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Just a thought...

Today as I was messing with my server's configuration before I decide on whether to go live with it full-time, some asshole aimbotter/speedhacker showed up...i booted him--killed my server.  Who the fuck plays on somebody elses server just to hack against bots?

ANYWHOOOOOOOO.....

I had an idea...

Can we come up with a community Ban-List?  List all the hackers and douchebags it. (generally just assholes who make the game unenjoyable for others)

Just a thought, i know its not THE answer to everyone's problems....but it might help out the situation.

yes, if the admins could find players IP addresses and post them up here for other admins that could be a good idea. I have not noticed any hackers, but hey. I wouldn't make the ban permanent though, but having their IP addresses up here would be able to give other admins a heads up.

yeah...i couldnt say for sure if this guy was aimbotting...he might have just had that good of aim

but the way he gained the extra bunny-hop speed from a STAND STILL...and how his ping would fluctuate by 20-30ms in a firefight...
this dude had to be speedhacking...which actually can be done in your own gateway/router by programming it to drop certain packets. 

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Why would I want to run a ban list?

simple...since theres not currently any anti-cheat measures other than requiring pure clients...
the talk about cheating came up with the rediculous guidlines for OA comps being all running under linux....

simple solution...get tough on cheating...kick first...ask questions later...

it makes it very clear to Newbs that cheating isnt tolerated
and by occasionally mistaking damn-good and clean players as h4xors, admins are letting the newbs know that there is somebody out there looking out for them, that the best do come under suspicion, and that there is no reason to resort to cheating just to stop the pure pwn3ge that can go on...

my case and point...

take any newb, give them a copy of ET, put them on a server with several seasoned pros at it....let them build up their frustrations

then show them the PBBans and PunksBusted lists...they  will see the almost 500% difference in bans for ET over other games....and assume that cheating is common in ET, and that cheating is so common because its FREE--much the same with OA

Plus...if youre that good that you get banned for cheating..consider it compliment to your skills...find out who did the banning and plead your case...dont be a whiny little candyass...

theres no 4th amendment rights in gaming...screw it...if you're an admin, your cop, judge, jury, and goddamn executioner...and its a game..you can raise people from the dead.....

its called circle jumping and about the ping, that means nothing.

this means absolutely nothing. guess what, if your on a crap box, when you get in heated action, expect lag. When there is a large number of players in the game, expect more lag.

what hackers on oa? openarena isnt nearly developed enough to have a hacker problem. All the aimbots are playing cs1.6 lols


my overall sympathies towards you people's claims towards hackers is to stop being overly suspicious and accept that your a newb.

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In what way is this relevant to speedhacking?

Speedhacking does absolutely nothing to effect your lagometer, so you using false methods to accuse someone of hacking. As I said before, if your on a crap box, expect firefights to effect your lagometer. If the admin is downloading/uploading everyone's pings will increase, but this hardly means someone is hacking.

Don't get kick/ban happy if you don't know what your doing.

No single week passes without somebody, here or in game, accusing somebody else of cheating. "But that joke isn't funny anymoooore". Now it's getting to the point where some feature to ban people from servers is being requested. And all with the maximum care: "kick first, ask questions later". Are you out of your freaking mind? Care to watch a couple of videos so you can learn how well people can play? Or just join some 1vs1 server and educate yourself.

Jeeeeez

Take the Ouch, time heals all wounds . PLAY PLAY PLay!!.

Oh yes please, ban and arbitrary abuse...
Lists do work with spam and annoyances because most people agree on what is an annoyance.
Banning players is only revelant for server admins, and it's already a feature. Who to ban, who to kick, well it's up to each opinion.
Fucking up servers (flood etc) has to be dealt by a technical way.

Nothing wrong with suggesting some ideas, but what I often hear here on cheat prevention tends to disgust me a bit.

quoted for truth

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Could you explain a bit more ? :)

I think I'd have the same opinion, I prefer robust by design stuff, than having to set up a police.

