Seeing this come to light in the last few days has confirmed an event 8 of us experienced a short while back. A gladius came into CRU-L1 space and attacked a fully crewed Hammerhead. The Hammerhead had 4 guns on that ship constantly but it's shields never moved. The Hammerhead got popped pretty quickly, then a Carrack, then a Redeemer, then two Vanguards.... then it flew away. That was no super skilled pilot and we knew it but like it was said.... we just though "Wow, lucky for him to get the good side of the de-sync". After seeing this and other recent videos centering on hacking, we are all confident we encountered a hacking pilot.
This is indeed an interesting thing to learn, I remember quite a few patches ago(don't know how long the hacker's have been around) I was in a server sitting at Port Olisar, had just spawned my C2 and it randomly exploded along with every other ship in the server. Many of the player's and myself tried to spawn other ships and the same thing happened. Then while we were in armistice zone's like PO, we all died(And I distinctly remember hearing a silenced gun sound when that happened). A short while after we died it all repeated again, and we'll just say it was a very strange few minutes before a good majority of the people on the server tacked it up to a bad bug on that server and logged off to find a different server.
Couple years back during a Jumptown event there was a HH crewed by 1 person that was killing everyone effortlessly. Wasn't stolen, as all it's turrets were retracted. Instead it instantly blew up anyone it looked at. Me in a Superhornet dove in with 4 other craft: A Lancer MIS, Glad, Vangard Warden and another normal Lancer, all dove on this guy. The HH suddenly out accelerated us, and one by one we all blew up as it moved like a hyper cube around us.
It seems that the best time to address this cheating issue is RIGHT NOW, before game systems become too baked in and cheating countermeasures and preventatives become more difficult to design into the base code.
A couple years back during a free fly a player was basically one-shotting me no matter what ship I brought out. Finally I just quit when my 600i was killed by a gladius that I could never even see in less than 10 seconds. I laughed it off as a glitch or bug and never really considered a cheat until watching this and Avenger One's videos. Now I see it clearly. Wow.
@@mandrid They could just make every stat verified by server and easily get rid of any standard hack. And by standard I mean what we see for decades for other games - speed hacks, wall hacks, rapid fire, ammo etc. In WoT, for example, it is technically impossible to do it, because everything is verified on the server side.
@@fightingblindEAC hot garbage! They should use Blizzard's anti-cheat that scans your PC and checks your ingame gameplay, but here's the kicker when you get caught cheating your hardware is "marked" where you have to change your hardware to play again.
@@TruthIsKey369 Oh wow they ban the SSD and it gets replaced with another one for 20 dollars.If you ban make it proper,flag all components and then a ban strikes, you need a whole ne PC to play again.
If a ban wave comes from this, I hope CIG is as transparent about it as they have been with the rest of the development. I would like to know how many cheaters they have detected so we as a community can judge for ourselves if this is a major problem or not.
No it is a major problem either way. As SC becomes more popular more people will start to cheat. That's just how things work. It'll give the creator of the cheating tool more money and others will follow his way and create their own cheating tools to get a piece of the cake. Don't underestimate the money that is made with paid cheating software. IMO they need to identify this cheater ring and ban everyone of them for lifetime. The people involved in creating the tool need to be held accountable via a lawsuit. The punishment needs to be hard to discourage others from starting to cheat / create cheats
@@josephjohnson9857 So you recommend taking legal action because some people take advantage of CIG's broken game engine and BOTCHED code wow ok there bub.... More like legal action needs to be taken against CIG for lying to us for the last 12+ years and taking advantage of us through fraudulent predatory ship sales....
Great video brother, it's unfortunate but I wanted to expose what I investigated to the public so we can have this discussion as a community right now, BEFORE it gets to Tarkov level cheating.
no you are trying to save face, after getting called out for accusing another player. Then being proven there was no hack, continuing down a line to accuse them further. Man up, and own up. Dont cry wolf every time someone pops you in game. Thats a part of the game. Randomly throwing out 'he was speed hacking' is just lame.
