This used to be a fun game, but now with all the blatent cheating going on I'm just going to have to say fuck this game until a version comes out that makes it harder for all those little asshole to program in their little cheats, like perpetual shield and running gm just to name a couple. Too bad those little assholes have to ruin an otherwise great game.
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I completely agree (although I don't know what "running gm" means)!! It's getting ridiculous. Did anyone ever add in the ability to vote someone out of the game?
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I like the idea of being able to vote people off....the only problem (as someone mentioned to me once) is that a group of people can come on and take over a room that way (by kicking everyone else off).
-Tom
[tvon]
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I dislike the idea of voting. To solve this problem, they need some administers to kick cheaters off. They should warn them twice, and then the third time kick them off. This would allow them to plead their case and prevent unjust kicks. I have been kicked off for "cheating" when I really wasn't. They should also monitor IP addresses and have the ability to ban a specific IP. This would stop cheaters in their tracks. We should also add built-in detection for cheaters that use obvious cheats like super speed.
-Digital Dude
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I think Digital Dude is cheating. Let's kick him off the mailing list!!!!
;-)
Seriously, though, I don't like your suggestion because it only works if there is an admin playing the game at the time. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. I agree there should be built-in detection for cheaters, but there are PLENTY of cheats that you can do that the game would never catch. It's trivial to change the code so you can't be killed. You could change the client to highlight all the good flags, so you could always pick up GM or L. You could increase your speed JUST enough so that you'd have an advantage without the automatic detectors kicking you in. There's a hundred things you could do. I had a cheat I made a while back that would automatically blow up a shockwave on top of any player I decided I wanted to kill (it was a LOT of fun using that on anyone who was cheating).
The point is, it is easy to get around anything you put in the code to try to stop cheaters. The only thing that will really stop them is the ability to kick them. I agree that administrators should have this ability, but I think that there should be the ability to vote people off. Maybe one of the server options could be a percentage of required votes for kicking. That way, the person who sets up the server can decide how easy or hard it is to kick someone.
-- Flash
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although cheating is not that big of a problem for me anyway (I always play on ducati where I rarely meet people which are obviously cheating) I agree that we should still try to do somethign about it. Currently the only thign we can do is to kick these peopel fromthe server. They may still rejoin, though.
I also agree that not all cheats can be detected. Some cheats are very obvious, others can be automatically detected (like increased tank or shot speed, some peopel are running patched clients which can do this).
On voting / kicking in general: We (that is Tim ,myself and some other people) have discussed usign an authentication server. People would register their callsign at this server using some kind of public key cryptography to make it secure. Every time you log in to a 'secure' bzflag server, the server can test your identity by contacting the authentication server (probably an extended bzfls). Registered people could then rate other people on a scale from -5 (bad cheater) to 5 (nice guy). The authentication server would then calculate a global ratign for each player. Servers coudl be configured to only allow players with a ratign higher than a certain threshold to join.
That's only the basic ideas, the details would have to be discusses more thoroughly, of course. Maybe it's overkill to do that, I don't know.
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Anonymous
-
2002-01-13
You are never going to completely stop the cheating. I think the best thing to do is make sure everyone knows who is cheating, and embarass them off the server. For example "sadam " pads his score by killing teammates. I know that technically this isn't cheating but it is annoying to everyone. When I find him on a server I warn whatever team he is on. He usually leaves quite soon after.
If you have to cheat to win then you have won nothing.
beer time.
swine
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Cheating is becoming the greatest problem with this otherwise great game. Well , I guess it is the price we have to pay for the game being Open-source.
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Excuse me?! The most secure servers in the world are secure BECAUSE of open source! With a lot of people looking at the code, any holes are found quickly, and patches are usually available within a short time. Hence why many of the world's servers use Linux, an open-source, but secure, operating system.
Unfortunately, BZFlag doesn't have that many people looking at the source. We've only got 27 mambers, and I daresay only 3 or 4 contribute in a given year.
The problem isn't that it's open source; it's because the clients are authorative - anybody's client can tell the others what to do. This is actually due to the fact that, in order to reduce badwidth, the clients tell each other what they're doing, instead of the server. This means less traffic for the server, but less security, since there's no one computer checking the model for inconsistencies.
The big problem is that nobody's computer is doing any double-checking of the current game model, so any client can basically do what it wants.
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The client binaries are hardened with some kind of compiled-in authentication keys to make hacking clients more difficult (I quote the docs, "very difficult but not impossible").
If cheaters are a problem, allow only authentic (or blessed, as netrek people call them) clients. If you absolutely need your custom patches, contribute the code into the main pool and it'll be authenticated in the next release. If you just don't care, the server can accept non-authentic clients.
This should stop the average joe-blow from tweaking his client to boost his score. A determined hacker will no doubt crack the crypto with ease.
