Exploitation (Warp, Botting, etc.)

[Discordia]

There's been a lot of different kinds of exploitations that's been undermining the game as of late. These involve warping (from one node point to another, from one location to another, without the use of an Aetheryte Crystal), botting and other forms of exploitation. I've seen the warp exploitations myself, brazenly being used out where everyone should be able to see them, but either gets unreported due to apathy or that other players are also enaged in similar behavior.

If you want to know what is causing a lot of server instabilities, you might want to beef up your support staff that reviews the "cheating" tickets. Many players, myself included, have reported all sorts of things that are not limited to RMT spamming in chat. And I know some groups have even used these illicit programs for end game purposes.

[xSinful_Snake]

I have to imagine this is of PC player base origin as this is a common problem in a lot of major MMO's and typically never accomplished by console players (I know a lot of console hackers and they've told me in the past that modifying the functions of an MMO is often too frustrating to complete). However the opposite is quite false when it comes to PC Players. I've seen individuals use add-on executable programs to modify how games operate.

We reall need to report these instances as a whole or they will probably go unnoticed. Lets make sure to step on This before it gets out of control.

[KisaiTenshi]

There's been a lot of different kinds of exploitations that's been undermining the game as of late. These involve warping (from one node point to another, from one location to another, without the use of an Aetheryte Crystal), botting and other forms of exploitation. I've seen the warp exploitations myself, brazenly being used out where everyone should be able to see them, but either gets unreported due to apathy or that other players are also enaged in similar behavior.

If you want to know what is causing a lot of server instabilities, you might want to beef up your support staff that reviews the "cheating" tickets. Many players, myself included, have reported all sorts of things that are not limited to RMT spamming in chat. And I know some groups have even used these illicit programs for end game purposes.

I have two videos of this going on that I included in reports. As for how SE can fix it, would likely invite using anti-debug/memory-encryption/anti-hooking techniques that tend to make the computer much more unstable. The types of innocent software caught in the crossfire of doing this (for example PSO2 immediately crashes all media players (Gameguard), Hackshield breaks whenever Windows Updates (Nexon software), Themida prevents attempting to run the game on WINE/Linux/MacOSX) when it starts wasting CPU cycles doing this. The anti-cheat software used by WoW treats running on Linux and programmable keyboards as cheating.

Like the one good thing that OnLive is supposed to solve is to nerf the ability for people to hack game binaries.

[xSinful_Snake]

They don't need anticheat software. They need a special team of admins that are able to appear in any zone at anytime but be invisible in order to observe the reported characters. Very simple scenario: an admin receives a forward of a cheat report. Admin teleports to the exact XY coordinates of the player and observes them for some time. If the players performs an exploit while bein observed, the admin performs a ban/suspension process. I'm sure the admin could even have a window for monitoring chat box commands entered or even remotely monitor the .exe or config files to detect any abnormalities in CPU usage or unknown or anomalous code lines.

[Ihm]

All they need to do is check the values the client is posted back are not too far out of the expected range, but no, instead the server just accepts any data sent from the client so you can jack your memory, say you're somewhere else, and the server just accepts it.

[Discordia]

I think Ihm is right because that's what I have suspected. I know earlier on during Early Access (one of the very rare times I beat the log-in boss) that a character, level 1, was left outside innkeeper NPC in Uldah's Adventurer's Guild on Leviathan server, and you can see the lips moving, which means "chatting". Then all of a sudden it started to gurgitate stuff in /say, and they were all numbers, followed by what appeared to be codes or something similar. I think they had sat on some exploits found during beta and while other players had not stumbled across those to report to SE, proceeded to use these after release. SE needs to button up these exploitations because it *can* lead to server instabilities which may lead to more than just inconvenience (think about innocent players getting caught with corrupted data on their account)

[KisaiTenshi]

They don't need anticheat software. They need a special team of admins that are able to appear in any zone at anytime...

Have you played any other MMO? The number of staff employed full time is less then the number of people hacking the game full time. One game I had played, I know exactly how many GM's they have, and it's less than the number of servers.

We all keep thinking these are "easy to fix" by throwing staff at it, or off-the-shelf fixes, when it's not. If you want to beat the hackers, you have to beat them at their own game and actually leverage the community and GM's willingness to put an end to it. One game I played, the cheating was so rampant that they completely destroyed their European servers, because they relied too much on volunteers and had nobody capable of fixing the damage.

Here's what we can do in the mean time:
Take screenshots and video, use the game's "target signs" function to flag the bot, then right-click follow to show in the video that it's teleporting and the game can't follow. Show the video of them teleporting directly onto the gathering node and appearing in spots that are inaccessible. Right-click on the bot to show what level it's at and what gear it's wearing. Bots tend to wear all level 1 gear or no gear at all.
What SE can do break this:
- increase the rate of wear on gathering below-level tools and use this to check the bot reports with expected behavior. (eg attempting to mine level 10 with level 1 gear will break the gear after 10 attempts)
- check the positions of the gathering nodes against the positions actually "moved to", real players aren't able to move to two yalms in the air.

[worldofneil]

With FFXI they tended to wait and then banned thousands of accounts at time. Example of this:

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/polnews/news9096.shtml

I was trying to find an example which including teleport hacks (I think they called it incorrect movements), but unfortunately I was unable to do so. I remember reading about it multiple times though so they're certainly aware it can happen and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been monitoring accounts doing that already.

I don't know for sure if they'll ban thousands at a time like the did in the past, just mentioning it as their previous history suggests they will.

[Syamic]

why wait until they have thousands when it only take's 100 or so to f**k up the ecconomy

[KisaiTenshi]

why wait until they have thousands when it only take's 100 or so to f**k up the ecconomy

Probably because it's done as MDE (Mass Data Entry, or Massive Destruction of Evidence), usually it's a "bulk fix" instead of individual bans. Like banning 100's at once is because those 100's all matched the invalid data in their logs.