Time for an anti-cheat

[HikariKurosawa]

There are some technical reasons why i wrote it and my postings do not contradict. It is only a matter of effort, the botters/cheaters have to do to overcome the anticheat mechanisms. You can technically prevent a working code injection. This will propably stop all textures and model altering mods, damage meters etc. Code injection is also very easy to do for the players. Just start the character altering mod/parser with Administrator rights or use a special launcher and you are done. And that is the reason why so many players do that. Because it is easy. If you stop a working code injection, then many players and developers of those tools will simply give up.

But when it comes to stop Gil selling botters, they will not give up so quickly because real money is involved. For botting, teleport hacks etc. code injection is not needed. And if you put the whole Windows installation into a virtual machine then you can do what you want with the game from the VM host. But setting up such a virtual machine, which allows you to modify a game, running in the guest OS is way harder than starting a special launcher with elevated rights.

So no, you cannot prevent cheats and bots but you can raise the effort, which would be needed to run them successfully.


Cheers

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

[CuriousPerson]

Cheers

Cheers to you too

[Larirawiel]

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

There are so many online games with anticheat mechanisms and they are still full with bots. Again, as soon as you can earn money with botfarms, then the botfarm operators will put much more effort to neutralize the anticheat mechanisms compared to normal players. And if you make millions of Dollars with a botfarm then you can easily hire some software developers for very advanced bot software. If they put the Windows installation with the game into a virtual machine (things like KVM or Virtual Box or Hyper-V or VMware etc.) then the anticheat has no chance to detect a bot running outside of the VM. Because the anticheat mechanism runs inside of the VM and you can easily fool it. And yes, maybe an anticheat will fend off some normal players. But an anticheat is also a hack into your OS. And hacks can rise serious security holes into your Windows installation. And yes, it already happened in the past:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...ble-antivirus/


Cheers

[Jojoya]

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

Cheating is "abnormal".

Use of mods may be against the Terms of Service but it only becomes cheating when it gives a player an unfair advantage in completing content compared to those who don't use mods.

Most of the mod use in the game is not related to giving the player an unfair advantage in completing content. It's akin to taking a test where you're told to only use a black pen to mark your answers and you choose to use a blue one instead because you like blue more. Did you break the rule? Yes. Did you gain an unfair advantage in completing the test by doing so? No.

The amount of mod use that truly is cheating is small. If it were rampant, clear rates of high end content when still current would be much higher than they are and come much sooner after release.

So is there cheating? Yes, as you say you can't expect a game to be free of cheaters. Is it normalized? No. Most players will earn their clears and wins through honest skill and effort.

[Aword3213]

Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few online games which does not have server-side cheat detection.

so...how fares the other online games that do have cheat detection?

They're 100% free of cheats, add-on, and bots I assume?

[HikariKurosawa]

You guys can pretend and make all this stuff up all you want but all it does is illustrate how little you care about fairness in gaming and how you don't take this game seriously. It's fine, but it makes the game and its community look bad.

Have fun while you can, technological development is inevitable and AI will make it easy to deal with cheaters soon enough.

Cheating is "abnormal".

Use of mods may be against the Terms of Service but it only becomes cheating when it gives a player an unfair advantage in completing content compared to those who don't use mods.

Most of the mod use in the game is not related to giving the player an unfair advantage in completing content. It's akin to taking a test where you're told to only use a black pen to mark your answers and you choose to use a blue one instead because you like blue more. Did you break the rule? Yes. Did you gain an unfair advantage in completing the test by doing so? No.

The amount of mod use that truly is cheating is small. If it were rampant, clear rates of high end content when still current would be much higher than they are and come much sooner after release.

So is there cheating? Yes, as you say you can't expect a game to be free of cheaters. Is it normalized? No. Most players will earn their clears and wins through honest skill and effort.

Look at the database on fflogs. "But parsing isn't cheating!!" Yes, it is. It enables you to see who is underperforming, who is overperforming, what it takes to clear content. It is a live metric of your performance and how optimal your rotation is, it takes out so much work that it is crazy. Nobody has ever or would ever add up the numbers in battle log because it would be more efficient and effective to just play the game at that point. It isn't supposed to be so easy to see who is performing. All it does is create a system where the game is taken way too seriously in the wrong way and raises the bar of expectations to unrealistic levels. Instead of letting people naturally improve at the game and be seen as human players, they are seen as numbers on a parse and considered for their performance in a parse.

Then there are people who use auto rotations, simplified rotations, cooldown meters, dot meters, auto marking, cactbot, etc. It's very common and it is all cheating. All of this provides a huge competitive advantage in the raid scene.

Pretend all you want, but this game is dead to anyone who cares about fair play.

[Aword3213]

You guys can pretend and make all this stuff up all you want but all it does is illustrate how little you care about fairness in gaming and how you don't take this game seriously. It's fine, but it makes the game and its community look bad.

Have fun while you can, technological development is inevitable and AI will make it easy to deal with cheaters soon enough.

Cheaters would never know what hit them. It's not like those third party developers would ever think to utilize the power of AI to develop better cheats and bots.

Pretend all you want, but this game is dead to anyone who cares about fair play.

Online gaming is a cruel cruel world. Why can't everyone just be polite, lawful, honest, virtuous and fill the world with rainbows and laughter? Is this too much to ask?

[HikariKurosawa]

ITT: Cheaters malding over someone calling them out on being trash

[Saraide]

It isn't supposed to be so easy to see who is performing.

Me when I'm mad no one wants to hard carry me through savage.

[HikariKurosawa]

Me when I'm mad no one wants to hard carry me through savage.

Can't relate and not the point that was made. I was talking about how you are required to have experience to get into groups, and have to have a resume. It creates an old boy's club environment and lowers the overall participation in end game. This makes the level of play lower than it should be because there are far less people playing that level of content than there would be if not for these systems.

Keep pretending you're good though, even with cheats you're bad.