Why is facepunch eu 3 basically a hacker vs hacker server? - General Discussion

I know that we cant report hackers here and im not going to write there names here. My name is FreshY on the server and i have like 90% of my total game hours on this server only. I do basically know everone and everyone knows who i am. I try to be nice to everyone and i think that alot of people actually like me. In the last two wipes it has been going worse and worse with the hackers and as it is now you cant play. As soon as you get a big base the hackers get there and raid it. For example last wipe we had a hacker that was called "deadshot" he got banned 9 times on different account last wipe, instead of you guys ip banning him you just ban this account and let him create another. guess what facepunch, he is back again and with 2 more friends that are hacking right now! Im spamming in the chat to get everyone to f7 report him and alot of people do actually do! I guess you get like 20+ more reports right now about deadshot and you guys do still nothing about it? Why dont you make a system that freeze people if they get this many reports under a short period of time? Facepunch eu 3 is a good server with a nice community and alot of people do actually help reporting players. But why should we report if they dont get banned? And people like deadshot that uses the same name on every hacking account and you still not ip ban him? People are even farming for these hacker kids now, just to not get raided and killed from them. One of them is Freenzii, he do also have top 20 playtime on this server. We got raided last night by hackers and today when they saw that we build up again they came back and raided us again. They live in r11, q12 if you now gonna go online and check them out. But please facepunch, fix a better report system. If you get 10+ reports in 5min it should be auto kick/ban untill you guys check it up. It should not be possible for hackers like deadshot to be on the server for more than 1 hour. Everyone on the server knows who he is. Are you going to let him and his friends destroy one more wipe?

Do you think EAC is going to bomb their house or something? It sounds like a great idea until a clan mass-reports you for cheating, even though you didn't do anything, so you're frozen in place while they raid your house. Something like this is stupid and abusable. Just let EAC do their job or go play on a different server that's actively administered. It'd be easy for a clan to hit anyone with 10 false reports, report-kicking would become the new raid meta, and F7 would be that less useful. Also reports aren't manually reviewed, they're fed to EAC to inspect automatically. If you'd like to suggest how EAC can detect all hacks every created and that ever be created, explain in full technical detail. Until then, they're doing the best they can in the eternal cat and mouse game between hackers and devs.

And btw today helkus was online on the server. He banned 1 hacker that was new for this day. But deadshot and the other hackers and the team that i am writing before didnt get banned. It sometimes seems like deadshot is friend with admins or something. I dont understand how he can play on facepunch in his 12th account and that another hacker get ban before this guy. eu 3 is a HvH server right now and you guys need to fix it. Please helkus answer me why you went online and banned 1 of the hackers and not the hackers that everyone was spamming chat with?

#1 It's a myth that banning someone's IP address is some kind of magic bullet that will banish them forever. It's very easy to change your IP address as many times as you like by various methods - for example, just reboot your router. #2 You have to bear in mind that every time his account is banned he has to pay real money to purchase a new account (and Rust isn't cheap), so this is by far the most effective method to ban someone. It's not necessarily going to stop him dead in his tracks but it will certainly wear him down in the long term. #3 After many years of dealing with people like this in various online communities I've learned that they feed on attention. If you (and I mean everyone involved) ignore them as much as possible and don't give them any reaction, just continue to report them via the usual channels, they will get starved of attention and leave sooner than they would have otherwise.

I feel this, its every single official server and now its turned into a joke. you cant go one without being hacked and nothing is being done about it EAC takes way to long, and when they do get banned the damage is already done. I play on east 1 and i see a hacker everyday. Not when accounts are 3 dollars with cheats and a vpn, this is becoming a joke at this point.

#1/2 i feel that you are very wrong here. Ofcourse its easy to change ip address if you are someone that knows how to do it. But im suprised how many gamers that are just gamers and know nothing about computers in general and these people cant even change there ip address. So no, this is not the most effective method to ban accounts. If you make ip bad (if they are even allowed to?) the risk of the hacker comming back will be even smaller. You can even hardware ban people and that is even harder to fix, but still possible. And no, your public ip address that you get from your ISP dosnt change with a restart of the router, i think you need to do some research on public and private ip addresses. #3 Well ofcourse some kids thinks its funny when they get attention but the problem is that on eu3 have this been going for so long so the hacker is so well known that people spam chat every single day just asking if "is deadshot online". Yesterday some admin called ernn was online and even wrote in chat to us, she banned 10 hackers + some friends. She wrote something really stupid in chat "You guys are allways complaining anyways". Well ofcourse everyone on eu3 are talking shit about admins and the anti cheat when one single hacker can come back to the server over and over again with even the same name, be online for 1-2 days and then after all the raids and shit stolen he get banned. 5 min after he come back again, just as he did yesterday after she banned him. He told me "i cant let you take over this big house again, you are controlling the server". The admins dosnt understand the problem we have on eu3, i do really not think that we have the same problem on other servers, this server is really a hacker vs hacker server right now and its so stupid to see this happening.

