I am so confused.
Why is there more effort put into punishing people who build too much rather than players who cheat?
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Building a gigantic city with a bazillion thralls and torches can affect the entire server’s performance. Little Johnny stealing your stuff while you’re offline or having a better internet connection than you in pvp, not so much. Big builds are also way easier to find.
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Because detecting cheating is orders of magnitude harder than determining if someone’s build breaks the rules.
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This is where we need to fill a gap in communication.
As much as I appreciate the risk of revealing too much to 3rd party developers, a little bone to the rest of us concerned with legitimate gameplay being thrown would be nice. Placations aside.
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Speaking for undermessing only.
Question!
Is it difficult to create a mod that detects undermessing builds?
I am asking this because “Zendesk” already said that they upload the server data on their single player mode to clean the server.
Wouldn’t a mod like it help to clean undermessing of each server they investigate, so cheaters would be punished as well?
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That implies effort, so that’s a big nuh uh from Funcom (Tencent Slaves)
They tried that already. There’s a system in the game that would kill the player if the player was undermeshing. The bugs with that system caused a whole spate of people dying in caves and similar shenanigans.
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My idea is not auto lunch.
My idea is detect.
If the system detects undermessing then the admin can teleport to investigate before the rocket launch button 
.
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According to their own words, they don’t actually log into live servers to investigate Zendesk reports. They take backups of the game database and investigate offline.
They could modify the system that kills undermeshers and turn it into a system that detects undermeshers and emits the relevant information into the server logs. Then, the admins who investigate Zendesk reports could also consult those logs.
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If I send in a Zendesk ticket showing videos (multiple) and screenshots (multiple) using speed hacks, teleporting, and other hacks and glitches of the OP. Should he be banned?
With his ID its very easy for me to spoof that using mods, admin commands, and a little touchup in editing. So the only evidence showing wrong doing or not wrong doing would be what is sent in.
Obviously the answer is no. He should not. He’s innocent (I assume).
But that’s the problem with player submitted evidence. You can’t tell who you are looking at, as they are an echo that could be manipulated. You also can’t tell what server, if even on a server, the evidence is from. Only the word of whom reported.
With buildings, like Codemage said, they just pull a copy of the server (can even pull the copy backed up when the report was submitted) and see the violation right there in front of them.
Catching cheaters in the act is something that was required in most MMORPGs. And I suspect they need to do that here. That requires eyes on the person in real time, when they are doing the deed.
That’s not easily done. If I go the OP’s server right now, chances are the cheater isn’t even logged in. Depending on the time of day, there may be no one. Now think about this. You’re a Game Moderator. You have quite a few tickets to answer every day. You get a report of cheating. You glance over at the server, no one is online. What do you do?
Well you shelve it and move on to the next ticket. Maybe the ticket is simple recycled to the bottom of the list. Maybe there’s a change since you completed a few dozen others. You look over, still no one online… now what do they do?
If we were selfish, we’d say that he sit with the invisible command on server until the perp logs in. Letting tickets pile on because by God we got to have that cheater! But we’re not selfish. We understand other tickets need to be addressed because they can be addressed in the here and now.
All the GM can do is keep checking, and then when they see someone login, they can pop on their, see if the perp is on, and maybe watch them for a bit. Though if they don’t login for a day or so, or the GM keeps missing them. It starts getting ridiculous. Also if they do catch them online, and watch them, and they play legit during that time. What should that GM do?
At the end of the day, their policies dictate certain actions to take based on criteria and its much easier and more efficient to deal with building violations. I’m not saying they should and do ignore cheater reports. I’m saying that they cannot waste time waiting.
Catching a specific cheater on several hundreds of servers throughout a 7 day week and a 24 hour day isn’t exactly easy.
When I was a server admin, the process was easy. I was logged into a server anywhere from 6-8 hours a day. I was also passively monitoring who was logged in through discord and what they were saying (global, clan, whisper, everything, oh yeah… just so everyone knows… privacy doesn’t exist in Conan Exiles, keep sensitive stuff out of game guys). I could also watch people from their own eyes, if I suspected them doing anything.
While video and screenshot evidence was helpful, I never used it to decidedly take action on anyone. I usually used my own eyes and watch the act itself. Usually evidence provided wasn’t really good enough. People aren’t nearly as good at supplying evidence as they think they are. And in some cases they would self-incriminate themselves.
But Funcom has more than a single server to manage. In the time it takes a team of admin on one server to moderate a server. They have to spread that workload over hundreds. And that’s never going to change. You can’t justify a position that handled hundreds of servers in a work day to only doing a handful. Anyone who’s tried to tell an older generation how to play a video game knows what that is like. Now think about trying to do that with someone who is a stranger, who thinks you’re a young punk trying to reduce their workload, and is not your elderly parent who loves and cares about your feelings.
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What @Taemien wrote is one of those hard-to-swallow truths. All I would like to add is that this is precisely why Funcom has historically focused a lot more on preventing further occurrences of cheating (by fixing the game) than catching and punishing extant cheaters one by one.
Just think about how easy it is to buy a new account, and you’ll realize just how unproductive it is to catch individual cheaters.
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This is one of the reasons I’ve said they need (if they can) to stop offering the game at such crazy discounted prices. It won’t stop alt accounts. But when a dozen alts costs $400 instead of under $60, then it will slow down things.
Obviously the problem with alts is that many are purchased and stored. So even if they stopped yesterday with the discounts, you’d still see issues with alts for a long time as they are whittled down.
I don’t like saying this either, but I figure the Wargames movie’s message about the only winning move is not to play applies to these PVP servers. The cheats and hacks pretty much have the largest impact on the PVP servers. They can cause trouble with PVE-C, but nowhere to the same extent.
The ones spending tons of money on alts and programs to cheat with are doing it to really hurt other players. And the most efficient and effective way of doing that, is running over a server and destroying everyone’s buildings. That’s not possible on PVE and PVE-C. In PVE-C you can do the shenanigans and attack individuals and send them to respawn. But they don’t usually lose anything that isn’t easily replaced. They can also just logout and do something else till you get bored. When the program you purchased is mitigated by someone just refusing to play with you, it feels very much like a waste of money.
It sucks. But the best way to hit the cheaters from a players’ point of view is to make them feel like they wasted their time and money. That’s what their intent is to their victims. The victims have the power in this case. Refuse to play on their terms and they lose.
Yes in a way it lets them win. They get to fully empty out FC’s PVP servers. Let them have that hollow victory. Let them choke on it. And you don’t even have to play on private servers. Just play PVE-C. It wouldn’t even take very long to get re-established, especially for a PVP server player, starting over in the desert isn’t anything new for most of them.
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