Rust Dev Unveils Anti-Cheating Software, Bans 4,600 Players

[waj9876]

Yeah, I can easily see how this could go wrong. And that part about how they "don't want to hear about it" in regards to appeals, combined with the rather draconian reputation their forums have...This could go bad very, very fast.

Oh well, if it does happen, it'll hurt them much more than they could hurt the players. Their game's reputation would be ruined, and I'm pretty sure Steam doesn't allow devs to ban people with no appeals process. I could be wrong and thinking about a different company though.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Spoiler

cheating is not the same thing as glitching

when you use a third party program to gain and advantage over other player, you are cheating scum, if you use a glitch to get an advantage, well you are still scum, but significantly less so, the dev aims to counter cheaters with this solution, not glitchers


i really hate how people keeps saying "on early access you are paying to be a beta tester", dont be, buy the game on early access (or not because, as you know, its all optional) but dont play it until release, you will still have the game, and you will have probably bought it at a discount, there, you wont be testing the game, you will not get to play it before most people and contribute to its development

Easy difference between cheating and bug-hunting: Bug-hunting you test different aspects, find a bug, repeat the process to see if its repeatable, log your findings and report it.
Cheating is using any advantage, whether its 3rd party programs or bug-exploits, to gain an advantage over other players or circumvent game mechanics. Such as getting stuck inside a rock that allows you to shoot out but protects you from incoming bullets, and racking up kills by exploiting it rather than reporting that issue along with the mechanics/process used to make it happen. Exploiting a broken resource or other mechanic to gather more materials than intended by the game and doing that over and over to get more and gain from it = cheating.
Bug-exploiting is NOT testing the game, its cheating.

These are valid points, however the issue I'm most concerned with is that these are permanent bans that are administered by software that we, the greater gaming community, are unfamiliar with.

So lets say the bot looks for people using geometry exploits in order to get kills, like in that rock example. Being as this is early access there will be many clipping bugs and if you just happen to be messing around and get stuck in geometry for a little too long... Bam! Perma-ban. And there's nothing you can do because the devs don't want to hear a word about it.

You see, the issue here isn't what constitutes "cheating" but rather that these bans are permanent and will, probably, leave you with a hunk of software on your hdd just taking up space. A hunk of software that you supported financially before it was even complete.

If they change this policy to being a temp ban, or being only allowed to play on servers that cheaters are consigned to for a certain time, then I will have no problem with this. But so long as this idea of unquestionable perma-bans stays in effect then I can't see how we can honestly share our good will with the devs.

Finally this

"If you get kicked from the official servers with the message that you've been banned then you have been caught," he said. "You know what you have done. You won't get unbanned. We know it was your 9 year old cousin. We know your computer got hijacked. We know that the CIA is getting you banned from all your games on Steam so you will join them in the hunt for aliens."

Sounds like the words of a thirteen year old who was made forum mod through some accident, as he dishes out his myopic understanding of justice through his binary understanding of fairness. It strikes me as being very unprofessional, and in my eyes, as a customer, reflects poorly on their business.

Spoiler

wait, what kind of software is this that they employed, and how can we trust it to be infallible? With a perma-ban on the cards I would hate to have weird latency spikes flag me as a cheater (internet in South Africa sucks), or some other software I have on my computer cause some kind of conflict.

I mean, if I'm going to pay for an early access game only to get banned for something that isn't my fault, how can I even think of supporting this? The devs really need to reconsider this perma-ban story.

I agree to an extent, I do not like the idea of a computer program perma-banning automatically. I believe there needs to be human oversight on everything.

That said, my opinion might change if Facepunch actually comes up with a system that can show people being caught cheating, that at least gives some evidence if the system is working or not, and presumably provides the grounds for
an appeal.

I am however wondering how one exactly "cheats" in an early access game. I mean the idea here is supposed to be to try and break the game in order to help with testing and such. If anything at this stage Facepunch should be encouraging people to mess with the game in any way they can so they can gather data for the eventual release.

I'll be bloody honest, if I was in an early access game, especially one that I paid for, and someone banned me for cheating before the game ever came out, I'd probably get a lawyer. I mean these guys are basically charging you money to be alpha/beta testers which is insane to begin with, and then they are going to ban you for doing that job?

