How is R* gonna combat cheating?

[Maji]

Obviously with the way GTA Online is, my main concern is how is R* going to combat the same issues that plague GTA?

Hope there is someone with inside knowledge of this.

[pariah87]

Ban lobbies probably. My dad works for Rockstar.

[E•MO•TION]

Spoiler Alert: they won’t.

[gtafan1995]

It's still peer to peer, so the cheating will still be present. The good thing is that lobbies are more dynamic and you can't see other players on the map that are far away. So to get away from a modder you will just have to leave the region or fast travel and it will automatically put you into a different lobby.

Edited October 4, 2019 by gtafan1995

[Jason]

Depends what you mean by cheating.

 

Stuff like aimbotting? Good anti cheat will help, but those will always be around on PC.

 

Spawning in money, being able to kill players, god mode etc? Well those should be easier to solve. There's a reason why you don't often see those types of cheats in MMO's and MMO-lite's and other online games of this type, even ones that rely on peer to peer.

 

I doubt Rockstar have been looking at GTAO's hacking problems on PC over the years and are sat there going "this is fine", if for one reason only: shark card sales. But GTAO was coded the way it was, I doubt it was easy to fix in a post-launch post... otherwise it'd probably have happened by now. Probably.

 

I doubt RDO PC is going to be as bad as people expect tbh.

 

 

[Maji]

15 minutes ago, Jason said:

Depends what you mean by cheating.

 

Stuff like aimbotting? Good anti cheat will help, but those will always be around on PC.

 

Spawning in money, being able to kill players, god mode etc? Well those should be easier to solve. There's a reason why you don't often see those types of cheats in MMO's and MMO-lite's and other online games of this type, even ones that rely on peer to peer.

 

I doubt Rockstar have been looking at GTAO's hacking problems on PC over the years and are sat there going "this is fine", if for one reason only: shark card sales. But GTAO was coded the way it was, I doubt it was easy to fix in a post-launch post... otherwise it'd probably have happened by now. Probably.

 

I doubt RDO PC is going to be as bad as people expect tbh.

 

 

That particular line is what plagues GTA Online.  Every public lobby has some sort of modder doing this stuff, yet it doesn't get fixed.  This is just my concern, will RD go same way as GTA and just be another watch the money fly in and not care.  This is why i wish R* had a more public presence.

[Geisterfaust]

2 hours ago, Jason said:

I doubt RDO PC is going to be as bad as people expect tbh.

Mostly because it's going to be less popular than GTAO. I can bet my account that there's going to be little to no cheat protection in RDO. Release date, who knows, too risky, but that's almost a guarantee for me. As far as I have heard, there's no significant difference between GTAO and RDO networking principles and if it is correct, it's going to be fooked. Anyway, I have zero interest in RDO and will be playing SP with some mods that cool guys and girls will come up with.

[FuturePastNow]

2 hours ago, E•MO•TION said:

Spoiler Alert: they won’t.

This. They've given up on stopping anything except money/duping glitches in GTAO. The way their multiplayer works is simply incapable of effective anticheat.

[eastriver]

If they prepared a better foundation than they did for GTAV, then they should be able to more effectively combat cheaters.

GTAV didn't really have a good foundation planned for them to roll out an effective anti-cheater program post launch.

GTA Online is a bit of a joke, on console and PC. The backend is just bad. With somewhat limited time on RDR Online, I can already tell it's a much better experience than GTA Online, so I'm somewhat more hopeful for good anti-cheat software on PC.

Edited October 4, 2019 by IG_

[roggek]

My concern is a player with a modded "hay driven Opressor Mk II" a k a flying horse, with a Browning/Gatling gun...

 

There is still a lot of griefing/glitches in RDO, and i feel sad for those who await the PC version...

So to be honest, i have "no damn faith" in RDO on PC...

Edited October 4, 2019 by roggek

[Max96]

I think gotta be same as GTA Online.

[SWATsqad™]

TBH at least for the first few months this could be solved by simply having a lot of log data to work with and hiring people to ban reported cheaters.. I'm sure they have plenty of analytics and resources to at least go through 3-5 reported people per minute per employee, assuming their tool UI is good. While the game isn't discounted or grey market leaked I'm sure it would work. And then when the universe starts its heat death phase, perhaps rockstar will have implemented an actual anti-cheat solution by around that time.

