Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: raidr on October 09, 2003, 02:00:18 PM
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'Bustin Punks'
Tony Ray walks tall and cracks cheaters heads..
Computr Gaming World
November 2003 issue 232 by George Jones
When programmer Tony Ray found he was consistently toiling against squads using cheat scripts and aimbots, the father of two decided he'd seen enough.
"We were playing one day," Ray explained."And the cheating was just out of control. I started getting so angry at these guys, and I thought to myself,'Those little.... Man, we're going to bust those punks."
A sucessful network and business programmer, Ray went back to his Houston home and began coding a 10,000 line program that would allow a game serve to check gamers systems for imperfections that indicate the presence of a cheat.
"Initially only 10 servers tried it," Ray recalls,"But once the program detected the first aimbot-it took off like wildfire." Ray pauses, relishing that first sweet bust. "People who didn't believe cheaters were out thwere started believing real quick." One Thousand leagues picked up 'PunkBuster' in it's first month of release.
These days, Punkbuster supports Quake3, return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Soldier of Fortune11, but Ray and his globe-spanning crew of 16 are just beginning to capture the gaming industries attention. "I have monumental respect for those guys,"enthuses former Blizzard North co-founder Bill Roper, who witnessed firsthand the devastating effects cheating had on Diablo. 'It's a thankless task , and it requires so much work."
Andre Roy, online producer for Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and a new PunkBuster devotee couldn't agree more. 'Cheating kills the fun factor," Roy says. "When a few bad apples show up with their cheats, it drives the real players out."
Not anymore! Punkbuster is on the beat, and publishers that need ongoing support are even paying ray and his group to police up games. Up next: massively multiplayer online games. "We're really interested in ensuring that massively multiplayer games are fair," Ray states, "We kind of see ourselves as a doping commission of sorts for gaming."
With cheaters everywhere, and multiplayer play increasing, it seems Ray and his avengers will definately be busy for awhile.
How about this Skuzzy??? AH could definately make use of this!
raidr
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Did you get dropped on your head as a baby?
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Originally posted by Furious
Did you get dropped on your head as a baby?
:rofl :rofl
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'thou doth declare thine innocence too loudly'
u saying what???
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Originally posted by raidr
...u saying what???
In case it wasn't clear, I was implying that you some sort of brain damage. Hope that clears it up for you.
Have a nice day.
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1.) i didn't write the article, it is pertinent to gameplay.
2.) why do u immediately resort to insults and namecalling about a viable subject? (all ur ammo just chest thumping?)
3.) just what do u have against a level playing field with no exceptions?
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The article is not pertinent to AH.
The subject is not viable.
There is a level playing field.
I dare you to prove otherwise.
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Personally I think air warrior needed this more than ah, but saying nothing can be going on sounds just like the government. If HTC started using it we'd know for sure....assuming it works for mmol games.
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uh...
Punkbuster is a 3rd party app created to help combat _RAMPANT_ cheating in halflife, because valve had done nothing about it.
Are you implying that there is rampant cheating in aces high? And that HTC has been ignoring it?
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I've been cheating for years and HTC's never caught me.
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Originally posted by BenDover
I've been cheating for years and HTC's never caught me.
In before ban
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banned from h2h? rofl :)
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I have only had a few instances in sh where I wondered if a particular sequence of events was clean. I must admit, after a bit of relection, I feel pretty sure the most likely causes were connection issues or my own misinterpretation of e states and angles. Essentially AH feels clean. That being said, if cheat checks are available that would actually work for our game [coding methodologies are so diverse no single solution would work] I would hope it is used and issues dealt with discretely.
Now, are them thar "aimbot" things perked?
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Just record any fight you're in. If something doens't feel right it's easy to see in the film viewer.
This is no FPS game; you can't aim insanely fast in here (either skill or cheat) on your end without the other noticing - you have to position your plane for a shot. And whether the process of this positioning is clean or not can be seen on film.
Of course there is network lag and sometimes people "warp" or shoot from "impossible" angles because they pulled the stick back on their end and lag did prevent a timely update on your system but if someone does this consistently (with the help of cheat programs) it will be noticed.
On top of that, the low number of people flying here compared to FPS games makes it a lot less probable that someone will come up with such a thing.
It's not impossible but the situation here is far away from what the FPS communities face: dozens of cheats to choose from and a lot of people willing to use them.
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Hey, I love this game! Personally i agree that many 'questionable instances' can be explained by lag, connection etc. But anyone who has flown online multiplayer games for 10 years knows when something is totally 'out of the envelope'. Only a fool would say 'THEY KNOW' any particular game is 'clean'.
Cheating (the forbidden subject) is everywhere, if some people have the opportunity, and they think they can get away with it, they will cheat. That's a FACT! and AH is just another slice of society. I say 'Let's find out'!!