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As I understand this, people would have to use official binary released to play on servers which enforce authenticated clients. This might in fact help against most cheaters, but I don't like it very much becuase it could rule out some players who prefer their own client from source.The reasons for this can be various: from using an exotic platform to minor changes which are cruicical for some people. We'll try and see how the karma system in 1.8 will work out.
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Anonymous
-
2002-04-04
Yup, the way netrek has it is pretty invasive. But the authenticy could be viewed as a proof of an untampered client. No-one could cry "wolf" when you're sheep to the core.
I hope they move flag/collision checking to server with 1.8 too. Either every third player cheats (=personal experience) or lag creates very realistic looking "cheating" when clients lag too much (bullets go through, tanks jerk around avoiding hits...) A karma system could backfire and innocent people get a bad reputation.
Cheater teams could support each other and karma out the ones who oppose them. On servers with no karma limit, cheaters can create a temporary identity and wreak havoc. OTOH neutral-karmaed newbies can't enter the "safer" karma-limited servers.
How about adding the two systems together? If you have a blessed client, you'll get an intrinsic karma bonus and can enter karma-limited servers easier. But if you're a developer who needs custom clients, you probably already know enough BZFlag people to your karmas up in an jiffy.
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>Either every third player cheats (=personal experience) or lag creates very realistic looking "cheating" when clients lag too much (bullets go through, tanks jerk around avoiding hits...)
That's the problem, it's hard to tell the difference between cheating and lag in many cases - and it's entirely possible to put in intentional lag to cheat! Since people rarely stand still when playing, lag could easily cause people to appear in one place, but really be at another.
I have seen real cheaters, however, and it's ridiculously easy - Experimentation on a local machine playing bots reveals it only takes a change in only one line of code to make somebody invincible - ouch!
I vote either use "blessed" clients or make the server enforce the rules (run the simulation completely on the server, with clients acting as "dumb terminals").
Using "blessed" clients might be the way to go, since making the sever enforce the rules increases bandwidth to the server.
Right now, server operators (and people with the correct password) can kick people, and it works when the server owner or other authorized user is on, but it doesn't when they're not on, and many servers don't have anybody watching them (or they don't have an updated version of the server).
Using a system to authenticate callsigns is an idea - although we'd have to decide the best way to implement it.
We'll see how the "karma" system will work out with 1.8 - there's also been many, many other changes (much of BZFlag has practically been re-written), so I've got a feeling that there will be a different set of problems to work out.
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Voting system: the longer you are on a server, the more votes you get. Server keeps track. Players can vote for a temporary admin to perform a single function, such as kick/ban.
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Nah, If i'm cheating, i may stay for hours. Others will get disgusted early and leave. Therefore I have all the voting power. That doesn't work. Heh, now I can start kickin fair players just to be nasty.
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Also, as im sure many of you may have seen, these cheating bastards are using ridiculously long names with all sorts of garbage characters and quotes which would be difficult to enter if you have to kick players by their callsign.
The "/playerlist" admin command lists players by IP address and also gives each player a number. It would therefore be very convenient if you could kick players by their number as given by the /playerlist command. This doesnt appear to be possible at the moment at least its not documented in the man page
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obviously you can ban players by ip number, but it would be nice to just type in their number as shown by /playerlist and have their ip address banned.. instead of having to type in their whole ip number thats what i was trying to say
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Well, I guess this won't change for 1.7 anymore. For 1.8 it might be a good idea to integrate this with the authentication / karma system. So, in addition to use a global karma threshold, a server might some identities from joining. But we'll have to see if that will ne necessary at all (and implement the karma system first :-).
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Anonymous
-
2002-09-25
Hi, i have my server running most of the time. This is what i do. I give out my server password to people i trust. I like them taking care of my server while im not there. Maybe (just an idea) what we should do is, people who have servers up and running should maybe give their bzflag server password to other known and trust-worthy server holders so we can kick users. It will be more like hidden server admins.
I go by the name Smooth, and my server goes by; all highspeed flags.
Let me know what u all think.
Email: stetson@stx.rr.com
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I think thats a good Idea, but I think, people have to use free servers first, that they start to like this game...
Martin
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Anonymous
-
2002-12-05
Im all new to this game, i downloaded it and installed in good faith. but when i log on a server i got blamed for cheating and i hadnt even learnt what the game was about.
what am I doing wrong?
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Anonymous
-
2002-12-05
I logged on again, and it happened , people was telling me i was cheating. and i dont know why, i got the client from sourceforge so it shold be ok, right? and how could they tell i was cheating, i just jumped around not knowing what happend around me, very odd this game.
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the1trex: some people are way too fast in accusing others of cheating. I would guess that maybe you have some networking problem, for exampel related to NAT or a firewall. You might want to try a different server with more helpful people on it. Just choose one from the server list, the fullest server isn't necessarily te best one.
