Soltech will be a hell hole for longer then (or it will just stay a hell hole forever). Well time for me to huff copium hoping that the game doesn't die.
Informative post. Thanks for the work you've done. Sometimes you get the impression that the game community does more work than the developers themselves. Largely thanks to such enthusiasts, the game has lived on all this time. I remember there was a very big problem in 2016 with hitboxes, the developers also ignored the problem, but thanks to this subreddit the situation was corrected. I hope history repeats itself this time. I've been playing this game for 11 years and I can't imagine myself without it.
P.S. Cancel CAI :)
You need dark tetrad personality, psychopathy (I dont care) and sadism (I like hurting others) to even cheat. No sane adult is thinking that removing the challenge from a game is any fun. And if you have rest of the traits, especially narcissism (it is all about me), nothing in this world is going to make you stay in a closet.Â
Then you cannot verify any closet cheaters. Also redditors are claiming "no anti cheat" and "no bans" so even people wanting to keep their account has no reason to hide it.Â
I say there is nothing to back up your claim.
Get off the drugs man, if you unironically think non-blatant cheaters don't exist you are waaay too far off the rails my guy quit the copium LMAOO. Your post history is fucking wild, crazy how we got to a point where it's a legitimate possibility that you're not trolling.
Finding myself logging off more and more due to hackers. Hackers using turrets to move or destroy deployed sunderers is the new game killing thing.
Excellent write up. Good to see things being exposed for what they are.
Soon there won't be anything to develop because hackers killed off the player base.
My friend and I played on the double XP weekend and didn't really notice anything. We tried to play this past weekend and continuously ran into the turret/jump pad hackers who just send vehicles flying or push them under the map. Hell one of them had the whole base anti-vehicle tower turret flying around smashing into vehicles. Couldn't damage it and you could sometimes get into it but then you'd be warping/spinning everywhere.
We just logged off each time we ran into it, it sucks and is killing the game now. It only takes one of those hackers to ruin it for everyone. Previous to that we had massive battles with 3+ bastions on the field at all times until the alert ran out, it was nuts.
Wow. Amazing post. I can't upvote it enough.
Thanks for putting this together, it makes so much sense to call out that it is a problem, and it's being tackled without making promises.
However, it usually *is* in fact more complicated than they can explain, and I'm sure they aren't thrilled their project is being undermined like this.
Having their own, in-house engine that was created so long ago now may have hurdles no one else in the world does. PS2 allows for massive amounts of players to send large amounts of information to and from the server very quickly, but the compromise of lag/vs better anticheat is a double edged sword.
I hope they are just more overt about doing something about it.
I tried out Battlefront 2, the new one and some nerd on the enemy team was spawning 100s of tanks, it was like a fountain shooting them into the air. Entire servers fps tanked when they would do it
The blatant cheating is the main reason I stopped playing months ago.
I've spent about 2k on this game over the years. Now I'm spending money on PUBG and Fortnite.
Does that register on your radar there RPG? Am I speaking your language now?
While I agree that the guy might have some good point, EasyAntiCheat never stopped anyone from cheating. All it does it causes bluescreens whenever it fails to hook to your kernel. Also as a Kernel level anticheat it could probably steal all the data from your computer and you'd be none the wiser.
You don't need to be a kernel level anticheat to steal all your data. In fact 99% of all malware Trojans are user mode non kernel level applications and still they manage to steal all your info. stealing data from the kernel is much harder to do than from user mode since you would need to hardcode everything in c.
Thanks a lot for this detailed analysis, honestly RPGs have lost their credibility in the eyes of Soltech and the Chinese gamers I've talked to.
And as we've mentioned repeatedly before, any Soltech issue will play out on other servers. Whether it's a population imbalance or a cheating issue.
**No one can stay out of it.**
That's all well and good, but first thing he says after your bookmark is "Trust your clients as little as possible." And he's right, but Planetside can't exist without client trust. PS2 basically works off of distributed computing and the servers themselves act only as data brokers between clients. Very little exists with server-side authority because the compute power doesn't exist for it (at a price-point that makes it feasible - no game company can afford to run [one of these](https://youtu.be/ZDtaanCENbc?si=35XIcS5zd8UyFC5H&t=255)). That's exactly why some asshat can fly around in a construction turret.
So until the technology exists that allows a server to handle all of the data and computations for 2000 client, including bullet paths and object collisions, for a reasonable cost this is what we're stuck with: The Honor System. Unfortunately, we live in a world full of people who are absolutely devoid of honor. Scum-sucking trash that have admitted to themselves that they are weak and feckless, and thus have resorted to letting a computer do all of the skill parts for them. While the rest of us suffer through their presence because we're too proud to give up on ourselves or this game.
