NS2 Anti cheat
DjROniX
Join Date: 2008-12-21 Member: 65825Members
Join Date: 2008-12-21 Member: 65825Members
Comments
I've seen PunkBuster kick someone because they got too many headshots in a row. True story.
That would be because PunkBuster would aim to detect cheating not by looking at the machine in question for cheats, but to look for players who are doing too well. Honestly, there is a line where you can drawn that doing better then that would require cheating in one fourm. You are never going to hit 100% of the round in the best place possible over the extended time. You have have short burst of it, but to do so always would requre a cheat of some kind, even if you are hacking real life to slow down so you can do it.
However in my experience, VAC works the best, at least it a lot better then Cheating Death.
The problem from what I understand of VAC being too powerful is that it detects methods used to cheat, and not all these methods to cheat are used only to cheat. But it is worth it.
Generally in my experience, anyone who gets banned for cheating in a game (be it by VAC, by an MMO admin, even by your local Counter-Strike admin) and gets upset will try and make themselves look the victim. If anyone says they were banned "for no reason" I always take it with a grain of salt. 99% of the time I'm sure they know exactly why they were banned.
So will you need have steam running and have an user there or will it happen through game and isn't needed?
But on topic:
Hardly any system is totally foolproof but something is still better than nothing.
But whatever anti cheat will be used it'd be great if they'd update regulary and be in touch with the game developers to address specific problems if they should arise.
The benefits of an anti-cheat system seem to be:
1. That admins can turn the anti-cheat switch on and they'll be somewhat protected against a variety of attacks
2. There is probably a team of skilled individuals behind the anti-cheat system who will attempt to deliver patches to fix any holes in the cheat detection.
The drawbacks seem to be:
1. Admins need to wait for a given problem to be patched before their serer is protected.
2. There may be "false-positives" which will kick/ban players and cause a variety of problems such as "What if it IS a false positive and I should unban this player?"an If this cheat system is used globally (like VAC) then that player is banned from every server using the anti-cheat system and the admin has no say on this.
Not an exhaustive list but I think it brings up the key points. If we were to ignore anti-cheat technology, server owners would have to either keep a close eye on their server(s), "hire" some extra admins (which may cause some problems of their own - admins could let the power go to their head, etc...) to keep an eye on the server(s), you can turn the server into a "self-policing" server, or any combination of the three.
I think the first option, just keeping a good eye on your own server would be a very difficult thing unless 90%+ of your day was spent somewhere you can keep tabs on your server and take action when neccesary. Getting some other admins onboard would help with that but sometimes finding level headed and fair admins you can trust can be hard to find.
So that leaves the self-policing of "vote kick" and "vote ban" to do the job of getting rid of cheaters on your server. I think, and only if they're configured/balanced correctly, that systems like votekick and voteban actually do a lot more for the server than VAC or PunkBuster. Now I do have no actual statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if real admins and votebans do more of the banning on servers than the anti-cheat tech.
I really think if votekick and voteban were implemented into NS2 and anti-cheat tech was perhaps left out, I think we'd do okay.
The benefits of an anti-cheat system seem to be:
1. That admins can turn the anti-cheat switch on and they'll be somewhat protected against a variety of attacks
2. There is probably a team of skilled individuals behind the anti-cheat system who will attempt to deliver patches to fix any holes in the cheat detection.
The drawbacks seem to be:
1. Admins need to wait for a given problem to be patched before their serer is protected.
2. There may be "false-positives" which will kick/ban players and cause a variety of problems such as "What if it IS a false positive and I should unban this player?"an If this cheat system is used globally (like VAC) then that player is banned from every server using the anti-cheat system and the admin has no say on this.
Not an exhaustive list but I think it brings up the key points. If we were to ignore anti-cheat technology, server owners would have to either keep a close eye on their server(s), "hire" some extra admins (which may cause some problems of their own - admins could let the power go to their head, etc...) to keep an eye on the server(s), you can turn the server into a "self-policing" server, or any combination of the three.
I think the first option, just keeping a good eye on your own server would be a very difficult thing unless 90%+ of your day was spent somewhere you can keep tabs on your server and take action when neccesary. Getting some other admins onboard would help with that but sometimes finding level headed and fair admins you can trust can be hard to find.