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This used to be a fun game, but now with all the blatent cheating going on I'm just going to have to say fuck this game until a version comes out that makes it harder for all those little asshole to program in their little cheats, like perpetual shield and running gm just to name a couple. Too bad those little assholes have to ruin an otherwise great game.
I completely agree (although I don't know what "running gm" means)!! It's getting ridiculous. Did anyone ever add in the ability to vote someone out of the game?
I like the idea of being able to vote people off....the only problem (as someone mentioned to me once) is that a group of people can come on and take over a room that way (by kicking everyone else off).
-Tom
[tvon]
I dislike the idea of voting. To solve this problem, they need some administers to kick cheaters off. They should warn them twice, and then the third time kick them off. This would allow them to plead their case and prevent unjust kicks. I have been kicked off for "cheating" when I really wasn't. They should also monitor IP addresses and have the ability to ban a specific IP. This would stop cheaters in their tracks. We should also add built-in detection for cheaters that use obvious cheats like super speed.
-Digital Dude
I think Digital Dude is cheating. Let's kick him off the mailing list!!!!
;-)
Seriously, though, I don't like your suggestion because it only works if there is an admin playing the game at the time. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. I agree there should be built-in detection for cheaters, but there are PLENTY of cheats that you can do that the game would never catch. It's trivial to change the code so you can't be killed. You could change the client to highlight all the good flags, so you could always pick up GM or L. You could increase your speed JUST enough so that you'd have an advantage without the automatic detectors kicking you in. There's a hundred things you could do. I had a cheat I made a while back that would automatically blow up a shockwave on top of any player I decided I wanted to kill (it was a LOT of fun using that on anyone who was cheating).
The point is, it is easy to get around anything you put in the code to try to stop cheaters. The only thing that will really stop them is the ability to kick them. I agree that administrators should have this ability, but I think that there should be the ability to vote people off. Maybe one of the server options could be a percentage of required votes for kicking. That way, the person who sets up the server can decide how easy or hard it is to kick someone.
-- Flash
although cheating is not that big of a problem for me anyway (I always play on ducati where I rarely meet people which are obviously cheating) I agree that we should still try to do somethign about it. Currently the only thign we can do is to kick these peopel fromthe server. They may still rejoin, though.
I also agree that not all cheats can be detected. Some cheats are very obvious, others can be automatically detected (like increased tank or shot speed, some peopel are running patched clients which can do this).
On voting / kicking in general: We (that is Tim ,myself and some other people) have discussed usign an authentication server. People would register their callsign at this server using some kind of public key cryptography to make it secure. Every time you log in to a 'secure' bzflag server, the server can test your identity by contacting the authentication server (probably an extended bzfls). Registered people could then rate other people on a scale from -5 (bad cheater) to 5 (nice guy). The authentication server would then calculate a global ratign for each player. Servers coudl be configured to only allow players with a ratign higher than a certain threshold to join.
That's only the basic ideas, the details would have to be discusses more thoroughly, of course. Maybe it's overkill to do that, I don't know.
You are never going to completely stop the cheating. I think the best thing to do is make sure everyone knows who is cheating, and embarass them off the server. For example "sadam " pads his score by killing teammates. I know that technically this isn't cheating but it is annoying to everyone. When I find him on a server I warn whatever team he is on. He usually leaves quite soon after.
If you have to cheat to win then you have won nothing.
beer time.
swine
It's still worth it to try - we can keep cheaters down to a minimum.
Cheating is becoming the greatest problem with this otherwise great game. Well , I guess it is the price we have to pay for the game being Open-source.
Excuse me?! The most secure servers in the world are secure BECAUSE of open source! With a lot of people looking at the code, any holes are found quickly, and patches are usually available within a short time. Hence why many of the world's servers use Linux, an open-source, but secure, operating system.
Unfortunately, BZFlag doesn't have that many people looking at the source. We've only got 27 mambers, and I daresay only 3 or 4 contribute in a given year.
The problem isn't that it's open source; it's because the clients are authorative - anybody's client can tell the others what to do. This is actually due to the fact that, in order to reduce badwidth, the clients tell each other what they're doing, instead of the server. This means less traffic for the server, but less security, since there's no one computer checking the model for inconsistencies.
The big problem is that nobody's computer is doing any double-checking of the current game model, so any client can basically do what it wants.
How about using similar system as Netrek has?
(www.netrek.org and the crypto-part at http://www.netrek.org/pub/netrek/rsa/ )
The client binaries are hardened with some kind of compiled-in authentication keys to make hacking clients more difficult (I quote the docs, "very difficult but not impossible").
If cheaters are a problem, allow only authentic (or blessed, as netrek people call them) clients. If you absolutely need your custom patches, contribute the code into the main pool and it'll be authenticated in the next release. If you just don't care, the server can accept non-authentic clients.
