Hacks! An investigation into aimbot dealers, wallhack users, and the million-dollar business

I'd only play competitive games on console, the trouble with PC is that just by reducing resolution/textures you can gain an advantage over other players... never mind all other professional hacks.
 
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mmj_uk said:
I'd only play competitive games on console...
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Wow.

mmj_uk said:
the trouble with PC is that just by reducing resolution/textures you can gain an advantage over other players.
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This bit I kind of agree with. The trouble is that many games running in highest settings makes it feel incredibly sluggish, even on high-end hardware. Anyone that grew up with twitchy FPS games will probably be running their modern games in lower than highest settings in order to maximise the responsiveness. I used to judge it as a behaviour but the last time I played any FPS game for any length of time I ended up doing the same just so I didn't feel like I was moving through treacle and/or got motion sickness.
 
dreigns said:
I remember quake 2 day I was always called a cheater it made me feel good ;) that just with my own skill I would be called that.
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If I had a dollar for every time someone called me a cheat when a sniper in BF3 and Global Agenda............ top ranked in the top 0.01% as a sniper in both games.
 
As annoying as they are, hackers aren't really that much of a problem when you're in a well organized server. It's when you get stuck with no admin for long periods of time, that's where it becomes painfully frustrating.

I always remember being in my clan practice server in Arma 2 and some random guy joined somehow and just tore apart the server.

At first he was just aimbotting and teleporting around the map, but then he starting spawning things at will, deleting objects and entire buildings away. The admin couldn't kick him and we were powerless to stop him. He then spawned us all in the middle of nowhere, as goats, then proceeded to shoot us one by one. Once that was done things went crazy, one second we were all spawned into jets in a giant dog fight, then next we were on bikes whilst he chased us down in a tank. It then literally started raining vehicles and npc's until the server crashed.

It was one of the strangest yet most hilarious things I've ever come across in all my years gaming.
 
Sin_Chase said:
It's never going to happen. Cloud Based GAMING is a pipe dream.

Full on streamed gaming is just not practical with any kind of added latency. Not to mention any minor packet-loss that would otherwise be handled will be an entire freeze/drop of the entire game.

Supplement PROCESSING power from the cloud for non latency sensitive segments of a game? Yeah, I can see that happening.
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Perhaps it would never be acceptable for you.

However there are plenty of console gamers happily playing on TVs with 100ms input lag. How many people even know how much input lag their TV has?? And then you have people who don't use Gaming Mode, and are quite happy being a couple frames behind - they don't even notice.

So sure, Online and the like won't be good enough for pro twitch gamers... for the rest, I can see it happening in the not too distant future.

Sony wouldn't have invested a ton in Gaikai if they didn't think it had a chance.
 
FoxEye said:
Sony wouldn't have invested a ton in Gaikai if they didn't think it had a chance.
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So you're saying Sony can't make mistakes? :P

Last I knew onlive simply could afford to provide the service so branched out into other areas. In fact last I read they went bankrupt but I guess it's been bought out.

I think some people underestimate what goes into providing a game to someone remotely, you still have to have that game render on the host machine - thus requiring a semi-decent setup. Understanding they've pretty much turn everything down to low including the resolution, it still requires all the hardware requirements to run the game and the connectivity/maint costs.

So offering the ability for someone to play games at a cheap monthly sub, where does any of that recoup the costs spent on farms of servers?
Advertising? Or like I said before, branching out into others areas to support the product?

I could be missing something though, maybe they expect to have enough users to cover the costs and realize that not all of them will be playing 24/7 so meet the demand only when needed, shutting off the rest when not.
So they'll probably expect a single device to host x users y times a day.

Still, the tech is limited by physics.
 
Being called a hacker (and not) in any FPS is pretty much the ultimate achievement in "skill" :P
 
And it's not just FPS. Even on little old League of Legends there are now hacks/cheats. Really is quite sad and it's only on the increase
 
And then you have the likes of ISBoxer in EVE where you can control 20 accounts at the same time. The strange thing is CCP seem to think that is ok because someone is at the keyboard but can't seem to get their head around the fact it no one could actually play 20 accounts and therefore external software is giving the users a distinct advantage. I guess they keep quiet because they get 19 more subs that way.
 