@@lukaswatson4197 Thats all well and good, this is not that. This is a Streamer trying to save face after being called out on his bs original accusation.
@@cavemancrafting1933 He apologised to team Scorpius. That is present in A1s video as well. Where was he continuing down a line to accuse them further when he apologised? There is no saving face here he was (along with other RU-vidrs) highlighting the issue.
@@lukaswatson4197 Now we are going to see shit tons of false reports claiming people are cheating regardless if they are or not, already happens enough as it is.
Thanks for sharing what I went through last year. It was rough. I had a discord of hundreds of people targeting me on the daily, and I had to have one of my moderators take very drastic methods to get rid of that discord, just so I could somewhat enjoy one of my favorite games again. Unfortunately, Tarkov is now just in general in such a bad state, it's like that for everyone now. We can't let that happen to Star Citizen.
Sometimes actual admins spectating can be as effective or even more effective than the anti-cheat programs. Cheats can bypass a program but if their ship is performing beyond its capabilities an admin would notice that.
@@acli9704 cheats don't care about overclock ships. They want an unfair advantage that other people don't have. Also when all those new weapons and quantum jump is added to the game, I promise you the cheats will have hacked it in less than a week. Combating cheats is a forever struggle. Game updates, cheat update. Why? Because selling cheats is a million dollar industry. It's not just a nerd making a cheat for his friend. It's a business.
Cheats can't bypass the server though. The issue here seems to be that the servers don't validate what the clients are sending. The only way to make sure these types of cheats can't happen is to make the server have the last word (server authoritative rather than client authoritative). Of course, that increases both the load on the sever as well as the latency, and potentially "desync" for the players since the server now needs to "confirm" every action, but I can't really think of any other system that can't be bypassed if the goal is to prevent cheating outright. That said, there is another option and that is to monitor what is happening on the servers, and then take action based on any anomalies found. In other words, rather than trying to prevent cheating the focus would on detection. This would require a non-trivial monitoring system (requiring non-trivial amounts of maintenance), but it could probably function separate from the game servers (since it doesn't need live data to prevent cheating, it "only" needs to reliably detect it after the fact), thus avoiding impact on game performance. I imagine this could work to make cheating less prevalent, assuming CIG take swift and decisive action whenever cheaters are detected.
@@MareLooke I wonder if it would be possible to have other clients checking and reporting on each other within a certain distance. For example; lets say I'm flying along and my client sees someone fly up at well above the speed cap, pull a 30G turn, take 0 damage when being hit, and/or deal far more damage than should be possible. My client(and any others within render distance) could detect that as suspect, flag the offending client, and then the server could verify. So base detection would be client side for everyone within render distance of the cheater, and the server only has to run checks if a client is flagged by another. This would avoid making the server constantly monitor hundreds of clients, while still being difficult to circumvent and much faster than a player filing a report and waiting for a manual review. Client side cheat detection could be tweaked as needed to avoid/reduce false positives, as well. So the clients share the bulk of the work by monitoring and reporting on each other, but the server still gets the last word. Maybe. Possibly. I'm not a programmer, and this idea could be full of holes and entirely impractical lol
@@MintyGT it could work, but it would be even harder than the other options since that would require custom technology, whereas if you do it based on server side monitoring (meaning: by parsing the server logs), then tech to wade through vast amounts of logs and look for patterns exists, and is very mature though I'm not sure if it's been used for this particular purpose before. Of course, that means the logs need to contain the relevant data, and that someone defines the patterns to look for.
This is a pretty common thing in online games, and it's just a matter of cat and mouse with the cheat tools and the cheat detection. It would be good to have in-game reporting tools, not just for bugs, but for cheat reports too, as then they could capture data at that time.
Pointing out hacking is extremely important if the game is still under development. It's like trying to build a foundation on top of a sinkhole. If you don't know it's there, fixing the problem after you have already built the house becomes more difficult.
