Is anticheat worthless these days?

[Alpha]

Was sitting on DM copping the usual from Diable when a few players jumped in bad mouthing ac saying it doesnt work anymore. How true is this?

( Notice at the end of the discussion the only ones bad mouthing it are the ones not actually using it) 


Diable: Hacker lost again
Agent335: only potential hackers here are the ones not using any sort of anticheat IE YOU
claire: anticheat is old
claire: and not useful anymore
claire: and is no indication of cheating or not anymore
Agent335: lol claire. its better than nothing. and if u think that go load it up and download a
bot or wallhack and try use it
Diable: lol
Diable: dumb dumb
Pile0g00: LOL AC is a joke, has not been update in too long
claire: ive seen friends load bots with ac loaded
Agent335: on servers with wallfly?
claire: yes
Agent335: have u told quadz about it
claire: nothing he can do
Diable: ac is your only defense
Diable: poor
Pile0g00: ignore the idiot... knows nothing about how AC works or programming
claire: like i said...AC isnt relevant anymore
Diable: speed hack
Pile0g00: aAC is crap
claire: it was a neat idea...but handicapped the game
Agent335: if u think i am cheating in any way. record a demo and post it on forums so admin can
ban me
Diable: lol fuck you
Diable: cuz you're a fraud
Diable: i will never stop
Agent335: as i said. u think i cheat? record a demo. either that or stfu
Diable: u fuck with me n all of us
Diable: u aint foolin nobody
Diable: youre a fraud dude



+----------------+--------+-----+------+
|  Player Name   |AC Valid|Files|Client|
+----------------+--------+-----+------+
|WallFly[BZZZ]   | exempt | N/A | N/A  |
|Diable          |   NO   | N/A | N/A  |
|Fishbone        |   NO   | N/A | N/A  |
|random          |   yes  |   0 |R1Q2  |
|Pile0g00        |   NO   | N/A | N/A  |
|Agent335        |   yes  |   0 |R1Q2  |
|claire          |   NO   | N/A | N/A  |
+----------------+--------+-----+------+

[quadz]

Is anticheat worthless these days?

Answer: "It's complicated."




Simply stated, it's not worthless, but its utility has diminished.

[|iR|Focalor]

claire: ive seen friends load bots with ac loaded

Um... Which friends? Name these people.

claire: it was a neat idea...but handicapped the game

Explain precisely HOW it handicaps the game. With no other explanation, one can only assume you mean that the usage of anticheat puts someone at a disadvantage over the person not using it. I've used it MOST of the time over the past 5 years, although there have been brief periods where I connected without it. I have noticed no difference in game performance with or without it.

[Whirlingdervish]

Short answer: If nobody is using it, like most days on DM, it's useless.

Long answer: It still pops people for known cheats if they are using it, and makes it much harder to cheat if they do know of certain workarounds. Without AC a server admin is left with only banning on the table as a method of handling suspected cheaters. With it, you can force them to use it and collect more information.

Even if people have found ways to hack it now (which I've rarely seen done in a useful fashion) anticheat is still able to give an admin useful input in the form of reports like "unknown renderer", and historical information like IPs and aliases when people who have been caught with a wallhack years ago show up again trying something slightly different now:

Here's an example, with a current player who uses a variety of aliases and changes his IP intentionally trying to evade well earned bans: "Budman/chaos/krogulce/bonger"

http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=174.62.128.157&t=c
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=71.235.101.85&t=c
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=24.250.16.74&t=c
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=24.250.18.212&t=c
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=68.14.69.112
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=68.14.68.206&t=c

For years he shows up ONLY with the exact same attempt at hooking his renderer in order to wallhack. Without the IP and alias history AC provided that shows his similar IPs and overlapping alias, we would not notice that this is the same person over all these years.
Instead of having to use AC right now, he could be connecting with any client and be cheating all day with impunity because he's so mediocre that it doesn't make him actually win when he does.

