Multiplayer cheating

[Tsakonas]

About multi-character cheat

 

Its very difficult to find who is honest and who is cheating playing Eternal Lands.

I have single player games to my pc and some multiplayer games.

Games that i own and dont allow second time to open application files .exe to open to the same pc.

If you try to open nothing happen.Games like

Game = 4x4Evo2 File = 4x42.exe doesnt allow to open second application

Game = Fallout Tactics File = BOS.exe doesnt allow to open second application(you can play online this game.)

Game = Mafia File = Game.exe doesnt allow to open second application

Game=NeverwinterNights File = nwmain.exe doesnt allow to open second application(you can play online this game..)

If i try to open the game Championship manager 4 File = cm4.exe an error window opens with

the message championship manager 4 is already running.

If i try to open warcraft 3 Application=WarcraftIII.exe second time it displays

the message Warcraft III is already running.(you can play online this game.)

Game= Fallout File = fallout.exe doesnt allow to open second application to the same pc.

Game=Fallout 2 File =Fallout2.exe doesnt allow to open second application

Game = Max Payne File = MaxPayne.exe doesnt allow to open second application

 

I downloaded and other online games like

Game = endless online File = endless.exe doesnt allow to open second application.

 

I wrote so many games and i could wrote many others who doesnt allow to open second application to the same pc.

Why not Eternal Lands to do the same.I suggest that this would be a great change for the next update of the game.

There are people who will say that want to play more than one character the same time online without the characters

help eachother.There is solution for them.When you want to play your other character exit the main character and play the

second or third character but one character online everytime.After a while the cheaters will stop playing EL because they

have learnt to work with one,two,three or more characters online helping eachother hopping not get caught.Soon the cheaters

will learn that only with the fair way they would be able to continue playing Eternal Lands.

 

I think that this is a good way for Eternal Lands to reward the honest players and punish forever the cheaters.

I like this game and i would like all the players to be honest but the game is like real life.There are good and

bad people and the only way to stop the cheaters is the rules and the limits.

 

 

All the honest and fair players will agree with this.

The others who want to cheat and steal will not talk and will try to hide.

I would like a lot of players to post their opinion here.

Thanks for reading this.

[McLane]

nice idea, but EL is open source so would be easy to "remove" that feature and doesn't prevent people from using 2 computers

[kampsuniahv]

Yeah, but how many cheaters now how to modifie client? It certainly would cut off some cheaters.

Edited August 4, 2007 by kampsuniahv

[Tsakonas]

Sure some will try to modify the client and cheat again.Read rule 5 of the game rules.Cheating in the game means using illegal clients.The client connects to server and sure sents messages to server.They know when a client is legal or not because its rule of the game.If they couldnt track the illegal clients they wouldnt have this rule.

[Placid]

I must be very tired, very stupid or neither of those. WTF?

 

Where would this list be defined?

At which point would it be queried? OS level or Application level? (best have good reasons for the latter)

How would this stop users on more than one machine?

 

I can't begin to comprehend how bizarre this suggestion is.

[The_Piper]

Using windows, you can get a list of all open windows and their titles, so you can simply search for "Eternal Lands" and the client wouldnt start if theres already a window with the title "Eternal Lands".

 

Not sure, if Xwindows has a similar feature, but this way you will get rid of all those 4 year old kids who just create an army of alt chars and start cheating like hell.

 

Of course, since the EL client is open source, for someone who knows what he is doing, removing such a feature is just a work of 5 mins, but i guess, that the overwhelming majority of EL players are not professional C coders

 

Piper

[Tsakonas]

The players who pissed off with this good suggestion are these who want to cheat again and again.

They are well known people who will try to destroy the post and insult those who want to play with less cheaters.

Why is bad the one client per pc ? Haw many people have two or more pc.If they had many pc they would never play free online games like EL.Most players have only one pc.

Less cheaters means less work to track them.

[Placid]

The players who pissed off with this good suggestion are these who want to cheat again and again.

They are well known people who will try to destroy the post and insult those who want to play with less cheaters.

Why is bad the one client per pc ? Haw many people have two or more pc.If they had many pc they would never play free online games like EL.Most players have only one pc.

Less cheaters means less work to track them.

Yes, that's right. Everyone who finds faults in your suggestion is a cheater

[sparhawk]

Err.. I am sure that Placid and Piper are cheaters that multiplay all day long. Who can trust the snowball with the pig avatar and the man with the hole in his bag (who happen to be old time moderaters)? Look buddy, we do not need it and it will only create more problems than fix them. What about the people who want to have their chars on at the same time but not intereract? Besides, who are you to say mods are cheaters and that you know how to stop cheating better than them?

