R2Northstar
Implement a sort of counter-cheat system
Introduction
With the discussion of a global banlist and according pull requests (1 and 2), I'd like to instead propose an alternative system using what I'll refer to as a counter-cheat system.
In particular this system is inspired by a recent addition to Call of Duty: Warzone where cheaters upon detection would receive a nerf so they can no longer damage enemy players, essentially turning them into easy prey.
Goal
Similarly the here proposed counter-cheat system would act as counter measure to whatever some players offence. Compared to a ban system this would allow offending/banned players to still play the game but see their offending characteristic (aimbot, ...) be nullified, meaning their presence on a server is no longer an issue.
Examples
- An aimbot user would see their damage output severely nerfed so that any players they are shooting have enough time to react and counter-act, essentially nerfing the cheating player's effective damage output on an enemy to that of a sub-par player.
- A player spamming chat with random or offensive messages (racism, homophobia, etc.) would get shadow-banned resulting in them being able to play the game as usual and also being able to send messages, however their messages would never reach other players, essentially muting them.
- A player using speedhacks (do those still exist?) would see their speed server-limited by being teleported back to a previous position (for other players it should just look like they are moving in one slow continuous motion) or just frozen in place entirely.
Additional
Not directly related to this discussion but on a sidenote I'd argue that these restrictions posed on offending players should be performed by server owners as opposed core Northstar contributors. In particular this means while Northstar MasterServer could be used to host a list of offenders, servers should not the grabbing its contents by default but rather server owners would have to specifically enable it. The idea being that cheaters and other offending players cannot blame core Northstar contributors for their ban but rather have to deal with the wider Northstar community (in this case the server hosters and maintainers).
To add another example:
- Someone is known to use wallhacks -> they will be perma map-hacked so everyone else sees their position through walls and such.
Seems easily abusable and prone to false positives, seeing as how 'interesting' Source is.. If it's implemented, someone can frame another person with doctoring evidence, social engineering, manipulation, etc, to get them into the ban list. That, or bugs like being flung around from Titan and Pilot interaction will be detected as fly/speed hacks and a false counter will be applied.
Exploit detection is not part of the system. This system solely discusses how to deal with someone that was marked as cheating/whatever. Some stuff like muting spammers could be done automatically but things like aimbot detection will always rely on a human to judge.
Basically, such a counter-cheat system would deal with player once they have been reliably marked for some offence.
I have reservations about adding server-side anti-cheat to a C-S architecture game mode that allows self-hosting and allows free use of mods; Server-side anti-cheating looks wonderful, but it will potentially require the server to have more storage resources and higher processor frequency to perform data verification and judge the legality of behavior in each logical tick; at the same time, because of the existence of mods , the server administrator can define any possible value within the parameter range and apply the game, which will greatly increase the difficulty of anti-cheating processing, and the difference in game configuration between different servers also makes the unified anti-cheating agreement useless. (By the way, I think the default implementation of the banlist should be called more: a list of potentially unwanted users)
Because of the difficulty and unreliability of automatic anti-cheating implementation, the behavior of automatically discovering and marking cheaters in the game will have a very high probability of accidental injury to ordinary players, so similar to Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 custom servers, which are recorded by spectators/servers The behavior of banning and automatically submitting to the main routing server after discovery in the administrator game is more worthy of reference ,but this may also lead to the occurrence of "banned for killing the administrator" :( ,this will be extremely Player trust between major damage communities
Keep in mind that
Exploit detection is not part of the system.
This is only for when a player has been verified for some offence using some other methods.
I think it might be wise to keep the cheats/exploits in a separate banlist from the chat abuse banlist. The default behavior, as stated above, should probably be to allow server owners to opt-in to using one or both of those lists.
Again, this is not about a banlist. But rather assuming there exists one (opt-in, opt-out. whatever), could we add measures that punish offenders?
At this point, this issue might as well be moved over to Spyglass, @Erlite :>