Funcom & Cheaters?

Conan Exiles PC Discussion
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Hi, just another cheat thread stopping by.

Is there even anyone doing anything regarding this? Cheaters infiltrate populated servers in PvP almost every evening, and Funcom doesnt care?

I cant comprehend, how simple it would be, to just hire ONE admin to navigate around the servers from time to time?

On official server 1111, i have weekly been looted in my closed base, with my closed chests without anything in my eventlog, why isnt there anything happenin regarding this huge problem?

It was the same cheat almost 1.5 years ago, looting closed vaults/chests, speedhacking and other extremely stuff like that.

Do something man, hire just ONE freaking admin to jump around, hire me, i do it for free, and thats another case.

Funcom have possibilites to hire FREE working admins to control the official servers, but they just dont bother, i love this game, i love PVP and i wished they actually did anything.

But hey, another DLC :slight_smile:

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Feel your pain badly. How ironic.

There are 780 Official servers in all, it would require a team and would cost a lot. Perhaps a sub would be an answer to both cheating and ToC workflow.

I would want any admin to be subject to the terms of their employment. Not a volunteer, who is probably a player, making decisions without great oversight.

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Well let me get through a hiring process, sigining some contracts? Whats the issue, so if you work at funcom, you CANT play on their PvP servers, because you wouldnt be loyal? Nah

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No, the issue is money. Funcom evidently don’t want to pay a more dedicated team of server admins.

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I joined neebs gaming family servers patrion to play with like minded people on a moderated server. They have a conan following but not a Conan server. Patrion is a reoccurring charge of $5.

So I can prove I would spend $5 a month for moderated vanilla official servers FUNCOM. As proof of the monetary viability of actively moderated servers.

I am a COB. I have not even spent funcoms croms at the bazaar. Ask any one that knows me, it takes a crowbar to open my wallet. Actively moderated servers are that much of a value to me.

As it stands it seems funcom is about to lose a large part of their regular player base to haxers. It’s why I quit pubG after living and breathing it for 18 or so months, when it went F2P. It just stopped being fun.

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Tbh, just hit pvp officials with 20+, that is where the hackers get thier ego acknowleged lol.

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And they are STILL on 1111 server with the same names, and Funcom STILL didnt even try to connect and watch them :smiley:

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This is why I’m kind of against things like BattlEye and Vanguard; they’re compromises to system security that don’t prevent people from cheating. You can use DMA devices, a Raspberry Pi, a second computer (even a 10 y/o IPad or phone works) or any number of other things to cheat even with BattlEye and other kernel-level drivers enabled.

Generally, the best solution to cheaters is to encrypt the data on the source system and use lots of client-side validation with up-to-date, non-intensive protocols and to just ban them on sight. It keeps the script kiddies out, and because the game’s somewhat expensive it’ll be too much of an investment for most Valorant or RUST-style dedicated hackers.

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This isn’t effective because you’d need persistent 24/7 coverage to ensure you caught all the cheaters. For hundreds of servers, that gets remarkably expensive, and you’d have to hire extra admins solely for this purpose.

For these kinds of games, official PvP is a demo. The highest quality enforcement will always be a well-run private server with 24/7 live GMs.

(Also, volunteers patrolling the servers leads to rampant vigilantism almost immediately, since volunteers don’t have the investment that employees do – you will find far too many willing to lose their position just to take out that one guy who skirts the rules but never breaks them and is just generally annoying AF.)

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In regards to that last point: I think it’s fine to punish people who break the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. People being annoying and rules lawyer-ing their way around it is a very common issue and why most EULAs no longer include specifically actionable offenses.

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I looked at that thread and I can probably give a bit of insight on why Funcom and Steam are no longer (able to be) doing much about the cheating problem broadly; long story short here but… I’ll put it in my own words.

XIGNCODE3, EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye, PunkBuster, GameGuard, Hyperion, FACEIT, FairFight, Arbiter, Vanguard, oh [REDACTED] this list can go on a while so I’ll stop now - they all use a similar method of detecting cheats, and it’s kind of the be-all end-all of anti-cheat as it has access to the hardware level of your computer. They scan active devices, memory, processes, etc. and compare them to an internal whitelist of processes necessary for the OS or for UX like, say, MSI Afterburner.

Sounds good, right? Well… no. Unfortunately, it being the be-all and end-all applies just as well to the developers too - there’s nothing more they can do once you’ve found a way to circumvent these. They already have access to your entire computer, all files on it, all hardware.

The methods used to circumvent these anti-cheats vary from running them in a VM to buying cheap/expensive hardware that lets you externally run/intercept code ala ESP or “interpret” visual data and use it - and now, AI too - to generate aimbots.

The best way I can put it: it’s undetectable when set up properly, and it’s very easy to set up properly - you can even buy cheap “script kiddie” packages that do it for you, depending on OS. The solution to people has to be other people, and at that point you may as well get rid of the kernel-level driver.

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Thanks for the explanation, that does shed much light on what is happening.

So if this is the case then Funcom needs to start making decisions instead of allowing it to continue to fester.

Whether it be active moderation or exploring alternative tools (if possible).

What worries me is that if the decision is to remove PC PVP Officials, that does not eliminate the problem. Privates would see an uptick and probably some passing off of responsibility as I’ve seen it all too often: contact your service provider. Or complete take over of PVE and PVE-C Officials as PVP has seen.

What a pickle.

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imo the best choice they can make is making server - or at least event logging - code open-source so people can design their own solutions. It’s easy to circumvent one form of anti-cheat, not so much a series of different open-source anti-cheats with their own heuristics.

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Yeah, i thought about the same thing. And have updates every 2 weeks on PC that randomly change something in the validation checks/keys. That would deter alot of low level coders, and make constant updating of the hack program a real chore.

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If there by a miracle sitting a Funcom employee right now, please come and check 1111 server, there is literally and i dont lie - 10 cheaters online RIGHT NOW…

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