Tag: Cheaters

John Smedley Deploys Lawyer-Grade Weaponry To Fight Planetside Cheaters


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Sony Online Entertainment has been taking the fight to cheaters in Planetside 2, and the battle has not been an easy one. Whenever the development team comes up with a new way to combat aimbots and other cheats, the people making said cheats simply find a new way to work around the system. So in a post on the Planetside subreddit, John Smedley appeared to clarify a few misconceptions about the policy against cheat users. In addition to the usual discussions of zero tolerance and constant development, Smedley also pointed to Sony’s newest battle tactic: Lawyers.

After having personally viewed some of the major cheat sites I can tell you I’m blown away by how sophisticated some of these operations are. They are making money on this. We’re working on that from another angle too that I’m not going to go into just yet (hint. it involves lawyers) . But we have the resources to fight this fight and we will keep doing it.

Fighting cheat makers in court will be a lengthy and expensive process, but more power to Sony if they are willing to go through with it.

(Source: Reddit)

Garry’s Mod: When Your Community Is So Atrocious…


Back when I first started talking about alternatives to Lego Universe, a few people came up and recommended Garry’s Mod, a modification for Valve’s Source Engine which allows players to play a very wide variety of games from shooters to role playing to building and everything in between. Without hesitation, I said no. Absolutely not, I would not subject my greatest enemy to the blight that is the active Garry’s Mod roleplaying or building community.

AusFrag, an Australian web host, has announced that they will no longer be hosting Garry’s Mod servers due to the massive number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) associated with the game.

AusFrag is no longer supporting Garry’s Mod due to network abuse. We have been slapped with a massive bandwidth bill that could potentially close our doors if we continue to host this game. We have found Garry’s Mod servers are targeted almost daily in DDoS attacks which we do have protection to an extent but we are still billed for domestic packets the scrubber doesn’t filter.

From my time in the Garry’s Mod community, the DDoS attacks come for a variety of ridiculous and immature reasons: Jealousy from one server owner to another, servers are regularly attacked for running anti-cheat scripts or by banned griefers, and even Garry’s websites are attacked on a regular basis by cheat makers and their community, some of whom create and sell the very DDoS tools that the banned cheaters use.

Now, obviously DDoS attacks occur on other games, but this is the first time that I have personally seen a host drop support for a game entirely due to how widespread and common the issue was. It is a shame because Garry’s Mod still have amazingly talented people working on modifications and special servers, unfortunately the band of cheaters, pre-teen children and their DDoS scripts are ruining the experience for everyone.

I used to enjoy Garry’s Mod for the roleplaying servers, but stopped as each one fell one-by-one to DDoS attacks from “competing” (in the words of the other server owners) roleplay servers. Eventually I just didn’t have any time to find a good server and stopped playing altogether.

Garry's Mod: When Your Community Is So Atrocious…


Back when I first started talking about alternatives to Lego Universe, a few people came up and recommended Garry’s Mod, a modification for Valve’s Source Engine which allows players to play a very wide variety of games from shooters to role playing to building and everything in between. Without hesitation, I said no. Absolutely not, I would not subject my greatest enemy to the blight that is the active Garry’s Mod roleplaying or building community.

AusFrag, an Australian web host, has announced that they will no longer be hosting Garry’s Mod servers due to the massive number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) associated with the game.

AusFrag is no longer supporting Garry’s Mod due to network abuse. We have been slapped with a massive bandwidth bill that could potentially close our doors if we continue to host this game. We have found Garry’s Mod servers are targeted almost daily in DDoS attacks which we do have protection to an extent but we are still billed for domestic packets the scrubber doesn’t filter.

From my time in the Garry’s Mod community, the DDoS attacks come for a variety of ridiculous and immature reasons: Jealousy from one server owner to another, servers are regularly attacked for running anti-cheat scripts or by banned griefers, and even Garry’s websites are attacked on a regular basis by cheat makers and their community, some of whom create and sell the very DDoS tools that the banned cheaters use.

Now, obviously DDoS attacks occur on other games, but this is the first time that I have personally seen a host drop support for a game entirely due to how widespread and common the issue was. It is a shame because Garry’s Mod still have amazingly talented people working on modifications and special servers, unfortunately the band of cheaters, pre-teen children and their DDoS scripts are ruining the experience for everyone.

I used to enjoy Garry’s Mod for the roleplaying servers, but stopped as each one fell one-by-one to DDoS attacks from “competing” (in the words of the other server owners) roleplay servers. Eventually I just didn’t have any time to find a good server and stopped playing altogether.

Sony: So Much For A Final Warning


Cheaters have a high rate of recidivism, especially when punishment is lax and not at all intimidating. Earlier this month, Sony unveiled a final warning on their forums, for cheaters to give up and play legitimately, or pack up and go home. Today, the developer announced that 700 accounts have been suspended as a first warning.

Remember that these suspensions are merely the first wave, and further action is on the horizon. We will not rest, but will instead continue to gather data and take action as necessary on behalf of the entire player base.

An unspecified number of players were discovered to have been flagged mistakenly and had their suspension removed with a small time credit to their account (one week according to a couple of users on the forums). Hopefully the suspension will be taken seriously by those involved.

(Source: Everquest forums)

Everquest Channels Jagex: Sends Cheaters Final Warning


Players who partake in cheating are hereby put on notice: stop now. This isn’t an idle warning. We have quietly invested significant behind the scenes effort into detecting cheaters quickly and accurately. The vast majority of players enjoy the game on a fair and even playing field. Those who gain unfair advantage over others will not be tolerated.

