*Important note:
This thread is about spreading awareness of the numerous flaws in UWE's poor anti cheat system in order to motivate UWE recognition of it as an underplayed issue. This thread is NOT about accusing players, it is NOT about providing links to actual hacks or how to hack, nor is it about the current incidence of hacking. Suspecting a hacker is one thing, providing solid evidence and preventing hacks is another.
========
I think its due time to point out the many holes in UWE's system of anti cheat and why i believe fixing them should not be the very low priority that it currently is. There is currently a substantial absence of properly functioning tools available to ensure fairplay, and this isn't exactly new information for many either. Words of assurance tend to mean nothing if issues continue to remain unaddressed for as long as they have been. I believe it is important to have solid anti-cheat foundations in place to support the integrity and growth of the community at large, and it is asking far too much of tournament organizers and server operators to either come up with their own comprehensive anti-cheat systems or accept that cheating is going to occur with nothing they can do about it.
Definitions
In order to stem any kind of useless back and forth discussion about what is or isn't hacking or cheating, here are your definitions.
Hacking
Any third party modification to vanilla ns2 that is designed to give one player an advantage over another player who is not running that same modification. This includes workshop mods
Cheating
Use of any hack that is not within the contextual ruleset of play
The goal is not necessarily to combat hacking, but to combat cheating, although more often than not the two are the same thing.
Types of hacking
a) an injection. e.g. wallhack or aimbot
b) macros and scripts. e.g. pistol script
c) texture modifications. e.g. pink skulks
d) Lag hacks
Types of anti cheat
a) demo system
b) 1st person spec
c) consistency checking
d) Random screenshots (this one is probably best implemented as a community mod).
Simple table asking whether an anti-cheat system can provide evidence or prevent use of a hack, although sometimes with a large error margin. 'Ideally' indicates a severe shortcoming in NS2's implementation. Table does not address feasibility issues.
![w4rMlm7.jpg]()
Why currently implemented anti-cheat is ineffective
a) Demo system
![Y8OFQhW.jpg]()
NS2's demo system has many limitations, and although it is effective at providing evidence, it's use as an anti-cheat tool is unreasonably prohibitive due to how buggy and time consuming it is.
1. Playback speed depends on the fps of the watcher relative to the original recorder. For perfect 1:1 time sync, the demo watcher must somehow match his/her fps to the fps of the recording player perfectly. Any fps variation causes game speed in the demo to play back slower or faster than normal. Besides the problem of simple accessibility, what this means is enforcement of pistol scripts through observation of pistol timing is unfeasible.
2. A bunch of ease of use issues that make demo recording frustrating enough to warrant even thinking about whether ensuring fairplay is worth the frustration.
- No skip, rewind, forward, or fast-forward. 2 hour long demos, with alleged incidents occuring 1 hour in literally mean you have to leave the demo playing for about an one hour. And if you miss it while afking, tough luck. Even if an event you need to watch is very early on in the game, you have to sit through the loading screen. Also, if the server has opted to use more extensive consistency checks, you will still have to wait through the 5 minutes of 'waiting for server...'. See consistency checking 1.
- Alt-tabbing out of game will cause demo recording to stop, and the only way to start recording again is to do so before joining a server. *edit* will need to confirm this. Admittedly second hand information.
b) 1st person spec
![2qsono0.jpg]()
NS2's first person spec is just barely functional enough to allow the gathering of evidence via demo recording or fraps
1. It is most usually unrepresentative of what the player is actually seeing on his screen or performing. So while it is possible to provide evidence of wallhack, aimbot, pistol scripts and lag hacks, there is a significant error margin which has to be manually corrected.
- Sounds play twice, which may give false positives for pistol scripts.
- Animations and mouse movements are much too frequently out of sync with actual player actions and sometimes skip or repeat. This can make it hard to differentiate between natural lag and lag hacks.
- Player model positions are not accurate, which makes it very hard to detect smart wallhacking as the timings are off.
- ALL minimap dots are visible regardless of whether they are actually in LOS or visible, also causing problems in detecting wallhacking.
c) Consistency checks
![NMLob0b.jpg]()
ns2 consistency checks are quite frankly a joke. They are easily bypassed, and incur huge loading times.
1. Incurs huge server loading/compilation time. Literally 3-5 minutes depending on how many additional checks you add to consistencycheck.json, which any sane server owner tends to do upon seeing how insufficient and lax the default checks are. The interesting part is that it never used to get stuck on 'waiting for server' for so long and worked perfectly fine for what it was trying to do. It's bordering on ridiculous that players who wish to ensure the bare minimum integrity of play have to suffer such long loading times.
2. They are easily bypassed. I am trying to refrain from detailing how to perform any potential cheating, but it seems impossible to do so without describing the flaw here. Suffice to say, the server instance does not have certain files (quite alot actually), which thus cannot be checked against the client to ensure that those files have not been modified in any way. Pretty big oversight if you ask me.
