ditto

** uk server **
www.ko krull.com (without the space, dont u love swear filters )

I think this is the third cheaters wave now.
This is the reason i gave up playing FL after exploring everything and doing all trades and mission what left for you is real pvp and clan wars. One day i saw one of the major players using cheat that was almost un-provable and probably was memory hook. I lost my faith in this game, cheating is too easy.But, still,i do some flaming on TLR so its fun though.

Sword clan
www.stand.at/sword

I get cheaters all the time on my server, but thats any server. The most you can do is to prevent any non-player items from falling into their hands (IONCROSS can scan players for this) enforce the rules as best you can, and have players keep you informed of troublemakers. It's a difficult decision to stop a server, but I eventually catch most cheaters on my server. I already have quite a ban list as it is. Some cheaters aren't smart enough to leave other players alone, so when I get numerous e-mails about the same player causing problems, it's easy to take action against them.

You just can't stop all cheaters on a server, but you can definitely put your foot down on them. One trick I use, whenever my ban list gets a new member, I share that info with other servers. It may be illegal to freely give away their number code, but I won't turn away any admin who wishes to verify a cheater on their server by comparing notes.

It's always nice to have a few admins you can trust. not a bunch, but enough to keep a watch on your server during most hours of the day. They can usually catch things any cheat detector will often miss. And if a cheater wants to make himself known, then it'll just make my job easier. There's plenty of room for more on my ban list. I'm booting them out and taking names, and I'm willing to share that info with any server host that requests it. Eventually, all cheaters get caught.

___________________________________
There is no knowledge that is not power.

I certainly understand Pinger's and ukserver's frustration. As moby says it must be waves of cheaters because in the last month, especially in the last three weeks things have been screwy on the server. I'm not going into details except to say the various anti-cheat stuff I have catches and bans about half of them. But then all it takes is one bonehead to ruin it for one or many other players so a single cheat can have enormous reprocussions.

Captain Tylor or any other server sysadmin, feel free to peruse my server's page of shame here. Updated frequently and unfortunately growing.

moby, your proposed anti-cheat software would be nice right about now...

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Earendil
SysAdmin of Boston Freelancer server
See server rules and server news for more info.

It does seem to happen in waves. I find that usually around the beginning of the month or around holidays is when it occurs most though. We've had an outbreak of cheating on our servers lately, but for the most part the IFSO has caught most of them. There are some things though that don't get caught like the speed modders, but there are so many people that don't like modding these days that they'll turn these guys in pretty fast. Since using several of the utilities available through this site though, I've managed to cut cheating down to those that get just a little too giddy and decide that what they have isn't enough and then they get nailed their first time trying to cheat.

For those that want to keep tabs on names or what not of cheaters I have a banned list HERE

Admin Skyevalen - Hunters Association Server

I am sorry Earendil, my "solution" would fail here, this is one of the reason i droped the idea, even though i know of someone that does some working on the issue.

The only GOOD solution here will be imo - "PunkBuster".

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The use of PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat software is optional and has always been provided without direct cost to our users. We believe that the cost to provide Anti-Cheat protection should be built into the cost of online games. Therefore, we contract directly with game developers and/or publishers who wish to have our software and services associated with their online gaming products. If your favorite game does not yet have integrated PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat technology available, let the game's developer and/or publisher know how important this issue is to you.

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In other words WE - the freelancer community have to get those a*ses of DA and MS get moving. Their patch was a laught.


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/me going to protest marching at Redmon MS-HQ

Yes, for strictly memory editing cheats there is little to nothing you can do moby. I hadn't thought in just that way, I was thinking of a bigger picture. Maybe that anti-cheat stuff would be useful but would M$ really have used it if they knew? Would the anti-cheat be helpful for memory cheats? We can push it for FL2, if there is one...

@Skyevalen: I guess I never considered there would be more than a dozen similarities between certain cheater names between two different servers. You can check out my banned list here.

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Earendil
SysAdmin of Boston Freelancer server
See server rules and server news for more info.

Thx, I do tend to keep tabs on other server's banned lists and also player lists. You'd be surprised how many players on Elite have been banned on other servers for cheating, but Elite still has them as being able to play. If we all set an example for the non-modded servers that we won't allow what happens on one server to happen on our servers, then the cheating will slow down quicker. However, there is always going to be cheating and that is the risk that we the server ops take when we setup our servers. It is a risk that we knew would happen and it does not bother us because we have the ability to remove these people from our servers and have our servers be as clean as possible for the non-cheating people that play on them.

Also a lot of the german players that come to my server and they speak their native language usually, they have been asking about cloaking mods in particular and where to get them from. They have been saying so that they can use them on these no-mod servers to cause havoc and lag. I personally don't speak german, but I wrote it all down and translated it one day with some help and was able to reply back in german to their surprise. Most of them have not been back since.....

Admin Skyevalen - Hunters Association Server One {HA1}

For There to Be Justice, First There Must Be Chaos....

Edited by - Fear Factor on 1/26/2004 8:51:55 AM

TE-2LT-RAVEN
you sound guilty

Raven - i hope to hell your banned from all servers.

Guys - just a question:
What the hell is a memory hack, and how does it work. Am concerned - cause i don't want months of work to be spoilt by idiots. And also - what do they mod? Is it just money, or equipment/ships or what? Am curious

Pinger may know more but I believe I have an idea. FL checks, especially for anti-cheat code, when the characters undock. Well once undocked no more checking occurs until another undock. While the character is flying around somehow FL, as it is installed in memory, can be hacked and changed with, well, anything. Since the checking is only during undocking, they can edit the character with anything they like that normally would be easily detected.

Of course I would never put something this "sensitive" unless I had a solution for the sysadmins! If you suspect someone of cheating, just edit the file with FLSO and send the character to any station. If he doesn't (or can't) change the character then when he undocks, then he's snatched and the anti-cheat software kicks him. If you have FLSO like I do, any auto-kick becomes an auto-ban. I would rather put a potential cheater under the microscope and apologize later for the auto-ban than try to find a cheater amongst the current players online or even the current players in a day of playing. What I am finding is half of my auto-kicks/bans are from lag. How I know this is something best left to sysadmin discussions only.

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Earendil
SysAdmin of Boston Freelancer server
See server rules and server news for more info.

Well my auto bans are 90% new players trying to use a ship mod or weapon mod that dont even get the chance to undock as the 1.1 patch catches them. As for the rest usually its unlimited bats/bots after someone has died a number of times and loads a trainer which is just a front end for a memory editor to make there bats/bots etc unlimited. Or the odd spawn cheat, who come on just to casue as much hassle as they can before banned so they can crow about it on there own server. Sad to say but most of those are a certain Nationality.

I do watch for the mission cheat kick bug in 1.1, but I've not had one of those since October last year.

But one thing that FL admins need is a addon to block IP's. As it stands on mine I cant cause its a ISP hosted so I'd have a heluva time getting the techs to put a good node block in place. As Installing firewall on the box is out of the question so until someone makes a good version of ataka's FLmonitor we will see the idiots return whne they have made a new ID number.

A lot people have dynamic IPs, so banning IP is almost pointless.