23 replies to this topic

[Deimos2005]

Several people I game with noticed MWO coming out. Initial response from most of them was very favorable.

Then reality began to set in. One of them actually said, "That looks like fun, except online gaming sucks"

Realize that most of my friends are avid gamers. Many have been playing multiplayer online games (off and on) since 1995. They love gaming and particular multiplayer gaming. But the current state of "online multiplayer" gaming is killing it for them.

Way back in 1995 we had hackers. They were few and far between. More often than not we had grief players. These are video games and they are meant to be fun. But how can a game be fun if someone on the other team headshots the entire other team at startup? Or worse, one team is doing a good job, then someone "toggle hacks" and headshots the entire other team immeadiatly. Or even the players who manipulates the game such that they can see thru hills and terrain so they don't need a scout mech. They know where you are and what you are carrying from the start, so your team is at an extreme disadvantage.

These people are not "playing a game" , they are grief playing. That isn't fun for everyone else in the game. It would be like trying to play chess against someone who has replaced all of their pieces with queens. Can you possibly win? That highly unlikely.

So if you can't ever win,.why even play? That's the conclusion many people have come to regarding online gaming. The grief hacking is so bad that there is no point.

Punk buster worked for about a year. That year was 2000. The original "counterstrike" was unbelievably fun for that solitary year that it worked.

Then the console games developed some "minimal" security. Droves of people I knew moved to playstations and xbox to get away from the hackers. The small amount that did show up, we booted immeadiatly. And the "guests" we had in our games loved it. Time and time again people randomly would chirp up about how much fun it was since we were then actively banning people. Eventually even on the console systems it because too much and we even quit doing that. Banning dozens of people every 30minutes gets old really quick.

Since then developers have shown ZERO interest in stopping the hacks. I only know this because my friends and I work in the computer industry (all over) and we know how to stop it, but yet it doesn't happen.

Modern Warfare 2-3 was a terrible example of this. So was battlefield 2-3. Many of my friends tried one or the other and then refused to buy another online game. A few even stopped playing online games altogether after MW:4 BK became so bad that they couldn't even stop around a corner without getting blasted by someone hacking.

One way to stop the hacks is to reconfigure the "memory map". And do it all the time. Then make it different for different players. Since MWO is ONLINE the players can be forced to download updates as often as you like. On top of that, perma-ban players who abuse it. If someone wants to grief play, let them play single player all day long. Why let them abuse other people when it is obvious they are not there to play the game but simply to bully other people?

This may not be the "cure all" but it would go a long way to curbing grief playing. Even if this idea is not liked, DO SOMETHING. If just about evey gamer i know is sick of it, there migh be millions others out there who feel EXACTLY the same way. Fix the hacking and attract customers!

Ok with that said the "professional gaming" situation is WAY out of hand. By pro gamer I mean people paid to play these games online. Yes, they exist. I know a few, and i've spoken to quite a few more. The problem with these people is that in many cases they are given hacks by the companies they work for. They then go about ABUSING the game population.

My friends and I actually found a group being very abusive in an RTS game that sounds something like "Ultimate Commander". Not only were they hacking, they were verbally abusive of the customers in the game. We threatened to report them.

Their response was, "Go ahead, we haven't heard anything from game company in months. We would love to hear from them again."

Even very large companies have serious problems with these people. Friends of mine have had trouble with professional gamers from a certain "winter storm" company. Their people were abusive, and basically prevented the PAYING CUSTOMERS (us) from having a good time the game.

Imagine if a grocery store let their check out staff abuse the people as they walked thru? Would anyone come back for more? Or what would happen if a school teacher was abusive of the students in his/her care? That teacher would quickly get replaced. The problem with online professional gamers is that they are secret, and there is NO WAY to report them. And they know it!

If you are going to hire these people, watch them like hawks. Stop them from hacking, stop them from abusing your paying customers. Many development companies do not, and their online communities end up run by these little napoleons who just about get away with murder in the community.

Allowing that to occur is not a recipe for success for any company.

Good luck with the game. Thanks for listening.

