Solutions to this issue are hard to find. First lets see where all the issues actually are.
First one is gathering evidence. If I showed you a screenshot of someone floating above a base in an apparent blatant hack to get inside of it. Can you tell which server it is on? You cannot. You’d have to take my word on that. Do you wait for multiple people to send in evidence like that? Well… what if I fabricate some situations and have a few discord friends send it in?
What about video evidence? That’s better to show hacking especially speed hags, lag switches, and similar things. Again, there is nothing tying that to a specific server. More plausible than a screenshot, but still not to hard to fabricate.
Is evidence useless? No, its not. But its not a definitive way to ban someone. It does open a case and a bit of probable cause you could call it for a moderator to put their eye on said person. Can they figure if someone is cheating in this case using their tools and methods? Maybe, probably, but we’re not going to know the details and nor should we so it isn’t easier for those doing these things to hide. Better to let them be complacent and get snatched up by the number.
But that leads to another issue. The one you brought up:
Conan Exiles frequently goes on sale for around $5USD. That means for the price of a new game, one can buy 12 copies of the game. For less than a price of a coffee, throwaway accounts can be purchased. In fact these players likely have an account with full purchases, bazaar, battlepass, etc, and don’t do those things to avoid it being banned and use the alts to shield the main.
The issue is that shielding is a bit effective. Spoofing keeps those different accounts shielded from one another and so forth. But what about Battleeye?
In my experience (in a controlled environment, so nothing illicit done on my end), spoofing hardware is easier than spoofing IPs, and IPs aren’t hard to begin with. Battleeye is going to prove ineffective.
So we’re in quite a pickle here. Cheaters are hard to catch, requite quite a bit of effort to catch. And when caught they come back like heads on a hydra. What can Funcom actually do here?
Not much more than they are already doing. They can close up loopholes in the game that allow hacks and such to work. But that won’t affect some of the things people do. And the hacking programs are expensive applications who’s developers are financially driven to update just as fast.
Why do private servers not have as many problems? Well mostly due to their nature.
FC servers are many. About 700 I believe in total. I don’t know how many moderators they have. But its not one per server. Private servers will have multiple mods, admins, and owners. This means if a hacker does something bad, it is much likely that one of them will see it and take action before much if any damage can be done. They can also take immediate action to alleviate the problems caused immediately and decisively.
For FC servers to do that, they’d need about 2000 moderators. Not feasible. Even if they increased their staff to 70 mods (10 servers per person), it wouldn’t be feasible, and even if it was it would have little effect. The mod can only monitor so much activity at once, and only for an 8 hour work day. Meaning they wouldn’t have 10 servers to watch, but 30 as the crew has to be broken up into shifts. Remember… privates mitigate cheaters because there is a number of them online at a time and having a much greater coverage over a single server. Not diluting a presence over multiple servers.
They could lower the amount of servers. This would help with admin coverage. But it would have to be a significant reduction. But if you do that, is having all the moderators justified? You can justify a team of around a dozen people for 700 servers. You can’t do that with 3 servers (per game type) per region. That’s going to take some convincing of someone above the CE team that it is worth it in the end to pay the taxes and salaries to an entire team for a handful of servers. At the end of the day a PVP player isn’t worth any more in revenue than a PVE player. They are just as likely to be finicky about purchases (there’s plenty of threads about bugs, glitches, bazaar prices and so forth, keep the comments about that to those threads), even if they aren’t dealing with hackers and cheaters. So devoting resources to them is tricky.
The only suggestion I have is to mitigate the alt accounts by stop participating in sales. I don’t think they will do this, since its hurtful to the revenue. But its the only way to get cheaters to slow down the alt accounts. There’s some guys with some real disposable revenue and buying 12 accounts at $40 a piece doesn’t bother them. But its not all of them.
There’s also the issue of cheaters already having the accounts. So doing this would not yield immediate results, it would take probably a year or two before you see a difference.
The biggest issue is Conan Exiles is a niche game type using a niche Intellectual Property. Lets not beat around the bush here. Conan is popular through a very rabid cult following dating back nearly a century. Its not exactly mainstream. Its just really cool to a subset of the general population. What this means is its not Fortnite, or World of Warcraft, or Call of Duty, or any of those other pop-games. Its mainly why we all like it if we’re going to be honest, its not like those.
But because its not a pop-game franchise or genre. Its not got millions and millions of players. Thus no billions in revenue. So we don’t get teams of people dedicated to stamping this stuff out. So its always an uphill battle as the hackers get more revenue to do their hacks than FC can dedicate to stamping the loopholes out. Its a resource disparity that can only be defeated by removing the incentive.
Removing the incentive is basically to not give the cheaters victims to victimize. That sucks, because it implies to just take your stuff and go home and just let them have the servers in question. But if cheaters can only victimize each other. They’ll get bored and leave. For those who don’t want to take that option, I’ve got nothing that will help your situation. Neither does Funcom. They’re doing everything they can, they are doing the best they can. The facts are the facts and that means not much is going to change
