nor did I have any means to identify my killer at all.

I took a quick look: a simple google session will give you the tools to ruin the game for everyone without BattleEye lifting a finger. Spawning weapons, vehicles, teleporting players or causing other types of havoc.

Rocket himself said that cheaters are probably the largest threat to his game right now. The original Arma 2 was, from what I understand since I wasn't around back then, much more close knit, much more oriented around clans and groups of players. That lack of social control and the fact you're mostly on servers full of strangers, means there's a sharp rise in the amount of cheaters who are just out there to spoil other people's fun.

Cheating is relatively easy because Arma 2's networking is client-authorative. The client says he does something (say: "I want to spawn an tank"), and the server accepts that (in things like website development this is a big no-no, hence the saying "never trust the client"). This does have its perks: servers can host huge groups of players with processing time to spare for other things (which I guess DayZ happily uses for zombie AI). Server-authorative engines, such as Source and Unreal, are much more secure but it also makes them limited (player counts beyond 32 makes things unstable and laggy).

So I'm left wondering how this is going to play out. What measures is Rocket going to take? What measures can be taken right now? Is the upcoming stand-alone version of DayZ going to change anything? Is it going to allow us to physically punch cheaters in the face over TCP/IP?

Cheaters are a serious gamebreaker for this mod. More so than in any other game. All your progress, all your effort, all your fun, all down the drain because of one asshole.

I know how you feel, we have a regular script kiddie comes on our server most days teleporting to people then shooting them but we can't do anything about it because good old Rocket says you can't ban someone from your own fucking server....

[jordy@sigux.com 44]

1. DayZ Staff cant to anything about the hacking.

2. Arma 2 devolopers didin't expect so much popularity with skids with scripts so they didin't make a "perfect" anticheat, but battleye has already banned so many people and it will continue banning.

3. Battleye is doing it's best to catch all the script kiddies.

4. The change of anticheat is out of questing, because it would take ages.

In my 5 months of gameplay I only managed to meet 2 hackers and the other one wasn't a douche, instead he just made everyone dance and gave 12 satchels :D

Please, just please don't call them script kiddies. They have done NOTHING with the hack, they simply install it. I refer to script kiddie as someone who tried to script or has scripted something and makes him feel cool. These hackers dont even have the skill to make a script, thus we should not call them script kiddies. :-)

[NigeyS 16]

I know how you feel, we have a regular script kiddie comes on our server most days teleporting to people then shooting them but we can't do anything about it because good old Rocket says you can't ban someone from your own fucking server....

If you are certain they are cheating, ban them, just be prepared to back up your ban with proof if possible.