[roggek]

2 hours ago, pederasto said:

TBH at least for the first few months this could be solved by simply having a lot of log data to work with and hiring people to ban reported cheaters..

 

As we all know, this isn't working today on consoles to "report the abusing players", so what would say it work better on the PC version?

 

Lobbyhopping and a "Offline" PSN/XBox gamer tag, is a true sign of that…
And a sometimes ridiculous XP level...

 

Griefing on consoles and exploits/hacks is today a common thing, and I fear it would be worse on the PC version...

 

The icing on the cake would be crossplay between consoles and PC...A truly immersive experience...

Edited October 5, 2019 by roggek

[Tez2]

Cheating is an endless war between the developers and cheaters.

No one will win, the only way to win is to screw over your game so bad it becomes unplayable for legit players, that's when you win over cheaters.

Basically, your super strong anti-cheat is useless if it has to process data for legit players, because cheaters can deceive themselves as legit players.

I was reading this just an hour ago, I felt like it was such a cool anti-cheat until I decided to scroll down to the comments and there was one dude who said he cracked it in two hours and all the things mentioned were common anti-cheat measures that just make it harder for the newbie cheater.

So the only way to combat cheaters is to use what DICE (Developer of Battlefield) and other developers have been using, a software that track player activity and check if the player did the impossible, like FairFight.

The problem with GTA Online is it's peer to peer network, but the worst part is what happened after the Gunrunning update when the cheaters figured out how to mess with script events which allow them to send false events to other players causing them to spawn things or change RP/money ..etc

Back in 2017, it was so bad that a cheater could tell your game to pay the hospital bill which he modified to cost like 2 million dollars.

Now when it comes to FairFight, it use the same way, it's like in the midst of the cheaters messing with the game's communication, there's one extra player who is actually the server-side script that is making sure everything is happening according to legitimate reasons. If the impossible happens like some dude somehow teleported to a place that's not a fast travel point nor was he in a "verified by server" mission and he's teleporting multiple times, then he's clearly a cheater thus it ban him.

Same with aimbot, if some dude is scoring headshots all the time, this server-side script will check if he's using Paint it black ability card, if his point of view is facing the other players, if the distance between him and the other players allow him to auto aim, if he is scoring headshots while other players are sprinting really fast, the amount of times he is scoring headshots with perfect accuracy ...etc

All of this is calculated and then it's determined if said player is a cheater. There's no counter to this, what cheaters can do is to do their best to make it look like they are just a bunch of skilled players.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Fun 2

[Spider-Vice]

14 minutes ago, Fun 2 said:

So the only way to combat cheaters is to use what DICE (Developer of Battlefield) and other developers have been using, a software that track player activity and check if the player did the impossible, like FairFight.

 

This has some nasty performance and security implications though. Since ever StarForce's fiasco back in the mid-2000's, people have been reeeeeallly against external software to monitor cheating.

[Tez2]

7 minutes ago, Spider-Vice said:

This has some nasty performance and security implications though. Since ever StarForce's fiasco back in the mid-2000's, people have been reeeeeallly against external software to monitor cheating.

Quote

FairFight by GameBlocks is a real time cheat detection and suppression system. FairFight is non-invasive, customizable and engine agnostic. It does not reside on the player's computer and does not examine the players' devices or perpetually look for the latest hacks. FairFight uses our proprietary GameChanger™ rule engine along with advanced database structures to evaluate players' real-time gameplay actions. FairFight combines algorithmic models that assess an array of statistical markers to identify possible cheating, and cross-checks these measurements using objective gameplay reporting to Make it a FairFight™ for everyone

It shouldn't affect the performance of your game, it is a server-side script. It should be affecting Rockstar servers, but Rockstar is using Akamai Content Delivery Network services for Red Dead Online which is something like this

Spoiler

 

[Spider-Vice]

Oh, oops. I thought about something more in the line of EasyAntiCheat, Punkbuster, etc.

[Jason]

Just a comment on aimbots, they aren't as black and white as headshots 24/7. The generic run of yer mill aimbots do that, but the clever ones used by clever cheaters don't and are much harder to detect.

 

Used to admin servers for an FPS game and I spent a lot of time trying to detect cheaters, some of them are real clever and use tools that aren't a 100% win button. It's the same with wallhacks, easy to detect when idiots are using them cause they'll trace an enemy players movement through a wall but a clever cheater will use the information wisely.

