ACWC 2012 Dedicated client?

[Reedie-oH]

HAVE IT BASED OFF OF THE 1.0.4 RELEASE AND I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER!!!!!!

F1 !

[ExodusS]

Who voted F2? To blacklist him for cheat.

[paulmuaddibKA]

Lol, it was me. Problem?

It was by mistake, XD

[Terran]

i will slightly go offtopic here and i am sorry for that but i wanted to say why i like idea about dedicated client
...

If they (alleged cheaters) can hold that level of play with dedicated clients, i think apologies are in order. :)

...

The important thing is that lot of players (that are suspected of cheating, or even been bl for cheating) can clear their names simply by playing at their usual level with dedicated acwc clients. All win.

P.S. Thank you Larry for doing this and community for supporting this great idea with (so far) 25 to 0 in favor of dedicated clients.

Problem: Dedicated client != cheater free. If they're any good, they know how to mem hack. Just sayin'.

As far as the dis-allowing or freezing spectating by benched players goes, awesome idea.

I wouldn't sign up even if I was allowed (not that level of player) but I figured I'd toss in some points.


EDIT (To prevent taking over the thread): @Wolf: They can certainly view the coding and they can work around it with mem-hacking but they can't physically modify the code of the client unless you provided them with the source. And mem-hacking isn't a noob's game, they'd have to be pretty good.

[#M|A#Wolf]

Well to be honest RAMPAGE, I don't think giving the same client to everyone would prevent ALL hacking. Anybody that knows enough about the hack's code can transfer it to the given client.

[Habluka]

Well to be honest RAMPAGE, I don't think giving the same client to everyone would prevent ALL hacking. Anybody that knows enough about the hack's code can transfer it to the given client.

you can potentially give it a really really odd version number or something (I don't remember how that works) and have the server only accept that version without releasing what that number is to the players.

[Terran]

you can potentially give it a really really odd version number or something (I don't remember how that works) and have the server only accept that version without releasing what that number is to the players.

Well I didn't want to buffer my post count over one thought but here it is:

There are two ways that a decent cheater could get around a version check. One is check-sum spoofing. The second is mem-hacking which I mentioned earlier.

For those of you that don't understand, mem-hacking doesn't require a modified client. You can mem-hack a game without changing any of it's files.

If you want to enforce this, the only way I can think of is to do both a check of say the MD5 or SHA as well as have the client send a unique packet to the server that verifies it as a clean client. Even this isn't a perfect idea though because MD5 check-sums can be spoofed and anyone can attach a program to the process and wait for the verification function.

Let alone the fact that if you want to be 100% certain there's no cheating going on, you'd have to check the computer's memory for anything injected into the game's memory.

[spoiler=tl;dr]My post wasn't meant to make it difficult for you. I just wanted you to understand that just because they're using the same client, it doesn't mean they aren't cheating.[/spoiler]

[Ronald_Reagan]

The easiest way I can see doing this is having a couple different hashes that can be sent. One can ask for a hash of weapon tables, certain variables that might get changed and such, and frags. So hash something like: weapon tables + frags + deaths + vars.

Hashes would be requested by other clients. It would work without any server help. You could just do text based communication (using /say and such, but that is ugly and intrusive).

mem-hacking isn't as easy to do, and iirc you could change some parts of the code so they are hard to track down.

Remember that none of this would be open sources, so all you see about the hashes is something like this:

[cubescript]
//Check hash using hash type 1, requesting the hash from client 10
/checkhash 1 10
[/cubescript]

[RAMPAGE]

Well to be honest RAMPAGE, I don't think giving the same client to everyone would prevent ALL hacking. Anybody that knows enough about the hack's code can transfer it to the given client.

I understand guys what u say, but stopping ppl for using well known (to them) and proven as hardly traceable cheat clients is accomplishment by itself. If we have one cheater less it's better, but i think we will have a lot less then we are used too.

I understand it's not a God's Given Client that will not be eventually cracked, but it would (i assume) take some time to do so. (If i understood correctly Larry, for most of the cases we would be able to know if someone tempered with code or not). I am no programmer as u can see from my posts, and i will not give impression that i know anything about mem-hack or wtv.

I assume that any idea that could help ppl (like larry), that know what they are doing, design the dedicated client to be more resistive to known ways of cheating would be appreciated.


P.S. Cheaterfree ACWC!
You may say im a dreamer, but i am not the only one... :P

[Roflcopter]

Basically, injectors can be stopped by storing key variables in multiple places (with different encodings) so when the injector changes one variable the other goes out of sync with it.

Regularly recompiled cheat clients will be impossible since to emulate the behaviour of the specialised client an attacker will have to reverse engineer the hashing system provided.

Ronald_Reagan: Your method of hashing would be easy to recognize since some hashes wouldn't change in a legitimate client and could therefore be faked.

Also MD5 or SHA hashes mentioned by Terran are not so suitable since they're hard to reverse which means you can only really compare them to an obviously right answer. If you can reverse the hashes given a little extra knowledge you can send information where there are many right and wrong answers.

[Vermi]

larry owns cheaters

[paulmuaddibKA]

While you are at it ladies, I have a proposition!
What would it hurt to add the AC Olympics to be played in between matches in the ACWC?
You can see what is needed and what it stands for here , and it seems like a fun feature to entertain the audience and the players in the meanwhile teams get ready.
A mod that counts time from when you pick akimbo? It cant be THAT difficult...

[Ronald_Reagan]

Ronald_Reagan: Your method of hashing would be easy to recognize since some hashes wouldn't change in a legitimate client and could therefore be faked.

Even if you digest a value like frags or such into the hash? There are plenty of values that change that both clients could use to make the hash.

[Dam.white]

fuck. why im so noob with computer...
i dont understand a word.
Do the best for ACWC :)

[Roflcopter]

Ronald_Reagan: Your method of hashing would be easy to recognize since some hashes wouldn't change in a legitimate client and could therefore be faked.

Even if you digest a value like frags or such into the hash? There are plenty of values that change that both clients could use to make the hash.

Yeah, something like that.

While you are at it ladies, I have a proposition!
What would it hurt to add the AC Olympics to be played in between matches in the ACWC?
You can see what is needed and what it stands for here , and it seems like a fun feature to entertain the audience and the players in the meanwhile teams get ready.
A mod that counts time from when you pick akimbo? It cant be THAT difficult...

I'm very busy myself so don't have any extra time to spare on extra projects. You should talk to those who cast our games to get aired before matches.