What's more, unless I miss the point of Rust, I fail to see how exactly someone "cheats" in a resource harvesting/building game. I know this one has a PVP component, so I'm guessing it comes down to aim botting or
something to kill other players. I mean otherwise what is there to cheat at? "OMG, you found a way to gather too many sticks too quick?"

What's more with the bullying going on in RUST I'd think they would be more concerned about griefing, and finding some way to prevent established players from just shooting new ones running around with a rock for lulz. Factional infighting sounds like it's part of the fun, but with all the stories of newbie harassment, I'd be more concerned about that before release because the last thing you want is to immediately chase off half your player base or have them demand refunds because experts who learned in early access are killing all the new guys again and again for fun and not letting them actually play or live long enough to figure anything out.

I have a feeling that they are looking for input altering programs. Let's say you collect resources by clicking 'e' while pointing at it, the program registers that it has been clicked, it adds to your resource total. Then it becomes inactive/removed/deleted etc.. This is done extremely fast but there is a window where the resource is active for clicking after you have done so(though impossible to do manually since the time it takes to go from active to inactive can be faster than the screen updates from one frame to another). Also, on the users end, games tend to limit how many inputs it can register when sending that info to the server. However, there is travel time between user inputs and server... crap, gonna be late for work...

Long story short people can alter their inputs by catching them and altering the data sent to the server.

 

[misg]

In my years of gaming thousands of hours logged in games in alpha beta and everything else. I've never been banned or received a warning. Now maybe I'm the exception and not the rule. But I can see way they would take this approach, they don't need or want a few players ruining the experience of the vast majority of players. It doesn't take too many people cheating to give a game a bad name. Maybe they will change this approach in time. Maybe they will unban accounts at launch but I can't blame them from taking a hard approach to this. It's a drain on their resources that need to go to developing this game into a long term success.

 

[Lightknight]

If they mostly banned the correct people then this is nice. My logins were riddled with asshole hackers flying across the terrain and slaughtering everyone they saw witohut being hitable (as near as I could tell, they moved far faster than the typical player is capable of so it may have just been the speed that made them not show blood/get hit).

 

[Happiness Assassin]

The thing about this that I love whole situation is perusing the Rust forums looking for the people bitching about getting banned. One I saw claimed was merely using admin tools (that he was told to download from a third-party site in a winrar file ) and a few are claiming that the Cheatpunch is a trojan.

 

[Qvar]

Can we wait until it actually fail to get all doomsday-ish?

Also, do I happen to be the only one who did read that the bot only bans you from official servers?

 

[The Wooster]

Thank God.

Rust is an absolutely amazing game, but the heavy price of defeat means Cheaters can literally ruin weeks of work.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Wasn't there a site that chronicled posts from different forums with people asking why they got banned. Most of them pretty much stated why they were banned in their complaint like it was a legit thing. I'd read Facepunch's proposed site just for the giggles.

Though, yes, no system is full proof. They will get false-positives and miss a very small amount of true cheaters. They have to be saying that zero tollerance line just to get a few of the less bitchy cheaters not to clog up their support services so the few legit customer hurt by this can be heard.

 

[Kross]

Likely the cheat detection is looking at the "state" information on the server (among other things).

There's things you can do to move faster or teleport in games. There's nothing you can do about the server analyzing your coordinate changes (the server has to know where you are, or you cannot be there) to see if you're going faster by mucking with your client coordinates.

Even if the player is not actually messing with their movement, what if they are triggering a specific action every 2 seconds for 3 hours in a row, without missing a beat? What if when they move around, they never jitter the opposite axis (run in completely straight lines). That's how you start to find people running bots.

This kind of thing is hard to do "live", because it means the server has to do these checks as the client is moving in real time. However, it is not nearly as resource intensive to record the gameplay data for later analysis.

You can do the same kind of methodical sanity checking on inventory changes or combat details.

It all comes down to how much data you are willing to record, and being able to pick up unusual patterns that a normal user can not easily maintain.

Most of such analysis is about finding outliers when looking at data in bulk - There's always exceptions/overly stringent thresholds, and nobody likes false positives that inconvenience happy customers.

 

[I'mANinja]

Hail Based Garry. Maybe I'll be willing to play now.

 

[uchytjes]

Firm banning like this is probably the best and worst idea ever. It is very good because "normal" people won't even think about cheating because of the very real event that they could be banned. It is also a horrible idea because we have no clue what activities get you banned and we don't know how the software tells the difference between accidental glitching and meaningful cheating.