Everquest is among the elders in our list of MMOs and while the game has seen updates over the years to allow for more a more casual friendly experience, the game still stands as one of the hardest on the market. Unfortunately, the engine and the systems in place have aged far in their years, and the Everquest team has a lot on their plates to deal with hackers (real hackers exploiting the engine, not your run of the mill bug abusers). Well, on the official forums, SOE Piestro has unsheathed his sword (pictured above) and issued a final warning to cheaters: Stop now, or face the +5 banhammer of troll smite.

Ten Ton Hammer published an incredibly in-depth article earlier this year discussing the epidemic that is hacking in Everquest, which you can read here. Scripts and bots that allow players to warp themselves and NPCs, despawn bosses, and more. At the end of the interview, we’re left with a tease that investigations into cheating would ramp up once Veil of Alaris was completed.

Best of luck to the Everquest team in fighting this never ending threat.

G1 To Cheaters: Don’t F-Up Your Last Chance


The Gamersfirst team working on All Points Bulletin quickly became my best friend thanks to their method of not merely banning cheaters but publicly humiliating them. In a dev blog update yesterday, Bjorn continued the approach of calming the crowd by reassuring that the team is indeed fighting aimbots. Recently, Gamersfirst was able to perform a mass ban on the three largest cheat tools, also posting some rather humorous complaints from the cheat forums.

But the G1 team is not entirely without knowledge on how to milk inane cheaters who would come back on a new account and continue spending money sympathy. They have put forward an offer: delete the cheats, start a new account, and they might allow you to continue playing their game. Maybe, if they feel like it.

Even stranger for some of us is the notion that some of these cheats that were caught cost upwards of $30 a month. Look, for $30 monthly, I will play your APB for you. If you prefer, I’ll even throw in the added DLC, where I eat all the junk food and drink all of your RC Cola, for absolutely free.

G1 To Cheaters: Don't F-Up Your Last Chance


The Gamersfirst team working on All Points Bulletin quickly became my best friend thanks to their method of not merely banning cheaters but publicly humiliating them. In a dev blog update yesterday, Bjorn continued the approach of calming the crowd by reassuring that the team is indeed fighting aimbots. Recently, Gamersfirst was able to perform a mass ban on the three largest cheat tools, also posting some rather humorous complaints from the cheat forums.

But the G1 team is not entirely without knowledge on how to milk inane cheaters who would come back on a new account and continue spending money sympathy. They have put forward an offer: delete the cheats, start a new account, and they might allow you to continue playing their game. Maybe, if they feel like it.

Even stranger for some of us is the notion that some of these cheats that were caught cost upwards of $30 a month. Look, for $30 monthly, I will play your APB for you. If you prefer, I’ll even throw in the added DLC, where I eat all the junk food and drink all of your RC Cola, for absolutely free.

Falling Victim To Your Own Greedy Nature


While the MMO Fallout inbox is never saturated with emails, so to speak, I get a fair amount of tips especially regarding outbreaks of account theft. For the most part, these thefts are not real. A person will have his account stolen at the general time his friend did, so his conclusion is that a lot of accounts must be getting stolen (or the company is selling accounts to gold farmers, please stop emailing me with those conspiracy theories). A quick check of our archives will show that I do indeed report on legitimate server breaches.

One particular email I received prompted this article: To sum it up, a “regular reader” made the claim that I am being paid off by “illegitimate gold farmers and bot developers” to not post warnings when a bot program is actually a trojan horse or a gold farming company starts stealing credit cards. To start off, my apologies to this disenfranchised man. Secondly: I don’t believe in warning potential cheaters that their service of choice may be even less legitimate than thought.

Let’s break that down, shall we? To use the term “illegitimate gold farmer” implies that there are legitimate gold farmers, which would only apply if the developer sold the gold/items or authorized players to do so. No, I’m not going to make the baseless claim that all gold farmers are identity thieves, but to call the business legitimate is about as disingenuous as you can get. Rather, I see the system as knowing the risks. You buy gold knowing full well the potential consequences if this person turns out to be an actual criminal. To give an outside comparison, this is akin to the people who buy laptops off of truck beds in parking lots and then find out the box is full of rocks.

So I don’t write warnings about criminal cheat websites for a few reasons, but I do write articles like this one warning the unwary (however few of you might exist) that gold farming outfits are indeed shady business that has become a haven for identity theft. This way, when the time comes that your Runescape account is cleaned out and Jagex bans you for buying powerleveling services, you might not write to me and ask me to warn other people about an illegitimate service turning out to be a scam.

Video of the ___: Runescape, Cheater’s Paradise


I care little for the inner-drama in MMOs, so the fact that the person who posted this was a player moderator, and had his status revoked afterward, plays no part in this video being posted here. With the overwhelming quantity of gold farmers that have infested Runescape since its reinstatement of free trade, Jagex has taken to issuing the usual “don’t look over there, look over here,” developer blog, promising that they’re doing something to stop the bots.

And more importantly: What is Jagex doing to keep the game from being swamped with bots and gold farmers like it was pre-trade? They seem to be very sure of themselves that their secret weapon can combat this.

I’m still waiting to see this secret weapon.

Video of the ___: Runescape, Cheater's Paradise


I care little for the inner-drama in MMOs, so the fact that the person who posted this was a player moderator, and had his status revoked afterward, plays no part in this video being posted here. With the overwhelming quantity of gold farmers that have infested Runescape since its reinstatement of free trade, Jagex has taken to issuing the usual “don’t look over there, look over here,” developer blog, promising that they’re doing something to stop the bots.

And more importantly: What is Jagex doing to keep the game from being swamped with bots and gold farmers like it was pre-trade? They seem to be very sure of themselves that their secret weapon can combat this.

I’m still waiting to see this secret weapon.