Handling Cheaters Gracefully vs Hardline ToS + Questionable legality of bans

[redheadturk]

OK, how do you distinguish between mods, which can be used as an advantage in PvP and harmless content only mods? In a generic way it is not possible. You have to work with mod specific black-/whitelisting to achieve this. And i doubt, that the devs will introduce those black-/whitelists and keep them up-to-date.


And yes, you can get advantages in PvP when you replace things like textures. You can make walls transparent (so-called wallhacks) or you can make invisible players visible again etc.



Cheers

I will forever fight against a hard crackdown on non cheating mods. I don't care if you can use texture mods to cheat. I care if the person using them is cheating with them. Ban the cheaters, do not make qol mods impossible to use.

[Larirawiel]

I will forever fight against a hard crackdown on non cheating mods. I don't care if you can use texture mods to cheat. I care if the person using them is cheating with them. Ban the cheaters, do not make qol mods impossible to use.

But you cannot distinguish between people, who use the mods for cheating and people, who do not. That is the problem. You can programmatically only distinguish between "modded client" and "client in original state" and not how the mod is used. And because this nature of it is so binary, there will only be a binary solution: ban all mods or ignore all mods. If you do not want, that this decision is made in a binary manner, then you have to use black-/whitelists. And again, it is unlikely, that SQEX will do that. It is much effort to keep them up-to-date. And if you start with black-/whitelisting mods then you would implicitly allow certain mods.

The best thing would be: design the game so, that the players do not have the desire to mod it. But this also needs some manpower to insert many new hairstyles, clothes ... and maybe nsfw content.


Cheers

[redheadturk]

But you cannot distinguish between people, who use the mods for cheating and people, who do not. That is the problem. You can programmatically only distinguish between "modded client" and "client in original state" and not how the mod is used. And because this nature of it is so binary, there will only be a binary solution: ban all mods or ignore all mods. If you do not want, that this decision is made in a binary manner, then you have to use black-/whitelists. And again, it is unlikely, that SQEX will do that. It is much effort to keep them up-to-date. And if you start with black-/whitelisting mods then you would implicitly allow certain mods.

The best thing would be: design the game so, that the players do not have the desire to mod it. But this also needs some manpower to insert many new hairstyles, clothes ... and maybe nsfw content.


Cheers

Or simply do not use automated enforcement, expand the enforcement team so they can have actual eyes on the problems to enforce the rules against the actual cheaters. Automated tools that not only eliminate the QOL mods and accessibility mods that disabled people use, but also eliminate mac and linux users, and would actually eliminate console users as well as consoles cannot run anticheat are not the answer. Extra enforcement staff to catch and punish cheaters is

[forsakee]

The best thing would be: design the game so, that the players do not have the desire to mod it. But this also needs some manpower to insert many new hairstyles, clothes ... and maybe nsfw content.

Cheers

No we don't need in-game NSFW mods, that sounds like a way too lose a lot of revenue! Would change the rating of the game and could possibly get the game banned by many cultures due to laws/religion etc.

[redheadturk]

No we don't need in-game NSFW mods, that sounds like a way too lose a lot of revenue! Would change the rating of the game and could possibly get the game banned by many cultures due to laws/religion etc.

On top of what I noted above: Automated enforcement tools in the form of anticheat would remove a good portion of the playerbase due to people that due to either their operating system or their equipment can't run anticheat.

[Larirawiel]

Or simply do not use automated enforcement, expand the enforcement team so they can have actual eyes on the problems to enforce the rules against the actual cheaters. Automated tools that not only eliminate the QOL mods and accessibility mods that disabled people use, but also eliminate mac and linux users, and would actually eliminate console users as well as consoles cannot run anticheat are not the answer. Extra enforcement staff to catch and punish cheaters is

Hey, i am not for client side anticheat mechanisms because i know their limitations and what harm they can cause for the overall security state of a client. And it seems to me, that some people vastly overestimate which things are possible with those anticheat tools or what SQEX can do on the server side. And no, "look into the log" is not a good solution. It is very personal ressources consuming. Reading and analyzing logs is not a trivial task. And logs are not very accurate. Trying to figure out, whether a reaction of a player is "not possible as a human" or not would be maaaaaybe possible in a zero latency environment between clients and servers. But the internet is not zero latency. And because it is not guaranteed, that the ip packets will always take the same route between client and server, there will always be situations, which look like "reaction is not possible as a human" in the logs and the player is not guilty using cheats. Sorry, the whole thing is not so easy as it seems.

No we don't need in-game NSFW mods, that sounds like a way too lose a lot of revenue! Would change the rating of the game and could possibly get the game banned by many cultures due to laws/religion etc.

That is the reason why i used the word "maybe". A lot of mods are for nsfw content.

But they could start with sfw content first. More hairstyles, more faces, more clothes ...




Cheers

[redheadturk]

Hey, i am not for client side anticheat mechanisms because i know their limitations and what harm they can cause for the overall security state of a client. And it seems to me, that some people vastly overestimate which things are possible with those anticheat tools or what SQEX can do on the server side. And no, "look into the log" is not a good solution. It is very personal ressources consuming. Reading and analyzing logs is not a trivial task. And logs are not very accurate. Trying to figure out, whether a reaction of a player is "not possible as a human" or not would be maaaaaybe possible in a zero latency environment between clients and servers. But the internet is not zero latency. And because it is not guaranteed, that the ip packets will always take the same route between client and server, there will always be situations, which look like "reaction is not possible as a human" in the logs and the player is not guilty using cheats. Sorry, the whole thing is not so easy as it seems.




That is the reason why i used the word "maybe". A lot of mods are for nsfw content.

But they could start with sfw content first. More hairstyles, more faces, more clothes ...




Cheers

A few false positives with actual real people that can be reversed later are better than wholesale eliminating accessibility for disabled people that use mods for such. I will always advocate for enforcement by real people over automated tools, and I will never support automated tools, whether server or client side.