So that leaves the self-policing of "vote kick" and "vote ban" to do the job of getting rid of cheaters on your server. I think, and only if they're configured/balanced correctly, that systems like votekick and voteban actually do a lot more for the server than VAC or PunkBuster. Now I do have no actual statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if real admins and votebans do more of the banning on servers than the anti-cheat tech.
I really think if votekick and voteban were implemented into NS2 and anti-cheat tech was perhaps left out, I think we'd do okay.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Any server admin could implement that plan on their own if they didn't want VAC... or they could do exactly what you suggest and also have VAC. I agree that any good server needs to have active admins, but at the least VAC will reduce the number of cheaters that enter any server in the first place.
Id say that if you want to get anti cheat program, there should be somekind of sreenshotclient (ssc, eac, choac or something thats made by you guys) + demos. Its enough for clan matches i think.
Also somekind of silent anti cheat update would be nice. That would update when joining to server so the cheaters that think they use new cheats will get busted when joining the server. That becouse when new update comes to anti cheat it will be cracked in 2 days.
But at the moment ENSL for exple is cheater free for what i know and i think that all the cs teenagers that want to cheat dont even gonna play ns2 cuz is too hard for them, cuz ns2 will be also about tactics and playing with team. SO i dont see any need for anti cheats, demos are enough.
Its not about how good anti cheat stuff you got, its about how good scene you have. And looks like ns2 will have pretty nice scene.
And one thing more. I hope anti cheat that you pick will not ban for little fixes like deleting background sounds that ive have done in ns2. Also it should not ban for hud fixes or things like that. In ns1 its been nice to adjust huds and stuff so it looks nice for yourself.
The benefits of an anti-cheat system seem to be:
1. That admins can turn the anti-cheat switch on and they'll be somewhat protected against a variety of attacks
2. There is probably a team of skilled individuals behind the anti-cheat system who will attempt to deliver patches to fix any holes in the cheat detection.
The drawbacks seem to be:
1. Admins need to wait for a given problem to be patched before their serer is protected.
2. There may be "false-positives" which will kick/ban players and cause a variety of problems such as "What if it IS a false positive and I should unban this player?"an If this cheat system is used globally (like VAC) then that player is banned from every server using the anti-cheat system and the admin has no say on this.
Not an exhaustive list but I think it brings up the key points. If we were to ignore anti-cheat technology, server owners would have to either keep a close eye on their server(s), "hire" some extra admins (which may cause some problems of their own - admins could let the power go to their head, etc...) to keep an eye on the server(s), you can turn the server into a "self-policing" server, or any combination of the three.
I think the first option, just keeping a good eye on your own server would be a very difficult thing unless 90%+ of your day was spent somewhere you can keep tabs on your server and take action when neccesary. Getting some other admins onboard would help with that but sometimes finding level headed and fair admins you can trust can be hard to find.
So that leaves the self-policing of "vote kick" and "vote ban" to do the job of getting rid of cheaters on your server. I think, and only if they're configured/balanced correctly, that systems like votekick and voteban actually do a lot more for the server than VAC or PunkBuster. Now I do have no actual statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if real admins and votebans do more of the banning on servers than the anti-cheat tech.
I really think if votekick and voteban were implemented into NS2 and anti-cheat tech was perhaps left out, I think we'd do okay.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What if the said cheater wasn't cheating to create chaos but to make himself look better? and he was good at hiding his program? Yes it's kind of rare but most admins don't notice as long as you stay within a certain kill range. I think we should still implement VAC. PB doesn't do anything but pick straws. I got kicked on CoD4 because i had 50 or so more kills than the other team members. Good thing it wasn't a ban.
VAC is the best i have seen so far. and you have the option to disable it in your servers so if you want to police your own server you can. Bu i think admins feel more safe if there is an anti-cheating program in use.
Also a false negative rarely happens, and if it does the person that it happened to was probably doing something he wasn't supposed to like injecting the game with a media player so when he whould hit ctrl+5 it would bring up a menu to open songs.
Quoted for truth. I believe that NS2 without some kind of anti cheat system will lead to its downfall. +1 for VAC.
But seriously, VAC is simple and powerful enough. PB is simply too invasive, running when even the game isn't. I do remember when PB first came out for Unreal, the first version. It was hacked shortly thereafter. I was even thinking of getting a cracked version of it for 2142 but decided against it, as the hitreg in this case was poor because the game engine was bad. It being the only game that wanted that I decided against.