[Derin]

There would be no way to prevent cheaters from cheating by using the measures you suggest.

 

It would be nice if we could, but in an open source environement you simply can't.

[The_Piper]

It wont stop cheating, of course, but it would make it harder for sure.

 

As i said, not every 4 year old kid (THATS AN EXAMPLE!!!) is able to modify the client or to download and use a modified client.

 

So cheating would be still possible, but its not that easy as it is right now.

 

Piper

[Wizzy]

I have to agree. Not many persons would no how to down load a sorce package over CVS, modify and compile it to something usefull. Some will. However, this would not stop cheating at all. Multible machines? or a virtual machine (emulator) to run more clients. There are ways around this. If there was to be a 1 charater at a time rule, it would have to be done (to be most efective) at the server side. (IP adress is already logged in etc) Though clever people with proxy servers could get around this also. Best to keep things the way they are. And as far as multible clients go, I can barely manage one charater at a time effectively. Hats off to those that can do more.

[Learner]

I have to agree. Not many persons would no how to down load a sorce package over CVS, modify and compile it to something usefull. Some will. However, this would not stop cheating at all. Multible machines? or a virtual machine (emulator) to run more clients. There are ways around this. If there was to be a 1 charater at a time rule, it would have to be done (to be most efective) at the server side. (IP adress is already logged in etc) Though clever people with proxy servers could get around this also. Best to keep things the way they are. And as far as multible clients go, I can barely manage one charater at a time effectively. Hats off to those that can do more.

One issue that happens regularly is that the illegalo cheat clients get passed around between players. That already happens now. Trusting to something built into the client like that will onbly catch a very small number of people and give a false sense of security.

[bkc56]

One counter example: I will often go on the test server to test new features (especially when Radu requests testers) while I'm still on the main server. That's two clients running but not cheating (by any definition I'm aware of).

 

 

If the statistics can be run, it might be interesting to see how may occurrences of multiple characters playing from the same IP are out there (that have NOT been locked for cheating). That might give us a rough number of the players/families in this class that aren't cheating.

[sadarar]

One counter example: I will often go on the test server to test new features (especially when Radu requests testers) while I'm still on the main server. That's two clients running but not cheating (by any definition I'm aware of).

 

 

If the statistics can be run, it might be interesting to see how may occurrences of multiple characters playing from the same IP are out there (that have NOT been locked for cheating). That might give us a rough number of the players/families in this class that aren't cheating.

 

My programming is certainly not up to the standard of programming the el server, and almost certainly not up to worthwhile changes to the client, but I am pretty au fait with what is and isnt possible with software, and I can think of numerous ways that the server *could* automatically detect a lot of such illegal activity. If some/all of these methods are not used I would be surprised, not to mention #abuse calls when people report their suspicions of players cheating. Look throuh the bans forum, and see which rule(s) bring most bans, and it seems, to me at least, that any cheating of this kind is quickly detected.

[The_Piper]

The point is: This suggestion would stop a lot of cheaters.

 

Of course, it wont stop cheating at all, but the question is, what is more wanted:

 

Making cheating easy like it is now and pick on players just for the sake for doing it, or make it harder to cheat, I.E. to get rid of all cheaters who just use what is possible and what the server allows. And the client too, of course.

 

Or just have some more protection from cheating, like to make it harder to run to clients at the same time.

 

That wont stop cheating at all, for sure, but it would make it harder to cheat.

 

Piper

[crusadingknight]

Hrm, wouldn't it take just one person with a hex editor altering one character of what would be the window title to break the whole system? In my experience, cheaters can pass this on _much_ faster than people assume. Of course, it will cut out maybe 0.01% of cheaters who can't use search the internet for 'cracked' binaries. Most of the aforementioned games have fairly complex anti-cheat software running clientside, which monitors processes, all socket activity, etc., and can even forward it upstream - _That_ is where their anticheat software is. Checking for multiple clients is only a tiny part, and also intended as a convenience feature to keep multiple clients from causing resource starvation. It makes a decent enough feature (at least for me, who used to triple-click by accident on windows), but a fairly weak anticheat strategy.

Edited August 5, 2007 by crusadingknight

[McLane]

another issue: many people who run the big contests need to run more than one EL window to coordinate checkpoints/characters for the contest (I've participated in at least 2 of such contests) including the moderators running the gods.

If it gets implemented i wouldn't look for the the window title but would use a mutex

Edited August 5, 2007 by McLane

[jamincollins]

Why is bad the one client per pc ?