Agree. Though I would prefer if people would make a post on the forums when they find an attack vector. Wouldn't even expect them to do it for free. I'd write something like: "Hey, I found a weak spot that can be abused. I'd appreciate compensation for the work in exchange for details."
Damn... I just started playing, after watching You (Morphologis) for a few years. Your architectural reviews of ships are one of my favorite things to watch out of all YT videos. It's a shame to see this... Not surprising, but a shame because it reminds me of all the greatest games I've ever played and how much of it is ruined by people who aren't even trying to enjoy the work of the developers.. I hate it when hackers get involved in games. It's no longer a game. I hope this is taken seriously.
Yeah, I agree. I can ignore a griefer. I cant ignore some jerk instakilling me over and over because they suck and want to make everyone's lives harder. Those people who are found hacking should have their IP address banned from access to the game permanently.
@@I_SPECT3R_I I’m not a hacker and I said it. Did you not know about the morphologist controversy where he was complaining about griefing at Jumptown? come on man it is a huge problem in the game. Most people do not full time engage in PVP combat loops in the game, so therefore the majority of players that do not are affected by Griefers which statistically makes it a worse and greater problem
CIG could also be working on solving that issue too, using a honeypot trap. It worked well for Valve not too long ago for DOTA2 players. It's not that reporting them will stop them, it's the exploiter keeps using the exploit that shows who is actually cheating.
So what? They just buy a cheap starter on the grey market or use hacked accounts of legit players who then get banned, same happened in Tarkov & other games.
This video really touched on the present and potential future issues created by this problem. Very, very well articulated. Thank you for this! Stay Frosty!
I recommend everyone sets up a macro to enable r_displayinfo 2 (or just keep it on all the time, I understand why streamers especially might not want to) so that when they capture weirdness they also capture the session-id and server timestamp. I keep r_displayinfo 2 always enabled (only turn it off for screenshots) and 20min instant replay buffer in NVidia overlay, not because I expect to see people cheating with hacks (or other ToS violations) but for reporting bugs.
That UI is an open source framework. I forget the name of it, but I've seen it thousands of times used in backend dev tools. Edit: It's ImGUI The tool isn't polished. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's just CheatEngine packed with an ImGUI interface.
Pretending this does not exist is the worst thing CIG can do. It will come out eventually and I am pretty sure CIG knows about this already. High level hacking can and will, if left unchecked, ruin the whole project. So it needs to be pointed out and handled accordingly.
I think I saw this happen during the first jump town event ( of course I could have been a bug which I thought it was) but every one there had an agreement to watch each others backs and get the boxes, when I was on my way out EVERYONES ships ( about 5 of them including a Carrack) all exploded within less than a second from each other and our ships were landed a pretty decent distance apart. It was always strange how the carrack got killed almost instantly I always thought it was a bug.
That "hack" software is actually tapping into CIG admin development tools. You know, the kind developers use to teleport around the map, call up ships and give their pistols god mode to test shields and armor. Those same tools can be used (if hijacked) for nefarious purposes by hackers.
you'd think, with the server being the authoritative final instance, that would not be possible. I also can't see, CIG 'forgetting' that only 'authorized at login by server/user credentials'-peeps would be able to do this. To top it off, I think server sided scripts checking for 'illogical events' (i.e. uber-speeds) would reveal quickly, who's hacking the game-engine.
This better get the attention of everyone at CIG and hopefully they publicly come out and give a plan on how they are going to address this type of bs.
Hopefully they dont and just keep developing the game as they are, which they have said includes an in-house anti-cheat. Avengers video is the ancient aliens equivalent of hackers exposed videos. The content is from a couple of years ago before EAC when you could just run cheat engine in SC. Even with EAC, anyone with a search engine can figure out how to get around it. What the community is doing over this is like stockpiling nukes just incase aliens turn out to be real. Instead of protecting ourselves we end up nuking ourselves by blowing a situation out of proportion.