[Kenyon Burguess]

pong got hacked. if you didnt realize the issue till 95, you must be quite young still, because hackers have been around since the very beginning. its the natural drive of humans to tear things apart, see how the work, and put them back together. is it wrong? of course! but it can and will happen, and for every fix someone creates, 2 others will find a way around it. that being said, any data that you and your friends have that can be used to prevent hacking, im sure would be appreciated by the devs. but dont think that MWO is going to be over run by hackers, nor will it ever be free of them. its going to be a day to day struggle for the company. exactly what part of the field did u say you worked in?

[Deimos2005]

Cant you tell by my IP Geist?

[Lettuce Prey]

Deimos2005, on 26 July 2012 - 11:11 AM, said:

Several people I game with noticed MWO coming out. Initial response from most of them was very favorable.

Then reality began to set in. One of them actually said, "That looks like fun, except online gaming sucks"

Realize that most of my friends are avid gamers. Many have been playing multiplayer online games (off and on) since 1995. They love gaming and particular multiplayer gaming. But the current state of "online multiplayer" gaming is killing it for them.

Way back in 1995 we had hackers. They were few and far between. More often than not we had grief players. These are video games and they are meant to be fun. But how can a game be fun if someone on the other team headshots the entire other team at startup? Or worse, one team is doing a good job, then someone "toggle hacks" and headshots the entire other team immeadiatly. Or even the players who manipulates the game such that they can see thru hills and terrain so they don't need a scout mech. They know where you are and what you are carrying from the start, so your team is at an extreme disadvantage.

These people are not "playing a game" , they are grief playing. That isn't fun for everyone else in the game. It would be like trying to play chess against someone who has replaced all of their pieces with queens. Can you possibly win? That highly unlikely.

So if you can't ever win,.why even play? That's the conclusion many people have come to regarding online gaming. The grief hacking is so bad that there is no point.

Punk buster worked for about a year. That year was 2000. The original "counterstrike" was unbelievably fun for that solitary year that it worked.

Then the console games developed some "minimal" security. Droves of people I knew moved to playstations and xbox to get away from the hackers. The small amount that did show up, we booted immeadiatly. And the "guests" we had in our games loved it. Time and time again people randomly would chirp up about how much fun it was since we were then actively banning people. Eventually even on the console systems it because too much and we even quit doing that. Banning dozens of people every 30minutes gets old really quick.

Since then developers have shown ZERO interest in stopping the hacks. I only know this because my friends and I work in the computer industry (all over) and we know how to stop it, but yet it doesn't happen.

Modern Warfare 2-3 was a terrible example of this. So was battlefield 2-3. Many of my friends tried one or the other and then refused to buy another online game. A few even stopped playing online games altogether after MW:4 BK became so bad that they couldn't even stop around a corner without getting blasted by someone hacking.

One way to stop the hacks is to reconfigure the "memory map". And do it all the time. Then make it different for different players. Since MWO is ONLINE the players can be forced to download updates as often as you like. On top of that, perma-ban players who abuse it. If someone wants to grief play, let them play single player all day long. Why let them abuse other people when it is obvious they are not there to play the game but simply to bully other people?

This may not be the "cure all" but it would go a long way to curbing grief playing. Even if this idea is not liked, DO SOMETHING. If just about evey gamer i know is sick of it, there migh be millions others out there who feel EXACTLY the same way. Fix the hacking and attract customers!

Ok with that said the "professional gaming" situation is WAY out of hand. By pro gamer I mean people paid to play these games online. Yes, they exist. I know a few, and i've spoken to quite a few more. The problem with these people is that in many cases they are given hacks by the companies they work for. They then go about ABUSING the game population.

My friends and I actually found a group being very abusive in an RTS game that sounds something like "Ultimate Commander". Not only were they hacking, they were verbally abusive of the customers in the game. We threatened to report them.

Their response was, "Go ahead, we haven't heard anything from game company in months. We would love to hear from them again."

Even very large companies have serious problems with these people. Friends of mine have had trouble with professional gamers from a certain "winter storm" company. Their people were abusive, and basically prevented the PAYING CUSTOMERS (us) from having a good time the game.