This issue is as old as internet gaming. It will not go away any time soon. It sucks, but it is part of the world you are choosing to inhabit. My suggestion would be to find another server. The number of people in a server is nowhere near as important as the quality of people ina server. The number, quality and activity of admins is of paramount importance. Couldn't pay me to go on any public server. Would rather hang with a dozen or so until population grows by word of mouth. I have no doubt that is a minority opinion, but I have actual fun and enjoy my leisure time. My stuff is still there when I log on as well. Hope you find a place more to your liking. The public servers will always be a hacker's paradise.

Voila, the first result on Google of "how to bypass an IP ban" It's trivial. Bans are already HWID and other secret means so you're exaggerating a lot here.

If your ISP uses dynamic IP addressing (most do) then your IP will usually change when you reset your router. Anyway, there are plenty of other ways to change your IP. Have you never heard of VPNs or proxies? And what about users of large ISPs like AOL? They have multiple users on the same IP addresses, so if you ban one of those IPs it can ban a whole group of innocent users. No, IP banning is not the answer. As AnalogGamer says, if things are really that bad for you and you can't get anything done then vote with your mouse, there are plenty of other servers. If you choose to be stubborn and put up with these hackers then that's your own choice, but in my opinion life is short and if I was in your shoes I would move on to greener pastures because Rust is what I enjoy, and I'm not going to stay somewhere it's not enjoyable for me.

I like how you guys just dont see how big this problem really are. Instead of actually comming forward and trying to show the problem for the developers that sometimes thinks that we player are only buthurt and are not happy enough for the hard work they do. The admin who came online to eu3 litterly said in chat "you guys will keep complaining anyways" Well ofc we do because this is not a problem that has been here for 2 days, not for 1 week, it has been here for 1,5 wipes now. Same hacker, every single day. Most of you guys reading this do maybe think im joking and that im just butthurt about my own base. But no, its actually true. We rebuilded again, deadshot came back today and said "you guys cant be on this server" and then fucked us up totaly with his hacks. How can it ever be okey for this to happen? How the fuck can you guys just be "lets leave the server and take another one". Well if me and my team have played as much as possible on this server and have tryed to make our own little community just here on eu3 we ofc want to stay. Its stupid that the hackers allways win, i dont get that. If you guys just try to go to eu3 for 1 sec and ask in chat "do you know deadshot" i can tell you that every single person will spam the chat with yes. This is not okey, not on facepunch own servers.

Dood, there is a simple solution. Move to another server. If you just keep on showing up here to complain than that is what you will be deemed as,especially since there are alternatives.

I play on this server (EU3) the last 3 wipes. I wish facepunch had servers that needed a minimum amount of hours in the game to join a different tier of servers. Or even better since rust keeps tracks of some of your stats, maybe a minimum amount of hours and wood chopped or deaths by ____. That would completely solve the problem IMO. I also think that Hardware ID banning should be thought about. I am not playing now, no time and rust on Linux is not working after update, but I agree about the cheaters on EU3.

EAC already bans the HWID when it detects hacks?

They do? So the cheater must be spoofing the HWID then? Therr is no way I could change out Mainboard, CPU and Video Card every couple of weeks. These guys must have deep pockets.

Maybe it's time to make Anti-Cheat for the game!

@Lennartbulle for the record, nobody here thinks you're joking or butthurt, we all sympathise with your predicament and believe you 100%. We're just saying that although it may leave a sour taste in your mouth, you do have a simple solution available to you that will achieve your ultimate goal, which is to enjoy Rust. It's just a game.

Interested to hear your ideas on how to improve on the existing anticheat. Please go into as much technical detail as you can.

As a software engeneer, I can say that it's very easy to retrieve one's hardware serial number. IP banning is not a solution since IP can be changed easily, but hardware is much harder, you'd have to play on VMs to do so, and even though that won't be the perfect solution, it would delay furthermore the respawn of cheaters on the server. Anyway, I think that it's a good thing that cheaters have to buy a new steam account and thus, buy Rust again to keep cheating. More sales ensure more money for the game, and more devs incoming. If I were facepunch, I wouldnt change a thing, more money is always nice. As for the players, why do they play on official servers? I left those a long time ago to play on heavily monitored servers from the community and had very little experience with cheaters so far.

Ha you thought. HWID spoofing is trivial just like changing your IP.

Ban on computer components; hard drive, video card, motherboard.

