How GOA deals with cheating

[Bleri McThrust]

At a guess 99% of players abhor cheaters and 99% of cheaters like to boast about there cheats eventually.

The best way to catch them is to report them. And thtas always been the way it works.

Once reported its investigated. I cant really see GoA, Mythic or anyone being able to spend the time and money doing it themselves.

 

[chretien]

It's not entrapment Redi as the cheater is already cheating. If he's not then he won't see the 'honeypot' and thus won't react to it. He's not being tempted to cheat through the actions of the GMs. All the honeypot does is confirm the suspicious behaviour as actual cheating.
As for the legality of it, well for a start they aren't running a court of law, if they say you're cheating then you're banned and there is no recourse to law that you can take to overturn it or appeal it.

 

[The Real Redi]

aye, we all know the fascist police state we live in has it's own set of rules, but hey

lol! I used to think the UK was a bit hoity-toity and a bit reserved, till i had a long chat with an american... i cannot believe "the land of the free" has so many "but...."'s attached to it!

you cant even show a good size pair of boobies on the telly over there without having some parent teacher organisation or right wing governor bleating about how his kids will all be on crack by the end of the week because of it.

Seeing as GoA are the admin for DAoC-Europe, how do french laws stand on on-line games? Do they have such a thing as a governing body to regulate them?

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

Im sure in the EULA and CoC there are bits of small print that say just how and why GOA can ban you for all the above offences. Baiscally you break either of the rulings, you get a ban depending on severity, which GOA are judge jury and executioner. And so it should be.

As for GOA acting on reports from gamers themselves, well what else can they do, its damn hard to keep an eye on 26000 players across euro, so word of mouth to get the investgation going is the best way.

Obviously this chap who used a hack (and others caught and named on BW recently) deserve what they get. Cheating in games like this is damn laim, perhaps these people cant handle a challenge in life or are too bone idle to do anything, and will probaly end up as drunken bums living in cardbox boxes

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

http://www.fanta.dk/showmovie.asp?mid=235A70D3-62F3-44EE-BCC0-DF7DE3848E85

 

[old.Tohtori]

There are no bad players in DAoC, there are only stupid players.

Pull a PC when your solo? Not bad, it's stupid.

Lead a FG of Albs to your friends(two other guys) and shout "help plz!!" isn't bad playing, it's just stupid.

Even going into spindelhalla when you're level 15 isn't bad playing, it's stupid.

And furthermore, running after a mob that's kiting..not bad playing..stupid and also ends in a massive pull.

 

[ning]

laws are nearly the same in the whole European Union.

 

[old.Normengast]

Originally posted by brite
No it wasn't me that got banned

what i am trying to say is the only way of detecting cheaters is if players report them, and if you thinks thats good......

The tip came from normal players. A bit further it states that he was cought red handed, allthough he was a kobold.

 

[uma_thurman]

Originally posted by old.Tohtori
Even going into spindelhalla when you're level 15 isn't bad playing, it's stupid.

If you're new to the game and wander into Spin at a low level I hardly think that makes you stupid...just inexperienced.

We all have to learn at some point.

 

[lairiodd]

Re: Re: How GOA deals with cheating

Originally posted by bigchief
There was something mentioned in a grab bag or whatever the other day that said character movement speed is controlled client side not server. So its alot harder to monitor and alot easier to hack.

Its also why sometimes you get a bug where you move at 99% of the speed of the rest of group and keep losing speed. Though hasnt happened in a while. Generally, the only response you get is please download new graphics drivers .

Ideally, what you want is the server to send each person a speed multiplier so that the client will adjust their run speed if needed. Anyway, I can't see monitoring run speed as that hard. All you need to do is calculate the distance traveled based on position updates. This would allow you to generate a list of possible exploiters who could then be monitored.

 

[Falcon]

There's plenty of anti-cheat measures that could be used without breaking any privacy laws at all, the problem is as has been mentioned to do with processor overhead.

I'm not sure of the full DAoC server architecture but I do know for sure they use mySQL on Linux as their RDBMS setup. It's most likely that each zone is on a seperate server thus all data such as player info, monsters, items, is stored in the server's memory and then at a set interval or when a given event occurs the data in memory is offloaded to the SQL DB for persistance (This is probably how /stuck works, it just reloads the last loc your char was at from the database whose data maybe some time out of date thus be a loc you were at before you got stuck).

This brings a problem, the data can't be read from the SQL server, which would be the ideal solution because the data their isn't updated in real time. Thus, the only way to calculate player speeds is for:
a) The server with the player on to calculate the speed itself, check to see if they should be able to move at that speed and take necessary actions if not, more processor overhead if you imagine checks being done for not only speed but other things.
b) The server to offload all real time data to another server for that server to check, less processor overhead than above option, much more bandwidth, costly to pay for an extra machine.

As you can see, neither option is ideal and both have a cost issue involved, the first would require a more beefy server, the second would require another machine and possibly better networking kit.

The biggest problem DAoC has IMO is that it only has 5 coders and a total of about 30 - 35 people on the team in total, which is a relatively small dev team, especially when games such as Alien vs Predator were rumoured to have 32 programmers alone (I don't personally beleive that rumour to be true but I wouldn't be suprised if they had more than 5). All that and not to mention coding an MMOG is generally a much bigger task to start with. A lot of DAoC code and content is borrowed from Mythic's older projects or licensed from elsewhere:
- The engine is the license NetImmerse engine (www.ndl.com)
- The combat engine was originally licensed from somewhere else although I can't remember where, it was then customized and changed a fair bit last minute
- The server daemons themselves were borrowed from an older game of Mythics
- They use mySQL on Linux (by no means a bad thing!)

So what does that mean? It means Mythic have a small amount of coders working with a lot of code that they either don't have access too, didn't write in the first place thus don't know very well or just haven't touched in years since it was first written, possibly even by someone who's left the company by now (That's why that evil graphics bug in the classic client is still there, it's just not something Mythic can fix). Couple that with the fact there's only 5 programmers and you begin to understand why they just don't have the time, resources or perhaps in some cases the understanding to deal with problems such as automated cheat detection.

None of that said to slate Mythic, on the contrary they've performed a miracle with the resources they had available to them and not many dev teams could pull a game through to completion with limited resources, many teams would and have under the same circumstances had projects cancelled.

So there you have it, that's probably why there's no or little automated cheat detection, or perhaps wont be any time soon. Mythic, sadly, just don't have the resources to do it without sacrificing regular content updates and such. Cheaters are lame and annoying, but the game would get very stale very quick if they put programming resources into cheat prevention instead of content creation and bug fixes.

Anyway, I guess I better get back to work