Imagine if a grocery store let their check out staff abuse the people as they walked thru? Would anyone come back for more? Or what would happen if a school teacher was abusive of the students in his/her care? That teacher would quickly get replaced. The problem with online professional gamers is that they are secret, and there is NO WAY to report them. And they know it!

If you are going to hire these people, watch them like hawks. Stop them from hacking, stop them from abusing your paying customers. Many development companies do not, and their online communities end up run by these little napoleons who just about get away with murder in the community.

Allowing that to occur is not a recipe for success for any company.

Good luck with the game. Thanks for listening.

one thing i noticed is that the games with the fewest hacker problems are the ones that have a small "PATCH" every week or so.

i am going to guess that they are the ones that are doing something like changing the locations of where data is held in memory with each patch, the memory map as you call it.

that works with very little burden on those of us not cheating.
it works out to be a regular weekly maintenance routine for the devs and after you get enough of them on the current build you can just pick one at random to be this weeks patch.

so it seems there is a way around hacking, but greifers that only want to ruin what someone may have worked for months to get is another thing.
eve online is a good example.
the bounty system that eve has only encourages people to get large bounties placed on themselves because you can just log on with a second account and kill the character with the bounty on them and laugh all the way to the bank.

on the other hand there are scammers.
they are just part of the game and i don't mind seeing them and it's often good for a laugh watching people who fell for the scam complain in chat about getting hustled.
some people use the large bounty to run scams on people and are actually quite humorous with how they get people to give them money willingly.
if you play eve you can see one of these hustlers at work in the Amarr system on a regular basis.
and even if you don't go to amarr to see her [a female avatar anyway] in action, you can look at her bio and she spells out the whole scam to you there.
her name is : boom boom longtime
now with a name like that who WOULDN'T trust her.

so yes there are problems with online games, yet i have accounts in several and enjoy them all with the problems being something i deal with in the same way i don't walk through certain parts of town. real life has it's "work arounds" too.

[Hexial]

The cool thing about EVE is that hacks really suit the meta-game well. it's horrid, I know, but... it's EVE.

Though I think this is why tournaments for all games are only respectable over LAN. You never know who is toggling hacks.

[Deimos2005]

That might explain why many people i know never got into Eve.

One of them actually said, "The only problem with Eve is that it just isn't any fun."

If someone wants to "reverse engineer" a game and try things out single player, that's great. When they drag it into multiplayer they are just trying to be a jerk. No excuses for that.

From talking to alot of people i work with, many have quit playing online games entirely because of them. It's probably why online gaming in general is taking such a nose dive. People enter the market, see all the horrid things going on, and leave. And they never return.

That's the beauty of these online games; they are just games. If the developers won't stop players from griefing others, and don't give players ways to defend themselves, the players can leave. Regardless of what many people seem to think, we can all survive without our games.

People refuse to "find a work around" when it is so much easier to go do something else. And funny thing, people do exactly that time and time again. Eventually this concept will sink in with developers, unfortunetly they are slow to change.

[Rhyshaelkan]

Someone give me the TL ; DR version.

[5h3p4rd]

Yeah, hackers and griefers are a problem. They kill multiplayer gaming.

One thing that WoT has is an in-game reporting option, and a replay recorder. Quite simply, in addition to everything else you might do, implement those as well. That way, if someone is suspected of hacking, the game replay is saved, and can be used to report the player.

A funny thing to do just prior to their ban, would be to allow them into a game...only it's only them on one side, in a completely crippled mech (no weapons, slow movement), surrounded by 8 other ones. The 8 other ones, of course, blast the player into simtherines...and then they get banned, giving some of them at least the same sense of frustration honest players do when facing them.

[SuomiWarder]

Well, we know that MWO is server side so I would guess they can stop auto aim and non legal mech hacks. They hve stted several times (they the devs) that they are taking steps to reduce cheating. But obviously they won't publish what those steps are so that hackers will know to try other stuff instead.

If MWO dies because of too many cheaters, then it will be the publishers and developer's fault. Presumably they will do what they can.

[Tyzh]

Rhyshaelkan, on 26 July 2012 - 01:22 PM, said:

Someone give me the TL ; DR version.

The tl;dr would be "Hackers are mean."