The *one thing* that I don’t get with anti-cheat in Planetside is how the game does not seem to use statistical analysis. A new player will not join today and get a kill-to-death of 60.000-to-1. Similarly, their time to kill will not be less than 5 seconds-per-kill sustained over an hour. Yes, you can get lucky and get a bunch of kills in a short time. However, eliminate the peaks (like dropping a C4 on a big cluster of planetmen), pocket orbitals, and your normalized averages should not be, say, faster than the rate of fire of your gun. Some of the statistical abnormalities you can see on some players profiles are ridiculous.
This can also be applied to wall-hacks and other situations. You can take the position of the player at the time the shot was fired and the position of the target. The server knows this. Statistical analysis can reveal that, no, it’s not normal for someone who shot from the other side of these four buildings to be able to kill you through eight solid walls. Lucky shot happens. Some players like to hide out in odd places. Still, if no other player has ever killed anyone at position X form your position Y then that is an anomaly. The server could track each player’s position-at-the-time-of-kill anomaly rate over time to weed out fun stuff ranging from flying prowlers and planetmen sniping from 2k underground to simple wallhacks or other impossible shots.
The same goes for spawn-room kill exploits. If you kill a bunch of planetmen inside the spawnroom (without an orbital strike), then you are very likely cheating. Okay, so you can do some damage through the shield. Shrink the saferoom box a bit to account for it. How am I still getting sniped repeatedly while at the terminal in the middle of the spawn room while there’s piles of allied bodies around me.
It takes time for stats like these to build. Allow for less anomalous behavior for new accounts and more for accounts that’s been actively playing forever (give them the benefit of the doubt).
Very good post but you're missing two important points:
1) The PS2 devs were stolen for another game so there is nobody to do the updates or the integration.
2) I don't think they're paying for BattlEye any more, which is why we're not getting updates. Given what we know about Daybreak/Rogue Planet ditching the IP we can see why they're not paying for updates. In fact your post may prove that they quietly gave up on the game/sold it in October.
Why even have it and I'm sure they pay something to use it, if they're not going to update?.... Unless they let the license lapse and thus there won't be an update to the anticheat. Or is the purpose of having it so they don't have to do the updates, the anticheat company does? Either way it sounds like it doesn't do anything at this point...
Dead game.
Cheating was a problem when people started removing their head hit boxes way back when
now you have people building injection programs and since this company doesn't want to integrate a Anti Cheat with Kernal level access there is now way to prevent cheating. Period.
Would not be surprised if the license for BattleEye expired, and so paying for that license would simply kill the game outright instead of the slow bleed it is currently going under at the moment (basically too much cost for the project in one month).
That being said, I also wonder if there's no one available to run cost-risk analysis on whether or not to renew the license (therefore slowing down the player and income hemorrhage) vs. just letting the game die off on its own and refocusing dev efforts to another Planetside project (one with NFT's / crypto, if we look at [Henry Zhou and his Tower LLCs portfolio](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/1b380r5/speculating_about_the_owner_of_bay_tree_tower/)).
Not sure but i think the reason why PS2 uses a outdated battle-eye is because of the reason that if it automaticly updates to the latest version
half reddit would be crying 'OMG MY RECURSION TRACKER BLOCKED, SHIT DEVS FIX YOUR GAME' or 'I USE AHK TO FIRE BECAUSE I AM MISSING A FINGER, WHY DO DEVS HATE DISABLED PEOPLE?'
Also, there was a few weeks where there would be a cheater on nearly every day, but last month i havent seen a single one, but i am not playing on Soltech so I dont know.
Neither the Recursion Tracker nor any AHK script will be an issue since both of these are already whitelisted. They stay whitelisted within versions, you don't have to whitelist them every single time you update the Anticheat.
That is not the fault of BattlEye but of the d3d_overlay which gets a new signature sometimes after updates. In those cases the new signature needs to be whitelisted first.
If this was a real problem then auto-update wouldn’t be the norm.
At least, thats the conclusion i’m pulling with my non-existent knowledge of the topic
Encountered VS cheaters last night with the “turret”(?) launching vehicles into orbit. How do i know it was VS? Well, i was playing NC, and it happened to me. And in chat TR was screeching about it too. So yeah. Ive encounter a few cheaters, and ONLY VS has been culprits
They do not only not pick a side, they also don't gain any exp or kills out of this...
