Cheaters
I believe I encountered cheaters on my first two raids this wipe. And I'm fairly sure I re-encountered that first one again on a later Reserve scav raid. They were farming Reserve for XP and loot. Not unironically, that's why I was there too ... except I didn't have radars, wall hacks, and lag switches. Being mugged and killed by cheaters is very discouraging. The game is hard enough as it is, with many many steep disadvantages for newbies and low levels, but cheaters just rubs salt in wounds.
With my regular day-job I often have several minutes of downtime and one of the ways I use that is watching various Tarkov videos on YouTube and Twitch. Tutorials, streamers, guides, you name it. There are a number of players/streamers that I watch, it's fun and inspiring watching players that are really good. But today I got a double dose of discouragement. I was watching a recorded Twitch stream and the streamer was playing, but as he played he kept looking over at a second display. Twitch recordings show the synchronized chat traffic, but his lobby was empty. So I'm not sure what he was glancing at. As I watched the recording, he made a wide swing around dorms, then stared at the other display for a bit, checked something, and then he approached dorms - the windows were slate gray because the sun was at the wrong angle - he shot one out, revealing a PMC behind it, and a second shot took the PMC down. I'm fairly sure he was employing a radar cheat. And I watched an old video from a different streamer, who is really good, and he was fighting in Labs someone who was also quite good - the cat and mouse was intense. But suddenly the streamers ping alert showed red just as he pushed into a room in what I would consider a very risky move, he ran past the front of his adversary, who was aiming down sight, and then spun and killed him. The adversary, who until this point had been quite good, didn't move a muscle. And then the ping counter went green and went away. I think he used a lag switch. And I notice in his more recent videos that he now has a little badge covering up his ping display. Probably I'm not the first to notice this. There was a recent thread on reddit about a _different_ streamer who also has an upper right corner badge and a suspect victory.
Lastly, I watched this video from EUL Gaming with an interview of a cheater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=959-ts_WLGE It's worth watching.
So what to do? Well, for me personally, just chin up and carry on. But I do wish Battlestate Games would do something. And I have some suggestions.
Caveats and Qualifications
Before I begin, I will mention that I have never bought any cheats or RMT nor intend to. I started playing EFT last November, late in wipe 12.09. I am not a very good player (as my blog will attest).
As to software, I do know more than a little about software and software development. I have written real-time encryption code, battled software pirates, am well versed in client/server network software as well as very low level work on graphics and GPUs. I have technical chops, likely more than most of my readers. On the flip side, I have no direct experience with Unity (the platform EFT is written on), and there are some statements I will likely make about EFT not using encryption that I have read but have not verified for myself first-hand.
Motives
I don't want to take a deep dive into "why people cheat", but I think it is worth noting that I see two primary reasons for folk to resort to cheating:
- real money trading. There is a market for selling accounts, selling rubles, selling in-game items. The interview from EUL Gaming is with a cheater whose stated main motivation is RMT.
- prestige. The streamers I mentioned are likely motivated by this. It's not good enough to be better than cornflake (me), not good enough to be a really good player. They are looking for an edge.
Suggestions
1 - Align Economic Motives
Economic Motives Misaligned
One very excellent point made in the EUL Gaming interview is that Battlestate Games actually makes more money with the system as it is now. They ban cheaters, cheaters just buy new licenses. If BSG were to truly make cheating impossible, what would that mean to their sales? Would that be a tiny 1% hit to their sales, or would it be 10%, or 30%? I don't know, but BSG likely does. This is a problem, because it means that BSGs profit motives are misaligned. Obviously they want to ban cheaters, to get them to re-purchase licenses, but they don't want to close the door to cheaters, because then that would cost them sales.
Solution: Battlestate Games Should Sell In-Game Items (if you can't beat them, join them).
