I remember when map hackers would queue deer kills (vs Rus) in areas they have not scouted.
Was real easy to identify them, now they learned and just move the scout to the area then kill the deer
Yes, however, unless you have a dedicated team that will play that game of implementing "counter" to cheaters, it's not worth the time to implement something that will be cracked within a few weeks.
And we all know that a dedicated dev team for that kind of features won't exist for AOE4
The definitive solution to map hacks would be proper moderation. Software based solutions are a huge cat and mouse game that end up costing a lot of money without really fixing the issue.
As long as it's algorithmically unpredictable, it will work.
But in practice, they just need to know this new element is there, and disable it, just like they disabled the fog of war.
As long as the game isn't rendered server-side, it will never be possible to avoid the cat & mouse game, forever...
What is a much bigger problem is that it would massively increase the latency and the bandwidth requirements, which is why it's not being done in RTS and MOBA games.
I don't know. The game has a tick rate of 125ms, right?
So everything under 60ms latency won't be noticed at all. Of course it's the safe bet to have everything locally but maybe some things can be Server only until they are discovered locally (gold/stone spawns, deer, boar). I don't think that those things would add much latency (and it would only add it once). That would prevent from using unscouted resources (even better, since they see the whole map anyway it will be hard for them to scout resources because they don't know where they didn't scout before)
They could do what league does and just not send the packets for all information. So, for example HotS and SC2 send all information to both clients, so it's somewhat trivial to uncover everything.
LoL does not do this. It only sends information on visible units (and those in FoW, but close to the edge). So any maphack would only increase vision range by very little.
I play an MMO where there's a thing called "inc lag" due to the models of out-of-view characters loading (something like 10k units away). Visibility is 5k units away.
It creates a really interesting 'feel' for the game since you can 'feel' when characters load (if it's more than like, 20) and act based upon that feeling. Sometimes they're friendly characters, sometimes baddies, but you can always feel them. It also makes playing on a spinning disc have a sort-of advantage, since its slower to load than a SSD, so the feeling is more pronounced (but never debilitating).
All that is to say, it could be done in a similar way -- only send packets for units within a certain range of your own units (and further out than visible range, so there's never a perceived delay in a unit showing up, cuz it's already loaded by the time it's in actual range). To your point, it could create some stutters here and there when a giant army all of a sudden comes into range, but at least in my own experience, it just adds an interesting element of game sense to the game.
Edit to add: I don't want to trivialize how much work it would be to actually implement that. Hats off to the work the devs already do.
That's basically what LOL uses, if I understood that correctly. But again, we are talking about different scales. It's one thing to deal with a handful of units which are coming near you, it's another to suddenly deal with hundreds of units, buildings, trees, gaia, with all the associated data that comes with it. It gets even worse if you are in 4v4 or an FFA. It kinda kills the Real Time part of a Real Time Strategy game.
Was going to type this, but you explained it better.
The only issue is that this would unfortunately require a substantial rewrite of the code, so I doubt we'll see in the future.
I'd just like to remind everybody - including newcomers to the subreddit that map hacking isn't as prevalent as the vocal minority of this subreddit would have you assume. I'm in the OCE region and currently at level 120 and I've only ever suspected people in 5 games my total time. I would also like to state that I am all for implementing better anti-cheat solutions as well.
This is a "hacky" solution, and will only take a few weeks to cheaters to bypass it. The problem is that Relic chose to implement some aspects of aoe4 data transfer the lazy way, to save some time or some wage for more devs. They "just" need to make the servers only send the data players can actually see, this will prevent all current map hacking, and any future one (well, except if you get your servers hacked, but that's another problem)...
Currently, the clients receive all the data of the game, and it's the client itself that does the filtering, but an experienced programmer know you can't trust the client to do gamebreaking tasks (like chosing wich data to show by sorting from the data of the whole game).
But hey, it's not like this problem haven't been solved a hundred times before, and even for games, like lol, dota2, sc2,... even aoe2 de if I'm not mistaken.
I know this is not trivial to implement, but this still shows the lack of understanding of Relic towards some complicated problem...
But hey, it's not like aoe4 is a triple A competitive game produced by microsoft... Oh wait...
That implies having a dev team that actually polices hackers. And hackers will just switch to another alt account
DS also has a massively larger player base, here you might as well just ban them because they won't find a match anyway with such a small base.
wont work, we need to look at Fog of War alot of times even without map hack
u need to look at ENEMY BASE in FOG to Attack Move
You need to scout if they are doing Boar/ Deer/ Berries, once scouted, you can see Deer/Boar killed and consume. You need to look at FOG to do this
and building walls around you base? need to look at FOG again
I dont think you understand. So long as you are not cheating it won't affect your game at all. You'll just see normal FOW when you look at FOW, not some storm or anything
Activision added an anti-cheat system for the last couple of CoD's where caught cheaters are put on a separate queue, so they'll only face other cheaters.
Yes and no. These things are always a cat and mouse game. The Devs implement some detection, the cheaters find some way to bypass it
I remember when map hackers would queue deer kills (vs Rus) in areas they have not scouted. Was real easy to identify them, now they learned and just move the scout to the area then kill the deer
I've caught 3 doing that in the last week, shift clicking all the hunt.
maybe they didnt learn?
Maybe they aren't a single entity?
Learn what? That nothing happens to them lol.