You made the right call Morph...cheaters are cheaters and their exposure benefits us all as a community. It seems that things only get addressed if covered by content creators such as yourself. I for one say Thank You for bringing this to light.
I haven't experienced anything like that yet, but this is very important. Awareness of an issue is the first step in fighting the issue. It is a shame that there are people who feel they are incompetent enough that they need to cheat. I hope, as I've seen several others do, that CIG will have anti-cheat software that will catch this, and something is done to block the cheaters from this amazing experience.
I hoping that CIG are investigating this and making their program based on their findings and I doubt anything will happen in action anytime soon but if theyre doing what I am hoping all that info will be coming to good use when they go alpha and release.
Reminds me of a very weird death I had a few months ago. I disconnected from the server as one does, but when I reconnected there was about 2 seconds before I was instantly blown up by some random pilot. They weren't on my radar and I was in a Khartu Al so I really should have at least seen them. It's possible the desync was so impressive that this person strafed me while I loaded in, and the damage registered later, but it was VERY weird feeling.
If your game crashed, your player persists ingame just where it was and was doing, let's say you were flying at x speed and your game ctd, you keep existing ingame for some time until it disconnects you, so you get killed or you crash into something. This is done for crash recovery, the idea is that if your game blew up, you come in again and end up exactly where you were, this works almost all the time if you are in a ship, but like 10% if you are on foot.
I appreciate the heads up. I found it personally incredibly hard to believe based on an idea of just how and why someone would cheat at a space simulator but I appreciate the irrefutable proof. Great video, keep up the amazing content please!
What sucks is how much hackers like this bog down development because they can either be ignored which will annoy the player base or the dev team will have to be constantly engaged working to fix these idiots problems
Well, it's going to be needed eventually so might as well get some experience fighting it. Yeah, it sucks they'll have to waste time and effort on this nonsense.
Here is the thing for the people who think we shouldn't talk about it because it can make things worse where others are trying it. The same thing has been said about physical locks. The locking lawyer brought this up where he gets told by lock companies to not bring up how virtually all locks on the market are actually easy to break. The problem is, the locking companies use this to not actually improve the physical device. They use security theater and marketing a lock as unbreakable when someone can break it in seconds. He mentions it in the video that CIG could simply not take it serious. Just like the lock companies do now. We don't want this.
I’m really glad you brought up EFT (which I only got into because of your video on it) The hacking in that game has gotten so bad that I’ve completely stopped playing, and won’t go back unless the situation improves.
and this is why hackers need to be held legally liable for monetary damages. We get some hackers going homeless for being asswads, hacking will be dramatically cut back.
@@wontrememberneway Exactly. Hacking should be made illegal and actually forced by law. If hackers start seeing other hackers lifes being ruined they WILL think twice is it worth it.
refusing to acknowledge a problem is the absolutely best way to allow it to fester. shine the sunlight on this! CIG has enough data to know if a player manages to exceed GSAFE limited by a significant amount, teleports, or has a fire rate significantly outside what has been designed. The fact that they don't just detect these things is unbelievable because the game is centralized, the ability to prevent these kinds of things is just unacceptable.
This really surprises me.... I thought speed and fire rate were determined on the server. If a game client tells the server it's firing at 100. Shot per second that would be very easy to detect as a cheater. Same for all other out-of-envelope behaviour.
Doesn't matter what game it is, Some people genuinely are so bad at games even though they spend their lives sat on the pc. They are so insecure about it that cheating is the only sense of fulfillment they feel.
People are cheating like crazy and gaslighting the community. The problem is that most people can’t identify what is happening because a lot of players are casual
I’ve been blown up mining by unseen on radar craft, usually with one burst. I’ve had pvp enemies disappear from view (vanished) to only end up on my 6 a few seconds later. The foe reappeared on radar only when it fired. I assumed desync. Was I wrong?
I think when you engage in battles the specs of the battle should be recorded in a log. Something that tells you which weapons they used and average rate of fire, etc. That way if you see something that isn't possible you now have proof that it happened.