Because it is currently legal to run multiple clients. From time to time I do have two clients running on my machine. Perhaps I'd like to log into the test server to try something while playing on the main server too. Or, perhaps I'd like to test different attribute/nexus configurations with an alt. If you have any suspicions of me illegally multi-playing I welcome you calling for an investigation.

 

Haw many people have two or more pc.If they had many pc they would never play free online games like EL.

So, because I have 8+ PCs I'd never play EL? I can't begin to tell you how utterly absurd that is.

 

Most players have only one pc. Less cheaters means less work to track them.

Neither of these statements have anything to do with the suggestion. As stated before, the client is open source, removal of any such check would be trivial. Additionally, it removes legal multi-client play.

[Lexi]

nice idea, but EL is open source so would be easy to "remove" that feature and doesn't prevent people from using 2 computers

 

That's no lie at all, the game mentioned above "Endless Online" already has a crack for that, I vouch it, because I used to play it, and I used to have the crack.

[Tsakonas]

why is bad to add this suggestion to the EL client ? ( only one client per pc )

This will limit the number of the people who want to cheat not all but sure some of them .

I agree with The_Piper lets make the cheat harder adding more limits .

If it is so easy to crack the client and dont get caught why the rule 5 exists for illegal clients ?

and i have a question : How an illegal client can be detected ?

So the players who want to have alt characters to help each other will not have other solution but to crack

the client or download a cracked client and then get caught and punished very hard .

I never said that the players who have more than one pc must stop playing with this limit. They can play only thing they need is to be real family members or friends and not fake.

Everyone who has 2 or 5 or 8 pc and plays alone EL game with this suggestion must jump like monkey from one pc to another to control the same time many characters and not easy control them from the same pc in windowed mode with the current client which allows many windows open at the same time in the same pc.

[ttlanhil]

Yes, there are valid reasons why one person can have several accounts on at once.

No, this will not stop people, and will not slow down the more serious cheaters (who are probably more of a problem than the newbies who think they can do whatever they like). Just look at how many people passed around illegal clients to see that (and the resulting mass-ban or level wipe, or whatever, several such events in the forums).

 

You can call me a cheater if you like, but that's just going to prove you don't have enough clue to make suggestions about anything except the interface (the one thing new players are better at seeing problems with).

And for those in doubt, you can see that I'm one of the developers on the website; I often have reason to use multiple clients, and suggesting there be another version for the people with a reason to have several (like, anyone doing events) isn't going to work well either, there's just too many of them to assume someone won't give it to someone else who shouldn't have it.

[Theladin]

People who want to cheat are going to cheat but there seem to be many people who cheat who don't intent to. They're just too lazy to read the rules. If the downloadable install file here prevents multiple instances of EL from running and can prevent even one person from inadvertadly breaking the rules then I'd think that would be a good thing. I can imagine how many hours mods spent every month review logs, banning users, dealing with them in the forums, review logs again and then re-enabling accounts. If a 5 minute addition to EL can save everyone a few hours of time dealing with this problem every month then I would jump at the idea. As I said, cheaters will still cheat but if this prevents even one person from inadvertadly cheating then I think it would be time well spent to add this to EL.

 

Just my opinion

 

-Theladin

[robotbob]

Yes any feature in the client itself is pointless. Also, there are valid reasons (testing) that require multiple clients

and\or normal non interactions with chars (which is allowed).

 

With that said, the solution as I see it, (I have no idea how the server handles this), is when

to chars attempt to trade\interact etc and are not players\bot (my bots have my IP), it just doesn't allow it

and gives a server message "You cannot trade between clients on the same IP".

 

An IP could be used or a session guid|unique number instead. Granted each trade you get a

if (blah.ip != blah2.ip) , test on every interaction.

 

So I think the only solution is to prevent the activity at the server level from even being possible.

[luciferx]

Yes any feature in the client itself is pointless. Also, there are valid reasons (testing) that require multiple clients

and\or normal non interactions with chars (which is allowed).

 

With that said, the solution as I see it, (I have no idea how the server handles this), is when

to chars attempt to trade\interact etc and are not players\bot (my bots have my IP), it just doesn't allow it

and gives a server message "You cannot trade between clients on the same IP".

 

An IP could be used or a session guid|unique number instead. Granted each trade you get a

if (blah.ip != blah2.ip) , test on every interaction.

 

So I think the only solution is to prevent the activity at the server level from even being possible.

 

you'd have todo if (blah.ip != blah2.ip && "Neither is a bot" so bot owners can restock wthout triggering a flag/warning...

 

althogh i would assume (and hope) they already have such things logged anyway when we trade...