When that guy shows up with something else, we will now know that he has used up all the slack he was entitled to during his long history of trying to cheat here. It makes it easier to tell when something is probably not a false positive as well, like this:

http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=68.9.68.197&t=c

There are legitimate reasons you could get an "unknown renderer" hit from AC, but in the case of this guy would anyone give him the benefit of the doubt knowing his history? Knowing that he's never had one hit like this in years, you are left to wonder "why now?". Say this was an issue with his client or connection, or his q2 install: we would definitely have seen him get a hit for this before. The lack of history in this case is also more information for the admins to use.

I've seen this again and again with well known players and even a couple times where people forget that anticheat was there or came back after a while and got caught with their old hacks unexpectedly because at the time nothing caught them:

Like so: Didn't play for years, comes back... first day gets these hits.

http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=216.255.40.253


I've seen people come back from playing Quakelive and get immediately caught with their injection style wallhacks still loaded that were incredibly prevalent in that game:

http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=74.129.98.33&t=c

A long term example off the top of my head is Stick with his spiked models:

Then: http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=68.195.36.13&t=c
Now: http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=47.18.119.141&t=c

They magically showed back up the minute he loaded anticheat again after 5 years of not using it by choice.
During the period between these hits he decided to use nocheat instead of r1q2 for some reason which I will leave to you to decide.

Other examples just show that while there are not many of them, the people willing to cheat at this old game are persistent and stubborn fuckwads who will try for years to do so. They will change names, they will change ISPs and in some cases they will change countries to try to do it. This guy has been at it for 5 years straight:

http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=78.157.73.206&t=c
http://stats.antiche.at/?ip=81.147.52.200&t=c

Without AC we would not know these things.

 
long story short:

If nothing else, AC gives us better information with which to form better conclusions.

Without it, server admins are left with a very slim list of tools to verify that someone is or is not legitimate, and none of them are automatic, none of them keep a history to look back on, and none of them are performed by a completely unbiased 3rd party.

[haunted]

Claire must be talking about me, see the david thread.

That being said there's actually getting around AC, and then there's temporarily avoiding AC like Razor has done in the past yet still being logged as an 'unknown renderer' like dervish said.

[|iR|Focalor]

Well with all these people complaining that AC is stupid and useless, maybe Quadz should just shitcan it and start permanently banning everyone suspected of anything. But when that works out to where it's a couple of these negative-nancies talking endless shit about AC who end up banned, I'll suspect they'll yearn for the days when forcing AC was the next step.

The problem is that the most ignorant in the herd tend to be the ones making the most noise about it on the servers. And those of us who know a thing or two know that it's usually an exercise in futility to try to beat sense into the head of a self-made moron, and often we'll remain silent and ignore their comments for the sake of our own time that would be wasted trying to educate them.

I'm not saying I think more people should make the effort to educate these people. I'm more saying... FUCK IT. Enough of this shit already. If these dumbasses want it so bad, give it to them. And then when they start complaining about rampant cheating or about being completely banned after a first offense, fucking ignore them. Let them eat shit.

[quadz]

The problem is that the most ignorant in the herd tend to be the ones making the most noise about it on the servers.

Agreed, in general.

Then there are a few individuals embodying the trifecta of ignorance, obstinence, and belligerence, who are just an extra special pleasure to attempt to reason with.

Distinct from those types, however, is claire, who runs a sizable number of Q2 servers, and who ain't no dummy. So I'll have to ask him what he meant by, "it was a neat idea...but handicapped the game."

Not sure if he might have been referring to the exclusionary nature of some servers which elected to run with globally forced AC; or maybe something more along the lines that bothers me, which is that I've wanted to make some various tweaks and improvements to r1q2 over recent years, but there seems to be no point in doing so, as there's no clear path to getting such changes AC-approved. So r1q2 is effectively stagnant instead of continuing to evolve. Anyway, that would be my beef -- I dunno if it's claire's.

