Videogame PUBG Bans 30,000 Cheaters, Discovers Professional Players Cheated (newsweek.com) 118
An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek:
The makers of PUBG sent down the banhammer Thursday afternoon in a ban wave believed to iimpact more than 30,000 fraudulent player accounts. What PUBG Corp likely didn't expect, however, was that its new security measures would also implicate several of the game's pro players.
Like ban waves in most popular online games, technology is at the center of it all. In this particular case, Radar Hacking was the main target. For those unaware of how the method works, Radar Hacks reveal detailed server information and send the collected data to an external device via a third-party VPN. In layman's terms, Radar Hacks allowed PUBG cheaters to see all player positions via a second monitor or smartphone application.... Given what we know now, it appears use of this unsanctioned assistive software was somewhat popular in PUBG's European and North American esports scenes. Over the last handful of hours, multiple apologies, suspensions and explanations have been posted on behalf of players and organizations alike.
Newsweek reports that on at least one team, "Suspicions rose when teammates were admonished for not following in-game calls that didn't align with the information available."
Like ban waves in most popular online games, technology is at the center of it all. In this particular case, Radar Hacking was the main target. For those unaware of how the method works, Radar Hacks reveal detailed server information and send the collected data to an external device via a third-party VPN. In layman's terms, Radar Hacks allowed PUBG cheaters to see all player positions via a second monitor or smartphone application.... Given what we know now, it appears use of this unsanctioned assistive software was somewhat popular in PUBG's European and North American esports scenes. Over the last handful of hours, multiple apologies, suspensions and explanations have been posted on behalf of players and organizations alike.
Newsweek reports that on at least one team, "Suspicions rose when teammates were admonished for not following in-game calls that didn't align with the information available."
E-sports (Score:2)
The e-sports outfits just need to team up with the professional wrestling leagues. The wrestlers can help them become better entertainers and give them many tips on developing their showmanship.
e-sports events needs to be local server only (Score:3)
e-sports events needs to be local server only.
So it's fair and so that internet issues don't mess up the event.
Re: e-sports events needs to be local server only (Score:2)
Also, my bank doesn't like GoG, so my card won't work on that site:
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Also pros should compete in designated locations, not from home and not with their own equipment. Otherwise it's unfair and encourages cheating. duh.
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E-sports is dumb. Look to win, you need to play repeatedly to the point where it would bore most people to tears, I can do it but why and why would I care if others do it. Then there is trying so hard to win, you take all the fun out of the game. So a decision, do you practice and focus so hard, you have no fun or do you take in easy, do not so well but have a lot of fun. E-sports is all bullshit and marketing hype, it has no legs, each E-sport is doomed to die, it's not like say cricket been around for a v
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They could also pool their resources and get their drugs at a reduced rate.
Re: E-sports (Score:3)
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Yeah, I'm sure that total loser is crying into his, e.g., two and million dollars [esportsearnings.com] from being such a total loser last year.
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I'm just learning about this exploit now, so am going to have to do some reading... though wonder if this was done as a server optimization issue where the server doesn't have to do the work of "Can Player_A see Player_B?" based on building geometry, but instead simply distance.
Aside from that, I'm rather surprised that the traffic was so easy to sniff overall. Granted all of the traffic was UDP based... in [Current Year], is it too expensive to have some level of encryption on top of that (block based, not
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When the game knows where people "are" and will "be" lag feels less bad.
Game play feels responsive for all no matter the ping.
The alternative would be new servers needed in all/many nations with extra huge bandwidth costs.
Good design includes things not visible too (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this data being broadcast to the client? It's basic game security 101 that you only send the data to the client on a need-to-know basis to prevent this kind of exploit.
Need-to-know includes units, structures, resources, etc currently not visible. Things that a clean player would not know about yet. Due to network lag and local storage delays a server needs to inform the client of things just beyond legitimate detection so that the client can prepare to render those things smoothly should they become visible, without pause or stutter.
So there will always be the potential for a cheater to acquire an illicit early warning regarding things that a player should not yet know about. Yes, a game should not send everything on the map. But some things local to the player should be sent. The big question/problem in design and polish is how local.
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Another reason not to have e-sports, it's just not a very mature industry. What if balls suddenly deflated during a game. Oh wait...
