Cr0

A) People who get banned say FF sucks because "I didn't cheat". Sure. Nobody ever did, right?. B) All games will always have cheaters, so the anti cheat will always be blamed. If FF is the anti cheat they will blame that. Even Battleye which is supposed to be "the best" anti cheat has a slightly bad reputation. So the playing field what anti cheat is actually good or bad is pretty even among the proper ones used today. That is the reality. So the question is what to go for. What type you want. I already explained the strength with FF in my last post and that type of anti cheat is effective. BUT, it needs to be combined with a proper client side anti cheat. This is the solution needed, and I always say this. I totally don't agree. I maintain that they gave up. If there's anything that can make a distinction who is guilty it IS stats over time, (with proper rulsets), specifically, because some things are 100% impossible to do. If someone keeps doing that, FF can find it. For example if you lock on to a certain bone 100% without fail every time, all the time over a period of 50 hours, then you are cheating, because a human can't do that. Basic things like that you can't get wrong. That sort of thing should be used. Rage cheaters/stupid closets at least will be banned. Same if you have no recoil for example, you'll be able to aim in ways not possible for a human. Those kinds of rulesets are never questionable. That is the kind of stuff that should always be there. Right now, there is nothing to detect that kind of stuff afaik. FF would have done that. People in APB don't like FF because of how G1 misused it and couldn't deal with good rulesets. Truth is FF was a real problem for cheaters. On cheat sellers forums they'd have guides how to avoid getting banned by Fairfight and people still couldn't follow those simple guidelines and complained that they got banned, all the time. It worked.

The "sloppy netcode and server tick rate" mantra, I suspect doesn't affect Fairfight as much as people think, as Fairfight is based on stats collected over time and doesn't ban players on a various discrepancies. This can be tuned, but they gave up. The major upside to FF is that you can get to cheaters who have bypassed the client anti cheat, which cheaters will always do. This is why companies invest in FF in the first place. So they are never safe and what we saw in APB was how old "closet" type cheaters (which is the most common type) suddenly started getting banned which couldn't be gotten to before. Now that is gone and they are back to doing the same thing. So LO is going to have to relearn the lesson that old G1 did, however long that takes. Problem is: They don't have that time. They said themselves that if they don't fix the cheater situation, it's over.

That website was run by an APB player though. The company had nothing to do with that. [Removed video. -Spuzva] That's the guy I was referring to in my eariler post actually. "reported a speedhacker who was also advertising his cheat website in chat. Week later, he's still there doing the same thing. If there was a direct way for me to message a GM he'd be removed in 4 minutes instead of 4 months." The thing is that Fairfight can work really well, which is proven for other games in the same sort of genre, if you set it up correctly. The old G1 misused Fairfight when they dealt out questionable manual bans. They even let favouritism and and partisanship decide manual bans and unbans which they blamed on Fairfight. They completely hid behind it. Some times it was because some players had direct lines of communication with "befriended" employees. What a mess. It was completely catastrophic. If they wouldn't have abused FF like that, and it wouldn't be for the public display of bans within the game, it would have a lot better reputation in the community. Sure, it did get a few false positives but they got reversed, just like Battleye has also had false positives reversed. We need to have something like FF combined with something like BE.

I suspect you're referring to the video I put up 5 years ago named "With and Without Macro - Demonstration". I could be wrong of course. I had it set to private but I'm willing to have it public for the purpose of this reply/thread. It'll go back to private soon again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojZoAKnR06I

Oh... well so did G1 before FF. Those things they do themselves never seem to do much. When I said they don't have one, I was referring to something worth mentioning.

It was better than what they have now, which says a lot.

What am I missing? What's funny?

Correct, and that is because they have no server side anti cheat, just a client side anti cheat that once bypassed, you can cheat for a long time without risking detection. Then when they get banned they make a new account and use a new bypass. So they are constantly playing the game! If they get banned they are gone for a very short while. Then they play for whatever... 6 months, I dunno. Seems like it's worth it. Who can blame them? and who can blame the others for getting cheats themselves when they get tired of getting beat by cheaters? I sure don't.

reported a speedhacker who was also advertising his cheat website in chat. Week later, he's still there doing the same thing. If there was a direct way for me to message a GM he'd be removed in 4 minutes instead of 4 months.

You can talk about yourself without being egotistical.