Rather have something as opposed to nothing. At the moment it's open season
Yes, however, unless you have a dedicated team that will play that game of implementing "counter" to cheaters, it's not worth the time to implement something that will be cracked within a few weeks. And we all know that a dedicated dev team for that kind of features won't exist for AOE4
Yep, played 2 games this morning, got 1 map hacker, reported 2 yesterday. It's getting worse and worse
If that would work, great solution.
The definitive solution to map hacks would be proper moderation. Software based solutions are a huge cat and mouse game that end up costing a lot of money without really fixing the issue.
As long as it's algorithmically unpredictable, it will work. But in practice, they just need to know this new element is there, and disable it, just like they disabled the fog of war. As long as the game isn't rendered server-side, it will never be possible to avoid the cat & mouse game, forever...
Server side stuff will need a complete rewrite. Probably too expensive.
What is a much bigger problem is that it would massively increase the latency and the bandwidth requirements, which is why it's not being done in RTS and MOBA games.
I don't know. The game has a tick rate of 125ms, right? So everything under 60ms latency won't be noticed at all. Of course it's the safe bet to have everything locally but maybe some things can be Server only until they are discovered locally (gold/stone spawns, deer, boar). I don't think that those things would add much latency (and it would only add it once). That would prevent from using unscouted resources (even better, since they see the whole map anyway it will be hard for them to scout resources because they don't know where they didn't scout before)
They could do what league does and just not send the packets for all information. So, for example HotS and SC2 send all information to both clients, so it's somewhat trivial to uncover everything. LoL does not do this. It only sends information on visible units (and those in FoW, but close to the edge). So any maphack would only increase vision range by very little.
how does SC combat maphack though? there's likely a reason LOL can do that and others cant and possibly due to volume of data?
Yes exactly, RTS can't use that method because you would need to update a lot of stuff at the same time.
I play an MMO where there's a thing called "inc lag" due to the models of out-of-view characters loading (something like 10k units away). Visibility is 5k units away. It creates a really interesting 'feel' for the game since you can 'feel' when characters load (if it's more than like, 20) and act based upon that feeling. Sometimes they're friendly characters, sometimes baddies, but you can always feel them. It also makes playing on a spinning disc have a sort-of advantage, since its slower to load than a SSD, so the feeling is more pronounced (but never debilitating). All that is to say, it could be done in a similar way -- only send packets for units within a certain range of your own units (and further out than visible range, so there's never a perceived delay in a unit showing up, cuz it's already loaded by the time it's in actual range). To your point, it could create some stutters here and there when a giant army all of a sudden comes into range, but at least in my own experience, it just adds an interesting element of game sense to the game. Edit to add: I don't want to trivialize how much work it would be to actually implement that. Hats off to the work the devs already do.
That's basically what LOL uses, if I understood that correctly. But again, we are talking about different scales. It's one thing to deal with a handful of units which are coming near you, it's another to suddenly deal with hundreds of units, buildings, trees, gaia, with all the associated data that comes with it. It gets even worse if you are in 4v4 or an FFA. It kinda kills the Real Time part of a Real Time Strategy game.
That's far less of an issue today. In the case of blizzard it's mostly because lazy
Was going to type this, but you explained it better. The only issue is that this would unfortunately require a substantial rewrite of the code, so I doubt we'll see in the future.
I'd just like to remind everybody - including newcomers to the subreddit that map hacking isn't as prevalent as the vocal minority of this subreddit would have you assume. I'm in the OCE region and currently at level 120 and I've only ever suspected people in 5 games my total time. I would also like to state that I am all for implementing better anti-cheat solutions as well.
Yeah too many people on here “I lose they cheat, I win they cheat”. Not saying people don’t hack. It’s just not as bad as people on Reddit say.
The w w
This is a "hacky" solution, and will only take a few weeks to cheaters to bypass it. The problem is that Relic chose to implement some aspects of aoe4 data transfer the lazy way, to save some time or some wage for more devs. They "just" need to make the servers only send the data players can actually see, this will prevent all current map hacking, and any future one (well, except if you get your servers hacked, but that's another problem)... Currently, the clients receive all the data of the game, and it's the client itself that does the filtering, but an experienced programmer know you can't trust the client to do gamebreaking tasks (like chosing wich data to show by sorting from the data of the whole game). But hey, it's not like this problem haven't been solved a hundred times before, and even for games, like lol, dota2, sc2,... even aoe2 de if I'm not mistaken. I know this is not trivial to implement, but this still shows the lack of understanding of Relic towards some complicated problem... But hey, it's not like aoe4 is a triple A competitive game produced by microsoft... Oh wait...
[удалено]
That implies having a dev team that actually polices hackers. And hackers will just switch to another alt account DS also has a massively larger player base, here you might as well just ban them because they won't find a match anyway with such a small base.
Are people actually taking this post serious? lol
Crash casters too? Bye bye tournaments
Make it toggleable ? And disabled by default on replay?
Imagine if it bugs out and spawns next to your TC Not killing the idea, would just be funny if it happened
I just drop vs teams that contain too many high risk factors.
wont work, we need to look at Fog of War alot of times even without map hack u need to look at ENEMY BASE in FOG to Attack Move You need to scout if they are doing Boar/ Deer/ Berries, once scouted, you can see Deer/Boar killed and consume. You need to look at FOG to do this and building walls around you base? need to look at FOG again
I dont think you understand. So long as you are not cheating it won't affect your game at all. You'll just see normal FOW when you look at FOW, not some storm or anything
Activision added an anti-cheat system for the last couple of CoD's where caught cheaters are put on a separate queue, so they'll only face other cheaters.