GRO: Anti-Cheat Measures | Forums

[Jeeguiguren]

Hello Ghosts!

As many of you have noticed, recent beta-tests have had the first confirmed "public" appearance of cheats used in GRO. First and foremost, we would like to reassure the community that battling cheating is a top priority for the team, and these disturbances are not going ignored - in fact we've had tracking methods in place for several betas that allow us to detect many of these incidents.

Our programming team has also been hard at work putting multiple-measures in place to secure the game against those cheats that are beyond detection. This is in fact one of the driving reasons why GRO relies on Dedicated Servers to operate the game-matches, allowing us to implement more robust verification of in-game actions by players. Of course - our other priority is to never let such effort interfere with the game-experience itself, or degrade the game-functionality when new security measures are implemented or enabled in a particular beta-build.

With this in mind - the planned rollout of security measures follows an incremental path, where you'll see more and more features on this front in upcoming patches, but with each step allowing us to thoroughly test the new functionality to avoid negatively impacting the game before activating the next measures.

Roughly speaking, our security work currently falls into three broad categories:

• 3rd party cheat protection software - this has been in on-going tests since our first Beta, to guarantee we will not impair the end-user experience when its full-feature set is enabled.
  
  
• Server-side verification of in-game actions, this is again an on-going effort that balances in-game performance/experience, resource usage and accuracy of invalid actions performed by players.
  
  
• General hardening of local-game binaries against typical intrusion attacks.
  
  
• Tracking & analysis of potential cheats that aren't caught by any of the above - this is as much a technical exercise as it is training our GMs to understand what constitutes potential cheats and how to investigate when such occurrences are reported.

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As part of this ongoing effort, the next Beta-period will come with a few countermeasures specific to hacks that have already been observed in the wild, as well as increased tracking of such activities. Additionally, we're targeting to start enabling functionality of our 3rd party cheat protection software sometime during this period as well.

The members of our Security Team are committed to making this game as grief-free an experience as possible, and work closely with other teams on the game to achieve this.

We here on the Ghost Recon Online team recognize that the fight against cheating is an ongoing war and look forward to your support in the upcoming battle.


Rok Erjavec
GRO Lead Programmer

[Hex73uk]

This is very reassuring to hear especially as cheats in most online multiplayer games are now at the point to be considered 'the norm' and eventually end up killing the game for those who choose to play fairly. It is very disheartening to see a game you love get hacked and the devs do nothing towards making it harder to hack.

Please keep researching means of protecting the playerbase from cheats as you can only strengthen the community by doing so.

Also after some reading recently, I understand some of the more infamous 'undetectable' hacks are using a Javascript injection method to scan DX and then inject into the game code. Please look into this.

[djdajay]

the last few days, the number of cheating players had grown enormously, take all the fun out of this game.

[DodsonMC]

the last few days, the number of cheating players had grown enormously, take all the fun out of this game.

I agree with him... I got on today and either there was a wall glitch exploit, headshot immunity lags, or just plain hacking

[Bob-Albion]

I agree with him... I got on today and either there was a wall glitch exploit, headshot immunity lags, or just plain hacking

the last few days, the number of cheating players had grown enormously, take all the fun out of this game.

Yes same today got so fed up i just quit the game as there is no point in playing, all this is going to do is get other players to think if i can't win ill join in the hacking. Its a shame some people just like to bring a good thing to its knees even before the game goes live .. shame on all you hackers

[cirem]

Yep, Hackers! Everywhere!

Just learn how to play the game (it takes some time, you know) and stop calling everyone who's better than you a hacker. Please.

[Klaue_]

Wowowow meric calm down please.
Not everyone who complains about cheaters is a blame-troll or bad player.

Although i also think espacially new players should stay calm and keep their fingers from cheater accusations because very much people dont get that "taking cover" does not mean you are invincible nor beeing invisible.

I have to mention that much people seem to have problems with 3D-vision and not familiar with lag, so watch your characters legs, shoulder and arms carfully if they stick out somehow. Even some obstacles are "soft".

Not to blame anyone. Just stay cool and dont give the troll a roll.

[cirem]

Wowowow meric calm down please.

Hm? I'm completely calm

[DodsonMC]

I wasn't complaining about the cover, I know about how cover works it is just that my head is never i view when i am prone, but there are people who somehow are able to get headshots, not normal kills but headshot kills. I am ok with most players because I know they have skills, it is just the ones who think hacking is cool and easy. I thought this game was going to be fun, but if GRO doesn't get the hacking fixed, all the hackers are going to ruin the fun. I know the higher levels aren't going to have a problem. But there are lvl 1 players who are hacking and killing lvl 10s and others (it just doesn't seem right at all, especially if a whole team of lvl 1s defeat a team of lvl 5s and up

[Surviock]

I wasn't complaining about the cover, I know about how cover works it is just that my head is never i view when i am prone, but there are people who somehow are able to get headshots, not normal kills but headshot kills.

That problem is an bug, other player perspective that managed make a headshot showing you were standing, that with low cover (such as walls, windows and...maybe cars) will absolutely ruin your chances. I did reported that bug during previous beta test, but it appears that they are still fixing that problem. It will sounds annoying but until then...you have to deal with that nuisance, for now. In the meantime, the team might need more video's and screenshots, although it will be optional since the team are aware of this.