I’m sure every region has its problems - on the Oceanic servers, our biggest come in the form of asian clans. These clans arrive and cause all forms of chaos, usually destroying any active playerbase at the time. The problem being - they use every cheat or hack under the sun.
We don’t get as much by way of the giant undermesh bases anymore, but they dupe, use speed hacks, other hacks that let them kill people inside their bases, sky bases, literally everything.
The oceanic community goes through cycles where the population increases, these asian players see the numbers arrive, systematically raid every base on the server until the server becomes a ghost town, are banned by funcom then repeat the cycle a week or two later on alt/different accounts.
Practically any server which has activity goes through this cycle.
They gain entry via direct connect, circumventing regional latency limiters and similar.
Could we try - at least as a test for a few months, disabling this direct access?
It really is a frustrating cycle, and always, always from the same region. You’d have hundreds of reports of this from oceanic players. It’s tiresome, spending more time capturing evidence and filling out reports than actually playing.
This is not only a problem for the oceanic servers. It’s an overall problem Conan has & since I’m not a dev I can’t give smart advices on how to fix it BUT there needs to be a fix for it since they do not care if they get banned. They buy another account and do the same things all over again. One of those people is streaming and known for cheating he even has a price list where you can buy his services if you want to get rid of a specific clan/server it’s absolutely crazy and the possibilities of cheating in this game nee to be addressed asap.
As if “direct connect” as you put it would prevent anything.
You dont need the “UI direct connect” to direct connect if you so choose.
And any game that is open to the public, is open to connection.
Since as long as Internet play exist, no system of gatekeeping endures more than a couple days without a counter. Not even ToR is “oh so safe”.
The problem is not that.
The solution is not that.
Direct connect as you state is something written in a UI to tell you what that does, but that is not what “allows direct connect”. You have to allow direct connect for people, well, connect to the server.
The problem is the same “ease” that allows people to go and have fun playing, allows other people to go and, well, have fun playing.
Cant really go with the “lets remove your arm because some stab people” mentality, unless you want to actually end public servers.
it’s absolutely crazy and the possibilities of cheating in this game nee to be addressed asap.