If they don't make the game hack-proof they won't have a game. This is another reason they should rethink their new scm/qt model, which appears to give all the advantages to pirates, who are also the very ones who use hacks.
Honestly, if people see your video and decide to hack, thats great. If they're going to be ruining people's experience better that they start while the game is still regularly being wiped, and get themselves banned before full release (here's hoping they've got a fleet of really expensive ships on their account to lose).
Thank you for the additional coverage of this issue. Very well articulated. I truly hope the hacks are eliminated soon so our beloved Star Citizen doesn't suffer the same fate as so many other great games.
This is the issue I have with "death of a spaceman" combined with PVP. If the hacks/hackers aren't blocked, the game will not be fun forcing many backers to ask, "is the game worth the hassle of dealing with these reprobates?"
Player Reporting: Hi CIG, I need to report a hacker. CIG: Money? Player Reporting: What?.. No, I need to report hacking. CIG: Money! Player Reporting: I need to report hacking! CIG: Money please?!!
Played a lot of tarkov, a big reason why stopped was because of hackers. Not that hackers are to blame for every death, but you couldn't be sure that if wasn't hackers. You got popped randomly? Maybe someone snipes you with a well placed shot. Maybe someone snuck up on you. Or maybe they were just sad enough to pay for hacks. The fact you couldn't be sure took away a lot of the fun of it. Love the thumbnail by the way 10/10
Thank you for posting, I will pay attention to this. I avoid PvP so I have had few enough encounters, but when I do I generally lose quickly because, well, I am no good at it. The only thing I have experienced two or three times is my ship spontaneously exploding.
I think more awareness is good, and in the case of reports, it gives the devs a chance to look at a suspect situation and identify if it was a hack that deeds fixing, or a bug which also needs fixing, and then can forward information to the correct team to address the issue.
Might’ve been why a bounty I was doing was clearly able to disengage my targeting system on them. Whenever I would press T to select them, they would just be able to remove that and ultimately that got me killed.
I've seen some weird stuff before like being one shotted by a titan while in a hammerhead but I believe that was an actual known bug / issue. Apart from that I've been accused of hacking when desync was to blame which can be very infuriating for whoever is on the receiving end so I understand where it comes from.
I've encountered people from time to time who may very well have been hacking. At the time I chalked it up to just exploiting various desync and bug issues, but I always harbored the suspicion that they were surprisingly *clean* exploits. Often exploiting bugs is itself quite a buggy process, so it's always a little suspicious when someone can maintain a bugged state easily without it impairing any other part of their gameplay experience. Generally I don't tend to pay it too much attention until it starts getting really dramatic, like a single guy in an Arrow locking down an entire server during XT because he couldn't be flagged red for hostility or CS and was able to put out some truly insane damage spikes, or a single fighter soloing a fleet at JT for 20 minutes without ever getting hit. I've encountered super skilled players, and I've encountered plenty of bugs, but sometimes things are just too ridiculous and clean.
I don't do a lot of PVP myself, but have had one suspicious experience myself. Was out in my connie (yes, not the best for PVP but its what I had) running a quick player bounty for the certificate. Found him in an A2. Started shooting, his shields never moved, which is surprising considering the firepower of a turreted connie. After maybe 10-15 seconds he moves, and just disappeared across the system. Thought at the time it was just some crazy de-sync, but not so sure anymore.
Been a backer for nearly 10 years. Was flying with a buddy touring the system showing him all the ports. When going to Grim Hex I opted to fly in a Redeemer in case anybody got squirrely. We make it in front of the hangar doors and I joke 'I'm amazed we haven't been blown up by an Eclipse' and an Eclipse literally appears in one of the hangars, then vanishes and a second after we hear the missile warning we explode
Lots of people in the world have mental disorders. Trolls in general get a dopamine boost from it. They don't know what pride is and have the kind of personality you wouldn't want to share a beer with.
