[Feedback] Add Epic Easy Anti-Cheat to FFXIV before is too late

[Larirawiel]

World of Warcraft, for example, will disconnect a player if they move too fast as that's all verified server side.

But you do not need rootkits on the client side to achieve this.


Cheers

[KageTokage]

It almost seems like they had some kind of serverside validation in place for PvP at some point as for a time, you were able to DC yourself using Shoulder Tackle, Onslaught, and other gap-closer abilities to go over uneven terrain or obstacles in a manner that may have been confusing the server into thinking foul play was involved, but it seems to have been removed after generating false positives too frequently.

[Johners]

But you do not need rootkits on the client side to achieve this.


Cheers

WoW has and will continue to use both, same for the majority of other online games. For example, the Honorbuddy ban waves in Warlords of Draenor used a combination of client-side and server-side verification. Server side these players were using a paid rotation cheat to play their rotation for them in raids so at first glance it might just look like they're playing like a top level player. The anti-cheat however detects a third party program sending inputs to the game rather than natural keyboard and mouse inputs. Once Blizzard were happy they'd analysed gameplay patterns enough, ban waves that were timed to hit during raid nights. All of a sudden Mythic raid guilds were losing top DPSers mid-boss fight and guilds then had to deal with the social outcome of that.

You can't just rely on just client-side or just server-side protections. It's ultimately a lot of data collection and play style analysis from a dedicated team that can determine who's playing legitimately and who isn't. The issue for Square Enix is that bard music bots, the ones that "harmlessly" play in Limsa, would trigger the anti-cheat like an actual rotation cheater would. Square Enix seemingly want to avoid actually having to make difficult moderation decisions that they'd need to carefully communicate. The downside to this choice is that any PvP mode becomes at the mercy of plugin users overnight, as this happened, when it should never be a problem in 2022.

[AnnRam]

FFXIV Already runs horrible on modern PCs ( well since ever ) image now EAC, can't wait to get 25 fps on major cities using a RTX/I7.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

FFXIV Already runs horrible on modern PCs ( well since ever ) image now EAC, can't wait to get 25 fps on major cities using a RTX/I7.

I don't have and have never had issues running the game. This seems like a you problem maybe?

I don't think I've dropped below 60fps in cities in a while.

[Zsolen]

I'm no expert on anti-cheat software, so I do not want to comment on what can be implemented and what cannot, although I will say a lot of people seem to be parroting information on this. Parroting does not add to the discussion and often leads to misinformation. Let's only talk about thing you personally know something about, so when I read about someone's expertise or experience, I can actually take it into account. I claim ignorance here.

I've been a Ranked Feast player (dia most seasons with some plat), and I've seen the cheating first hand as well as on fellow players' streams/clips. The cheaters negatively affected the top players more, since the losses were much harder hits to take. The Special Task Force will not ban players in ranked matches, even with this evidence. On Crystal, we had a speed hacker that was never banned. He was reported by a lot of the top pvpers, myself included. Now we know SE will ban users using Twitch as evidence, but that only seems to be if it is the streamer themselves. Other Feast players were asking for a few things, from what I remember. Either check logs, accept streams/clips as evidence, or have a GM follow those in a match that have a few reports of cheating. Result: Perma the whole account and IP. Easy right? Except SE never does anything. At least let the clips be enough evidence for SE to look further into it.

There were others types of cheating as well, such as boosting and wintrading. Boosting is someone paying someone else to play their account, and wintrading can be done one of two ways. One side throws a real match to the other, or they queue up during dead time with 8 people and trade wins that way. Wintrading is actually rare on Crystal but it did happen. We did have the same person being boosted every season as well, but he annoyed people the least, since the booster still had to play. I mentioned these other types, because they can work their way into CC, like they did with Feast, so I figure it is worth mentioning. I don't think a anti-cheat program can stop that, but like I said, I wouldn't actually know.

[Syln]

I'm no expert on anti-cheat software, so I do not want to comment on what can be implemented and what cannot, although I will say a lot of people seem to be parroting information on this. Parroting does not add to the discussion and often leads to misinformation. Let's only talk about thing you personally know something about, so when I read about someone's expertise or experience, I can actually take it into account. I claim ignorance here.

I've been a Ranked Feast player (dia most seasons with some plat), and I've seen the cheating first hand as well as on fellow players' streams/clips. The cheaters negatively affected the top players more, since the losses were much harder hits to take. The Special Task Force will not ban players in ranked matches, even with this evidence. On Crystal, we had a speed hacker that was never banned. He was reported by a lot of the top pvpers, myself included. Now we know SE will ban users using Twitch as evidence, but that only seems to be if it is the streamer themselves. Other Feast players were asking for a few things, from what I remember. Either check logs, accept streams/clips as evidence, or have a GM follow those in a match that have a few reports of cheating. Result: Perma the whole account and IP. Easy right? Except SE never does anything. At least let the clips be enough evidence for SE to look further into it.

There were others types of cheating as well, such as boosting and wintrading. Boosting is someone paying someone else to play their account, and wintrading can be done one of two ways. One side throws a real match to the other, or they queue up during dead time with 8 people and trade wins that way. Wintrading is actually rare on Crystal but it did happen. We did have the same person being boosted every season as well, but he annoyed people the least, since the booster still had to play. I mentioned these other types, because they can work their way into CC, like they did with Feast, so I figure it is worth mentioning. I don't think a anti-cheat program can stop that, but like I said, I wouldn't actually know.