This should stop the average joe-blow from tweaking his client to boost his score. A determined hacker will no doubt crack the crypto with ease.
As I understand this, people would have to use official binary released to play on servers which enforce authenticated clients. This might in fact help against most cheaters, but I don't like it very much becuase it could rule out some players who prefer their own client from source.The reasons for this can be various: from using an exotic platform to minor changes which are cruicical for some people. We'll try and see how the karma system in 1.8 will work out.
Yup, the way netrek has it is pretty invasive. But the authenticy could be viewed as a proof of an untampered client. No-one could cry "wolf" when you're sheep to the core.
I hope they move flag/collision checking to server with 1.8 too. Either every third player cheats (=personal experience) or lag creates very realistic looking "cheating" when clients lag too much (bullets go through, tanks jerk around avoiding hits...) A karma system could backfire and innocent people get a bad reputation.
Cheater teams could support each other and karma out the ones who oppose them. On servers with no karma limit, cheaters can create a temporary identity and wreak havoc. OTOH neutral-karmaed newbies can't enter the "safer" karma-limited servers.
How about adding the two systems together? If you have a blessed client, you'll get an intrinsic karma bonus and can enter karma-limited servers easier. But if you're a developer who needs custom clients, you probably already know enough BZFlag people to your karmas up in an jiffy.
>Either every third player cheats (=personal experience) or lag creates very realistic looking "cheating" when clients lag too much (bullets go through, tanks jerk around avoiding hits...)
That's the problem, it's hard to tell the difference between cheating and lag in many cases - and it's entirely possible to put in intentional lag to cheat! Since people rarely stand still when playing, lag could easily cause people to appear in one place, but really be at another.
I have seen real cheaters, however, and it's ridiculously easy - Experimentation on a local machine playing bots reveals it only takes a change in only one line of code to make somebody invincible - ouch!
I vote either use "blessed" clients or make the server enforce the rules (run the simulation completely on the server, with clients acting as "dumb terminals").
Using "blessed" clients might be the way to go, since making the sever enforce the rules increases bandwidth to the server.
Right now, server operators (and people with the correct password) can kick people, and it works when the server owner or other authorized user is on, but it doesn't when they're not on, and many servers don't have anybody watching them (or they don't have an updated version of the server).
Using a system to authenticate callsigns is an idea - although we'd have to decide the best way to implement it.
We'll see how the "karma" system will work out with 1.8 - there's also been many, many other changes (much of BZFlag has practically been re-written), so I've got a feeling that there will be a different set of problems to work out.
Can you show some evidence of cheating? I've seen none.
David
Voting system: the longer you are on a server, the more votes you get. Server keeps track. Players can vote for a temporary admin to perform a single function, such as kick/ban.
Nah, If i'm cheating, i may stay for hours. Others will get disgusted early and leave. Therefore I have all the voting power. That doesn't work. Heh, now I can start kickin fair players just to be nasty.
Also, as im sure many of you may have seen, these cheating bastards are using ridiculously long names with all sorts of garbage characters and quotes which would be difficult to enter if you have to kick players by their callsign.
The "/playerlist" admin command lists players by IP address and also gives each player a number. It would therefore be very convenient if you could kick players by their number as given by the /playerlist command. This doesnt appear to be possible at the moment at least its not documented in the man page
obviously you can ban players by ip number, but it would be nice to just type in their number as shown by /playerlist and have their ip address banned.. instead of having to type in their whole ip number thats what i was trying to say
Well, I guess this won't change for 1.7 anymore. For 1.8 it might be a good idea to integrate this with the authentication / karma system. So, in addition to use a global karma threshold, a server might some identities from joining. But we'll have to see if that will ne necessary at all (and implement the karma system first :-).
Hi, i have my server running most of the time. This is what i do. I give out my server password to people i trust. I like them taking care of my server while im not there. Maybe (just an idea) what we should do is, people who have servers up and running should maybe give their bzflag server password to other known and trust-worthy server holders so we can kick users. It will be more like hidden server admins.
I go by the name Smooth, and my server goes by; all highspeed flags.
Let me know what u all think.
Email: stetson@stx.rr.com
I think thats a good Idea, but I think, people have to use free servers first, that they start to like this game...
Martin
Im all new to this game, i downloaded it and installed in good faith. but when i log on a server i got blamed for cheating and i hadnt even learnt what the game was about.
what am I doing wrong?
I logged on again, and it happened , people was telling me i was cheating. and i dont know why, i got the client from sourceforge so it shold be ok, right? and how could they tell i was cheating, i just jumped around not knowing what happend around me, very odd this game.
the1trex: some people are way too fast in accusing others of cheating. I would guess that maybe you have some networking problem, for exampel related to NAT or a firewall. You might want to try a different server with more helpful people on it. Just choose one from the server list, the fullest server isn't necessarily te best one.