BIS, Please Read This

[guyguy1 0]

BIS, there is a fellow named Marek Spanel who goes to servers and disables admin powers, freezes the server, kills everyone at will, and basically runs the server. he has god powers. please do something to stop this madness. this is not a joke.

Edit:

I do not mean he is Marek Spanel. I mean his screen name is Marek Spanel.

[guyguy1 0]

Some of his abilities:

Disable Admin Power

Modify Scores

Kill anyone at will

Kill everyone at the same time

Artillery spam coming out of nowhere

Freeze the server

Make the server screen go black, and say "All Your Base are Belong to Us"

Admins cannot boot him

He can boot admins

He can boot anyone

he can also leave the server and have these powers, which is very strange

PLEASE BIS do something this is making gameplay impossible. he goes around to a lot of

Edit: i do NOT have his PlayerID. everyone was too busy screaming at him in the server that nobody got his ID.

UPDATE*******

his alternate screen name is Rambo

and

i told the server about him while he was in-game

he made my ArmA crash

[JdB 151]

Sounds like you got hacked

[jasono 0]

There is no way he can take your admin account, as he needs to authenticate server side. As JdB simply said, he knows your server password, or has access to the server.cfg.

[guyguy1 0]

he goes to many servers and does this. i am just a player who happens to see him a lot.

he is NOT an admin, from what i can see. he can go to any server and do whaqtever he wants

[celery 8]

Maybe Marek finally snapped with all the complaints?

[opteryx 1562]

Maybe Marek finally snapped with all the complaints?

Let's hope not

....anyway, I can confirm this guy, just got back from a MP game where this guy was TKing like crazy with some sort of cheat, luckily he was kick before it got out of hand.

[deady 0]

Yeah the game is easily hackable. He is nothing special. The fact he used Marek's name just suggests he visits the forums and probably knows more about Arma scripting than most of the other hackers out there.

Wait for signature checking to be fixed in the next patch and the hacks will drop.

[TrunkzJr 0]

Well a few months ago, when i typed in ArmA or Armed Assault cheat in youtube, maybe 1 or none came up, now a few come up but i mean common when I watch the video of what he can do, the cheats insane, it's something where BI need to create or do something to Ban they ArmA keys or something so they can't play the game anymore without buying another.

[maddogx 13]

it's something where BI need to create or do something to Ban they ArmA keys or something so they can't play the game anymore without buying another.

That would be ideal, but since there is currently no central authority for validating or banning keys for online play, there's nothing anyone can do.

I am personally a strong advocate of a system like in Battlefield 2/2142. If everyone had to log in to a central master server and give their CD-key, and then needed to login in order to play online, certain keys could be banned.

At the moment, anyone with a working ArmA install can play online at will. Banning is not effectively possible.

[chipper 0]

Thats just the same old TKC guys doing their thing.

[Balschoiw 0]

It´s interesting to have a look at their forums for BIS as they are offering Arma cracks and no-dvd version there. Should be perfectly ok for a legal case.

[deady 0]

That would be ideal, but since there is currently no central authority for validating or banning keys for online play, there's nothing anyone can do.

Actually, gamespy can ban cdkeys. Well known pirate cdkeys are banned.

[Easy_tiger 0]

there are no grounds for legal action as they are not breaking BIS's T&C's

Their hacks stem from 2 places:

1. D3D / Direct x Level: If you know how to program in a OO language like c++ all you need is the SDK and visual studio and you can pretty much alter what BIS (and other games) use in DirectX to actally draw the game on the screen without altering anything to do with ArmA.

2. Using assembler and watching data registers on the CPU as ArmA requests and recieves data from various locations. with a lot of watching and a bit of luck you can manipulate the data and ArmA will be none the wiser.

In the public server context there is very little that can be done about this, even banning players wont work as player IDs can also be created on the fly. The only option is to lock public servers when in use and kick any cheaters, at least they wont be able to get back in for the duration of the game

Of course you can use the signiture checks on PBO's but PBO modification is quite "n00b'ish" when compared to the more professional approaches in use and i doubt it will make much difference to the situation.

After reading up on these clans like TKC and myG0t it seems that they go to all this trouble to simply make the point that its "just a game"  and to be honest i havent got a problem with it as i generally wont be hanging around exploitable public servers.

(you do realise that half the time mugs vote these ppl in as admin??? , i read that on the TKC forum! )

I'll only be concerned if i ever get back into competative play and its prevelent there! But who knows you never really can tell if it is anyway!

[Easy_tiger 0]

It´s interesting to have a look at their forums for BIS as they are offering Arma cracks and no-dvd version there. Should be perfectly ok for a legal case.

Again no grounds for legal action, its only illegal to distrubute the no cd crack WITH the game. Hosting a no cd crack is not illegal by itself.

