Hackers And Cheaters And Glitchers, OH MY!

When preparing for this article, I sent out a LOT of emails. I made my position clear – simply that I want to know what these companies are doing to stem the flood of cheaters in their games. I sent emails to EA, Activision, Blizzard (ACT), SOE, BioWare (EA), 2k, and at least 10 other, smaller companies to get their take on the situation and see what, if anything, they’re doing to get these losers out of the game.

Of the host of companies I emailed, only one had the balls to give me a proper reply. Sure, I got lots of emails back telling me “We use punkbuster” and “We accept complaints through our customer service department” and, of course, the ubiquitous “We taking this kind of thing very seriously”. Funny, though (really, it’s more sad than funny), SOE is the only one of the larger companies who bothered to write me back and they immediately invited me to sit down with their president, John Smedley, to talk about the situation.

Of course I took them up on the offer and I had a long, honest and open discussion with John about what Sony Online Entertainment does with cheating, hacking and griefing.

There are some things we talked about which I can’t divulge, due to the nature of the situation and because I understand that doing so would give the cheaters some good intel on how to skirt their methods. Also, some things we decided just aren’t fit for public consumption so I’m not going to transcribe the whole conversation here, I’m just going to hit the important points.

This conversation took place well before the release of Planetside 2, when a lot of cheaters were floating around the beta. This was a great time because it was giving SOE a huge opportunity to gain intel and data on the cheat methods which were being employed, and allowing them to increase their ability to detect them. You see, SOE has a number of methods in place to track stats and information in order to identify people who are PROBABLY cheating. Once the people are identified, they can be investigated and, if found to be cheating, they can be banned.

Here’s how it went down:

The first thing John told me is that the net was already out. They had already identified a number of hacker groups and were in the process of fixing some of the holes that allowed their software to run. They told me about some highly classified cloak-and-dagger, style, “I could tell you guys about it but I’d have to kill you or SOE would track me down” kinda stuff, as well but…I can’t tell you about any of that. What I can tell is some of the less hush-hush stuff about how they track cheaters.

First off, they have a team of people who are 100% dedicated to catching and banning cheaters. They do nothing else. They aren’t coders or artists or writers who moonlight as game security, no…All they do is track down and ban cheaters. Those people do that by looking at a wall of data and searching for anomalies. When they find one, they start to dig deeper. ONce they’ve dug enough, they find that either it was a true anomaly or they find that there’s some shenanigans going on. If shens are detected, they swing the ban hammer.

So what are some of the things they look for? Well, if you have an outrageously high percentage of head shots, you’re going to get looked at. If you have an outrageously high accuracy, you’re going to get looked at. If you have a really high XP:kill:death ratio, you’re going to get looked at. The people at SOE know what a cheater looks like, on paper, and they’re going to have a look at you if you do anything cheater-ish…That includes glitching and boosting (falsely inflating your score or rank) and many many people have been banned for doing shady things.

I know that they look at things like XP:kill:death ratio, like I said but one of the things that really caught my attention was that they also look at every round fired in the game. I asked them what they do about people who have figured out how to clip through walls and kill people inside buildings and they told me that they track every single round that is fired, from its point of origin (the gun barrel) to point of impact. From there, they can also track every single thing which was in the bullet’s path so if the bullet originated at X and impacted a Z but Y was in the way, they know someone’s up to something and can take action.

Some of the other anti-cheat methods they have in place are client side, which includes detection algorithms to prevent some of the more basic, key hacks which programmers use to change games. This prevents things like injecting code into .dll files and a number of other cheat methods. If those things are detected, the situation is reported automagically to SOE for them to investigate and act upon.

Additionally, they have server side detection which looks for modified packets, and helps to identify cheaters. This also takes a lot of load off of the team who works on catching the cheaters by helping them identify some of the anomalies which will lead them to snatching these people up. They also use the standard reporting type features which most multiplayer games use and the “humint” (human intel) facet of cheat detection is always valuable because people can catch things that no cheat detection program will ever be able to.

Now, is that so hard? Why isn’t everyone doing this?

During our conversation, John used a lot of analogy and he likened cheaters to sharks, many times. One of the things he told me is that he wants to make sure they don’t end up with any dolphins in their shark nets. I think that’s an amazing goal to have. He also told me that, as part of the sweep they were tracking (and will continue to track) every single aimbot in the game. They do this for a couple of reasons. First, they want to make sure it’s an aimbot and not a bug. Then, once they have identified it an aimbot, they want to gather as much data as they can. They may let an aimbotter play for an extended period of time so they can gather that data and make sure they can incorporate that data into their future detection.

It was a rather enlightening conversation.

We then talked about why people cheat…John Smedley’s take on it is that the people who write the cheat programs do so because they’re super smart and they can…They do it because they want to see how good of a program they can write. I can agree with that. I think it is a big motivation for people who are really smart and really bored to write software programs like that simply because they are able to and want to see just how good they are.

As for the people who use the cheat programs, his take is equally simple – cheaters cheat because they’re losers who like to cheat and screw it up for everyone else. This I completely agree with.

We went on to talk about all of the Youtube videos of people employing aimbots, speed hacks, teleport glitches, shooting through walls, etc and I asked if he had seen them. He told me that he had seen all of the videos which were currently out and featured people cheating. He also told me that a lot of the people who made those videos had already been banned and wouldn’t be making an appearance in the final release, which brought me to my major point…The dagger that I would thrust into SOE to make them see the error of their ways…

It’s a free to play game…How do you “ban” someone from a free to play game when they can just make a new account and continue to cheat?!

His answer was immediate and definitive…”The bans will stick” he told me, “Making a new account won’t bypass a ban”.

Orly? And how, pray tell, are you going to accomplish that, Mr. Smedley? We went on to spend a lot of time talking about the ban methods and the various particulars of how they are making it work. They told me that I am free to talk about those methods but to be honest, I don’t want to. I don’t want to because I don’t want to give the people doing this crap any information they may need to make it easier for them to find a hole in the system. What I can tell you is that the bans will stick…Of that I have no doubt.

Sure, someone may bypass one ban but you can’t get past them all…

Funny how SOE was willing to sit down with me and go over all of this but other companies wouldn’t even confirm that they use any kind of anti-cheat systems at all. I am under the distinct impression that many of them use no anti-cheat systems and couldn’t care less about cheaters because once they’ve gotten your money, what do they need you for?

Of course, now a lot of companies are starting to charge monthly or yearly premiums for the ability to play their games online which MAY cut down on a little bit of the cheating but in the long run the only thing most of these companies care about is money. They’ll continue to charge and really won’t do anything about it until gamers start to vote with their wallets.

It’s good to know that we at least have companies like SOE around who are taking an active stance against cheating and trying to make the gaming world better for everyone. It’s about time.