Efour said:
Being called a hacker (and not) in any FPS is pretty much the ultimate achievement in "skill" :P
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Haha, yeh I can see where you are coming from but at the same time I would be offended. I never have, and never will cheat in an online/MP game.
 
Hacking has always been prevalent in online games, but it goes way back to single player games too. Anyone remember the cheat cartridges you could buy for consoles? Or the cheat codes you could type in when playing doom (IDKFA, GOD, NOCLIP etc)? We have always instilled the mentality that cheating is OK, that letting someone else do the work for you is OK. The cheats are even coded into the games of old.

When I talk about cheats people call me paranoid. When I talk about how advanced they can be they think I am talking rubbish.

One of the biggest issues with hacks in the last 10 years is naturalised aim code. Basic hacks have 'snappy' aiming properties. Custom ones have naturalised aim which uses mouse accel/deccel to make the mosue movement seem real. They also have % accuracy code, so the user can customise how accurate they want their bot to be. In Quake 3 or QL, generally most hackers set them to around 40-50% accuracy, because that is realistically achieavable by a good player. Any higher and it becomes far more suspiscious.

Then there are advanced wallhacks that colour enemies based on how visible they are to the player. This stops the hacker shooting at walls by accident where a player is not quite visible yet.

Then there are hacks involving spectator cams, where the hacker will have a view in their hud of what the enemy player is seeing so knows where they are.

Then there are clean screenshot hacks which makes the PB screenshot function useless.

A smart hacker will just seem like a very good player, but watch them for enough time and they WILL mess up. I had to watch a few and make videos for ages before they gave themselves away.

I used to waste a lot of my time and effort trying to find and ban hackers from servers. But a good friend of mine put it into perspective. He simply said life is too short and they are not worth it.

So now I just play on. Report those I suspect and move server if they are ruining play.

Hacking has been business for years. Aimbots and wallhacks are not new, but they are far more advanced. As are the people using them. Often the hacker has self coded their hacks, or paid a very good coder to do it for them.

Some of these hacks also identify hackers using the same hack in your server and allow private communication between them.

Even 10 years ago, a custom hack for Quake 3, for example, would cost 100 Euros+.

That price would also include updates to get around new revisions of Punkbuster.

I don't understand hackers, I just accept they exist. They always have and always will.

It is a shame - if hack coders and hackers put as much effort into actually playing a game that they do into making and using hacks without detection, they probably would not need hacks! lol :p

I do think part of the issue is people supposedly fighting fire with fire. The "I am being hacked so therefore I must hack back" mentality. Or, as is more often the case, it is people being relatively new to a game that are butt hurt because they get owned by experienced players.
 
BuffetSlayer said:
Even 10 years ago, a custom hack for Quake 3, for example, would cost 100 Euros+.
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At one point in quake3, punkbuster was relatively easy to block using advanced security programs.

I used to play quake2 / quake3 in div1 for tdm, ra3, osp, cpma etc and when quake3 was first released (before punkbuster + before sv_pure) there were at least 3 passworded private sites owned by top players/teams with downloadable cheats (consisted of texture packs, wallhacks, autoaim, autofire, timers)
When punkbuster came out I saw at least 20 players from the top uk teams get kicked on connecting to match servers.

The problem with quake3 / quakelive is all people need is a colour autofire bot/app and a bind ingame to switch the enemy colour to achieve a toggle. (autofire + railgun is deadly)

BuffetSlayer said:
I do think part of the issue is people supposedly fighting fire with fire. The "I am being hacked so therefore I must hack back" mentality. Or, as is more often the case, it is people being relatively new to a game that are butt hurt because they get owned by experienced players.
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I agree with this, this has happened in a few teams I've been in.

