How to Survive Clan Cheats

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Hi everyone, this is a discussion on how our clan learned to survive the constant onslaught of server-hopping clans that routinely cheat to wipe a server before jumping to the next one.

The situation: It is well known that clans who cheat on Funcom official servers. The internet is rife with videos showing the cheats. Our server (official #1800) has (historically) been populated by a decent amount of people. The latest server-farming clan has been especially brutal with their cheats and exploits that most of the people are just quitting the game. We tried to give them hints on how to survive until the cheating clan moves to the next server.

The Clan: We’ve always had a lot of people on chat every night. Once the cheat clan (their name is a series of symbols) appeared, numerous players on the server chatted that dozens of bombs around their bases by invisible players every time they rebuilt. Many were also reporting that they were getting hit when there was no one present.

The defector: One of the cheating symbols clan came up to our clan and said that he quit the symbols because they were doing unethical things to the players across several servers. We asked him how they did it and he said they hacked into the admin panel so they could call infinite gear and become invisible. They would create a dummy account who would no be part of their clan. This account would hack the admin panel, call everything in they could, and give all the gear and supplies to the symbol clan. Eventually, Funcom would ban the account, but it was tool late and the symbol clan had a massive amount of gear and supplied at day one on the server.

The solution: Funcom cannot do anything about this. Technically the offending account is not part of the cheating clan, so they can only ban the ‘drop’ account (then they simply make another). We have been telling everyone on the server how to deal with the cheating clans.

Since the clans will continue to destroy everything until there is nothing left, the trick is to let them think that there is nothing left. As soon as anyone on the server is aware of another cheating clan’s arrival, take everything out of your base and hide it. All gear, benches, pets
everything. Find small crevices that are out of site all over the map to store boxes in. Remove all the doors to your base, let them freely come and go. They may blow some floors to see if you hid things below, but it won’t be the complete destruction that comes with them breaching the base.

During the day, they cannot touch your base, so put a simple door on your base and move the tables back in to create, fix, and upgrade. When it is close to raiding time, pull everything back out and into the hiding spots. Make sure to have several hiding spots in case they find one.

If all the rest of the players on the server do this, then the cheating clan will only be able to hit a few buildings, and then get bored and move on. Once they are not on for a few days, the all-clear signal is given, and game play is resumed. Most of us seasoned players have learned to live with this. However, new and mid-level players just don’t see the point in playing so they move on to another game.

Additionally, do not fix any damage that the cheating clan may have done. They should think that you have abandoned the base and will look for you elsewhere. Only fix what is needed to be secure during non-raiding hours. After then, pull your tables and gear and remove the doors.

When traveling around, only have on you what you can easily produce. Light armor and easy tools/weapons. When they see you they will instantly kill you and you will not be aware of their presence. Carrying only low-level gear will reinforce the idea that the server has been farmed out. If they see that you have good gear, they will stay to try to find your stash or rebuilt base.

A possible solution for Funcom is to have regulators on as many servers as possible. There are many gamers such as myself who play these games as they were meant to. Funcom should attempt to identify these players and use them as trusted informants who would inform them on what is going on in the server.

Good luck to everyone.

2 Likes

My advice: Troll the trolls.

If you believe that your server is about to be targetted, get petty.

I was facing a wipe on Xbox, and instead of just deleting my base and packing up all of my belongings, I got the pettiest of revenge: I built 32 vaults and spammed them around my base in circle, making sure that I wasn’t breaking any rules. Then, I took all of my silver coins to Seppameru and bought thousands upon thousands of glass flasks, and proceeded to fill every vault with them. After that, I packed up my base and hid. They invited me to their party to gloat (this is on xbox, btw) and bragged about the bombs they had duped on another server before coming to this one. And then they cracked my vaults. 1 at a time. Only to be rewarded with glass flasks and nothing else. They cracked every single one of them, thinking that one of them MUST have had my real loot in it. But nope. Anything I couldn’t carry got dropped on the ground. The only box in my base that was left was full of dung.

They kicked me from their party and left the server shortly thereafter :smiley:

Edit: There was a purpose to me posting this, and I completely forgot to tie it back in. The reason is this: They have cheated, but you can get revenge by wasting the 1 thing they can’t get via admin panel or duping: Time. On top of that, if Funcom has fixed the vulnerability with the admin panel, then the amount of resources that the cheaters have is limited. Vast, but limited. Make them waste their bombs, their powder, their God favor, and their time. Make the server an absolute slog to wipe. Harass them at every opportunity and ensure they never have a peaceful day. And reward them with nothing. After all, what is best in life? To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women.

3 Likes

As a response to the server-jumping hacker clans, our server has a discord channel to discuss exactly this issue. Last night, every single building on the server was wiped. It had to have taken hundreds if not thousands of bombs. Several clans watched as bombs just appeared out of nowhere, placed by invisible players.

Because they can call in any amount of anything, their goal is not your stuff
its just your destruction. Your solution is a fun way to seek personal satisfaction, but with an unlimited supply, the hackers have no issue spending 500 bombs on nothing, then going to the next player and doing it again. To them, they feel satisfied that you spent all the materials on building numerous vaults, just to have them make it all go away. The best bet is still just to bore them into leaving.

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I must have misunderstood you then. I thought that the “admin hacker” account was gone and that the admin cheat was removed. In that case, yeah, there isn’t really anything you can do except to bore them into leaving. Which about as much fun for you as watching paint dry.

Yup that`s what I use to do to really screw the cheaters except I would build a square black ice base 4 blocks thick and no doors. In the middle was a room with just a sign saying notin honey. I would place these all over and just watch. All the bad clans got was lost time and resources. In a very short time they all just left them alone and moved on.

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It still gives them content. And I would go the “no content” way against cheaters: simply don’t play on officials.

Yea, my first advice to players is that official PVP servers are inherently broken due to the massive amount of cheaters. I watched for months as new players would be decimated by hackers. Invariably, many of them stated that they reported the hackers to Funcom. But in the end, all of them would leave because there was never any action taken against them.

We ended up doing the same. You can survive for a while, but in the end they can cheat to find you and wipe everything you worked for in a manner of minutes. Funcom is just too overwhelmed to do anything about it.

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