Hackers

[silver vault]

What do you plan to do with the hackers that keep ruining everyone's games and crashing them? They crash it too fast to the point where we can't ban them and can't play.

[spark sapphire]

If you go to EN general and look at pins you can see what one of the devs said about it

#💬｜𝗘𝗡｜general message

[silver vault]

Even with that we have full hidden lobbies and the hackers still get in. This game used to be fun but now it's just unplayable at this point

[spark sapphire]

@real acorn

#💬｜𝗘𝗡｜general message

[real acorn]

I agree thay its unplayable with these hackers. Whatever they're doing to be able to crash lobbies for other people needs to be stopped. Hackers are expected in any good game, but there are people purposefully trying to destroy the whole thing. It would be enough to allow us to ban by searching names. We can compile the names of the people doing this and ban them all. It would be cool if we could unban specific people without resetting the entire list too. An accidental ban of a friend undoes all our hard work trying to ban hackers because we have to reset the whole list. Resetting the ban list seems entirely useless, like why would we want to do that? Under the ban stuff it says work in progress, so im really hoping that means the ability to unban a single person without resetting the whole list and even searching usernames to preemptively ban known hackers. I know people who already have lists qued up.

[silver vault]

Yes that is a great idea and I hope they do it

[spark sapphire]

That's really smart I like it 👍

[hidden violet]

There is no plan for an actual anti-cheat for the reasons mentioned above. The linked message explain it well, but to summarize :
It's a game intended to play with friends, and we won't invest time and resources to constantly fight a never ending war with cheaters.

We are implementing better session management with access to players' Steam ID in the session, so it could be an improvement to manage cheaters yourself, but fighting the cheats themselves is not nothing we can do.

[modern sun]

@silver vault https://github.com/Lobby-Lockdown/lobby-lockdown

[silver vault]

I'll check it out

[silver vault]

So basically we are on our own and there's nothing you can or want to do. You know what I'm done with lockdown for a long while bc like I said it's very unplayable no matter what we do.

[elfin vine]

I agree...I'm someone that works alot and dont often get to play with friends so public lobbies are mostly the other option for me....Been playing an hour now and not been able to finish one game with out hackers taking it down...Uninstalled for now...we will see if the game gets better in the future...but it is a broken game regardless of public or private lobbies with friends as hackers get in either way

[silver vault]

Exactly

[modern sun]

They said easy anticheat was too cost-prohibitive, but I looked it up and it's free in the EOS suite

I could make an anticheat mod :^)

[twilit rain]

Thank you for giving me a reason to uninstall this game. I love it but getting targeted by a hacker while streaming was not fun. I will make sure my community knows. I am a streamer and if you can't protect its players then this is a dead game.

I was in a private session and they were able to join just a FYI so no you really can't play in a private session with friends

I also have VOD proof of me being in a private session and them crashing it sooo...

[hidden violet]

How would you go about solving this problem ? I suppose you don't have a solution and we don't either
People making cheats/hacks have much better understanding of security breach than our single programmer does, and if we find a solution, they will find another breach

I understand the frustration, but there isn't much we can do

[twilit rain]

If you really want to keep this game afloat, then its time to invest in anti-cheat software. This game is going to be dead in a few months, if this doesn't change I have seen tons of reviews, posts, and comments(in the discord) about it.

[thorny mauve]

I mean do you not see that hackers are going into lobbies and killing the lobbies?

Other Game companies would already invest in a anti-cheat system or ban the hackers

[hidden violet]

Btw hackers joining privates game is a Steam issue, not ours, so it's not fixable, since we are using the built in Steam session system that include a private session parameter
If Steam engineers can't fix it, idk what we can do

(Make sure you make a PRIVATE session and not a HIDDEN sessions, these two aren't the same)

[twilit rain]

How is that a steam issue? We were not friends on steam, they were stream sniping my lobbies.

I tried on hidden twice and private twice they crashed both.

This is 100% a lockdown issue.

[thorny mauve]

I mean do you guys not care about the hackers ruining your game?

[hidden violet]

If you are 100% sure, can you explain why exactly ?

I believe you either didn't read properly, or simply didn't understand

[twilit rain]

Private session. I was inviting friends, and boom

Please tell me how is that not a lockdown protocol issue.

Its your servers after all.

[hidden violet]

We don't have servers, it is Steam servers.

[twilit rain]

Okay then maybe its time to address getting your own servers or bring this up to steam. Your game is dying my friend. I am sad because I truly loved this game.

[hidden violet]

https://tenor.com/view/papich-evilarthas-memeblog-gif-19892854

[twilit rain]

So basically its just a cash grab now?

No comment?

[hidden violet]

We use SteamCore an Unreal Engine plug-in to link the engine to Steam servers. We do not have the knowledges to do more

Any resource invested in an alternative (getting our own servers) would be expensive and time consuming for worse results because whatever we can build would not be as good as what Steam can provide

As I said earlier, if Steam engineer can't solve the problem, our small team won't do better

[twilit rain]

So you can't add a block/report player? I mean it would be that simple.

[hidden violet]

The block option is already what the session ban is, and if it get bypassed by cheaters, it's a again, a Steam side issue that we can't solve ourselves

As for a report option, it involve an immense data base of every single report and session data to confirm the complain, which not only need to be stored, but also treated one by one to ensure there is no abuse of the system (for example, mass reporting an innocent person to get them banned), so for now we prefer no report system, rather than anything that could be abused to cause even more harm

[harsh mist]

Could you add a band-aid solution such as allowing hosts to blacklist players with steam ID without the need to open the in-game menu (doesn't work as cannot open while dead/respawning constantly) and generating a unique lobby link/code per session so hackers do not keep the hosts join link to rejoin without an invite at a later time?