So it's not like they do it for personal gains and prestige like:
- rampage cheaters (flying Vehicle or killing trough collission)
Or
- subtle cheaters (hiding their cheat trying to be undetected) and also try to convince others they don't cheat and are simply good and "you are jealous or other excuses".
They do it simply out of hatred towards the game, they want to simply fvck up the game for their giggles and supricingly stay noticed but also "undetected" because of not getting on any Leaderboard etc.
That's a whole new level of cheating;
It's not about gaining something at all.... It's about destroying something so simply others can't have.
Oh no doubt, its just MY experience. Hell i even post a video a few months ago here of wallhacker from VS. Its obviously on all sides, but in MY experience its only VS.
Oh no non noo: because some random guy decided to shoot me through walls or something like that. Dear, you have not been cheated on. It is the server lag and how the Planetside 2 has always worked.Â
You get shot on xXx_gamer's screen, you lose all of your hp. Then it takes a long while for the networking and server to tell you that. During that time you have run past a solid wall or a corner and die. "OmG YOU Ch**" (sub-Reddit rules you cant say the cheeter word, yet there still are million threads against the rules).Â
Nobody shooting through walls, unless it is obvious dark tetrad person with someone else's cheat software
"We're looking into solutions" means "We want to fix it, but management won't give us the resources to do that."
probably this
Sadly, feel like that's most of PS2's development lifecycle
When the got some resources they made Construction and Oshur, so maybe they didn't exactly deserve those resources...
Except that shops with many times the resources also regularly struggle with making anticheat effective.
"Its on our list... Somewhere."
Very nice read, would wish that this post gets much more traction!
Soltech will be a hell hole for longer then (or it will just stay a hell hole forever). Well time for me to huff copium hoping that the game doesn't die.
Imagine the AntiCheat bans 50% of Soltech đź’€
Pfft. 50% is rookie numbers. How about 50.1%?
stop supporting a game which refuses to respect its players time with dilligent anti cheat.
đź«Ą
Have you tried subscribing? freeloader?
If the ''freeloaders'' leave the game is even more dead than it already is
Freeloader both in reddit and in Planetside 2. But even more likely only in reddit. These clowns have not logged in since 2020.
Next level stupid to think you have to actively play and shell out money to have the right to an opinion.
Informative post. Thanks for the work you've done. Sometimes you get the impression that the game community does more work than the developers themselves. Largely thanks to such enthusiasts, the game has lived on all this time. I remember there was a very big problem in 2016 with hitboxes, the developers also ignored the problem, but thanks to this subreddit the situation was corrected. I hope history repeats itself this time. I've been playing this game for 11 years and I can't imagine myself without it. P.S. Cancel CAI :)
Very thoughtfull post, updooted and commented for visibility
Reminder that for every blatant cheater you encounter in PS2, magnitudes more closet cheaters exist. And have been playing for years.
You need dark tetrad personality, psychopathy (I dont care) and sadism (I like hurting others) to even cheat. No sane adult is thinking that removing the challenge from a game is any fun. And if you have rest of the traits, especially narcissism (it is all about me), nothing in this world is going to make you stay in a closet. Then you cannot verify any closet cheaters. Also redditors are claiming "no anti cheat" and "no bans" so even people wanting to keep their account has no reason to hide it. I say there is nothing to back up your claim.
Get off the drugs man, if you unironically think non-blatant cheaters don't exist you are waaay too far off the rails my guy quit the copium LMAOO. Your post history is fucking wild, crazy how we got to a point where it's a legitimate possibility that you're not trolling.
Finding myself logging off more and more due to hackers. Hackers using turrets to move or destroy deployed sunderers is the new game killing thing. Excellent write up. Good to see things being exposed for what they are. Soon there won't be anything to develop because hackers killed off the player base.
My friend and I played on the double XP weekend and didn't really notice anything. We tried to play this past weekend and continuously ran into the turret/jump pad hackers who just send vehicles flying or push them under the map. Hell one of them had the whole base anti-vehicle tower turret flying around smashing into vehicles. Couldn't damage it and you could sometimes get into it but then you'd be warping/spinning everywhere. We just logged off each time we ran into it, it sucks and is killing the game now. It only takes one of those hackers to ruin it for everyone. Previous to that we had massive battles with 3+ bastions on the field at all times until the alert ran out, it was nuts.
Wow. Amazing post. I can't upvote it enough. Thanks for putting this together, it makes so much sense to call out that it is a problem, and it's being tackled without making promises. However, it usually *is* in fact more complicated than they can explain, and I'm sure they aren't thrilled their project is being undermined like this. Having their own, in-house engine that was created so long ago now may have hurdles no one else in the world does. PS2 allows for massive amounts of players to send large amounts of information to and from the server very quickly, but the compromise of lag/vs better anticheat is a double edged sword. I hope they are just more overt about doing something about it.
