EasyAC vs BattlEye vs FairFight

[MrLek 35]

Much is said about hackers, about anti-cheats that have already passed through the APB and about their effectiveness.
So I decided to make this topic to collect information from older players here in the community, leaving all this information in this topic, in the future it can serve as a source of information, so you old players are precious.

I would be very happy to read the reports of the oldest ones, and of course, of anyone who passes on information on the subject, I learn a lot from it. Don't limit yourself to the questions, feel free to extend your comments.

 

1 - Did FairFight work? 

a) How was your individual experience at the time of this anti-cheat?

b) In an overview, how did the APB behave, using this Anti-Cheat? 

c) According to what you know and the experience of others/friends: At that time of the APB, was it easy to get some kind of hack?

d) In your own words, how would you summarize this anti-cheat?

Optional: If you can, leave some data about this anti-cheat.

 

2 - Did EasyAC work?

a) How was your individual experience at the time of this anti-cheat?

b) In an overview, how did the APB behave, using this Anti-Cheat? 

c) According to what you know and the experience of others/friends: At that time of the APB, was it easy to get some kind of hack?

d) In your own words, how would you summarize this anti-cheat?

Optional: If you can, leave some data about this anti-cheat.

 

3 - Did BattlEye work?

a) How is your individual experience now with this anti-cheat?

b) In an overview, how did the APB behave, using this Anti-Cheat? 

c) According to what you know and the experience of others/friends: Currently, it's easy to get some kind of hack?

d) In your own words, how would you summarize this anti-cheat?

Optional: If you can, leave some data about this anti-cheat.

 

4 - Which of the 3 is the worst? And which of the 3 is the best?

a) Are any of these the ideal anti-cheat for APB? or is there any other anti-cheat on the market/in the world that would look better on APB?

b) In your opinion, at what time did the APB have fewer hackers?

*Optional: Leave a link to some relevant news about Anti-Cheats.

 

Thanks for commenting.

 

EDIT: L.O should go back to showing banned hackers.

Link removed.    - Azukii

[MACKxBOLAN 432]

Fair Fight is the only one I ever saw banning people.

I realize that the other Anti cheats dont broadcast the bans.

 

  Battle Eye is not an Anti Cheat per say

It is to deal with ddos, and or poor connection/ slow internet.

It kicks people from district or FC.

 Which is a problem in FC, if you make no kills or are not quick 

enough to get to the point, you get kicked, and like wise if your

afk in district too long B.E. is who kicks you.

 

We cannot judge eac at this point because they only installed the free version

some years back, and it has never banned anyone to my knowledge.

 Additionally EAC collects information over time, and only after that Time

does it begin 'Flagging those accounts that are receiving information they should not

be receiving. So this would be effective towards Wall hax, large teleporting, speed hacking

If the full version was installed, and its not.  cuz they lazy.

 

 So All My money is on Fair Fight.

It is My impression that no body has been banned by or flagged by an anticheat

since FF was turned off, and when they finally decide to turn it back on.

 I won't believe that any bans have happened without some documented proof.

ie the FF bans site, a pinned/Locked thread for moderators to list at least the number

of bans that week if not the names. 

   Waited too long to have any faith in LO.

 

 

 They are Stalling, LO does not show the level of urgency towards installing 

the anti cheat, that they should. The only time you see a gm is when the hackers

are threatened by dump truck violence, legits get smashed up by some gold low rank

Truck Trolling n nothing is done, noone comes to protect the legit.

 Its always been this way, the hackers run it, and they wont change that

with some watered down anti cheat. 

  The Game is not just the mission combat, We have to listen to the hackers

in chat, see em mob out the hang out spots blasting bad ice cream truck music.

Talking smack n listen to the innuendos n antics of hackers talking down on silvers.

Dominating every mission so legits cant do missions without golds invading, n then bitching 

at you in chat to carry them, or do more when the other side is hacking, n if you don't 

Rush in n ace the whole mission, the gold will tk ya, then call ya trash.

 This is the Way LO wants it. Toxic and Hackish 

[R3ACT3M 489]

I like the idea of them combining anti-cheats. I don't think any are silver bullets. But a well put together combo, backed up by some evidence that it's working I imagine will put people's minds at ease. That being said I don't expect the new implementation of these anti-cheats to really have any sort of visible effect. People are going to cry cheater until the end of time because simply put, YOU CAN'T SEE THE OTHER PERSON'S SCREEN.