But seriously, like normal sports, e-sports should uphold a certain set of standards. Be independent of the game publishers, create a strict set of standards for equipment, and so on. If PUBG has problems then remove PUBG from the competition.
Right now this is much closer to entertainment than to sports.
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Why is this data being broadcast to the client? It's basic game security 101 that you only send the data to the client on a need-to-know basis to prevent this kind of exploit.
It is because PUBG uses a peer-to-peer networking as opposed to a client-server architecture. It seems a lot of games these days use peer-to-peer which is rather unfortunate as there is no central authority (the server) so clients pretty much know everything about the game world and they can send whatever they want to other clients no matter how bizarre.
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Google: "frustum" and enlighten yourself. The graphics engine needs to know the players perspective to decide what to render; that means the rendering engine and graphics card need to know about all entities the player could *possibly* see, in order to decide which ones to render on screen.
This is how "wall hacks" for online games work, by hacking the graphics card to display "non-visible" entities that it has data for.
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Interesting, maybe all spectating modes should be given a one minute delayed feed to prevent that kind of info.
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Interesting, maybe all spectating modes should be given a one minute delayed feed to prevent that kind of info.
The half-life engine had this very option back in 1998.
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Too bad SuperKendall won't let you suck his dick to satisfy your weird obsession.
how can you call them a pro (Score:2)
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They're pro because they get money for doing it.
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If a person that is a so called "pro" uses a hack to get an advantage how can still call them a pro
Why is innovative use of all available information considered "cheating"?
I once cheated on a geography test of all the state capitols. This is how I did it: I memorized all the answers.
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Bad analogy. A better one...
Being chosen as a contestant on The Amazing Race and using a GPS device.
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This is how I did it: I memorized all the answers.
Ummm, that's not cheating. Using a written list would be cheating. Committing the list to memory isn't.
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Clearly your definition of professional is what the rest of the world uses. Pro athletes, for example, are the ones who *don't* take performance enhancing drugs.
Re:how can you call them a pro (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. Professional athletes are the ones that do sports for a living.
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Not really. Professional athletes are the ones that do sports for a living.
I would just woosh you but rather I'll let you know why you're being wooshed: The GP was using sarcasm to rebuke the obvious strange definition of "pro" that the OP used.
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Thank you. I appreciate the explanation.
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As far as I see this, as soon as big money is involved (maybe only indirectly) and sportsmanship in itself becomes less important the incentive to cheat in order to gain an advantage over your opponents gets bigger as well.
I also does not appear to be unique to video gaming. A similar phenomenon has been observable in physical sports for a long time.
I was wondering about this with CS:GO (Score:5, Interesting)
Just recently I tried a few rounds of the new Battle Royale mode of the ancient CS:GO FPS shooter.
After you die, as you spectate you can enable "X-Ray" mode that lets you see markers for where other players are, even if out of sight - and it made me wonder if someone could log into with two systems, have the first character die off quickly, then use spectra-view to see if he was looking towards other players.
It didn't seem like other players were doing that (no obvious reaction to x-ray information I could see when spectating) but it sure seemed like a flaw to me to broadcast all player information to anyone.
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It's called stream sniping if you're curious.
Re: I was wondering about this with CS:GO (Score:1)
Stream sniping is for people who are playing and streaming the game as they play it, lol. Someone watching that stream live knows where the streamer is, or close to it, all the time.
They do NOT know where everyone else is in addition to the streamer.
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Stream sniping is for people who are playing and streaming the game as they play it, lol. Someone watching that stream live knows where the streamer is, or close to it, all the time.
So, the exact thing I said.
They do NOT know where everyone else is in addition to the streamer.
They don't? Gee those wall hacks as they used to be called sure do work still don't they.
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No. It used to be called ghosting, now it might have a different but dumber name
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Not sure about CS:Go but certainly CS has had the ability to not only block the spectate mode but also to significantly delay the feed during spectator mode when it's enabled.
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This is affectionately known as "LAN-hacking". The term comes from LAN parties where one player would just look at the screen of their opponent. You can do the same thing in CS over the internet. Just wait for one of your teammates to die and then have them ghost/noclip/fly around and tell their still-living teammates where the enemy is. The game has an option to make dead players' screen black for competitive matches.
PUBG explained. (Score:4, Insightful)
PUBG is short for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds which "is a last-man-standing shooter being developed with community feedback."
Maybe I'm just old and out of touch but I think this should have been mentioned in the summary somewhere.