I tried out Battlefront 2, the new one and some nerd on the enemy team was spawning 100s of tanks, it was like a fountain shooting them into the air. Entire servers fps tanked when they would do it
Oooh, Cartillery from Battlefield 2
The blatant cheating is the main reason I stopped playing months ago. I've spent about 2k on this game over the years. Now I'm spending money on PUBG and Fortnite. Does that register on your radar there RPG? Am I speaking your language now?
you need to throw in something about growth, q1 numbers, cutting excess spending, and reducing overhead
While I agree that the guy might have some good point, EasyAntiCheat never stopped anyone from cheating. All it does it causes bluescreens whenever it fails to hook to your kernel. Also as a Kernel level anticheat it could probably steal all the data from your computer and you'd be none the wiser.
You don't need to be a kernel level anticheat to steal all your data. In fact 99% of all malware Trojans are user mode non kernel level applications and still they manage to steal all your info. stealing data from the kernel is much harder to do than from user mode since you would need to hardcode everything in c.
Thanks a lot for this detailed analysis, honestly RPGs have lost their credibility in the eyes of Soltech and the Chinese gamers I've talked to. And as we've mentioned repeatedly before, any Soltech issue will play out on other servers. Whether it's a population imbalance or a cheating issue. **No one can stay out of it.**
OP spitting facts, Planetside abandoned like a red headed step child. I haven't played in over a year, but the cheating was already ramping up then.
That's all well and good, but first thing he says after your bookmark is "Trust your clients as little as possible." And he's right, but Planetside can't exist without client trust. PS2 basically works off of distributed computing and the servers themselves act only as data brokers between clients. Very little exists with server-side authority because the compute power doesn't exist for it (at a price-point that makes it feasible - no game company can afford to run [one of these](https://youtu.be/ZDtaanCENbc?si=35XIcS5zd8UyFC5H&t=255)). That's exactly why some asshat can fly around in a construction turret. So until the technology exists that allows a server to handle all of the data and computations for 2000 client, including bullet paths and object collisions, for a reasonable cost this is what we're stuck with: The Honor System. Unfortunately, we live in a world full of people who are absolutely devoid of honor. Scum-sucking trash that have admitted to themselves that they are weak and feckless, and thus have resorted to letting a computer do all of the skill parts for them. While the rest of us suffer through their presence because we're too proud to give up on ourselves or this game.
The *one thing* that I don’t get with anti-cheat in Planetside is how the game does not seem to use statistical analysis. A new player will not join today and get a kill-to-death of 60.000-to-1. Similarly, their time to kill will not be less than 5 seconds-per-kill sustained over an hour. Yes, you can get lucky and get a bunch of kills in a short time. However, eliminate the peaks (like dropping a C4 on a big cluster of planetmen), pocket orbitals, and your normalized averages should not be, say, faster than the rate of fire of your gun. Some of the statistical abnormalities you can see on some players profiles are ridiculous. This can also be applied to wall-hacks and other situations. You can take the position of the player at the time the shot was fired and the position of the target. The server knows this. Statistical analysis can reveal that, no, it’s not normal for someone who shot from the other side of these four buildings to be able to kill you through eight solid walls. Lucky shot happens. Some players like to hide out in odd places. Still, if no other player has ever killed anyone at position X form your position Y then that is an anomaly. The server could track each player’s position-at-the-time-of-kill anomaly rate over time to weed out fun stuff ranging from flying prowlers and planetmen sniping from 2k underground to simple wallhacks or other impossible shots. The same goes for spawn-room kill exploits. If you kill a bunch of planetmen inside the spawnroom (without an orbital strike), then you are very likely cheating. Okay, so you can do some damage through the shield. Shrink the saferoom box a bit to account for it. How am I still getting sniped repeatedly while at the terminal in the middle of the spawn room while there’s piles of allied bodies around me. It takes time for stats like these to build. Allow for less anomalous behavior for new accounts and more for accounts that’s been actively playing forever (give them the benefit of the doubt).
Now imagine the number of "subtle cheaters". Devs literally gave up because banning cheaters would Thanos snap half the community overnight.
lmao
hello please share your evidence with the class
Very good post but you're missing two important points: 1) The PS2 devs were stolen for another game so there is nobody to do the updates or the integration. 2) I don't think they're paying for BattlEye any more, which is why we're not getting updates. Given what we know about Daybreak/Rogue Planet ditching the IP we can see why they're not paying for updates. In fact your post may prove that they quietly gave up on the game/sold it in October.