I thought it was the most humorous thing when I was using the tommy gun, and got called cheater. When I inquired, I was told that I was using a recoil stabilizer. To which I replied with: "How would you even know that?" 

Kill-cams need to be apart of this game badly. But of course should also be togglable in the settings for those who don't wish to use them. I also think that on the kill-cam a battlefield-esk detail bar is shown with the enemy's health and weapon. Alongside perks and consumables. Theme name and Symbol should also be togglable (for streamers)

[MACKxBOLAN 432]

24 minutes ago, R3ACT3M said:

I don't expect the new implementation

Well Yes and No, I think we'll have a week where they will all run to the closet, but the dailys

will still come in, but not hack, and during that time allot of these license plate non names will 

go away.  They will start coming back in and testing the system with 'Disposable' accounts.

 n about 2 weeks later, they'll all be back at it.

                    That's If they Ever Install it. 

[vsb 6171]

we’re at a point where no single anticheat is enough, the optimal setup imo is a client side anticheat to stop people downloading free shit from the first page of google, and a server side anticheat to catch those that bypass the client side anticheat - in apb’s case, eac and fairfight

 

 

 

1 hour ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

Battle Eye is not an Anti Cheat per say

battleye is first and foremost an anticheat

 

the reason you get a message from battleye is because it’s integrated into the login system

 

 

1 hour ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

We cannot judge eac at this point because they only installed the free version

some years back, and it has never banned anyone to my knowledge.

 Additionally EAC collects information over time, and only after that Time

does it begin 'Flagging those accounts that are receiving information they should not

be receiving. So this would be effective towards Wall hax, large teleporting, speed hacking

If the full version was installed, and its not.  cuz they lazy.

orbit discontinued eac the first time over price, it wasn’t free

 

eac has client side functions that scan files for changes

[MrLek 35]

1 hour ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

Fair Fight is the only one I ever saw banning people.

I realize that the other Anti cheats dont broadcast the bans.

 

  Battle Eye is not an Anti Cheat per say

It is to deal with ddos, and or poor connection/ slow internet.

It kicks people from district or FC.

 Which is a problem in FC, if you make no kills or are not quick 

enough to get to the point, you get kicked, and like wise if your

afk in district too long B.E. is who kicks you.

 

We cannot judge eac at this point because they only installed the free version

some years back, and it has never banned anyone to my knowledge.

 Additionally EAC collects information over time, and only after that Time

does it begin 'Flagging those accounts that are receiving information they should not

be receiving. So this would be effective towards Wall hax, large teleporting, speed hacking

If the full version was installed, and its not.  cuz they lazy.

 

 So All My money is on Fair Fight.

It is My impression that no body has been banned by or flagged by an anticheat

since FF was turned off, and when they finally decide to turn it back on.

 I won't believe that any bans have happened without some documented proof.

ie the FF bans site, a pinned/Locked thread for moderators to list at least the number

of bans that week if not the names. 

   Waited too long to have any faith in LO.

 

 

 They are Stalling, LO does not show the level of urgency towards installing 

the anti cheat, that they should. The only time you see a gm is when the hackers

are threatened by dump truck violence, legits get smashed up by some gold low rank

Truck Trolling n nothing is done, noone comes to protect the legit.

 Its always been this way, the hackers run it, and they wont change that

with some watered down anti cheat. 

  The Game is not just the mission combat, We have to listen to the hackers

in chat, see em mob out the hang out spots blasting bad ice cream truck music.

Talking smack n listen to the innuendos n antics of hackers talking down on silvers.

Dominating every mission so legits cant do missions without golds invading, n then bitching 

at you in chat to carry them, or do more when the other side is hacking, n if you don't 

Rush in n ace the whole mission, the gold will tk ya, then call ya trash.

 This is the Way LO wants it. Toxic and Hackish 

Did FairFight ban legitimate players?

EDIT: I'm asking this because I was looking at the banned players on the FF website, and I read some comments from people saying that the banned players were legit. Of course it could just be friends lying on behalf of the guy who got banned.

Edited April 20, 2023 by MrLek

[vsb 6171]

52 minutes ago, MrLek said:

Did FairFight ban legitimate players?