This is most likely not a comprehensive list of issues, with many other things i've missed.
This thread is about spreading awareness of the numerous flaws in UWE's poor anti cheat system in order to motivate UWE recognition of it as an underplayed issue. This thread is NOT about accusing players, it is NOT about providing links to actual hacks or how to hack, nor is it about the current incidence of hacking. Suspecting a hacker is one thing, providing solid evidence and preventing hacks is another.
========
I think its due time to point out the many holes in UWE's system of anti cheat and why i believe fixing them should not be the very low priority that it currently is. There is currently a substantial absence of properly functioning tools available to ensure fairplay, and this isn't exactly new information for many either. Words of assurance tend to mean nothing if issues continue to remain unaddressed for as long as they have been. I believe it is important to have solid anti-cheat foundations in place to support the integrity and growth of the community at large, and it is asking far too much of tournament organizers and server operators to either come up with their own comprehensive anti-cheat systems or accept that cheating is going to occur with nothing they can do about it.
Definitions
In order to stem any kind of useless back and forth discussion about what is or isn't hacking or cheating, here are your definitions.
Hacking
Any third party modification to vanilla ns2 that is designed to give one player an advantage over another player who is not running that same modification. This includes workshop mods
Cheating
Use of any hack that is not within the contextual ruleset of play
The goal is not necessarily to combat hacking, but to combat cheating, although more often than not the two are the same thing.
Types of hacking
a) an injection. e.g. wallhack or aimbot
b) macros and scripts. e.g. pistol script
c) texture modifications. e.g. pink skulks
d) Lag hacks
Types of anti cheat
a) demo system
b) 1st person spec
c) consistency checking
d) Random screenshots (this one is probably best implemented as a community mod).
Simple table asking whether an anti-cheat system can provide evidence or prevent use of a hack, although sometimes with a large error margin. 'Ideally' indicates a severe shortcoming in NS2's implementation. Table does not address feasibility issues.
Why currently implemented anti-cheat is ineffective
a) Demo system
NS2's demo system has many limitations, and although it is effective at providing evidence, it's use as an anti-cheat tool is unreasonably prohibitive due to how buggy and time consuming it is.
1. Playback speed depends on the fps of the watcher relative to the original recorder. For perfect 1:1 time sync, the demo watcher must somehow match his/her fps to the fps of the recording player perfectly. Any fps variation causes game speed in the demo to play back slower or faster than normal. Besides the problem of simple accessibility, what this means is enforcement of pistol scripts through observation of pistol timing is unfeasible.
2. A bunch of ease of use issues that make demo recording frustrating enough to warrant even thinking about whether ensuring fairplay is worth the frustration.
- No skip, rewind, forward, or fast-forward. 2 hour long demos, with alleged incidents occuring 1 hour in literally mean you have to leave the demo playing for about an one hour. And if you miss it while afking, tough luck. Even if an event you need to watch is very early on in the game, you have to sit through the loading screen. Also, if the server has opted to use more extensive consistency checks, you will still have to wait through the 5 minutes of 'waiting for server...'. See consistency checking 1.
- Alt-tabbing out of game will cause demo recording to stop, and the only way to start recording again is to do so before joining a server. *edit* will need to confirm this. Admittedly second hand information.
b) 1st person spec
NS2's first person spec is just barely functional enough to allow the gathering of evidence via demo recording or fraps
1. It is most usually unrepresentative of what the player is actually seeing on his screen or performing. So while it is possible to provide evidence of wallhack, aimbot, pistol scripts and lag hacks, there is a significant error margin which has to be manually corrected.
- Sounds play twice, which may give false positives for pistol scripts.
- Animations and mouse movements are much too frequently out of sync with actual player actions and sometimes skip or repeat. This can make it hard to differentiate between natural lag and lag hacks.
- Player model positions are not accurate, which makes it very hard to detect smart wallhacking as the timings are off.
- ALL minimap dots are visible regardless of whether they are actually in LOS or visible, also causing problems in detecting wallhacking.
c) Consistency checks
ns2 consistency checks are quite frankly a joke. They are easily bypassed, and incur huge loading times.
1. Incurs huge server loading/compilation time. Literally 3-5 minutes depending on how many additional checks you add to consistencycheck.json, which any sane server owner tends to do upon seeing how insufficient and lax the default checks are. The interesting part is that it never used to get stuck on 'waiting for server' for so long and worked perfectly fine for what it was trying to do. It's bordering on ridiculous that players who wish to ensure the bare minimum integrity of play have to suffer such long loading times.
2. They are easily bypassed. I am trying to refrain from detailing how to perform any potential cheating, but it seems impossible to do so without describing the flaw here. Suffice to say, the server instance does not have certain files (quite alot actually), which thus cannot be checked against the client to ensure that those files have not been modified in any way. Pretty big oversight if you ask me.
This is most likely not a comprehensive list of issues, with many other things i've missed.