Sort of. The idea that someone working on a game as part of their career and passion not caring about cheating is pretty ridiculous. Same thing that applies to someone working on moderating a set of servers. And then to apply it to entire teams is just bonkers.
But the fact remains despite the will and despite the effort, there’s a bit of a pandemic of cheats. And we have to examine why this is. Cheats and exploits can be handled one of two ways. On the development side and on the administrative side.
Development means fixing bugs, closing loopholes, and working on exploits that allow 3rd party programs to do their thing. Whenever an issue is identified, be it a bug or exploit, they have to identify how bad it is affecting the game and how much of the player population is affected.
For example the falling through floors bug is a major bug that is pretty high on the priorities. Some may not think so because of how long it has persisted, but given that they have talked about it in devstreams and patch notes on several occasions means it has a high level of focus.
Much more than fixing cheating. Now I don’t know if the people who can fix the falling through floors are the same ones who can fix the exploits (both game exploits and program ones) that allow for the cheating. But it seems to me that the resources are being diverted from fixing hacks and cheats given their prevalence by those who are exposed to them, the length they’ve been around, and the lack of mentioned by FC on the topic. As I said before this doesn’t mean they don’t care, they do. But their focus isn’t there.
The reason for this is the fraction of the population affected. Singleplayers don’t have to deal with cheats at all. PVE players have to deal with cheaters somewhat, but not enough to really be an every day issue (exploits in purges not withstanding, but I don’t think this thread is focusing on that). PVE-C players kinda have to deal with it. PVP players are taking the brunt… sort of.
I say sort of because its not 100%. I’ll say the part no one likes to hear me say, but its mostly PVP players on Funcom servers. On other servers they use active moderation, white lists, and fostering of communities to mitigate the issue of hacks and cheats. They have them, I’m not going to sit here and say these servers are free of them. But the effect they have is heavily mitigated and any problems a player goes through can be remedied by ones who admin said servers. You’re just never going to see that sort of mitigation of remedy on a FC server.
Now this is important because the population that plays on FC servers with PVP is a very small portion of the playerbase. I won’t say they are so small to be negligible. They’re not. But they’re being triaged out. If resources have to be diverted to help them at the expense of many other issues… well I just don’t see that happening. It’d be different if PVE wasn’t a game mode and private servers weren’t an option, then you’d see a much higher priority. Now don’t construe that as blaming PVE or private servers. They have just as much a right to play the game as anyone else. And I would say so do those who play on FC servers in PVP.
However I am pointing out that they have a lower priority due to lower population sizes. Even at their peak before many started migrating out to other server types or other games, they were always a smaller portion. Its just the focus is going to be on issues that affect more of the playerbase. I mean the falling through floors affects these PVP players too. Even if the issues pretty much prevent most of them from even noticing it.
Its a pretty sorry circumstance and it sucks that its happening. But there’s no getting around it, its happening.
Now the administrative side of things is another way of dealing with these things. This is where FC has made some pretty bad decisions going back 8 years. The game launched as a server to peer system where anyone could make their own server. Nothing wrong with that. Many games did. Many games still do.
But then FC decided to bolster its number of servers when it released by a partnership with G-Portal. They did this to advertise and to make the number of servers be incredibly beefy when the game released. Instead of a handful of servers ran by players who took a financial stake by investing in their own servers (either hosting it themselves or renting) they launched with several hundred. So when a player first looks at the server browser they see tons and tons of servers. Makes the game look good. That was the intent in 2017-18.
Given the success of games like Minecraft, Terraria, and other survival like games like, I don’t believe this was needed to get an initial boost. I mean when someone purchases the game, they’ve already purchased. Seeing hundreds of servers isn’t going to make them… well buy the game they already have.
And what it did do is gave a sense of ‘standard’ of how the game is supposed to be played. I mean for 7 years now we have seen players state that FC server settings are the base settings and everything should be compared to those. Even despite the developers and even the server admins saying that isn’t the case and that the settings are MEANT to be different from one server to another when talking about player ran servers and that the FC servers are only one type that FC wishes to offer. There’s a weird expectation that things should be managed like a MMORPG server.