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You talk about one way to cheat with packets, how can we talk about robustness with any internet application which has to send packet at a particular rate ?
That just means Internet isn't robust by design, not the game.
Some guys just ignore this fact and tend to think "we need a trusted solution !", yay, make a trusted one and it'll be cracked, and if not, it's because your application became trusted to a point it became unusable.

The solution is to get your application being open, customizable, accessible, full of features (that's why noghost can be good), and discuss standards.
WTF if some guys come on it and want to fuck up the thing ? It's not different than scriptkiddies willing to flood some apache web server, the problem is with their manhood, not with Apache ;)

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Well, I'm aware of how encryption works, it does because of its principle : mathematics overcome technological limits, so it's secure because CPU ressources aren't enough to break it. Heard about grid computing and supercalculators used to break keys ?
Security is only about making things not accessible for common people.
But what the hell, when you play a game, you shouldn't need all that secure shit.
We're not developping OpenBSD, we just want to play a game which doesn't crash. Then we just have some ways to meet good guys there, and deal with bad guys in another way than setting a chipset on their neck.
Why would you want to do that when there is enough guys who with you like to play ? In worse case you just have to leave the server, in best case you explain the cheater this is boring (and do it in a respectful way) and he'll listen to you. Cheating is a lack of maturity, nothing else.

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I'm not sure you got the logic,

Develop some trivial protection, then it's cracked.
Then develop some punkbuster code, then it's bypassed too (dunno at which point it has been on Q3, and which drawbacks and complication it brought)
Then develop some trusted-dunnowhat, then take the risk to see it bypassed again.

Either you spend your time developing some punkbuster-trusted-dunnowhat, either you just live with the few cheaters there is.
IMO it would be more useful to write a how to deal with cheaters ingame, and spend the rest of the time you spared improving the game in itself.

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Why posting if not to convince ? ;)

If my opinion makes sense then that's fine ...

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Sorry but i'm not running a ban list.

As a less than average player I really would rather effort be but into recording stats so I can see if I'm improving or not. I used to come out better in Openarena but I've noticed its starting to attract better player where at times I'm simply outclassed especially on CTF where I think I have it going on, just to have a couple of people who can work in pairs just simply decimate the level.

i was just complimented being a "f*ck cheater"  \:D/

big assumptions...
most of the IPs are not static
guids are easy to change.
ban list won't work unless you want to ban subnets...

Congrats Jack. Did you fall off your seat :D

We had this guy called "fragger" on today.
He was constantly calling votes by player ID (where can I find the player list in the console?) so we couldn't tell who we were kicking, and he kept on calling them until we spammed him back and he left.

hahahaha

[url]i have lame ideas please use them!!!!/url]

I would start by looking at and using the UAA Banlist.  I use it on my UrT server.  they are expanding to all FPS games.

Link to the UAA - Join the JURY
http://www.urtadmins.com

keeping cheater on the run.

i have only seen one hacker on oa and he did not have a particulary good set up for their aimbot.  obvious leading for ping with hitscan weapons...  when g_delaghitscan is set to 1.  but here is an idea anyway without having to modify the source, create a server.cfg rename it servercfg.cfg, write a shell script which uses wget to download the ban list and replace the current server.cfg with servercfg.cfg then append the downloaded file to it which contains the bans.  a ban list updated from the server every time it is started from the script which calls that config making script.  no work except a little writing and adding bans.  i'm not writing the script because i use tcsh not bash like most seem to like.  the best use for such an idea i can think of at the moment is banning people who insult everyone via that, because there is likely only one aimbot, the creator only has it and he doesn't seem like he would unleash havok with it, why do you think he was there when only bots were there?  as to not annoy real players. i actually talked to him and hes not nasty or anything, probably just wants something interesting to do in their spare time same as me.  btw i know about the insecurities in what i mentioned above but its just an idea, fromhell doesnt want to run one, some want one and the insecurities can be mostly worked out with a little extra work and creative thought like only appending lines which start with the proper ban list stuff and dont contain ";", etc.