But they already do that? You're describing what EAC already does. Give me some technical innovations that'll actually solve the hacking problem. Or admit you don't know what you're talking about and don't know what's already being done to combat hackers. If you think what's being done isn't good enough, let's see your suggestions on how to do better.

I absolutely love that you always get super butt-hurt whenever someone says EAC is a trash system. Of course no one is going to do your job for you on a forum post no less. If this is something you've had your hand in developing, then perhaps Facepunch should hire a more competent person in place of someone that lashes out on forums instead of hitting the whiteboard. If this isn't something you've personally worked on, then what a weird and dumb hill to die on. Seriously, all of your comments on the topic are almost identical except the various levels of anger. What other multiplayer games have hacking issues at this level? Right, because they hire competent devs... So let's see YOUR suggestions on how to do better!

To the people complaining: thank you for giving cheaters exactly what they want by constantly coming here to complain about how hacker infested the official servers are. You've proven yourselves shining examples of the Rust community by holding your ground and complaining rather than moving on to different servers. By now some might have though that the lack of moderation is on purpose, like to lure cheaters into a false sense of security by making them think their cheats are truly undetectable and as a result reducing the amount of active cheaters on community servers, but you geniuses have proven that you know better. You have also proven yourselves by ignoring and insulting moderators and people who have been in the community when Rust was just a curiosity, because obviously people who have seen this before know less than a guy with thousands of hours of game time. And for the record, I'm not staff or tied to Facepunch. You can't see a game 24/7 so your claims that no other games have it as bad with regards to cheaters are pointless. I eagerly await the inevitable reaction from one of the Rhode Scholars of the community because they obviously know better but keep their fool proof ideas secret. I sadly don't have any genius ideas, I just see how shit works and know things are working despite how it looks.

The idea might actually be pretty good if implemented correctly. There is a popular algorithm called Ada Boost that is used to create strong classifiers out of weak ones. For non computer scientists: A classifier is a module that can assign classes to some inputs, like deciding whether a player is a hacker or not. The theory states, that if you combine weak classifiers (player reports in this case) that are only slightly more accurate or inaccurate (!) than pure chance, you can get a classifier that makes arbitrarily precise decisions, given that the amount of weak classifiers is large enough. This was even successfully utilized for complex tasks like detecting humans in videos. I don't know what EAC is doing precisely, but in case that their effort is mainly directed at detecting external alterations to the Rust software and finding reliable means of permanently banning players (which are both really hard), I would consider this a really promising approach. Depending on the effectiveness of the actual implementation this might allow the community to manage the server in the absence of admins, which would solve this problem on the official servers. There are so many far more complex problems that have been solved by using the right approaches that I cannot imagine that it's not possible in this case too.

This is an issue that is not going to go away. I am assuming that the best way to keep hacking out of a game is to encrypt the game code. And the base game engine. That would make it impossible to mod, and puts more heavy lifting on server-side. The amount of financial and human resources involved make and support a fully encrypted game makes that concept a unicorn made of rainbows. In the eternal struggle between armor and weapon... weapon will always have the initiative and advantage. Find a well-moderated server, and make it your home. The best suggestion that I could give in this particular game and community is this... Crowd-fund the cost of full-time admins on Official servers. You want them that bad... pay for them. If the game income could support admins, they would already be there. Ask FP what the cost of full-time moderation would be. Probably not cheap. Apply for a job at Facepunch with all your personal details and sign an NDA. Volunteer to be a full-time/part-time admin. Or realize it is just a game with thousands of other servers and move on.

You can't encrypt a program without giving the user's computer the keys to decrypt it, because otherwise it can't run and is just pseudorandom garbage. There is no such thing as "encrypting" Unity. The closest you'd get is obfuscating variable names to make debugging harder but doesn't actually prevent hacking in any way. You can't run a program on a computer but keep its memory contents secret from the user. If the user is sitting at the computer they have total control over the machine. The best Rust can do is refuse to run if it detects things it doesn't like (such as a debugger hooking into it) -- which as I understand it is something EAC already does -- or report the machine to the mothership for automated inspection for potential hacking. Hacking is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game that doesn't end until the last player stops playing the game. The devs are not interested in hiring GMs to actively moderate official servers and that policy has remained constant throughout Rust's lifetime. And your comment about "if the game income could support admins they would already be there" is absolutely incorrect. The studio has the money to hire people to do the job, they just are not interested in creating those positions. Official servers are unmoderated, period. This is even less likely to happen. garry has a very short list of people he trusts with power and he has learned to keep that list short and be highly suspicious of anyone actively looking for power. This is the best piece of advice in your post. If you don't like how the official servers play, find a different server that's actively and fairly moderated.