Cheating in SupcomFA

When is the development cycle going to include active steps to reduce cheating in Supcom? Or are there any plans to actively tackle cheating?

I understand that dropping people and desync through packet manipulation is hard to detect, however there are many other cheats that could be resolved.

For example UI mods, would it be easier to simply ban UI mods and integrate those that are allowed on a case by case basis once approved and then add the adjustment of those on the options screen rather than the lobby screen?

Would it be worth to then separate in the vault a UI mod from a SIM mod. A UI mod could be anything that affects the user interface, while a SIM mod is anything that effects the simulation (E.G Auto eco management, hover bombing and all of that).

I know there was a discussion about this some years ago, but it never really resolved to any clear plan of action.

@Psions said in Cheating in SupcomFA:

For example UI mods, would it be easier to simply ban UI mods and integrate those that are allowed on a case by case basis once approved and then add the adjustment of those on the options screen rather than the lobby screen?

Are you going to contribute in order to implement those UI mods ? To make it clear, i'm not telling contributors to work on that or that, unless it's really game breaking (eg the free ressource generation we fixed few patches ago).
Most contributors just code something that interest them, and there is no way to tell them what to do. Only thing i can do is to promote stuff that would be important to fix/add.

The main limitation is getting approval first to do something like this. There are many UI mods already integrated directly into FAF, and we're running on a blacklist for some others.

I would have thought this is mostly a moderation decision rather than a development one if we were to opt for a whitelist as opposed to a blacklist type of solution.

As to actual measures to combat cheating, then sure. I would need to first understand how FAF is built and what functions are available. A common way around maphacks was to have invisible units that get revealed by the hack, and are conditions to triggering some other code. This could be used if FAF supports hidden states on units.

For auto-eco mods or auto-micro mods, then a simple input check would work. Then a line would needed to be decided on what is "humanly possible".
If these have to be implemented as an anti-hack mod then these can be integrated into FAF.

If we can get a clear statement on a model for this, then I would be happy to have a look and learn and contribute. Otherwise, I might end up doing a bunch of work for something that is never going to be implemented and that otherwise serves no functional purpose.

Got any real cheats to report?

Last time he said Suzuji was using maphack because he "accurately guessed his income" when he basically told him his income just before... I wouldn't count what he says as actual facts.

FemtoZetta you were the one who confirmed it after I sent you replay. Which is the only reason i bothered to report it, as you and 2 others looked at replay and said that was the case? Anyone can read the public chat on discord on the 11th September at GMT+1 at 1am.

But you're welcome to make personal attacks, instead of contributing to the discussion. That seems to be what most of discussions degenerate on FAF these days anyway, and you wonder why people feel reluctant to contribute anything.

But lets not drag up forum drama shall we and maybe get back to the topic being discussed. I thought derailment was a breach of rules anyway, its certainly poor etiquette.

And if you don't believe such cheats exist, go read the same forum posts in a thread back in 2015 where it was last discussed and nothing was done. Multiple people confirmed such mod exists.

So back to the actual topic of discussion.

If someone was to make a anti-hack mod targetted at specific types of cheats, would this get integrated?

Are there any possible decisions of moving to a whitelist as opposed to the current black list?

I didn't confirm anything lol I didn't even watch that replay.

There is a place to report cheating. The report would get reviewed and then a decision made as to a course of action.

You would have a hard time trying to define what is cheating and what is not. Unless there are multiple reports coming in for cheating, why would anything be done about a non existent issue?

Ok, so no real cheats to report.

I was hoping for some cheats. fake news

I was hoping for some cheats. fake news

Yea what a bait...ffs.

Most of you are missing the point of my initial query.

First we don't have any proper categorisation of what is cheating. There is too many grey areas. So to solve this a whitelist of integrated mods would be better than a blacklist. If i make a mod tomorrow that automates certain parts of the game is that cheating?

Secondly, most cheating goes completely undetected, and this is partially due to point 1, and partially due to a lack of accountability and transparency in gameplay.

So it would be nice to have a more definitive explanation and position, and assurance that if people work on anti-cheat implementations they will be integrated.

If i was to go give you a cheat i'd get banned, so idk why you're expecting me to bother cheating the game or supply people with cheating mods, when its not even something I'm interested in doing.

If the community was large, tournaments had a lot of money at stake, then the risk might be mitigated.

You have not given ANY evidence that cheating is wide spread and a problem. Give proper examples? Maybe come up with rulebook yourself?

Well personally I consider anything that inputs a command external of the player as cheating and anything that aggregates information in a way that the player would not otherwise have acces to is cheating as it gives a competitive advantage against a person who does not have the same mod installed.

I honestly have the same opinion. Take Target Priorities for example, where you can set target as the ACU so they don't target random pgens, engi etc. Gives you a huge advantage over someone that does not have that installed.

The way it was explained to me though... the targeting should be able to controlled by the player and just a downfall of how the game was designed originally.

@scytale you can do what you described without the mod though

I thought the target can change without right click? So targeting the acu for example, then right click to move, the target may change on it's own?

you can use the snipe mode, although target prioritizing the acu has been remove for a lot of land unit

@Psions said in Cheating in SupcomFA:

For example UI mods, would it be easier to simply ban UI mods and integrate those that are allowed on a case by case basis once approved and then add the adjustment of those on the options screen rather than the lobby screen?

No, no it wouldn't.

@Psions said in Cheating in SupcomFA:

Would it be worth to then separate in the vault a UI mod from a SIM mod. A UI mod could be anything that affects the user interface, while a SIM mod is anything that effects the simulation (E.G Auto eco management, hover bombing and all of that).

I already talked about this with some people when we were discussing the state of the mod vault. Considering the popularity of AI mods, Faction additions, etc. It would be cool to give the mod vault some proper sorting.

@Psions said in Cheating in SupcomFA:

But you're welcome to make personal attacks, instead of contributing to the discussion.

I'll take the offer.
You're dumb. Give the thread these before it's worth a "discussion"

1. Evidence of cheating, feel free to link your thread from 2015. Don't think people havent realised how you keep avoiding this request. We know why you're doing it.

2. A consensus that UI mods are cheating, where there is definetly not one. You would need to bring your case to prove that they're of such an advantage to a player that it makes a tennable difference in a users play. We're just talking in this thread like it's a given that ui mods are cheats, which I don't think anyone else here actually believes?

The separation of UI and Sim layers for modding is a key feature of SupCom and one of the things that makes its UI so advanced. People should be free to use whatever UI mods they think will improve their experience or effectiveness, including coding their own private UI mods.

UI mods should be allowed and part of the game, and if some people are losing an advantage by not using them, then the problem is education, not UI mods.

And if some people know how about the existence of UI mods, but are unwilling or unable to use them effectively, then that's a player skill problem, not UI mods.

We can only decide that UI mods are a problem when their use is universal and we see that the entire game devolves into some unwanted state. That's the time when access to certain functions/data should be closed off to the UI layer, or certain UI mods banned, etc.