the \serverstatus command


yes that would be useful, aimbots usually have flaws.  in different fps games i have seen auto aim miss because of certain movements and also at a disadvantage to the aimbot user is their own auto aim.  it will usually lock on from some condition or other and that can be used against them.  the conditions i know of and have seen are: closest to crosshair, closest to player, lowest health, the one aiming at the player.  most public ones mostly dont have all of those but some do prioritise with them, like closest to crosshair along with aiming at player.  aiming at player taking priority.  knowing how they work sure helps.

i feel like i have said too much lol...  i usually only write short posts on forums and only once in a while

My friend uses some pipe command or something when the game starts which manages stuff like this. For example, when a player connects the console prints the users geo location which is always useful. I will speak to him and I have access to the server, it may save some work.

Perhaps it would be nice to have a useful mod that checks an online database for Banned IPs and adds them to your specific server.

ill need to do some fact checking but...

its my understanding that if the bans are handled externally, ala ETPub/Tremulous...

One could write a simple client/server program that could post/retrieve the bans from a master MySQL/SQLexpress db fairly easily.

It would run side by side the OA server independently. 

It could be done in .Net in a matter of days...for portability it would probably need to be done in java or plain C/C++ (al beit that would take a lot longer)

no code changes to the OA code base would be necessary

The problem with this is say person 'x' doesn't like person 'y'. What's stopping 'x' from adding 'y' the the bans list, thus stopping them playing on lots of servers?

I wish I was good enough to be called a cheater.
Ho Hum maybe one day
lol

I was called cheater by 3 guys on a server once. I've entered, said "Hi" to everyone, didn't get any answer, and when the match ended (I've entered 5 minutes before the match ended) I was the winner, and they said me I was a cheater. I didn't record a demo of that moment, now I'm getting sure that I record every match I play.

if the ban list is centralized please include demos. Although I don't think I've ever seen anyone get banned on OA. But I too think the bigger named servers should step up and be responsible for their servers against exploits in the game. Us players really cannot switch servers (contrary to suggestions) because the only players gather in mass on selected servers. And no one wants to play a multiplayer game against bots. I've got some demos of wallhacks, although it might be related to vertex lighting or shadows, it was still a wallhack. These tweaks that are exploitable shouldn't be tolerated on public servers. And neither offensive player names and offensive language(like blatant racism, homophobia, etc) in general. I understand this community isn't as big as Urban Terror, but maybe a lack of good public servers (ones that implement common sense rules) is the reason why. If there is a ban list it should be community ran rather than developer ran, it should include demos, and it should be implemented by people that actually care about their servers/game.

Also can I really pipe things into OA?

On the surface it always seems like a logical ideal, however, we tend to forget that 99% of the net is running on a dynamic IP and although you can effectively ban inter communities ( cities/states/countries ), it should be obvious that things are going to go wrong one way or another and fairly quickly, they'll either defeat the ban of you'll have one very lonely server. It's no secret that people cheat games, not you, but games in general and it's no secret that that to date we have had little control over it and so far nothing other than PB in this area and PB wasn't too impressive in the QuakeIII realm to begin with. So, someone whip something up. ;)

you could always the remove the ban after a month

when i was still a rail-king, i was once called a cheater by some noob, don't remeber when

No, what you need are MAC address bans. That way a dynamic IP doesn't help.
It however won't get you rid of sophisticated cheaters like me, but it will get you rid of most of them.

But the question is: With that many OpenArena players who play "fair", would there be anyone left if you started MAC-banning the cheaters?

since I don't cheat, I'll still be able to play

hopefully will be the case if such a thing is started, i think it would be better to just have admins actually on the server keeping an eye on things having a bit of experiance with cheats before to tell the difference.  i see lots of accusations these days without substance because people seem to believe another without any evidence just look at the score and lightning without spectating the player or taking the time to learn 1 small detail in how the networking works with high ping and \callvote kick /v/jessicara lol

put two // or a ~ in front of your name, that will stop morons from calling votes agains you...