I thought your question about seeing clear instances of hacking was interesting. The answer is no however when you're just cruisin' and suddenly explode, i'm curious if they can spoof the law system and radars, how can we differentiate being hit by a tali vs some dark matter space pebble/bug vs some of this cheating?
Things like this is why I prefer playing on private servers with a group of people I either know or can at least trust. The idea of online servers is great, but it also brings so many issues that can ruin the game for players.
Avengerone's video was SUPER melodramatic, but this topic overall was interesting to learn about. I had considered that there might be hackers in SC but didn't really have many details aside from that.
This is not high priority for 2 reasons. 1 - The game is in alpha and is not finished, In game Dev A game will only get the anti cheats pass after Beta. 2 - In resource time, The game would take double the time to finish if the would need to anti cheat every patch. CIG will get to this after beta and now at this point in time it does not mater if someone cheats because we get wiped every other patch.
Well, I once encountered a pirate gladius near grimhex, I was going at top speed with a vanguard sentinel and used decoupled mode to look behind. The dude was lasering me while just graviting around my ship. I don't know if he was awfully good or cheating. Never knew, The server gave me a salvatory 30k mid fight.
I agree with you on this, hacking is an extremely prevalent problem in certain games. Not just in SC, but also games like EvE Online and Elite: Dangerous. EvE Online and Elite Dangerous are notorious for being communities where hacking and ganking are a near-constant threat. And the publishers refuse to do anything about them. The fact that CIG is on the ball with this is a point in their favor and against communities like ED and EvE.
Yeah A1 saved us all. Lol, just like he saved us from the scorpius brothers. We blew him up with a railgun over JT a bit ago. Guess that rail round hacked into his ships frame.
I was online the other night, and saw chat about a cheater... I wish I could remember the name. He announced "Everus Harbour is mine. 150k if you want to enter or leave, or you will be destroyed." We all thought he was full of it, then he started one-shotting anything that went after him. Did this for HOURS. I've never seen the appeal, but then again, bullies gonna bully.
I think many of us, myself included, just didn't consider there would be a cheating community for this game... Particularly at this point in development. I think it needs to be discussed. It's an important topic that will greatly impact the long term health of the game.
I've ran into hackers twice. One was someone teleporting to any place they wanted. The other was in a PTU build where someone was giving people CS-5's because they were able to trick the server into thinking we had committed HUNDREDS of crimes. You find out if you've been targeted because you will be doing nothing and all the sudden your feed get swarms with "crime reported" messages. After that, the person would kill you in some way so you'd be forced into prison. I stayed on the server and stayed inside a building on Orison to see if the hacker would eventually get to me. And yes, suddenly, I got a CS-5 with a huge feed of trespassing crimes. I kept hearing explosions outside the building and didn't realize that the hacker was now trying to kill me but couldn't. I wasn't moving, wasn't near a ship, and wasn't near an object they could speed hack and kill me through physics. The SC devs did know about this hacker though. The whole time this was happening. A SC dev in chat was asking around if they saw a specific person doing it. I stayed and kept giving the dev info on what was happening. After an hour of watching a never ending feed of "trespassing" warnings and a chat full of a confusion why they got a CS and died -- I got off with a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
I have a serious question about all of this, How are we supposed to report a hacker if we don’t know who killed us? I have heard that one hack that is used very often is some sort of crimestat immunity hack which makes it so that if they kill you, you can’t press charges (and through that you don’t know who killed you)
I am just going to say this as a backer who has spent thousands of dollars on this game so far and has big plans for an org and role play. CIG better get all hands , all devs on deck and snuff out these cheaters quickly and consistently because if I have to deal with some script kitties cheats and a toxic attitude I will delete the game and request refund of all of my money. Some of us have spent multiple thousands of dollars , the 890 jump is over 1000 bucks as it is … this is completely unacceptable. Next hackers will steal your ships. They better FIX it
At least a year ago, maybe during 3.14, I experienced a hack while playing late evening on Port Olisar along with a few other people in Crusader space. I remember hearing the station guns going crazy (I was still in my hab) and then all of a sudden I got a CS and multiple over head messages of assault. I got transported to Prison and when I looked at my Journal, I saw almost a full page of assault. Chat was saying the same thing that night. This was also before I knew how to take proper screenshots and recordings so I couldn't even submit an IC or forum post.