The <BAD> clan uses a demo o f the whole server, which can easily be documented per ban and often is. I would like a better time sync, like list time in consel so you can just report that instance and the thirty seconds before it as a person locking onto a cloaked skulk is pretty obvious. Maybe they could stream in a smaller file size demoing setup for NS2 so more servers can do it. Nothing is more decisive than a recording of what happened.
I understand why Valve take the VAC only approach or they would end up with hundreds of false accusations from CS players every day and it would be too much work looking at them, but I can't see that being a problem for NS2. VAC does not stop cheaters, any server admin can tell you that. Anything advanced enough to run in supervisor mode or is private/paid should be completly out of VACs reach and have been for years. VAC is however superior to for example PunkBuster IMO in other ways; it does not run in the background at all times, you never need to update it and it just works without any problems without ever being in the way or even being seen by the user.
Investigating alternative anticheats may also be a good idea, GSC for example used BattlEye for STALKER and ArmA: Armed Assault followed shortly after, before that BattlEye was only used for some free games (I don't know if it's any good though). But I think EasyAntiCheat could be worth looking into, it's quite widespread and advanced but looking around at Google it appears to be one of the harder AC for cheaters to bypass and it's supposed to be made by a former cheat programmer, could have something do with that. It also detects those pesky supervisor mode cheats while VAC cannot and can also send screenshots to admins to reveal stuff like wallhacking.
Without PunkBuster, around 5 people per server had hard, unsophisticated aimbots. This wasn't an isolated case - we tried 5-10 servers and it was the same everywhere. Sometimes there would be a match or two without aimbotters, or an admin playing Whack-A-Mole with a horde of cheaters.<b>Either way, servers without PB clearly have orders of magnitude more cheaters.</b> Go ahead ! Join a server <i>without</i> PunkBuster and tell your story.
A lot of cheaters are losers and have little technical knowledge. They barely know how to install a cheat they downloaded. They can't tell compiler from source code. Once caught, they often give up and settle for playing PB disabled servers. PB does fine job at killing common, distributed hacks. It's like needing a few points to draw a line through. Private, custom hacks are another story, but these are rare, isolated cases by definition. They're hard to catch <i>because</i> they're rare.
Back to topic. I think what's very important is accountability. Each player id/cdkey should be unique and as much as possibible counterfeit-proof. If there's an easy way to determine player's identity and ban him manually, it's half of a victory. You can't cheat perceptive players and admins for long, and if you somehow manage - chances are the cheat you used wasn't very distruptive. That's valuable, too.
That's not to say that a smart player can't get away with a cheat. Cheats are very tempting in competitive environment, and clan players are most likely to hide it. Players may be trained into NOT following an enemy (wallhack) with crosshairs. So it's harder to detect when spectating. There are firebots - instead of snapping crosshair to an enemy and rotating quickly, they pull the trigger when crosshair passes over an enemy.
I think a game like NS2 is fairly resistant to cheats in a way. A lot of weapons are not insta-hit. From my limited experience with NS1 and more with Tremulous it seems that marine weapons, being hitscan, are much juicier target for aimbots, firebots etc. Various detection abilities like parasite, motion tracking etc reduce the advantage a wallhacker may have. In many cases wallhack would just be redundant.
<b>A word of caution.</b>
I don't know about VAC, but PunkBuster identifies player by various hardware keys and stuff. Once a cheater is caught, he may need to replace some or all of his hardware. A common practice is to sell 'contaminated' components on eBay etc. Be aware of this if you're buing used hardware.
Back during the WON days, I was constantly banned from servers for "hacking".
It was very frustrating. Lack of a good Anti-Cheat made many people kick/ban anyone better then them. Rage quitting I can deal with, rage banning? Now that's something I'd rather now deal with again.
Amen, I was an admin for a DoD:S server for a couple years and my oh my. The lengths people would go to avoid being seen as a cheater. I had once caught a member of the clan hacking and the exact excuse he used is that we were all too good for him and needed to use it to be on par with us...
As for the topic though, I'm fairly sure all versions will be using VAC due to Steamworks being integrated.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say. If you believe that vac runs 24/7 in the background of your computer, you are mistaken. VAC is not an antivirus, it will not detect malicious code.