That said, AC still seems to me to be useful. (But nowhere near as powerful as it was when the AC server was being updated to recognize newer cheats.)

[Alpha]

I have actually taken the initiative to contact r1ch and try and get a response to this thread, to either update the anticheat database or hand it to quadz who is more active on the quake 2 scene

[quadz]

I have actually taken the initiative to contact r1ch and try and get a response to this thread, to either update the anticheat database or hand it to quadz who is more active on the quake 2 scene

Hm.  I never asked to be in charge of it.

[AmpLiF1eR]

Hi all,

Anticheat is the reason why I say goodbye to Quake2.
I was very active (lithium) in 1999/2000/2001 and came back a month ago.

I noticed that my IP range is on some blacklist that forces me to use anticheat on playground.ru for example because my ping is too high on tastyspleen (while 80% is not forced and doesnt use it when checking the aclist).
Because I'm forced to use it, I'm basically forced to use r1q2 while I want to use Q2pro which works much smoother to me, also because I'm forced to use it, I'm forced to be in windows all the time while I normally booted into my linux environment which isn't compatible which anticheat and again, because someone in my IP range ruined it for me, I'm forced to use it.
I've seen many hacks on ac servers, so in my opinion, the disadvantages are greater than the advantages today so I can only say goodbye while I've always enjoyed Quake2 so much.

So for me personally, Anticheat ruined it so I can only looking back to the old days and say 'it was fun' and leave.

Greetings.

[R1CH]

I do still check the anticheat logs from time to time. These days I find there are very few attempts to use new cheats, mostly old ones that are long since detected or known spiked models. Just because R1Q2 or the anticheat.dll haven't been updated for a long time does not mean anticheat is worthless. Anticheat was designed to run mostly server-side - the client sends hashes of loaded files, DLLs, etc and then the server can compare them to known cheats so even without any updating it's easy to add new checks.

In the last few years or so I've added two new spiked models, 12 new OpenGL hooks (likely wallhacks) and 1 new aimbot.

If anyone thinks anticheat is not detecting someone who is hacking, feel free to message me with their name or IP and I can check the logs for anything suspicious. I'm always on QuakeNet as R1CH. There are very few new hacks being made for Q2 any more and unless they go out of their way to evade anticheat, most hacks are still easily detected.

[quadz]

Hi,

Because I'm forced to use it, I'm basically forced to use r1q2 while I want to use Q2pro which works much smoother to me, also because I'm forced to use it, I'm forced to be in windows all the time while I normally booted into my linux environment which isn't compatible which anticheat and again, because someone in my IP range ruined it for me, I'm forced to use it.

Sorry to hear that. Having to boot to a different OS would be a deal-breaker for me as well.

[quadz]

Howdy R1CH,

I do still check the anticheat logs from time to time.

Great to hear.

Thanks!

[|iR|Focalor]

I have actually taken the initiative to contact r1ch and try and get a response to this thread, to either update the anticheat database or hand it to quadz who is more active on the quake 2 scene

Hm.  I never asked to be in charge of it.

I actually started to post last night suggesting that maybe you could ask R1CH to be allowed to update things, or maybe even create your own anticheat system since you do run the largest Q2 server community in North America and it would benefit you the most. But I didn't. I figured it would be kind of rude to even suggest such an idea since I'm pretty sure it would take lots of work, work that maybe you ain't so overjoyed to take on. It would be akin to saying, "Hey. Anticheat might need updating. I don't wanna do it, so... uh... YOU fuckin' do it. You weren't busy with anything else were you? Yeah, I don't care if you were. DO IT!." But apparently not everyone is as courteous as I am.

And as good of an idea as it sounded like at first to me, I do realize that it would take more time and effort. And because of that... fuck it. Don't do it. You already do more than anyone around here is worth and rarely ever get a thank you for it.

Thank you, by the way.

[haunted]

AC is extremely useful, especially with r1ch checking up on it every now and then, imo.