I think it's also important to note there are some major bugs that are not noted in any notes by CIG or anyone. EX: Invisible players, (you have seen/heard the ASOP terminals being used with no one there? That's what I'm talking about) this also can include ships becoming invisible. I saw a video about it where s group tested it and tried to find a cause. They related it to a tech CIG implemented a long long time ago that allows the server to only load stuff near you when it needs to, like most games do. But for some reason things have been not working very well recently, and players, ships, and even astroids have been invisible. SO just FYI, sometimes randomly blowing up, is a legit bug. Especially in astroid belts and things like that. And sometimes you could tell someone is shooting at you but you can't see them, doesn't always mean someone is cheating.
I mean, ignoring the issue until release, or the code is more set in stone, might be ok if this was a normal game, but that doesn't work for a game that's going to be in this state for another decade. We can wait until summer to deal with some hackers, but not until summer of 2032.
Glad you're picking up on the topic. It's an important one. Hope you don't mind a little constructive criticism: please be accurate when referencing your sources. They might not mind, and it's possibly just a pet peeve of mine, but hearing "a couple of guys and Avenger One," or incorrectly naming 11's Hangar against his reference footage, doesn't match up with your usual production quality. The thought that crossed my mind when I heard the "couple of guys" seemed to downplay the enormous amount of reporting those guys did before Avenger One got involved.
Since you just uploaded this I’m hoping you see this, Do you have a playlist for the music you use in your videos? Especially for the architect reviews videos like the Corsair one.
I think it's good to catch these things early and develop ways to detect/prevent it. We're still early enough in development that it's arguably easier to attempt to reverse engineer these and find their method of attack, patch, and note for the future. In addition to that though, I believe that we need an in-game reporting system - maybe even before these sort of hacking tools are addressed.
You underestimate how easy it is to make a cheat tool. I've made more than my share of them for my own personal wants and needs, and I hardly even have coding knowledge. (Though, don't take that to say I cheat in live games with other people; I simply do it in single player games because I enjoy picking apart games and playing with their underlying code, seeing whats possible, whats meant to be unseen, what can be done with some tweeks... But the knowledge to do that in online games isn't far removed from this point.) Today everything is easy to make, easy to share, and easy to build from already existing code bases (mostly what I do), that and with almost every single game on the market sharing one of a handful of engines as a baseline makes things easier for hackers; SC being (in essence) its own fork of CryEngine, anyone with enough know how of it and/or how to build tools for it, could easily crap out a tool in a matter of hours. Also, EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) is 100% verifiable dogshit at actually stopping the use of cheat tools, script hooks, or any kind of various injections. (Think of EAC like a wire fence, where the wires are about a mile apart, yeah it's there, but it's really not stopping anything but the most braindead "hackers" - "hackers" in this case, being the kind of idiots that are dumb enough to buy cheats; because those are the people that will flip on the tool and go wild for all of about two minuets before getting banned; they really don't know how to cheat, and that's why they're stupid enough to pay for it.) Though, you're not wrong, its here to stay; hackers will always be a thing in online games and there's virtually no anti-cheat on the market that can actually do as good of a job as active admins; the only real choice for anti-cheats are to basically sign away all privacy and have root level anti-cheats that are little more than malware running on your system at all times, and I detest those kinds of Anti-cheats. Why? because while they're good at stopping cheaters in game, they're also an open door for anyone with the knowledge of those anti-cheat systems to access your machine in multi-system attacks if they ever gain access to it though a vulnerability; it's untenable to ask players to run malware with backdoors to their root just to stop hackers in a game... because then the risk of hackers is beyond just the game, it's now in your persoanl system, your files, data, identity... The only solid solution is a combination of tools like EAC (bleh), active and knowledgable admins in game, and players that make good-faith reports with as much verifiable data to submit as possible. So, best advice, if you think someone is cheating; report it, becase that's about as much as you can do.