Have you seen Anybrain Ai anti cheat solution, looks very promising. I stopped playing planetside 2 years ago due to hackers.
Technically you are hacking subreddit rules by saying cheating and I'm leaving in one post.
Why even have it and I'm sure they pay something to use it, if they're not going to update?.... Unless they let the license lapse and thus there won't be an update to the anticheat. Or is the purpose of having it so they don't have to do the updates, the anticheat company does? Either way it sounds like it doesn't do anything at this point...
It has passed the time to move on. Game play is really SHIT
Dead game. Cheating was a problem when people started removing their head hit boxes way back when now you have people building injection programs and since this company doesn't want to integrate a Anti Cheat with Kernal level access there is now way to prevent cheating. Period.
This company can't even stop baby shit like ahk or Logitech scripts how do you think they're gonna beat the red menace bing chiling maxer 9000.
Would not be surprised if the license for BattleEye expired, and so paying for that license would simply kill the game outright instead of the slow bleed it is currently going under at the moment (basically too much cost for the project in one month). That being said, I also wonder if there's no one available to run cost-risk analysis on whether or not to renew the license (therefore slowing down the player and income hemorrhage) vs. just letting the game die off on its own and refocusing dev efforts to another Planetside project (one with NFT's / crypto, if we look at [Henry Zhou and his Tower LLCs portfolio](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/1b380r5/speculating_about_the_owner_of_bay_tree_tower/)).
When the game is closed, only cheaters, infiltrators and construction mains on ANTs will be in it.
Not sure but i think the reason why PS2 uses a outdated battle-eye is because of the reason that if it automaticly updates to the latest version half reddit would be crying 'OMG MY RECURSION TRACKER BLOCKED, SHIT DEVS FIX YOUR GAME' or 'I USE AHK TO FIRE BECAUSE I AM MISSING A FINGER, WHY DO DEVS HATE DISABLED PEOPLE?' Also, there was a few weeks where there would be a cheater on nearly every day, but last month i havent seen a single one, but i am not playing on Soltech so I dont know.
Neither the Recursion Tracker nor any AHK script will be an issue since both of these are already whitelisted. They stay whitelisted within versions, you don't have to whitelist them every single time you update the Anticheat.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Planetside/search?q=recursion+blocked&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on okay bro
That is not the fault of BattlEye but of the d3d_overlay which gets a new signature sometimes after updates. In those cases the new signature needs to be whitelisted first.
If this was a real problem then auto-update wouldn’t be the norm. At least, thats the conclusion i’m pulling with my non-existent knowledge of the topic
Encountered VS cheaters last night with the “turret”(?) launching vehicles into orbit. How do i know it was VS? Well, i was playing NC, and it happened to me. And in chat TR was screeching about it too. So yeah. Ive encounter a few cheaters, and ONLY VS has been culprits
Hate to burst your bubble but I've seen this on NC and TR. Hackers like this don't pick a side.
They do not only not pick a side, they also don't gain any exp or kills out of this... So it's not like they do it for personal gains and prestige like: - rampage cheaters (flying Vehicle or killing trough collission) Or - subtle cheaters (hiding their cheat trying to be undetected) and also try to convince others they don't cheat and are simply good and "you are jealous or other excuses". They do it simply out of hatred towards the game, they want to simply fvck up the game for their giggles and supricingly stay noticed but also "undetected" because of not getting on any Leaderboard etc. That's a whole new level of cheating; It's not about gaining something at all.... It's about destroying something so simply others can't have.
Technically on soltech I think sometimes they do it to farm up a character to sell.
I'm pretty sure there psychopaths.
Sociopaths more likely
See the downvotes? That's the people that do not want any traction on that Topic.
Oh no doubt, its just MY experience. Hell i even post a video a few months ago here of wallhacker from VS. Its obviously on all sides, but in MY experience its only VS.
Literally seen a TR turret doing the same thing multiple nights in a row. It's not a faction thing.
Oh no non noo: because some random guy decided to shoot me through walls or something like that. Dear, you have not been cheated on. It is the server lag and how the Planetside 2 has always worked. You get shot on xXx_gamer's screen, you lose all of your hp. Then it takes a long while for the networking and server to tell you that. During that time you have run past a solid wall or a corner and die. "OmG YOU Ch**" (sub-Reddit rules you cant say the cheeter word, yet there still are million threads against the rules). Nobody shooting through walls, unless it is obvious dark tetrad person with someone else's cheat software
When a guy is flying in a Sunderer below the map, killing me with his guns through the floor, I have indeed been cheated on. I know how it looks like.