This will likely be my most controversial suggestion, and the least technical, but I think it is the right one. There is obviously a market for people who want to simply buy their way to Level 20, or to Kappa, or a THICC items case, or whatever. BSG should provide it. They can undercut the prices of the current RMT vendors, and keep undercutting them, to make it unprofitable for RMT vendors. This will significantly cut down on the number of cheaters who are in the game just to mine it for profit. This will also offset the money BSG loses if it makes cheating impossible. In fact, it will align their motives - now the harder it is to cheat at the game, the more money BSG makes. Win win.
I know a lot of readers will object, but my take is this: I don't care if some player has Class 6 armor and a top-tier weapon that they didn't "earn". That does not affect me in the slightest. But what does affect me, is if some player uses radars and lag-switches to kill me unfairly. Heck, I think the first Class 5 armor I ever got my hands on was one I found on a body, I didn't earn it.
Here is a follow up suggestion to really put BSG in the drivers seat: items bought from BSG are unlootable after the first death - they are only lootable on the second death. That's something that those other RMT companies simply won't be able to offer. Would it be annoying to me to kill someone with HexGrid and be unable to loot it? Hell yes. But less annoying than being aimbotted or wall-hacked.
I think this suggestion will help address the RMT cheating aspect. But it still does not address the prestige "just need an edge" motivation. But my other suggestions might help.
2 - Encrypt Network Traffic or Payloads
Public/private key encryption isn't hard and there are options (like elliptical-curve encryption) that can be done fast. Just doing this will stop most radar cheats, which are tools like WireShark that just monitor and filter all network activity on a PC. Again, I don't know Unity, so maybe this would have to be done underneath it, not on top of it, which might be significantly harder (or impossible), but in theory it should be straightforward.
3 - Move Loot Information Out of the Client
As I understand it, presently every client has all the world information in it all the time. This includes the contents of every box, file cabinet drawer, duffle bag, as well as everything carried by every PMC and Scav. This doesn't have to be this way. Since most of these items are not visible on a character, their presence is not needed for rendering. The server, and the server alone, should know the contents of the weapons boxes and duffles, as well as the PMCs backpacks and rigs. Only when searching is the request sent to the server and gotten. With enforcement on the in-world location of the searcher, this one change should also help combat radar cheats. Presumably loose loot would be left as is.
4 - Time Intervals to Prevent Lag Switch Cheats
This is more complicated, and, again, I am not familiar with Unity so it may not be possible from inside the Unity system, but there are several approaches to deal with lag switch cheats. The simplest are time gated intervals for "truth resolution". These punish all players with a small bit of lag, but keep the world synchronized handily - and players with large lag will find the game more difficult. When the lag is small but consistent, it is entirely manageable from a player standpoint. But it absolutely prevents players from introducing lag to take advantage of the all-in-client world information. Alternately, gated time intervals aren't needed, but players with slower connections will experience more rubber-banding, etc. But, in any case, Lag Switch Cheats are technically entirely addressable, I'm just not sure if they are addressable from within Unity.
5 - Streamers who hide their ping behind badges/graphics are not invited to tournaments.
This one could be implemented by the various tournament hosts, and it should be well advertised in advance, so that any streamer who just wanted to put some bling on their screen is not unfairly prevented from tourneying. But it's a not-unreasonable expectation. And I don't mean just for the tournament, I mean on their regular twitch/youtube streams. I don't want to start a witch hunt where making the mistake of putting a graphic in the upper right corner invites accusations of cheating, but I do think that for transparency, until BSG can sort that out, ping indicators should not be masked.
6 - Escort the Noob Quest
This is my dumbest suggestion. It's not really an anti-cheating suggestion. It occurred to me after listening to the EUL Gamer interview where the cheater mentioned performing "carries" with a team, which I presume means meeting the RMT purchaser in the lobby, grouping with them, passing them the stuff in-raid, and then escorting them to the nearest extract. This should totally be an in-game activity/quest.
I will leave the details to others, but a quest where you have to pair with some Level 1 noob and escort them safely to extract might be pretty cool.
Comments
Post a Comment