I encountered a cheater more than a year ago when despite me having full shields the person in an Arrow was able to disable my ship completely with distortion repeaters with few shots. 3-4 ships (Including large ships) exploded in that fight and we all were just shocked at how an arrow can kill all fighters as well as large ships even with full shields. No one believed us at that time when we said that that is cheating. Everyone said that it could be an exploit.
In 2022, I was standing in the lobby of one of the Lagrange stations. Suddenly I got crimestat 5 for armistice violations. I was confused for a moment. Then chat lit up. Everyone was getting crimestat 5 for Armistice violations no matter where they were. One guy was in quantum travel passing the star, one guy was mining in a cave. It didn’t matter where they were. Over 40 people got instant crimestat 5.
Anyone saying this isn't a big issue is a hacker or a scumbag, I fled GTA back in 2016 and fell in love with the SC community, with SC being such a high capital investment one begins to wonder if alot of these "it's not a big issue" people didn't grab some paid cheats along with their expensive game glass addons or voice attack and are just fiercely protecting their downloaded skills.
I've got nothing against bringing these Sh*t bags to light and honestly I think we should. What I'm worried about is the pettiness of those playing the game. Exhibit A; how fast the community attacked A1 after his fire side chat video. My fear is that now that this is being brought to the forefront that there those in the community and the hacking ring that are going to start finger pointing and playing the victim card like children and politicians do towards the players who aren't cheating. I've seen this happen with many games in the past from WoW to War Thunder/WoWS (which I've been personally accused cause I know how to WASD) to EVE Online. People love to be crybullies if they think it will get them advantage. Dont believe me, just turn on the news or read a news paper.
Over the years I have seen many, many exploits in Star Citizen. These are things a player can do in the game that break the intended actions/balance of the game. A benign example in the current PTU is taking a gun off of a weapon rack in an armistice zone will allow you to walk around with it out (you still cannot shoot it though). These, while annoying, are part of playing a game in active development and are usually dealt with eventually with new patches. Hacks are actively modifying or adding additional software to gain advantages that the developers never intended. Both are frustrating for the players but I think it is an important distinction and should carry different penalties.
i agree with your point. i am not a player as i can’t put money into something i don’t consider a full game. that being said, if i did, this would be one of the issues i would have to accept when volunteering to play a pre-alpha project. i would consider these as QA rather than hackers for exploiting things that need to be patched.
God i hope this game doesn't end up like GTA or RD2O which are full of hackers that Rockstar doesn't seem to care about. Hackers really burn me up, especially when you have good people spending 💰 real world money to fund this game. 😡
I've only experienced one obvious hacker, it was at a xenothreat event and was flying around disabiling all player ships with on shot of distortion then would loop around and shoot everyone down. After he killed all the player he finished up the xenothreat mission in like 30 seconds. Was bragging how good he was in chat the whole time. Cheaters always have chat open.
This goes to show that EAC isn't actually worth that much. I know that it's being used in passive mode right now because otherwise it would break Linux backers, but even in passive mode CIG should be getting anti-cheat telemetry from these compromised game clients. So either CIG isn't getting the telemetry they need from EAC or they don't trust it enough to drop the ban hammer. In either case, why use it?
Last Xenothreat I encountered a redeemer that was untouchable to three arrows and a sentinel. No matter what we could not keep up, it would speed away and return. Did almost no damage but received no damage. I thought it was desync until the gunner started boasting about how their redeemer had ultra boost. Took screenshots and reported it to CIG, they were banned. I guess CIG found something then.
This happened to me today by Yela doing my MRT certification. I was approaching my target, was about 14k away and just suddenly exploded. Definitely did not hit an asteroid. We need accessible logging as to who attacked you to assist with this.