The number of servers was cut in half several years ago, but even still there is far too many servers to manage. Well not really. Given the methods they use to police building violations, they likely have enough people to effectively do it. The reason being is they have machines they use where they load a snapshot of the map file and check from there. They don’t need to login to a live server, and if they want to be fancy they can load up a backup close to the time of the report. This way if someone tore down their structure, they can’t hide the fact they violated the rule. This is actually a more effective way of doing this than is available to most private servers. I mean they can do this too, they just don’t because of hardware resources. Well some might do it this way.
There is obviously an issue here however. You can’t detect cheats or hacks with this. When you’re the only one on the map looking at it locally. The cheaters and hackers aren’t on there cheating and hacking.
So how do you catch them? The short answer is, you don’t.
People send in screenshots and videos. But how do you prove said people in the screenshot or video were doing the deeds shown, on the server that was reported? Do you trust the report? Do you just pray they aren’t doing something nefarious?
I mean think about this scenario. What if I showed many of the people I’ve had disputes with over the years in a faked video doing some hacks? That’s not a hard thing to do getting a few people to help or even using non-workshop mods to show some of them doing some bad things and spoofing their IDs (its very easy to show display names of anything you want them to be). I could even spoof consoles in this way.
So it wouldn’t be very hard for someone to spoof a rival on a server to get rid of them. And given how competitive PVP can be, people would do this. People DO do this. How does FC discern what is real and what isn’t? Number of reports? That’s pretty easy to fabricate too. Get 10 videos from different angles from seemingly different people, and use AI (though this is overkill) to type of 10 different reports. Sorry to say, but what most players consider damning evidence is only enough to get someone to ‘look into’ a report.
Being as no one has reported seeing a server admin login onto a FC server. They’re not logging in to verify the hacker or cheater is hacking or cheating. Which at this point is really the only way (we know of) to verify its happening. I suspect they have another way. This is never going to be revealed to ensure it still works.
Is it working? Well maybe. Is it working well enough? According to those who say hacking and cheating is running rampant. Well I’d say no. And I see no reason for the sake of argument not to take their word at face value.
Now here’s another issue FC has made for themselves in this area. The ease of making new accounts. On PC there is sales. You can get Conan Exiles frequently for only a few dollars. You can get it sometimes just for free with bundles or other promotions. People willing to spend $800 for a hack, aren’t going to have an issue buying 20+ accounts. That means a handful of hackers can outnumber the number of legit player accounts on these servers. Easily.
Let’s go a bit further. How these accounts can access said servers. They just. Do. There’s no sign in. Its all automatic. You login and your FLS account is linked. Using IP/Mac spoofing you can even make it look like entirely different people, from different locations around the globe. They are truly anonymous. Don’t need a phone number, don’t need an email address even. Even the wild west wasn’t that unregulated in that regard.
When looking at a MMORPG, especially one like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. You need a game purchase linked to an account. The account needs a phone number, an address, an email, a credit card number, and a game code linked to a purchase. Its not impossible for hackers to get around this, but the time and effort is much higher. Just slowing them down enough makes it so their efforts need to be less blatant.
So going back to 2017, they had no intention of requiring an email address, credit card, phone number, or any of that stuff. It wasn’t a MMORPG that required those things. It was a simple user hosted server to peer game. That would be overkill.
It’d be overkill now in 2024 admittedly enough. Can you imagine if players logged in after a patch and it required us to go to a website to enter in an email address, personal information, maybe even credit card information just to play? Some of us would be alright with that. Many wouldn’t. Especially when they weren’t warned during purchasing the game that they would have to do this. That’s not the game any of us purchased.
Funcom knows this. And they don’t want to hold that information in a secure manner at a cost in resources to keep it secure (as required by law in pretty much every country this game is available in). Not to mention it would be overkill. Remember what I said about triaging the player base? Well singleplayers don’t need this level of authentication. Neither do players playing on non-PVP servers. And neither do non-FC server players either. Pretty much the largest majority of players don’t require this. That’s a ton of effort for a very small section of the playerbase.
TLDR: Yes, it is not on FC’s agenda to fix these issues. The section of the player base is just too small to devote the amount of resources, time, and effort it would take to adequately take a bite out of the issues. All you can do is hope enough of the other issues in the game get fixed and addressed enough that they can toss the occasional bone.
Funcom would love nothing more to fix these issues. But there’s no easy fix that is worth the investment to. And I would point out that throwing manpower and money wouldn’t fix this.
I am glad that at least you know where it’s at.