I don't know what you mean.

Removing FF increases the need for active GMs etc. Having staff inexperienced in APB to look over who is cheating is tricky. It takes years of proper experience to quickly spot types of cheating not even visible to a beginner, semi-experienced or even very well experienced as long as they don't have the proper type of experience. Ego gets in the way here. The correct set of eyes can spot things easily on streams daily which the vast majority of veterans will never notice at all. People hate to hear me saying it.

It was nice to read your post because in my opinion you actually understand the real problem. Yes, what we have is exactly what you describe: The higher threat you become the more often/likely you'll face these blatants (and other not so blatant, but I respect that the topic is not dealing with this). So this leads to a couple of typical things once fed up with this. a) People either completely stop or mostly stop playing / Just hang in social, apb forums, discord, watch apb streams, not really playing. The developer makes no money from such players. b) The cheater loop: People start cheating themselves to be able to beat cheaters/continue enjoying the game, thereby becoming cheaters themselves, giving birth to new ones for the same reason. c) People start doing stupid stuff like de-threating, rolling new accounts staying low rank on purpose, trolling etc. You can't completely stop cheating in games. The best situation you can get is one where a server and client side anti cheat together with GMs etc make the cheaters that are playing, not able to cheat very much or for as long. That's the best it can get, would be good enough and it's doable.

Disllikes a game plays it for 8 years.

As I've always said and always say: You need both a server and client side anti cheat at the same time. Only (a working) Fairfight anti cheat: Inject almost anything you want, as long as your statistics are not completely impossible, you're safe. Only client side anti cheat: Once bypassed, as long as others can't see the impossible things you do and the cheat remains undetected, you're safe. Both: You're never completely safe and you can never go full out. The most blatant cheating happens when there's only client side anti cheat. This isn't news to anyone, but a reminder of the old days when there was only punkbuster. The same type (not magnitude) of cheating we see now.

Just for entertainment alone it's a funny idea. I can picture funny scenarios with this But these kids at least make sure to use a while hold button feature so it won't fire by itself by detecting something else within the same color variables. Another bad thing about it is they'd then know they're being investigated.

LOL

What I find "interesting" is that no matter how much the playerbase has decreased over the years, the DDoSing hasn't exactly gone hand in hand with it.

The only thing different is the looks. I like it actually. Underrated IMO.

Hard to bring something back which was never there

@Westford I don't, actually, but thank you anyway

The big problem with NOT having any server side anti cheat going for statistics in terms of for instance accuracy (some things are simply impossible no matter what) is that once the client side anti cheat is bypassed there is no system detecting the impossible actions they do. To at that point instead rely on player reports to manually ban such players can be impossible if that player is avoiding to look like a cheater, especially seeing how extremely large the skill gap is in APB. With something detecting impossible actions server side, it means that just because someone is through the client side anti cheat security, they are not safe at all, as opposed to if there is no server side stats checking and these people can toggle fairly hard and blend in with the actually very skilled players.

All SPCT applicants who had more forum posts that hours ingame got automatically denied (just kidding) Good choice of SPCT members. Good luck all of you.

LO purchased a game that was in an iron lung. They must have really felt that they knew exactly what to do to save it, because that's a risky investment and the last 30 days the peak has been 550 players. I believe they are working really hard. I believe they will launch the new engine for testing somewhere around start of the new year. Then at the real release it needs to be stable enough to not only maintain but for the first time expand the playerbase or I doubt it'll be worth the investment (still wanna know how much they paid for it). That's the last chance for this game. I mean, it has to be really good to do that, and that will be the one chance they have where it will be decided because: They know what kinda names they can bring in, in terms of streamers. That's what would make it happen. So when the engine upgrade is actually released live (not OTW), it has to be working really well. Like, that's their big shot, and it has to be really ready for that. Bugs and glitches have to go, things have to be balanced, smooth, optimized and have a good feel, or it'll fail. This game has potential like few other games. There's nothing else really like it. If they succeed they'll have something people will play and there won't be much competition in the genre because it'll kinda be almost its own genre. But it all comes down to what happens within the next months or so because nobody is going to give this game another chance after LO. It's already a lesser miracle that anyone was crazy determined enough to pick it up. It wont happen again.

Thank you! I just googled Sonic 2 Chemical Plant and yeah, I hear what you mean