It makes sense to stop the'badguys' from initially logging on to the game than it does for individual players to chase 'suspects' around, filming and deleting films. Bad guys spoil the fun for everyone. Game security is responsibility of the Server side. Paying members are already paying for a 'secure' game experience.
I say, prove to the loyal, paying members that there ISN'T any cheating. If ALL it takes is to run serverside software designed for cleaning up the game, I say DO IT!! Nothing to loose but the bad apples that spoil it for everyone else.
Who, just WHO would be AGAINST booting any cheaters and having a level playing field?
The 'paying' accounts members decided they wanted a level playing field when they signed up and PAID.
Again.. who WOULDN't want a 'fair' game?
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This sounds like software that runs on the server. HTC controls the server here, how do you know what cheat checking programs they have on the server?
If you suspect cheating, film it and mail it to HTC. They will take it from there and I have never seen results posted openly. This seems like a good idea to me. If the hackers knew what they used to detect cheats, they could defeat the detection.
Gunner
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Spend 10 minutes to search the internet for Counter-Strike cheats.
If you're done try the same with cheats for Aces High.
See any difference? :)
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Yeah Punkbuster is all fine and dandy till it boots you off a Ravenshield server for no reason. :)
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There is an assumption here that HiTech does not have this type of cheat check running on his server/game.
What make you think that he doesn't aready have some sort of cheat check(s) already in place that he wrote himself. Also, it would not be something that he would share with just anybody. When you write "trapping" code, you don't go public with the info.
This Tony Ray guy is probably a very clever programmer, but I don't think that his programming skill level would be anywhere near the level of HiTech, nor does anybody know the internals of AH better than HiTech.
The trap may already be set so be very carefull.
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To keep things in perspective, AH has had proven cheat cases. P51's were dropping dozens of 1000lb bombs and lancs dropping hundreds of drunks.
And for every one that gets caught, 10 go undetected.
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That case occurred 3 years ago. Ever wonder why that's the only case of cheating used to prove cheating exists here on the BBS?
HT finds cheats, he bans them.
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Take it from someone who has experienced HTC's wrath on hacks and cheats, it is not tolerated one bit. I simply posted a troll in a thread about inducing warps and got my tail banned. Why? Because, as HT told me on the phone, accusations of cheating are just as deadly to an online game as actual cheating. If someone were to post a warp-cheat, even if it didn't work, people would still scream "cheat!" on every plane that takes a sudden warp and soon there would be pandemonium.
I also remember someone posting a link to a cheat site for online games that affected the packets in some way and HT responding on the boards that he had to ban several accounts for using it so evidently he does have software in place to monitor these things and I'm sure takes swift, decisive action when proved. They don't post or announce the bannings to the community in general but without a doubt they are policing the game.
I learned my lesson well. Think someone's cheating... film it, mail it, and then let HTC take care of it. Anything else such as screaming on channel 1 or coming to these boards with accusations does nothing to resolve the situation and only takes away from the community/game.
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In
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Originally posted by SlapShot
There is an assumption here that HiTech does not have this type of cheat check running on his server/game.
What make you think that he doesn't aready have some sort of cheat check(s) already in place that he wrote himself. Also, it would not be something that he would share with just anybody. When you write "trapping" code, you don't go public with the info.
Slap...
He does. He also makes sure to check out accusations of cheating as well (even though most of them are bogus). Which is why this thread is moot :).
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NB,
After meeting HT at the con and having a long conversation (bored the crap out of everybody else .. hehe) about when we starting our programming careers, what languages we had used, and past applications we wrote and developed, I had no doubt that the traps are in place.
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Originally posted by bockko
Personally I think air warrior needed this more than ah....
Air Warrior needed far more than PunkBuster...
ack-ack
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Originally posted by GunnerCAF
This sounds like software that runs on the server. HTC controls the server here, how do you know what cheat checking programs they have on the server?
If you suspect cheating, film it and mail it to HTC. They will take it from there and I have never seen results posted openly. This seems like a good idea to me. If the hackers knew what they used to detect cheats, they could defeat the detection.
Gunner
It's both a server and client side application. If you play on a server that uses PunkBuster, you need to have the client version of PunkBuster in order to have to play on a PunkBuster server.
In case for those that don't really know all PunkBuster does is check the files on the client to see if they match the files on the server to prevent using hacked models or scripts. I'm pretty sure that AH does the same process when you log on, so really PunkBuster isn't needed nor it it designed to work with MMOG games. If you notice PunkBuster is only on FPS online games and not for MMOGs.
ack-ack
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Oh he said "the word"...Im in.
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AW needed more for sure, something worthy of the name 'B**chslapper' might have worked.
In. :D