Splatoon 2 player hacks leaderboard to petition nintendo to add anti-cheat - Sensationalist Headlines

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/205174/a65fcb93-f821-4c7f-bdd9-83ec6fbafd89/image.png This will be my statement, I guess: I hereby claim responsibility for the recent incident on the Rank X leader board. Proof Splatoon2 is a game that I love so very deeply. Despite having its connectivity issues, I think it provides a healthy and competitive environment for all players; it advocates strategy and a strong sense of team work. It is because of this, everyone enjoys Splatoon, and enjoys the fun of fighting for a rank or a league position. However, this will not be true as long as there are cheaters lurking around.I've never personally played the first Splatoon, but I heard how bad it was, being overrun by cheaters who tamper with the game and impose unfair advantages on others. I, at first, was relieved that the Switch had a decently strong system security. Perhaps that's what the development team thought as well. Yet it doesn't justify removing all the security measures from the first game, and leave the game and its players completely defenseless to ill-purposed griefers who mod their game to victory. I figured that someone needs to deliver a message to Nintendo.And a loud one. Nintendo, you're welcome to ban my console any time. My purpose was to call attention to the current issue that plagues the game, and I've done that. But my message is, please make protecting your players the top priority. Please add anti-cheat. --- Quick edit: It seems that many people got the wrong idea that I abused some hacks like the ones I'm accusing of to get on the leader board. I would never do that. It lacks certain... elegance. Not to mention that I serve to protect players, not harm them. What I did was that I simply edited my XPower. The short game in my screenshot, in fact, was just a lucky push. Oh, thanks Sendou for the Colosseum invite offer. Expect my DM as soon as I actually reach a top 500 ;) Enough said, time to start saving up for a new Switch. --- Update: Looks like Nintendo finally woke up and removed my power level. Bet you never seen a "X Power: 0" before. Now that it means they have seen the message. Source

It seriously puts into question how the Nintendo Online service is going to change the general multiplayer experience, not much if I had to guess. I'd be surprised if they even acknowledged the issue and attempted to fix it. I really enjoy Splatoon 2, but it's seriously annoying that you have to deal with a 16hz tick rate, a tick rate that's lower than the 24hz present in Splatoon 1, and the god awful system that punishes players for having "connection" problems that aren't even their fault most of the time. For context, there's a system in place that temporarily bans players from playing regular matches if you happen to leave a match midway, either because you decide to leave or because of a connection error after several warnings.

Who the hell designed that?!

A lot of games do that shit. Even worse is something like OW where you get shoved into an instaloss and the game wants you to waste your time dragging your nose in the ground till its over. Then you get a leaver penalty if you had the audacity of not wanting to waste your time for being shoved into it. Its so annoying, especially when connectivity issues are the reason why you get D/Ced.

Nintendo, of course. It's a punishment for ragequitting, and ragequitting but thinking you're sly by power-cycling your router instead of just leaving the match or turning the Switch off (both of which Splatoon 2 can log). Surprise, it also punishes you for having less than perfectly stable Internet. Or for being matched with people with shitty Internet, even. Splat2's multiplayer runs on ad-hoc P2P -- the players' Switches temporarily make a mesh network together and every Switch sends and receives data with every other Switch. I've been issued "hmm that disconnect was suspicious" messages for matches ending early due to connection errors by other players; my net was just fine.

very strange that Nintendo decided the Switch doesn't need anti-cheat. IIRC the first Splatoon on Wii U had anti-cheat.

I can't tell whether it's the players themselves, the enemy team or whether its something else but, there's been instances of players who happen to be a fair high rank are suddenly incapable of obtaining a single kill and they're completely destroyed by less-skilled players and they spend the whole match unable to do anything. I seriously can't explain it. A few matches ago, they were kicking ass and taking control of the battlefield and now they're incapable of doing anything. It's mind-boggling.

Just spitballing here, but Wii U already had homebrew for a while by the time Splatoon 1 came out IIRC. Splatoon 2 was practically a launch title, which almost guarantees no homebrew would be available at Splat 2's launch, so they might have left anti-cheat out to save dev time. Now that it's a legit problem maybe they'll add it back in.

Ill also point out that the wii u was essentially a hardware upgrade of the wii (which itself was just an upgrade of the gamecube). With how thoroughly hacked the wii was, Nintendo knew it wasn't a matter of if, but a matter of time before the wii u got hacked. Thats also why they sandboxed wii mode in such an awkward way as well. With the switch, Nintendo moved to a brand new architecture, so they assumed they had time before anything happened. Unfortunately, the hardware of the switch was very similar to Nvidia tegra dev kits, so it was breached right away. It should be noted that there was a lot more encryption and security this time around, but thats already coming down. Either way, the hacking of the switch is happening a lot faster than Nintendo expected, they will respond soon with console bans in all likelihood, because that seems to be the big tool they are using against the homebrew scene this time around

If you quickly reconnect (i.e. restart the game), you actually don't collect an instaloss or lose SR.

Not really. The CPU was similar (but heavily improved) but the OS was completely new. The exploits and homebrew were pretty much all completely new methods for the Wii U, which is part of the reason why they took a while. Also, not really relevant to Homebrew access, but the GPU was completely new to the Wii U as well. Calling it an upgraded Wii isn't really accurate.

I mean of course there were differences, like a much stronger gpu since it was running multiple screens at a higher res. The wii u still, however, ran powerpc architecture while everyone else moved onto ARM or x86/x64. The wii U CPU was essentially a tricore version of the wii cpu with a higher clock speed and faster cache. The gamecube, wii, and wii u all used evolutions of the powerpc 750 series CPUs. The wii u still used a lesser ARM processor for security checks and certain system calls (which the wii did and I am pretty sure the 3ds does as well). while better implemented, it was clear nintendo took a lot of inspiration in the design of the wii u from the wii. I would point to several security improvements nintendo made on the wii u as reasons hacking took so long, for example, while the wii let its games run with full HW access, the wii u kernel ran everything in a supervised mode. Also there was just less general interest in homebrewing the wii u in general unfortunately. if you look at the difference between the amount of homebrew released for the wii vs the wii u, you can see what I mean.