EDIT: I'm asking this because I was looking at the banned players on the FF website, and I read some comments from people saying that the banned players were legit. Of course it could just be friends lying on behalf of the guy who got banned.

fairfight was used to manually ban people for non-cheating offenses while claiming all fairfight bans were for cheating and there were false cheating detections due to fairfight not being properly maintained by g1 - these have been confirmed by orbit as reasons for lifting fairfight bans, altho we were never given any specific numbers or names afaik

 

keep in mind that ffbans was a third party website that scraped the ban announcements off twitter, people could and would say whatever they wanted on the site

 

 

[MrChan 337]

Maybe I'm suffering from a reading comprehension deficit, but there seems to be some overlap in these questions. Answered as best I can.

 

1 - Did FairFight work?
Technically yes in the sense it banned some people who cheated. But in practice it took too long to ban blatant hackers and wasn't tuned to APB properly. We also know from LO that there were false detections, (Matt said he was able to trigger a false detection himself) but probably not as many as those unbanned due to the false detections would like you to believe. G1 also broadcast manual bans through the FF system to further muddy the waters.

 

a) My individual experience was that I'd meet a hacker every now and then. Blatant ones ie. speed/teleport hacking, very very unsubtle wall/radar hacks, would survive way too long for something that works the way FF was supposed to. This was at it's greatest for 12-18 months (maybe longer, I've been playing a long time) at the end of G1's reign when they had to turn off Punkbuster and had no client side anti-cheat of any description. Literally anyone could fire up a free cheat and ragehack until FF bothered its backside to ban them.

 

b) It wasn't unplayable or anything, but there were cheaters there, and sometimes really obvious ones.

 

c) None of my friends are confessed cheaters, or cheaters of any description I would think. I was with a couple of different groups during the FF period. One group hackusated like fuck all the time. Too much imo. The other rarely did.

 

d) Wasn't tuned correctly. The only 'good thing' about it was the broadcasting of bans. And how cathartic that was tells you how shit the game was.

 

Question for anybody who thinks FF was the best anti-cheat APB had: Is it actually FF you want, or just the ban broadcasts that came with it? Cos LO (rightly, imo) are not going back to that. I for one don't think going back to it taking days to ban blatant hackers is a desirable outcome.

 

2 - Did EasyAC work?
Yes.

 

a) Best experience I've had on APB in terms of hackers. Sure there were no broadcasts, but blatant hackers were at a minimum and there were far fewer 'suspicious' players, or sense of dying to total nonsense. EAC era was by far the best place the game was in terms of cheating and anyone who says otherwise is wrong, as far as I'm concerned.

 

b) Game was as clean as it's been.

 

c) As per my answer for FF, I don't know anyone who admitted to cheating. I was largely playing solo at the time.

 

d) This is the most effective anti-cheat APB has had to date, even though it didn't have a full feature set implemented for the game.

 

3 - Did BattlEye work?
Yes, although not brilliantly.

 

a) The first period of BattlEye when LO came in first was better than the current one. To be absolutely fair, I don't see as many blatants as I did during FF, but there are some there. There's also a fair bit of 'borderline' play. Way more than we saw during EAC.

 

b) See answer to a.

 

c) As per my answer for FF, I don't know anyone who admitted to cheating. I was largely playing solo at the time.

 

d) It's neither great nor terrible. Could easily be improved on.

 

4 - Which of the 3 is the worst? 
FF, although BattlEye isn't a million miles away.

 

And which of the 3 is the best?
EAC

 

a) Are any of these the ideal anti-cheat for APB? 
Probably not, but EAC felt clean enough.

 

Or is there any other anti-cheat on the market/in the world that would look better on APB?
Don't know.

 

b) In your opinion, at what time did the APB have fewer hackers?
When we had EAC.

Edited April 20, 2023 by MrChan

[MonkaS 215]

3 hours ago, glaciers said:

fairfight was used to manually ban people for non-cheating offenses while claiming all fairfight bans were for cheating and there were false cheating detections due to fairfight not being properly maintained by g1 - these have been confirmed by orbit as reasons for lifting fairfight bans, altho we were never given any specific numbers or names afaik

 

keep in mind that ffbans was a third party website that scraped the ban announcements off twitter, people could and would say whatever they wanted on the site

 

 

*puts on tinfoil hat* LO claims there were false fairfight bans and reversed every fairfight ban(including those who did in fact cheat) BUT they never gave any specific information on WHY fairfight banned 'legit' players or HOW they knew they were false bans. Its pretty simple guys LO supports cheaters and if EAC comes it'll only be after cheaters figure out how to bypass it. *takes off tinfoil hat* The best solution is something like fairfight + battleye/EAC or creating an esports 'OS' essentially that only allows for whitelisted programs/drivers effectively stopping anything but hardware/ai cheats.