[harsh mist]

Or is something like these options ^ not possible?

[tulip gyro]

At minimum

you could develop a system in which players are allowed to see a list of players or online players in which they can ban but tbh I dont know if yall would do that

[tulip gyro]

I feel like people forget data is able to delete itself after a certain amount of time and or after review

the way it works with most of us is after we make a reporting system we just review the complaints, if a specific person is spamming or giving false reports we flag them and then delete the rest after reviewing and taking action

it doesnt cost as much as they are making it out to be

but i guess cost is subjective

[modern sun]

implement password protection for private lobbies like most other games do

[modern sun]

EAC is free and you're already in the EOS ecosystem, so it shouldn't be that hard to implement

[modern sun]

That's what my tool does :) https://github.com/Lobby-Lockdown/lobby-lockdown

[modern sun]

blob storage on cloud providers isn't terribly expensive. if you reserve it for 3 years on azure, it's $845 for 100TB (which is WAY more than you'd ever need) for cool storage. you don't need hot storage https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing

Delete reports that have been denied to keep costs down and delegate access to the ban system to your discord mods or other volunteers to spread the load

at the very least though, integrate EAC. it's free and there's no downside to it (and make sure you enable linux support 🙂 )

to help action higher-quality reporters' reports faster, implement a weighting system. players' whose reports result in a ban should have a higher weight and their reports should be pushed to the top of the queue

so people mass reporting essentially just get their reports sent to the void

if you want to contract me as a consultant and/or to help build such a system, feel free to dm me

[upbeat condor]

Allowing people to be banned in advance in a separate menu is a very good idea, I will implement this in the menu rework. The menu and session system is in rework for a future update and I will try to implement more security at the same time.

But you have to understand that the game is primarily designed to be played with friends, public sessions are a BONUS. And fighting against cheaters (in this kind of game) is not worth the effort at the moment. My goal is to improve game mechanics or ergonomics first.

[fierce field]

How are players going to use or give feedback on new game mechanics if we can’t play the game? I understand it can be costly, but spending money on a game we can’t even play is an equivalent of buying a pack of dead batteries, which in turn, lowers y’all’s income to help improve the game. Maybe time to take away public games and make it private only with passwords to hopefully deter hackers. Seeing as how the most common way, so I’ve been told, is using public lobbies to gain the players ip address, and using that to get in.

If there is a way for a level of greater separation and encryption, it might greatly decrease the amount of hacks.

[modern sun]

I posted this in #🧩｜modding, but it's still relevant here too. I made that application I posted above to be able to view/add to/remove from your ban list as well as pull from a centralized list of banned players. I just packaged it into an easily-runnable .exe if any of you are interested: https://github.com/Lobby-Lockdown/lobby-lockdown/releases

As long as you have their steam IDs, you can ban them outside of the game

Keep in mind that I consider it a beta still, as it hasn't been tested with a large amount of ids, but the app will make a backup of your current ban list any time you open it, so you can always revert it back if it borks it

[tulip gyro]

Literally this, putting the cart before the horse.

We should just do a poll at this point

[fierce field]

seeing as how the player base is putting together lists of the hackers names too! Should be pretty easy to ban them. i have a friend that can get peoples ip adress's quite easily, which with the hackers using so many accounts, is the route banning should take. i also have a friend who is a software engineer and is looking into the game as well, and he stated to me there is a 99% chance there is a backdoor into the game, which if they implement the preban menu before dealing with hackers, could very potentially end up letting the hackers brick the game. the hackers ruining the game should be number 1 priority. even phasmo, when their servers burnt down, still delt with hackers and banning them.

[deep latch]

you people are asking a lot out of 3 people who have already said they lack the experience to do what most of you are asking. i do agree there needs to be a better password protection system, but there are third party mods to help prevent people from joining your private lobbies without permission, they do some of what you are all asking. this game has been out for several months and hasn’t made an awful lot of progress, to my knowledge, but remember this is not a team of devs, it is 3 people. i’m not using that as an excuse for them, but i feel like they should be given some slack, after all this game is only 10$ which in my opinion, for the replayability, is an extremely good deal. and to those saying this game is dead/will be dead soon, i dont think so. and saying the game is unplayable due to hackers is 98% OPINION and lots/most players are having a perfectly fine experience, me included. correct me on anything if i am wrong or have an odd opinion.

[tulip gyro]

definitely odd

the issue with hackers is not even the norm in free multiplayer games

[modern sun]

:)

[harsh fractal]

What does it use for detection, to prevent a void shot?

[modern sun]

it uses heuristic analysis to detect cheating

[harsh fractal]

So it essentially just looks for oddities in player states, got it...

[modern sun]

i could make it so that it works for anyone regardless of host status

but it'll only work if the player is host

it'll un-void people if they're not host though

[harsh fractal]

Is it quick enough to detect / protect from a trip to the void?
I've noticed no matter how quick you attempt to return you always end up with some side effect; broken camera, for example.

[modern sun]

because it's client-side, it will fix it

i could make it tick-perfect

meaning it'll do it instantly, but it's expensive computationally

[harsh fractal]

Has it been tested? I assume it just teleports the player back once out of bounds, or prevents an absurd knockback velocity from passing.

[modern sun]

not fully. it's very much an alpha, but it will catch egregious things. game-ruining stuff

i don't have the cheats

but i know people who do that'll help me test them

[harsh fractal]

Would you be willing to share the code, curious what it attempts to detect / respond. I might be able to help, but not guaranteed.

[modern sun]

it'll be available on github when i have it in a mostly working state

the org is lobby-lockdown

I have another banlist tool if you wanna check that out though

it allows people to add/remove to their ban lists and pull from a centralized ban list