Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
It’s just ridiculous the stuff you see that should be easy to catch with basic server checks (even if you were to run them after the fact). Players conjuring money and vehicles out of thin air, moving impossibly fast, vehicles/players with seemingly unlimited hit points, etc. You could easily catch that shit on the server side and ban the cheaters, but instead they go for the most invasive client side shit.
Sure, if you want to stamp out stuff like aim bots and whatever eventually you’ll need to look at the client side of things, but in a decade they didn’t seem to do anything at all.
That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…
Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.
All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.
I’m pretty sure there’s not a valid reason for players to be able to spawn giant Ferris wheels in people’s garages, that seems like a fairly easy one to test for