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Comment by z9e | Hacker News Reader

I can only comment on this from the perspective of a very active Battlefield 1 and 5 player, the current use of cheats is pretty much an epidemic right now on all of the PC servers. There are cheat programs that you can use on the Windows clients, carpet banning based on what OS you are using is totally the wrong approach here and continues to show EA & DICE have no handle on this.

Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.

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> they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers

Wish this was more common. Seems to work well in all the games I've played with this feature.

It also tends to get abused against really good players. Servers need more active admins.

Team Fortress 2 is going through a nasty bot invasion right now (mostly on EU servers) and the community has been using the vote kick in a very good manner.

Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be sneaky about it. You will see their view port instantly change, they never miss a shot, their cross hair always stays on a player model even behind wall, ...

Most people recognized the difference between a cheater and a good player fairly easily. It is even more blatant in a game like TF2 were most shots are actual projectile and not hitscan which mean that most cheater use a specific class/load out that is compatible with a basic aimbot.

Another way to see it is with cosmetics. Most cheater use throwaway account, they don't want their account with valuable items getting banned, so they only rock the basic cosmetics.

All of these combined make it so that I never saw an actual good player getting kicked. I don't know if Battlefield V has similar system, but making player care more about their account actually provide a good filter for this kinds of situations.

> Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be sneaky about it.

This could very well be a case of selection bias. I think there is a significant portion of cheaters who just want to get a leg up, rather than ragehack and pwn everyone.

When I was 13 trying to play CS, for example, I used a multihack with crappy 'humanizing' aimbot and wall/esp hacks. I could still barely get a kill, but it changed my gameplay experience from "run across them map, instantly die, wait for next round" to something a little more fun. I actually feel like it improved my gameplay because I could learn what to expect from other players, what routes and timings were common, faster than I could through regular play. Of course, now I would just watch demos / pro play to get the same value.

What I always did since cs 1.6 is, follow the best player and don't get in their way. They know the map layouts better than anyone. You don't have to cheat to kick it.

That and you're actively helping/backing-up an already skilled player. The definition of teamwork. Everyone plays a role, and they don't necessarily have to be rockstars to do it.

Makes sense, although that might end with that player getting pissed off from being repeatedly baited :)

Vote kick is only effective against cheaters that make it obvious. For the 5% of cheaters that are more subtle about it, there's a good chance their team won't vote to kick them. And since the TF team disabled spectating players, confirming that a player is skilled vs cheating is nearly impossible right now.

Thankfully, the number of cheaters (in US) is low enough that I can requeue if things get out of hand. Hopefully it stays that way.

When they become indistinguishable then it isn't so much of a problem anymore. Because there's no effective difference to you, the other player, between the opponent being a cheater and the opponent being really good. When they're hard, but beatable.

This goes out the window when there are tangible rewards for winning a match, both getting killed, etc.

That is not abuse. The vote kick feature is not an "anti-cheat" mechanism only, it is a general self-admin. If the rest of the players feel that someone's presence is not fun, they will vote kick that someone. It could be because they are a cheater, it could be because they are much more skilled and outplay everyone else or it could be the opposite where they are unskilled and burden the team they end up on.

A really good player can find a server where they can compete at their skill level instead of repeatedly noob-stomping others. A new player can find a server with other low skill players where they can compete at their skill level without being a dead weight.

In a game like BF5 which has no match making for skilled players to verse each other this would not be an option. And even then it doesn't stop it.

I use to play a lot of counter strike and every once in a while I would get accused of hacking. This was at the highest level of matchmaking available (Supreme/Global). In some games where I was popping off or the enemies were having a bad day I am certain the enemy team would have kicked me if they had any power.

And in that game your teammates have the option to vote kick. They do not kick hackers, like at all. I have over 2600 hours in the game and I have seen exactly 1 game where a hacker was kicked by their team.

I tried to play "Sea of Thieves" and gave up entirely after about an hour. They have a feature where the majority can vote to send someone to the brig, where you can't do anything, except apparently drown if your teammates sink the ship. Then you get to come back to life, in the brig still. I never even got a chance to play the game, so there was no reason to vote me out other than just to troll. And this happened repeatedly with every crew I was matched up with.

There may be valid cases for these "vote to kick" features, but they do get blatantly abused as well. I don't think they're a good replacement for more intelligent matchmaking.

Hey, some personal experience here:

Sea of Thieves had an issue in the past where you couldn't _lock_ your ship, and it's a forced-multiplayer game. Which, the way I see it, made this brig thing get abused.

Basically all you wanted was to play with your close friends, but you had 3 players not 4, so you can't go with the small ship (2 players) but the big ship (4 players) had one extra slot (and forced public). So you would just end up sending said extra unfortunate player to the brig since said player could just well go and cause havoc by several means (turning the ship/setting sail to somewhere not related to where you wanted to go, firing on "allied" ships (or even just at everyone), etc..).

Not saying this was your case, but it surely happened with me and my friends. Things changed however, nowadays we have a 3-player ship and you can lock your ship to private mode only, so you can also go 4-player galleon with only yourself in it.

It's an awesome game (that keeps getting more awesome) and hope you can have another go at it!

Thanks for the info. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Servers would have more admins if players could run their own servers.