 

For this reason I believe the go to way to detect things like aimbots and wall hacks is to run background checks on player PC's to see if they're running things they shouldn't, overlays or known cheats or w/e, or something like that. Basically, they don't simply (or at least exclusively) decide if you're cheating based on what you're doing in-game. I believe this is how Valve Anti-Cheat works at least.

 

But yes, server verification for every action that players do will plug a lot of the cheating holes in RDO. It's what any MMO does pretty much. We'll see if RDO is a copy and paste job from GTAO or if they've fixed it in a month or so.

[eastriver]

I remember reading about cheaters in BF3 a while while back (2011, 2012)... basically you're most common type of cheaters are never blatant. They use cheats that definitely give them an unfair advantage, but cheats only help them reach levels that good players can reach without cheating. You're not gonna call out someone for going 60-15 in Battlefield because it's very doable if you're good.

[Dock]

Well atleast with GTA O, R* have recently been cracking down on certain functions regarding money making (“stealth” money for example, which gives users $10m every tick) and anything that helps with finishing missions/heists quicker (like infinite health/ammo) etc.

 

There’s also been an apparent increase of actual admins patrolling lobbies (yes) to flag and ban anyone causing chaos or dropping money.

 

So they’ve certainly been trying to stop the problem but I guess it’s too late for anything substantial to happen for GTA O rn on pc. There’s other “illegitimate” money making alternatives still out there, and running wild in public lobbies with troll options and whatever will likely still be an issue.

 

These are certainly going to carry over to RDO but hopefully they’ve learnt from their experiences with GTA O so that they can tackle them.

 

AFAIK they’ve also been hiring more devs to work on anti-cheats, so it’s likely that they’re still sticking to an in-house solution rather than picking up something like BattlEye or EasyAntiCheat. Whether this is good or bad is upto you.

Edited October 6, 2019 by Dock

[Jimbatron]

I suspect it won’t be as bad by a long shot as GTAO, even if R* do nothing differently.

 

The reason being that I don’t expect RDRO to be as popular.

 

Some of the worst mod menus in GTA were charging a subscription fee, and making quite a bit of money. That’s a function of the size of the players base and effectively the amount of R*’s shark card sale they could illegally (whether you like micro transactions or not, that’s a fact) skim off.

 

As a result if R* introduced new countermeasures the menu “developers” had a cash incentive to find new work arounds quickly in GTAO. Any such cash incentive is likely to be much smaller for RDRO. Arguably for R* though the cost is more in damage to brand reputation than immediate loss of sharkcard / gold bar sales, so I would expect their efforts to be similar.

 

If there is also a lower player base I expect it to be easier to police. GTAO is so big they had to deal with everything in an automated way which was far from perfect. Smaller player bases may make it easier to investigate individual cases - although I’m not holding out huge hopes on that.

 

For GTA VI though I think they need to review the whole setup as P2P is just too vulnerable.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Jimbatron

[Spider-Vice]

Rockstar have the money to do with most FP shooters and similar games do - dedicated servers with fully manageable netcode and functionality. There's a really interesting GDC talk about how Overwatch does it and how they can tweak everything server-side to (try to) maintain everything as fair as possible, along with the techniques used for data and feature management.

 

At this point I see no reason why they couldn't do that, it would be much easier for them to manage too.

[Snoopbr]

Human force

[Ehllfhire]

They wont combat it they have to sell gold

[SilverRST]

Solution:

wait for Alexander Blade creating ScriptHookRDR and enjoy mods in storymode. Maybe _CP_ or Razed or both will create graphics mods.

Do not touch online at all!

[Ehllfhire]

My guess is the cheating will be as bad as before

[MulleDK19]

I hope they continue to use their own like V.

 

Pros
Won't be active in story mode. Typically games that have AC like EAC have it on at all times, including single-player, so that would prevent trainers and mods in story mode.

 

Cons
Will continue to ban innocent accounts, with no law stipulating that Rockstar (and other companies) provide proof or reason for bans.

Takes 5 minutes to completely circumvent for non novice cheaters.

[DrKrankenstein]

On 10/5/2019 at 4:53 PM, Spider-Vice said:

Oh, oops. I thought about something more in the line of EasyAntiCheat, Punkbuster, etc.

lets hope they don't add THAT one.man was it junk....that thing flagged legit gameplay as cheats.