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From the title: "Videogame PUBG"
TBH, if you're really so old and out of touch as you claim, the only thing you need to know is that it's a video game, and that's literally the first word in the title.
I'll get off your lawn now.
I remember back in 2002 ... (Score:1)
... playing pvp Dark Age of Camelot being radar ganked anytime I got into the frontiers. There were multiple windows applications that intercepted network traffic from the game client to parse the player position information in a overlayscreen or secondary monitor.
Just why the hell pubg never acted before is bad as well. They just did not care as long dollars swamped in.
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They just did not care as long dollars swamped in.
Don't be too hard on the cheaters. They're just trying to drain the swamp.
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Happens all the time and it sucks! (Score:3)
I can't tell you how many times I have been sitting silently in a room with no windows in the middle of nowhere on the map only to have a team of dudes open the door and throw in grenades to kill me.
Only way that happens is to be using a cheat device that showed my location to them on the map.
Re: Happens all the time and it sucks! (Score:2)
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I'm almost more concerned that you can't
recall "how many times [you've] been
sitting silently in a room with no windows
in the middle of no where on the map."
Is, uh, is there something you find :-)
particlularly rewarding in this?
Yeah. It's called going to take a shit. ;-) (You can the watch the minutes before your death on the death cam)
Why? (Score:2)
Why does the client need to know where everyone behind walls are? They had this issue literally decades ago with Quake and similar. You got a hacked driver and could see through walls. One card reseller even boasted about it as an official option briefly until blowback made them cancel it.
It also wastes network, a bottleneck for games having truly massive fights.
Just don't send the info. Send shooting data if it goes visible just nothing else beyond a small hysteresis for the client prediction if it loo
Re: Why? (Score:2)
PUBG is learning why you never trust the client. Sony learned it a while back.
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Except you have to trust the client in a considerable amount of scenarios. Everyone has learnt this, and yet the client must be trusted at least with the rendering parameters. If you offload the computation of this onto the server you're screwed. You'd need to track viewports, object transparency, the level of destruction of your environment, god forbid you just released Battlefield V, then you'd need to take into account client raytracing too.
The client has legitimate reason to need to know what is behind
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Why does the client need to know where everyone behind walls are?
Firstly, define a wall. In these days of transparent walls (we could call them windows), and destructible objects, what alternative do you propose? The server keeping tabs on the rendering viewport of every client would use bandwidth and processing power which would quickly cripple a typical network game which is precisely why basically every game is aware of objects behind walls. What about reflections? This is just beyond theoretical at this point but Battlefield V has already demonstrated that characters
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That's just the viewport. What about the lag?
Ohhh the "what about lag" argument ruins online play for so many games. Where you can basically cripple your own network connection by streaming a bunch of netflix videos or youtube videos on another machine so that you teleport around on everyone else's screen and they pause on your screen while you headshot them. I am sorry but if you're more than about 100ms behind everyone else in this day and age then there should be no compensation for your lag. In PUBG you can watch kill cams where people aren't e
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I am sorry but if you're more than about 100ms behind everyone else in this day and age then there should be no compensation for your lag.
No one said anything about compensation for a poor connection. You don't need to have a poor connection for a crap netcode to utterly ruin a a multiplayer game.
WTF? (Score:2)
TFS quotes Newsweek's Christopher Grough facepalmingly:
The makers of PUBG sent down the banhammer Thursday afternoon ...
<rant>
In today's version of journalism, apparently it's idiots mangling idioms all the way down. We've got "on the wrong tact" nitwits, some random, even number of "sheets to the wind" lunkheads, and now what I'd guess is a recently-graduated journo major who seems eager to add "send down the (varietal)hammer" to the list.
In terms of visiting discipline or punishment on people or organizations, hammers are never "sent down." Ever. They can be brou
Shocking (Score:3)
"I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!" -Captain Louis Renault
Seriously, I'm not even into gaming and I saw this coming from about 500 million miles away.
Offer anything of value -money, fame, notoriety, prizes- and people will cheat. Hell, some people will cheat just because they can, no incentive needed.
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It's a great game being developed by an overwhelmed company. These issues? Price you pay for it's indie flair and not being like Call of Duty or Fortnite. It's gotten better and is very enjoyable.
Stuff like this is why... (Score:2)
Bigger problem than they think. (Score:2)