Was going to say this. I recall getting regularly booted from Day of Defeat games for alleged cheating. Nope, I just happened to be pretty dang good at that game.

If the rest of the players think they'd have more fun if a really good player left, that's working as intended.

In the ancient Athenian democracy, they had the ostracism [1]: once a year they could hold a vote and whoever got more votes was sent to exile for 10 years. No bad feelings, shaming, etc., they simply had to go, because people just though the city would be better without them. I think this mechanism would work as well for game servers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

In my experience, it generally turned out those "really good" players were taking advantage of a glitch, and were kicked for that.. not for being really good. (server rules generally have a "no glitching" rule). Again, this is all anecdotal experience

I've never seen a vote to kick system actually function for the purpose of banning disruptive players. For instance, if only one vote can be conducted between rounds, then all the cheater has to do is be the first to pick some random schlub and try to get them kicked.

I haven't done much online gaming in a while, but I remember vote-to-kick most often being successfully invoked for stuff like people logging on then immediately spamming messages or abusing voice chat. The vote call was swift and the kick a certainty. They'd be gone in seconds.

I'm curious which games you've played wit this feature and how did it generally work?

This was abused by players in Rainbow 6 Siege imo, though I don't think it would be useful if it were implemented the same way in BF5. Siege plays similar to a search-and-destroy gamemode where you only get one life, and once you die, you spectate your team (and can watch cameras for them and call out). Iirc, only teammates can kick a player, so you would often get the least skilled person kicked as opposed to a cheater (unless the cheater was the last person alive and obviously cheating). This system wouldn't be useful in BF/COD style games because of the respawning ability. But the opposite way where the enemy team can vote to kick someone out of your team also is ripe for abuse. Imo, there is no easy and fair solution that bypasses existing centralized anticheat mechanisms because you generally can't tell if your teammates are cheating as you're not often spectating them, and letting the enemy team have the sole voice to kick someone isn't going to work.

I grew up during the Doom 1 era, Quake, CS1.3+, etc and IIRC most if not all had vote kicks before p2p servers and removing server browsers became a thing (I'll probably wind up listing a game that didn't have vote kicking, it's been a long time). I used to admin some game servers. You'd occasionally have vote kick trolls but honestly that caused a lot less drama than keeping a toxic-player/cheater around who would eventually drain the server of players. If the servers ever drained we'd have to throw in bots just so people would even join it again and nobody wants that. We had to do a LOT of IP bans of problem players and occasionally we'd block entire ISPs.

The best thing about these systems was servers would build communities that would self-admin and deal with the drama, for instance Tactical Gamers TF2 servers were my favorite place to play by far.

I don't consider vote kicking to be some fantastic anti-cheat mechanism and the developers still need to provide a lot of support in that area but it definitely helps bridge the gap between reporting cheats and the cheat vectors being closed (if they ever are).

edit: I've only done this on PC games. No idea how well this works in the console community.

The secret there is that vote kicking wasn't the real anti-cheat method, only the delivery. The real anti cheat was the friends we made along the way. Healthy server communities were a treasure back in the day, and functioned as a more compassionate, involved anti-cheat system.

Spot on with what I had in mind when making my comment. I suppose this doesn't work nearly as well with matchmaking systems where you don't have a community like you commonly did back in the day

We handle cheating in our Battlefield 1942 server by requiring players to submit their public IP to admins to be explicitly whitelisted. There have been numerous cheaters and trolls we have easily banned over the years.

http://ea117.com/access gets 20 players/night at 7PM..

It plays the “desert combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE.

It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu...

A white list solution seems rather extreme, although white listing keyhashes might be a bit better, you can even hand out cd-keys and verify in a cryptographicly secure way server side that the client has the cd-key you've assigned.

Using VPN detection techniques on TGE has really helped a great deal without having to jump all the way to white listing.

Installing today! Thanks for these links, I haven't played that game in 10 years

Are you looking for new players?

>perspective of a very active Battlefield 1 and 5 player, the current use of cheats is pretty much an epidemic right now

Is it?

I'm playing a lot of both too and hacking seems largely in control. Some games have them sure but it's not common enough to be disruptive

Then again I spent a fair bit of time on unofficial cod4 servers so my idea of widespread hax is different lol

I've actually been playing a lot on the more private servers (TSC and Salty noobs on the east coast) which have some active admins, but we still get cheaters once in a while and it does cause some frustration for a couple of maps before someone jumps in and kicks them. But if I jump on any of the [DICE] servers I always run into one or two after a couple maps. This is all anecdotal obviously (but I'm talking about situations where the whole server is complaining in chat, and actively spectating them, not being a sore loser). It's an epidemic enough to where you get people like jackfrags making videos on it. I would agree though that BFV seems to have the hacking under more control recently, but BF1 is still largely chaotic.

I play BF 1, Salty Noob servers seem to have fewer cheats because the server admins responds. The DICE servers are crap though. Auto-aim, invisibility, etc. Frustrating.

Man that's really rough. I've been playing BF1 on XBox and there aren't any significant cheating issues that I've seen.

It's exactly the same in GTA 5. PC servers are a cheatfest, a complete joke, while console servers are fine.

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