Edited April 20, 2023 by MonkaS

[Y2Venom 219]

4 hours ago, MrLek said:

Did FairFight ban legitimate players?

EDIT: I'm asking this because I was looking at the banned players on the FF website, and I read some comments from people saying that the banned players were legit. Of course it could just be friends lying on behalf of the guy who got banned.

I know one instance it banned a player that was later re-instated a lot of people piped up to say that he was legit and there was no way he was cheating. I know for a fact that he was cheating, i know what player he got the cheats from. I would say FF was 100% correct, but some people got away with in on a technicality.

[MACKxBOLAN 432]

3 hours ago, MrChan said:

Is it actually FF you want, or just the ban broadcasts

Yes I want the broadcast n know I won't get it, but the broadcast was the only evidence

presented to me that an anticheat had worked. 

 Yea if another anti cheat was off banning em by the hundreds, I wouldn't know.

I hate to say that in the absence of proof, that ignorance and assumptions prevail.

  thats why I say they should be reporting the ban numbers weekly or bi-monthly

on a Locked thread, with no names

[cheater 296]

fairfight my loves !11

[MonkaS 215]

Bans should also be broadcast and players should get JT or apb$ as a reward for correctly reporting a player if they are convicted of cheating 

[MrChan 337]

21 minutes ago, MACKxBOLAN said:

Yes I want the broadcast n know I won't get it, but the broadcast was the only evidence

presented to me that an anticheat had worked. 

 Yea if another anti cheat was off banning em by the hundreds, I wouldn't know.

I hate to say that in the absence of proof, that ignorance and assumptions prevail.

  thats why I say they should be reporting the ban numbers weekly or bi-monthly

on a Locked thread, with no names

The evidence anti-cheat is working is that you don't meet cheaters. I appreciate that you think half the game cheats, which imo is not correct, but roll with me on this for a minute.

 

Film was banned over 200 times by FairFight according to FFBans.org. Now browsing through his bans, whilst there were a lot of presumably instant bans where the banned character was R9, there are also a lot where the character was R30 or R40. Sometimes he got into the 70s. That's a lot of gameplay in which he was cheating.

 

Now, which is better? A system that tells you that Film was banned 200 times, or people like Film being banned the instant they cheat and not being able to play? I certainly didn't see the likes of him playing when EAC was running.

 

FF was terrible mate. Especially when it had to operate by itself with no PunkBuster. I don't understand how someone who is as obsessed with cheaters as you couldn't tell how much better the game was with EAC vs. FF or BattlEye. Just because the former didn't tell you it was banning people.

Edited April 20, 2023 by MrChan

[MonkaS 215]

Just now, MrChan said:

The evidence anti-cheat is working is that you don't meet cheaters. I appreciate that you think half the game cheats, which imo is not correct, but roll with me on this for a minute.

 

Film was banned over 200 times by FairFight according to FFBans.org. Now browsing through his bans, whilst there were a lot of presumably instant bans where the banned character was R9, there are also a lot where the character was R30 or R40. Sometimes he got into the 70s. That's a lot of gameplay in which he was cheating.

 

Now, which is better? A system that tells you that Film was banned 200 times, or people like Film just not being able to play? I certainly didn't see the likes of him playing when EAC was running.

you make it sound like both aren't possible

[MrChan 337]

5 minutes ago, MonkaS said:

you make it sound like both aren't possible

I'm aware it's possible to broadcast bans with any anti-cheat, it's whether you'd want to.

I guess it's a case that does some sense of 'justice' or sense of being proven right when a major player is banned outweigh a truckload of toxicity that comes with broadcasting bans.

 

Also rewarding players for reporting cheaters is not a good idea. People will get a mate to cheat and then report him for fabulous cash prizes, cos that's the sort of people who play APB.

Edited April 20, 2023 by MrChan

[MonkaS 215]

5 minutes ago, MrChan said:

I'm aware it's possible to broadcast bans with any anti-cheat, it's whether you'd want to.

