Rampant cheating in PVP?

[Taliriah]

FFS square, just slap battleeye on it

[drtasteyummy]

Why do u guys even open this useless threads, they would rather remove ranked before slapping an anti cheat on it, 50% of the community mods their game for various normal things pvp on the other hand is literally fotm and to be forgotten in a month lol

[Lau298]

Why do u guys even open this useless threads, they would rather remove ranked before slapping an anti cheat on it, 50% of the community mods their game for various normal things pvp on the other hand is literally fotm and to be forgotten in a month lol

Perfect, by all means, now leave.

[verdres]

I don't think the devs intend to add any kind of anti-cheat, and everyone would probably experience performance issues if they did that. I think a reasonable solution would be implementing battle logs that get recorded server-side, and then when players submit complaints during that match they can review the logs for "illegal" actions. For example, instantly swapping to a low-hp target, consistently and abnormally quickly. Or using skills with precision timing that does not align with normal behavior. Or even very egregious behavior such as using skills that ought to be on cooldown.

They also can look out for players exploiting existing bugs, such as the WHM heal charge bug. OR they could, with the cooperation of modders, get examples of mod behavior that can make it easier to automatically cross-reference from battle logs.

[CptBuckyOhare]

There is just one post about anticheat in this thread and it's the one above your post.


There is more then one way to go about it.
Main problem is:

<name> is a fully automated PvP combat routine. An ACR that finally focuses on the truly important parts of FFXIV, the PvP. The real content. 8-)

An ACR that aims to improve on the basic format of 'use skills on the target'. Automatically taking into account important details like target HP, their buffs, surrounding targets, how many of your allies are targeting a person, and whether or not they're in execute range.

Also featuring many quality of life features like smart targeting, a hotbar that makes it so you no longer need to fight the ACR to get skills in, a counter that shows you the number of people currently targeting you, and making usage of addons like Argus to draw lines to your healers that turns red if they're out of line of sight.

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Its fully reactional and basically you don't have to do anything anymore. just move around with your character the rest is done perfectly for you.
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Thing is that SE put in allot of resources to create something, with this going on it will be for nothing since people will start to avoid the mode in like you said a month or so.
I agree on not using anti cheat for the simple fact that it cripples the whole community not just the pvp croud.

There are other ways around it but that would take allot of continuous resources, question would be is it worth?
It's worth if SE has the goal to push this to e-sports, if not and it's just a mode to enjoy then I would say no but if it's a no they should remove rewards for ranking up.
This way there is no use for exploiting leaderboards since there is nothing to gain other then flexing on other people, and lets be honest nobody cares.

[Neoyoshi]

FFS square, just slap battleeye on it

Attach any type of anti-cheat engine, and watch an substantial amount of the userbase mass-exodus.

So many people cheat in this game, they wouldn't be able to play without them.

[Commander_Justitia]

reasonable solution would be implementing battle logs that get recorded server-side, and then when players submit complaints during that match they can review the logs for "illegal" actions

I think that is simply just too much work, only their SpecialTaskForce does that and they don't have that many of them and only do it when there are tons of reports. Would be easier if they can develop an AI that detects those patterns compared to using human resources, which are just too expensive for all those games.

They should shift ranked mode probably into party vs party only and not have it in solo anymore. Cheating will be less effective against coordinated teams and SE only would have to really check those games and not every solo game, which is a lot less trouble to deal for their GM's.

And they should probably let at least 2 people queue up together for the normal/unranked queue, I can imagine many people who would like to play with at least 1 friend.
In The Feast you were able to as well and there were only 4 people in a party.

[CptBuckyOhare]

partying up is fun thing that I agree should be implemented.
thing is that pre-mades will wreck non-pre-mades, so put them together.
2+3 pre-made vs 2+3 pre-made or even 5v5, but dont put non-premade vs pre-made.
People will be on discord coordinating their attacks vs people that just need to go on visuals which makes it really unfair.

[Taliriah]

I think that is simply just too much work, only their SpecialTaskForce does that and they don't have that many of them and only do it when there are tons of reports. Would be easier if they can develop an AI that detects those patterns compared to using human resources, which are just too expensive for all those games.

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of situation where a client side anticheat can actually work wonders. Sure, it's possible to circumvent them but serious products can update themselves on the fly while the game runs. The client integrity checking code that they use can be randomised, and changed whenever they want, and that makes it much harder to defeat durably. It would be better if there was also some server side validation, wow for instance despite having authoritative clients movements (which feels a lot better for the player), have the server detects some type of anomalous movements on the server side (with some well known false positive that result in instant disconnections, mostly involving gliders), but even in the absence of this a good client side anticheat is a lot better than nothing.

Something like battleye is very turnkey, the integration is pretty painless and then they send you the IDs of player who have been detected to cheat, they can even preemptively ban them (by preventing the client from starting when battleeye connects) so you can verify the reposrts and decide what to do with them (perma ban them, give them a warning, have your own policy regarding re-offence, etc). I'm sure other similar anticheat solutions are equally easy to implement. Heck, I'm sure that you could enable it only during pvp duty for the sake of harmless mods used outside of pvp.

The downside is that it's costly. But it's not like they can't afford it. I'm going to assume that whatever reason they offer for not doing that is window dressing for "we don't feel like investing money to solve the problem"

[Tobias_Azuryon]

thing is that pre-mades will wreck non-pre-mades

I dunno I gotta say I'm tired of hearing this excuse repeated infinitely by anyone who thinks people shouldn't be able to party up in a mode with 5v5.

You can get wrecked by WAR/WHM so we should stop WHM/WAR from pairing up.

You can get wrecked if someone has better macros for coordinating their team than you.

We can get wrecked by not having a tank/healer so if they can't have one, don't even start the match.

We can get wrecked by hackers and cheaters so don't even play the mode.

These all or nothing approaches provide no open possibilities for "fun" and/or change. At the end of the day I'd rather lose with my friends having fun making our glams be dwarves than be stomped by bots AND have to do it alone.