[DarklightCA]

Tyzh, on 02 November 2012 - 02:30 AM, said:

The tl;dr would be "Hackers are mean."

Those meanies!

[Lawler]

There is actually a MWO hacks page on certain community sites that blatantly advertise what and how the hacks they are using work. Some of them are aim hacks and others, I can only assume, are armor or heat hacks. I have not attempted to look into the sight for fear of picking up malicious software, but this is their claim at least.

[Banto]

The really funny part of all this is that PGI rewrote the NetCode and gave us all this lagging and rubberbanding and bad hitdetection and everything as a way to avoid hacking and cheating.

And now people just do it anyways and the normal people ("normal" as in "not f-ing a-holes") suffer the mentioned problems with the server based networking structure.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

But the problem is basically not the Devs, but the people who cheat and hack, a thing I will never understand for a multiplayergame.
I sometimes ask myself, how this game would be, if they had left the netcoding be as the engine support it regularly.
Maybe more cheaters, maybe less lagging and such. Would be interesting if it would be more or less fun.

[Sayyid]

People who cheat at games are not "hackers", I hate that term being used that way. They are cheats simple as that, hacking requires skill, and some base knowledge on how programs work and security suites work. People who use aimbots or godmode programs are just cheats simple as that. People who write them are crackers and thats it.

TLDR; Hacker=Anonymous, aimboter = poor excuse of a cheater or no skill btch.

[Exilyth]

At least most stuff is server side so we only suffer aimbots and wallhacks. Imagine Centurions running around at 400kp/h, carrying 10 gauss rifles... *shudders*

[Ceribus]

Ok so what I get from this thread is "hackers are bad MmmK" how exactly is it related to this game. Can you provide examples of people cheating in MWO? What changes would you suggest they implement. Banning does not really work on this model of game as most of the griefers would not use an account they have spent money on so all banning does is make it so they need a new email address

[xenoglyph]

Wow Deimos, I think the "computer industry" you work in must be tech support because you clearly know nothing about what you're talking about.

Your post rambles a lot and makes very few points that directly relate to MWO. I see very broad statements that aren't backed up: "Since then developers have shown ZERO interest in stopping the hacks"

People with no experience with PEs (portable executables) like you Deimos make it sound like the developers only need to spend 5 minutes and voila! all hackers are thwarted. Don't you think from a business perspective if it was actually that easy they would jump all over it and make that investment?

You naively suggest reconfiguring the "memory map". I don't even know what you're trying to suggest, and I don't think you do either. When a serious person hacks a game they don't hardcode memory addresses, that would be silly. We try to figure out the structure of game objects. (i.e. C++ classes will be organized in a way familiar to those of us who've debugged PEs generated by a specific compiler) We will also find a place in code where there is a pointer to our desired object. We can then create a "signature" of x86 instructions near that pointer so that we can locate it later even if the game exe is recompiled.

After I know how to work with a game object I'm interested in (work with here can mean calling object functions, reading or writing to object variables, etc.) most of my work is done. To thwart my efforts game developers would have to completely redesign the game or add in more security. Of course I can then attempt to get around that and the arms race escalates. Adding more security can make the game client behave erratically on some people's computers and can become quite a headache to manage. For instance, some completely legitimate programs (like antivirus, etc.) do things such as DLL injection and API hooking that appear very similar to the techniques that game hackers use. Game developers must balance security with performance and compatibility. Valve has a pretty competent protection scheme and yet it gets hacked as soon as they update it.

To try to oversimplify this problem and lazily proclaim that the developers aren't trying hard enough is just sheer ignorance.

Edited by xenoglyph, 02 November 2012 - 09:23 AM.

[xenoglyph]

Bah, just noticed I replied to a necro thread.

[Ceribus]

xenoglyph, on 02 November 2012 - 09:47 AM, said:

Bah, just noticed I replied to a necro thread.

Huh? Necro thread?

[Banto]

xenoglyph, on 02 November 2012 - 09:47 AM, said:

Bah, just noticed I replied to a necro thread.

Ceribus, on 02 November 2012 - 10:17 AM, said:

Huh? Necro thread?

Geomathews is to blame!