Frankly there is no need of a degree to see the difference, launch a game with this garbage ON and launch it again without it whatever hardware you have, you'll notice a difference in term of ressources and performance if you have like me an 8 years old pc, the older the hardware is the more you'll notice it.

There are many way far more efficient to solve this issue and as i said in my first post i'm shocked to see that there are peoples that are so eager to install crippling software that won't do much about said problem on their pc.

Now the bright side is that squeenix have an hard stance on this, for now at least.

[Zsolen]

Frankly there is no need of a degree to see the difference, launch a game with this garbage ON and launch it again without it whatever hardware you have, you'll notice a difference in term of ressources and performance if you have like me an 8 years old pc, the older the hardware is the more you'll notice it.

There are many way far more efficient to solve this issue and as i said in my first post i'm shocked to see that there are peoples that are so eager to install crippling software that won't do much about said problem on their pc.

Now the bright side is that squeenix have an hard stance on this, for now at least.

I prefer facts not emotions, generalizations, or repeated phrases.

What causes the PC to slow down? Which particular software does it? What other software is there? What do other games use? How do they affect PCs? Is it server side and client side? Blanket statements serve no purpose.

[-BlueGreen-]

Yeah, it's pretty pointless to add this, so let's not.

Anyone who knows anything about network security knows "never trust the client". All the server can trust is itself. The server can't even know for sure what program is sending the data that says "user x moves to location y" or whatever your character does in game. All it knows is a packet of data comes into the datacenter and the server needs to do something with it or ignore it.

If you try to run client-only anti-cheat, cheaters will simply disable that software and move on. If you add server verification to the mix, you'll increase network traffic (hello even more lag!) as every player will now have to send this data along with normal gameplay data. Cheaters will simply fake this data. Encryption won't work as the key(s) would have to be present in the official client to allow the official client to encrypt/decrypt whatever the server is expecting and cheaters will simply extract the key(s) from the official client.

This is precisely why anti-cheat can only work strictly server side. You build in checks like:

• Bob has 1k gil and tries to send Alice a trade to give her 10k gil. Is Bob trying to cheat? You bet!
• Bob entered Ul'Dah from the steps of Nald gate and was in front of Momodi in 0.5 seconds. Is Bob trying to cheat? Probably, but what if Bob just has a crappy internet connection?
• Bob has a level 30+ bard, unlocks performance mode, picks up his guitar and flawlessly plays Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and the Flames" first try. Is Bob cheating? Probably, but we can't know for sure, so we just let it slide as it is something technically possible no matter how improbable (exceptionally skilled people do exist, just not at the rate MMOs might lead us to believe due to cheating).
• Bob has been gathering from mining/botany nodes non-stop for 720 hours. Is Bob cheating? Almost certainly as that length of time should kill most people. Is it a cheat program? Maybe a bot, but it could be regular people rotating out (of course, account sharing is against ToS, too, but your client-side anti-cheat wouldn't be able to guess that unless you try to start including biometric data as well for cheaters to fake).

Of course, the real challenge is that some of these checks are pretty trivial to implement, like the first one, and are almost certainly built into the game from the start or are patched quickly. In cases like the second, the calculations can start to be CPU intensive since you have to account for network latency that causes players to appear to move faster/slower than intended even with the official client. Normally you wouldn't insta-ban someone for a single infraction of something like the second case. This means you have to look at their activity as a whole, run some heuristics and make an educated guess between cheater or crappy internet. You can make it as sophisticated/smart/whatever as you want, but you can bet it'll increase the server load as you do and then everyone starts to lag.

It's a balancing act between anti-cheat/server costs/number of players allowed online at once. Given the recent surge in popularity and the efforts to make do with the hardware on hand to increase the number of players allowed in at once per datacenter, they probably don't have much CPU available to add in a bunch of anti-cheat heuristics on the server side at the moment. I wouldn't be surprised if more players would rather SE do something about queue times at peak hours than take a stab at catching cheaters. It's also a never-ending battle. Close down one avenue of cheating with a new heuristic, and cheaters will just move on to exploiting something else.

As for the third, people attempting to shut down that form of cheating remind me of the people who like to split hairs in discussions about "legit" vs. "legal" Pokemon. There's no way for a system to know without a doubt if a given "legal" (as in technically possible) Pokemon is also "legit". It also doesn't help that "legit" is often a moving goal post of it's own. Consider situations like "legit Pokemon caught in game using normal methods, but then cloned using exploit" or "player manipulated system date/time/whatever to seed the RNG to roll the desired Pokemon attributes". Depending on who you ask, such things might be considered "legit" while others aren't.

Finally the fourth one is much like the second except that it can be done with the official client on a "clean" system even with untampered client-side anti-cheat (at least, I haven't heard of any which incorporate biometric data as well). While you can take a stab at guessing what the human limits are, there's always going to be someone who comes along and sets a new world record. While you can pretty well guess they're at least violating the ToS even if they aren't using a bot, you still can't know for sure.

[QooEr]

If you try to run client-only anti-cheat, cheaters will simply disable that software and move on. If you add server verification to the mix, you'll increase network traffic (hello even more lag!) as every player will now have to send this data along with normal gameplay data.

about this, i believe that at least for the context of CC only, server verification could happen at the end of a match. sure, you mightve lost that match but if the other team truly cheated in blatant ways that mightve been the end of them. the game ALREADY has event logs that the servers keep track of, since GMs often use said logs to verify reports. it likely wont work against every form of cheating in cc, but can cut down on at least the biggest ones.