I guess it's a case that does some sense of 'justice' or sense of being proven right when a major player is banned outweigh a truckload of toxicity that comes with broadcasting bans.

 

Also rewarding players for reporting cheaters is not a good idea. People will get a mate to cheat and report him for fabulous cash prizes, cos that's the sort of people who play APB.

its not toxic to broadcast bans(the only people who think its toxic are the losers whose names are broadcast) and yes people might try that but it'll eventually result in a ban for abusing that system. 

Edited April 20, 2023 by MonkaS

[MrLek 35]

Thank you guys for commenting, it's been very enlightening and productive, you're giving a class.

I hope more players answer the questions, the more opinions and comments, the better, because the purpose of this topic is to be enlightening. Therefore, each one draws his own conclusion.

[MACKxBOLAN 432]

1 hour ago, MrChan said:

you couldn't tell how much better the game was with EAC vs. FF or BattlEye. Just because the former didn't tell you it was banning people

I'm not throwing salt on EAC or BE. 

In the case of BE I may have misinformed as to its duties, thinking BE was solely DDoS.

And that it was doing its job as ddos prevention, as I have not seen the ddos storms we had

back in the days after LO took over. But I didn't see it as an In game anti cheat.

Thankfully @glaciers has 'schooled me' on what BE does, and I stand corrected.

 

        In the case of EAC, we couldn't afford it, and I believe it had issues with the 32bit, 

and to my knowledge has not be reimplemented since 64, as of yet. 

So we didn't have it long enough to be effective or to be judged.

 

 But Yes I would rather have an effective, quiet anticheat

than an ineffective or slow to detect anti cheat that bangs the Gong.

  Possibly this Vote should be reposted a couple months after they install.

[BlatMan 712]

7 hours ago, Y2Venom said:

I know one instance it banned a player that was later re-instated a lot of people piped up to say that he was legit and there was no way he was cheating. I know for a fact that he was cheating, i know what player he got the cheats from. I would say FF was 100% correct, but some people got away with in on a technicality.

There are players who were banned multiple times under fairfight, but Gamersfirst kept unbanning them. Sadly, the FFBans site didn't track repeated bans.

 

Each anticheat is a tool. It comes down to how well the user uses the tool. Battleye can be programmed to block just about anything if Little Orbit felt like it. One thing APB does not block, but other games block, is the ability to run APB in a virtual environment. Battleye can't detect what's happening outside the VM.

 

You have to be careful with what you block, because you can prevent legit players from playing. With PUBG, they blocked VMs running along side the game, because cheaters were using them to scan network packets for external radar. Worst part is you get kicked mid match, instead of getting the blocked message at startup. Meanwhile, cheaters switched to using separate hardware, like their phones.

 

PUBG and Rust block specific mice due to built in hardware macro capabilities. Again, it blocked legit players from playing, but cheaters found workarounds.

[Gateron 267]

When we had EAC it stopped most of your regular closet and cheaters till it was removed. What it couldn't do is server sided. This means it couldn't detect wall hacks and triggerbot.

 

Your most hardcore cheaters like rage king became idiots that played like bronze/silvers with trigger and walls.

 

BE is bypassed since release of the anti cheat. It probably only banned free cheats from 2013 or something.

 

Fairfight didn't work since it had false positives. They where just banning people A that where blatantly obvious or people on speculations for a long time. Mostly they where right though but, there are also false positives.

 

EAC will probably clean most of the cheaters up. When we had EAC there where probably like 8-9 people with real private cheats.

[Ketog 1032]

EAC / FF was my favourite, i hate BE, Battleye is intrusive as hell, it tends to block unecessary things, like some browser tabs on brave / vivaldi, and other tools, while still allowing cheaters to run around before acting against them.

Also Battleye doesn't seem to block stuff like Autohotkey or Autoit.

Eac blocked most things without being intrusive to other apps, just seemed to do the job way better in general without getting in the way of players.

FF was pretty good too, but FFBans was awful, bans shouldn't EVER be broadcasted

[Shui 225]

Just wanna have Link removed.    - Azukii back  

[TheMessiah 430]

theres one called ACE(anti-cheat expert)and is by Tencent

https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/#/solutions/pc-security

[BlatMan 712]

8 hours ago, TheMessiah said:

theres one called ACE(anti-cheat expert)and is by Tencent

https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/#/solutions/pc-security

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