More recently it happened on counterstrike source.
Some guy in the team thought I was cheating, he would spec me etc on matches. A few weeks passed and suddenly he was amazing.
We had a match in a league which had it's own anticheat software with a auto-screenshot function and he was busted using ESP :rolleyes:
 
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mortals said:
At one point in quake3, punkbuster was relatively easy to block using advanced security programs.

I used to play quake2 / quake3 in div1 for tdm, ra3, osp, cpma etc and when quake3 was first released (before punkbuster + before sv_pure) there were at least 3 passworded private sites owned by top players/teams with downloadable cheats (consisted of texture packs, wallhacks, autoaim, autofire, timers)
When punkbuster came out I saw at least 20 players from the top uk teams get kicked on connecting to match servers.

The problem with quake3 / quakelive is all people need is a colour autofire bot/app and a bind ingame to switch the enemy colour to achieve a toggle. (autofire + railgun is deadly)


I agree with this, this has happened in a few teams I've been in.

More recently it happened on counterstrike source.
Some guy in the team thought I was cheating, he would spec me etc on matches. A few weeks passed and suddenly he was amazing.
We had a match in a league which had it's own anticheat software with a auto-screenshot function and he was busted using ESP :rolleyes:
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Yeah, CS seemed to have more of a hacking issue than Q3 did. I remember playing CS 1.6 for a while and although I was relatively new to the game, there was clearly some cheating going on! I don't know why I thought that but players floating around the map just didnt seem right to me! :p

I still run a Q3 3wave server and there are not many people playing it, but out of the ones who still come, I am certain at least 40% hack. There was the usual accusations from the non hacking players (or those who were hacking less well! :p ), so I actually banned everyone who was hacking one day. The server was terribly quiet and everyone who was left unbanned then started complaining about the bans and how it has killed the server etc.

So, I re-instated everyone I had banned and pretty much walked away from playing there. I left them to it. I still run the server for the benefit of those who do not hack, and those who may want to return to the game after a period of absence. I hardly ever play on it myself though.

I play Tribes Ascend now. Which I also think is an amazing game, but it has been let down badly by the developers :(

But it is funny I was going to say how we hardly see any hackers in Tribes, and last night there was one using a push hack. Some American kid angry at the world who needed to spoil the fun of everone else.

It is so frustrating that the game developers messed up the voting system. Basically these guys cannot be kicked by the rest of the server :(

The only thing you can do is leave or try and ignore them. But they use sentinel who has a hitscan weapon + infinite jets + aimbot + wallhack. When they hit you they push you away from their shot at such a high speed you 'crater' on anything you hit.

You can use the safe fall perk so you dont crater but then you just get pushed into a corner of the map and as soon as you try to get back into the action you get pushed into the corner of the map again. Really annoying and completely wrecks a server.

Hi Rez have abandoned Tribes and no longer check accounts for hackers so the community is helpless. I just wish they would have fixed the voting system before they abandoned the game :(
 
When I worked for a games developer we found that a lot of the sites setting cheats, gold etc. were actually fronts for credit card fraud. They basically farm the details people use the buy their stuff. Then the money is used for other organized crime (usually in Asia).
 
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This may seem like a heavy handed tactic but those who hack and are proven to have hacks should have their IP logged and prosecuted. A fine, banned from game and community service should set them straight.

Additionally, publishers and developers should have a responsibility to support their games instead of turning the other cheek when a sequel is released.

In BF3 on PC there is a hacker in nearly every other game and it's more common than you think. I left the console scene after COD WAW became infested with those JTaggers and ruined the game. Activision didn't give two ***** because modern warfare 2 was the latest in the series.

I don't think that Publishers take this seriously enough and I think that gamers are socially conditioned to "not care" anymore and treat it as "normal".

Hackers will always be present, they get kicks by ruining the game for me, you and everyone else. However gamers, publishers, server admins and digital content laws all need to re-think how to minimize their numbers so that we can enjoy the games and online service we paid good money for.
 
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