Why not just explore ways to prevent, or simply catch, cheating? Before the ball dropped about Assist (when we possibly almost lost it forever), I had a long discussion with one of the admins/devs on xfire about some of the ways to deal with things like this. I've played this thing a long, long time -- at the very apex of competition we've been blessed to have in this game. Over a span of 10 years, I've been intimately familiarized with nearly every aspect of being an AA Player -- a "scrub," a "pubscrub," a "cheater," a "starter" on top teams, a "head admin" of a league, all the way to an "Anticheat" guy who infiltrated the hacking underworld, along with Reaper ACI.
When playing in these leagues and competitions -- Cal Invites, HTGN, TWL, AGC, Cevo Professional, etc -- there were similarities and differences in the way they handled matters like this. We can examine some of their successes and failures to determine effective ways to stop, underscore, and deter cheating.
But firstly, let's address some pivotal info about hacks. Hacks are pretty useless if you don't have the visuals (i.e. wallhacks, radars/esp, etc), especially if the cheater is attempting to be discrete about their cheating. If a cheater wants to 'aimbot,' they have to 'know' where the enemies are, so that they are not in the peculiar situation of multiple enemies being in their field of view, because this would make the player spin around everywhere like the Exorcist, constantly 'locking on' to heads (and the cheater better not EVER go idle, hahahah). This, of course, is a huge indicator of aimbot usage. Similarly, playing with no recoil is not a great idea for cheaters looking to hide their artificial "skills," as first-person spectating and bullet-spread decals will quickly highlight their digital malice. Without the visuals, fundamentally, all a hacker is really left with is "no-flash" (if their hack even has something like that). And no-flash is not enough to give them that great of an edge anyway, as they would have to "fake the funk" to prevent detection, so the point would be vacuous. So, with this info, let's examine the leagues and find some interesting information, which can EASILY help us in these modern days of Assist:
TWL -- it had an interesting run over the years, but after the first couple of major seasons, its significance and popularity began to wane, and slowly continued to do so, on up till the end, because of its insecure, yet stringent AC practices. TWL's AC could be easily bypassed. It did the basic stuff -- checked processes, scanned for extraneous things and general AA-centric system anomalies, but it barely ever caught "good" hacks. What made a hack "good" was not only its ability to bypass initial detection of a league's AC client and Punkbuster with its proprietary, constantly-updated hooking methods, but also its ability to discern the algorithm with which Punkbuster, and a league's AC client, use to capture players' screenshots (this is VERY important). Well, I don't think TWL ever got around to making its AC client take screenshots at all; and if it did, it captured them in a similar, "set," "static" fashion like PB's capturing method.
If an AC client is coded to only capture screenshots in a "set" fashion -- say, every 96 seconds -- then this is blatant predictability. What I believe I was told about PB was that its "updates" incorporated different static "set" capturing methods, which then prompted hack developers to update their visuals-bypass functions to correspond with the modifications within the updates for PB (and whatever else they were attempting to circumvent). So, with no implemented method of capturing "good" hacks, what TWL resorted to -- which contributed, greatly, to its lack of relevance -- was ban people for all sorts of stuff, like linked accounts (even loosely linked), pub bans, forum bans/disruptions, and all manners of things that weren't even pertinent to playing in TWL itself and on its client. This, in itself, was a huge indicator that it had no trust in its AC client. Top, well-respected players in AA who have never touched a cheat, or even been accused of a cheat, have been permanently banned from TWL, but those players didn't even care, because no one really trusted TWL in the first place, EVEN WITH their strange, paranoid, anti-cheat measures.
In CAL, early on, it was scientifically proven that their AC client was a complete and literal joke; meaning, essentially, it did n o t h i n g at all. It did, however, probably scare some people into not hacking in CAL, but the client itself was a bluff. Later on, though, they did get it to do something. It did an interesting job at catching hooking/injecting methods, but it still wasn't good enough, as its screenshotting method was static. The Cal "ACS" was updated a lot, though, because of people like me and Reaper. At that time, I had many connections in the hacking underworld. Hackers shared with me their forum accounts, and so I had access to these hacks whenever they were updated, and so Reaper and I would grab them and send them to Punkbuster and the leagues' AC depts (particularly CAL, as it was the biggest, most important league at the time). Ehhh, this operation we had going had to remain kinda hush, which means many people don't even know this was going on, as my hacking connections would've fucked me up (some of those dudes were seriously mentally ill/psycho). In fact, it had already happened once before when a well-known hacker got pissed at me and screwed with my computer for a few weeks. lol, I think Jonny from audigy/IoG remembers this time. But I've digressed. So the only reason some people's visuals were detected on CAL ACS was because we were sending the updated versions of the hacks directly to the leagues' AC (oftentimes before a lot of the cheaters even got a chance to download them, lol). This allowed CAL ACS to update its SS-capturing intervals, and so folks who tried to cheat on the ACS got banned because they had hacks that weren't updated to bypass its visuals on the right intervals. But doing this week after week was an annoying thing, and doing something similar today is not feasible; plus, I have no clue who's manufacturing AA2 hacks these days, and I'm sure the folks who DO know are not willing to do what I used to do.
Then, among others, we have the CEVO league. CEVO's AC client -- named "CMN3" at the time -- was probably the most feared AC client in the history of America's Army. We had to pay to play in this league, so the AC had to be trustworthy, and it was. Because of the secrecy surrounding all that it did, I'm not entirely certain about everything regarding this client. HOWEVER, I did find out something quite profound regarding why hack developers gave up on it. Turns out that CEVO took random, unpredictable screenshots. Now this is something I talked to Possessed about on Xfire during the recent, ephemeral death of Assist. This type of capturing method is beautiful; and with Assist being our very own AC Client, I think that there are substantive ways of catching hackers and leaving the ones we don't catch heavily debilitated (and 'catchable' if they become tempted to 'get good'). As I said earlier, without their visuals, it becomes a daunting proposition if they want to go unnoticed. A cheater without the visuals is either going to be a bizarre, spinning, Exorcist-like Blatant-Bobby, or he's going to be pretty bad, like everyone else. haha --
As of right now, although many don't realize this because they didn't read the new Assist agreement, Assist can take screenshots, but I'm not entirely certain if it takes the screenshots automatically and randomly. If we could incorporate this ability into Assist (if it's not already there yet, as I suggested to Possessed), then couldn't we just shoot for this? The screenshots could be automatically uploaded to a server, or servers, old PB style, where they can be viewed on an webpage that simply lists links to images of players' screenshots. This would use up some bandwidth, but it shouldn't be that bad at all. Perhaps we could do an auto-purging thing for these SS images after, say, 48 hours or whatever. This would help free up server-capacity space.
In closing, after all my years of AA, the most effective AC method I've seen was the client (CMN3) that took random screenshots, and not the set, predictable screenshots of everything else, including PB. And as for banning policy, I say if they cheat on Assist, charge them $300 to play again. Assist, at its core, is already a second-chance thing, and cheating in a game that only has a handful of players is really messed up. But a perma-ban would just mean 1 less player. Make them pay; this could help with the development.
SORRY FOR THE WALL OF TEXT!!!
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Topic: [Poll] Banning Policy... (Read 53395 times)