I'm having to use a no cd crack because i binned by damn copy of arma (still have the the lic key etc tho..) and it was the only way to play Arma after i updated to 1.08.

just waiting for a bargain on ebay now....

[-DirTyDeeDs--Ziggy- 0]

you might want to rethink that one sentence there, Easy-Tiger..

[pepel 0]

is obvios that the direct3d/Directx cheats are very hard to detect but!:

1. The armed assault server should be able to detect instant change of position (for exemple). So we need:

- A better server control over some parameters.

2. We really need a central authority with the signatures for the addons, and a server should only accept those that are known to be harmless (obviusly an admin server might add some to a local list). So we need:

- The signature tool

- A central authority

I have to add some things to the first point... I think it would be very difficult to make a diference from a mission script changing position (or blowing up cars) and someone cheating. any clue?

regards,

pepel

[guyguy1 0]

yes, unfortunately we need better anticheat. i was just playing a couple min ago and the same guy, "Rambo", came in and started calling in artillery on everyone, then froze the server screen until it went black and said "All your base are belong to us". the server was then shut down

[BraTTy 0]

I haven't watched the videos (some days ago I did see the machine gun w/ explosive rounds)

Read most of this topic, not to give any ideas but they are probably running a script client side, createvehicle weapons w/ modified ammo

Nothing to do with directx or c++

I am brainstorming ideas such as server side script to list all the start weapons for the missions and vehicles (would need to be en/disable feature)

Killed (or hit) eventhandler to check after every death, desctruction values and kick/ban on second kill (possibly you exploded your plane into them)

edit : I am so behind .. http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard311/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=73;t=64927

[dustoff 0]

I was in my server sitting around while I was testing somethings.

In comes this smacktard and ask if I needed any weapons , Gave me all kinds and then started boasting about how easy it is to cheat.

It was at that I decided to log in as a admin and kick his sorry butt off the server.

[Nutty_101 0]

Laugh.. I don't see why everyone is so gung ho on the signatures. It can be bypassed...

If something is created the server should be the only one to create it, not the client. If the client creates the unit and the server offloads the processing then that is the cheat. The down side is we would need better servers to process everything on the server side. Since this game is so cpu intensive it would make it next to impossible to create large games.

We get a huge trade off in this game that really no one else offers. That is freedom. To stop the hacking we will loose quite a bit of scripting freedom. Though even with that, we are still open to problems. Heck people could cheat even if the game was in its own unit with 0 ability to talk to it. Since it is digital and information must pass to another computer there is a hole.

Xbox live has cheats out, people use routers and software to modify packets as they play. Plus many more options.

Google up defeating cheats. Even the large companies cannot do it. Look at Blizzard and wow, that has a huge effort to block the hacks, but there are so many out there still. Shrug.

[pepel 0]

Laugh.. I don't see why everyone is so gung ho on the signatures. It can be bypassed...

In fact any anticheat measure could be bypassed, the server ones too... What is important is, at least, make cheaters work harder... and no just get the ofp cheats and put them in arma...

regards,

pepel

[maddogx 13]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

There are some major flaws in the way internet gameplay is handled, not only with ArmA but with online games in general. They are all optimized for performance and for nothing else. Gameplay security is mostly added as an afterthought. Game devs should remember this simple rule:

Everything that happens on the client computer can be manipulated by the client.

No anti-cheat system that relies on data provided by the client can ever be truly effective, because a hacker can disable or circumvent it. Punk Buster is the best example of this, as there are hundreds of cheats out there that dance around Punk Buster as if it were a disabled kid in a wheelchair. Now and then Evenbalance manages to lash out with an update and catch a few of them but they are still losing in the long run.

To truly combat cheats we need to prevent them from working in the first place instead of trying to detect them once they exist. In order to do this effectively, the entire architecture of online games would need to be changed. The Quake Wars devs have already made some great progress in that area with their "scope of relevance" system that makes sure the server only sends data to the clients that the player avatar can know about. This is a great step toward preventing wall hacks.

That's my rant and I'm stickin' to it. If you find a typo you can keep it.

[pepel 0]

The Quake Wars devs have already made some great progress in that area with their "scope of relevance" system that makes sure the server only sends data to the clients that the player avatar can know about. This is a great step toward preventing wall hacks.

The only problem of this is about resources. Obviusly, if server only send relevance data to clientes, you can take out the foliage if you want, but you won't see more...

But in order to do that, server will have to render the scene for each player, so it may take a lot of resources, and in the current state (or no state) of the arma server optimation it will be worst...

It would be a good start if the server would start controlling some paramters (position, damage of weapons....)

regards,

pepel

[deady 0]

Being able to ban by IP would also help.