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For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes G

by snarfy 2y ago

For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ghxst 2y ago
This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.
  - Sayrus 2y ago
    Assuming obvious cheat, even 100ms or 200ms latency is unbeatable by a human. Especially since the cheat doesn't need time to aim. Even for non-obvious use-cases, it's hard to beat the advantage provided by knowing the position of players. On my own hotspot, I have less than 30ms of latency.
  - ghxst 2y ago
    Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections. Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency. And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.
  - jjmarr 2y ago
    I regularly played CSGO in Europe because the North American ranking system were screwed up. I got to Supreme (2nd highest rank) with 150 ms ping. The people I queued with hit Global. It's possible to play legitimately with very high ping. The higher ping put us at a disadvantage, but the skill gap between regions made it worth it to arbitrage.
    - Systemmanic 2y ago
      What was screwed up about the NA ranks?
      - xnyan 2y ago
        NA is (or at least was when I played) the most populated and visible regional zone, and attracts a lot of players attempting various kinds of rank manipulation. On the one hand you have smurfing, which is the practice of a relatively high skill player using a an account with relatively low rank so that they can dominate lower ranked players. On the other side you have boosting, which is a relatively high skill player ranking up new accounts for later sale. In practice this means at lower ranks, it was not at all uncommon to be matched with players with similar rank but vastly better skills.
        ultimafan 2y ago
        This was my experience too years ago when I played CSGO. The difficulty at higher ranks (up to a certain point) felt significantly easier than the lower ranks. Getting out of the silver and gold ranks (can't remember the exact names) was a hellish grind with lots of matches that ended in one sided stomps with one or two guys on the other team racking up some insane k/d. Past that was smooth sailing for a long long way.
      - jjmarr 2y ago
        At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help. It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.
  - eertami 2y ago
    It's not ideal but I lived half a year with unreliable internet and frequently played over a tethered 4G mobile connection (in Europe). Latency was around 40-50ms, which was still lower than the people playing from Eastern Europe who would play in EU West matchmaking. I imagine with 5G it could be even lower.
- mouse_ 2y ago
  The tactic 4chan uses: Regular IPs can post freely VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public. It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where you can't just block a /24 or a /16 because they're in some icky ghetto. Yes, I know there is abuse, but if this is the alternative, it doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of innocent people losing access. EDIT: Well, I guess the tribe has spoken. Pretty surprising. I think y'all are just assuming you'll always be the ones with the "good" IPs...
    - kbolino 2y ago
      We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peers at least since it was opened up to the public.
      - miki123211 2y ago
        > until serious illegal activity is committed What do they do in such cases? Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all. If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?
- ec109685 2y ago
  Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.
    - ec109685 2y ago
      I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.
  - ghxst 2y ago
    You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.
gosub100 2y ago
Just curious if IP bans work with IPv6 or if they are fundamentally incompatible?
- ghxst 2y ago
  IP bans are fundementally flawed since you can't assume a static IP in the vast majority of cases anymore, if you rely on an IP blocklist then it's inevitable that you will end up hurting the experience of small amount of unlucky but innocent players. I suppose this might be more of an issue on ipv4 than it could be on ipv6, but really you should always expire IP bans to avoid issues like these, or you want to combine another data point with the IP such as a hardware ID (or a hash of a combination of hardware IDs). Cheaters do know this so even if we could assign everyone a static ipv6 they would likely just disable ipv6 support on their NIC and rely on their ipv4 exit ip. Edit: If you don't think this is an issue I urge you to Google "pokemon go belgium ip ban" for a fun rabbit hole.
- toast0 2y ago
  Sort of. Doesn't make sense to ban a single v6, you'd start by banning at the /64 level and move on to banning shorter prefixes from there. You quickly run into the same kinds of problems you do in v4 though; most users have access to a shared pool of addresses, and you may need to ban the whole pool to ban an abuser, but then you also ban everyone else in that pool, and the abuser is more likely to have ability and motivation to use other pools. It's better if you have multiple factors... if you don't like the IP, don't ban it, but be stricter on other measures, etc. So a well behaved client from a 'bad ip' can still play, but enough suspicious things and you can't play anymore.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
How about just a whitelist? I can't imagine there are a ton of legit ut2k4 players left?
- snarfy 2y ago
  Yes, we have a whitelist ability also, but it is definitely a last resort. The game is mostly dead and difficult to discover for new players. We don't want that roadblock if we can avoid it.
  - Syntonicles 2y ago
    TIL people still play UT2004. I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...
    - ghffjgff 2y ago
      Ut99 with the matrix mod was where it was at for LAN parties...
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Is this game online/multiplayer only? I mean, people still play Galaga and PacMan and other older classic games so why would you think someone wouldn't still play this one too?
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        It is not online only as we would now understand. But it is certainly only multiplayer game. Well you can play against bots, but even then it is multiplayer.
    - hypercube33 2y ago
      I still play Quake 1 and 2 online, randomly pop into Tribes 2, Counter Strike 1.5....usually the community is clicky and toxic to outsiders but sometimes you bump into really neat people.
dietr1ch 2y ago
What about banning VPNs?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
project2501a 2y ago
sorry for the not-so-smart question. the cheats are software, software has certain quirks, like the way it aims or the way it tracks. And I'm willing to bet it has enough distinctiveness from human aiming to be classified. Couldn't a classifier work on the behavior of the cheating software itself, rather than use IP bans?
- snarfy 2y ago
  It's more effort than it's worth. There are server aimbot scanners which do something like this. There are also aimbots written to thwart this type of detection, adding delays, random drift, etc. It's a cat and mouse game. We don't have a lot of players left so it's not that much of an issue.
- treyd 2y ago
  This is part of what Valve does in CS. It works pretty well but it does have false positives so it requires user intervention for confirmation of bans.
- derefr 2y ago
  In order to actually catch a cheater mid-match rather than long after the match is already over, you'd need the servers that players are interacting through to have enough CPU grunt-force to do that kind of analysis "faster than realtime" — i.e. for the server's CPU to be able to run the game's physics faster than any client can, so it can run the physics with extra math in the same time it takes the clients to just run the physics. Which might be something you could guarantee, if the game were locked to wimpy console hardware; or if the game had minimal CPU physics such that it was effectively never running CPU-bottlenecked and there were massive gaps in frame-time where even the client CPUs are sitting idle, that a server running in lockstep could cram that kind of analysis into. But gaming is a race-to-the-top, hardware-wise. The CPU in a gaming rig might not have as many cores as your average server CPU, but it's almost certainly going to have higher single-core perf. And part of the reason for that, is that games really do try to use your whole CPU (and GPU), with AAA studios especially being factories for constant innovation in new ways to make even the minimum requirements just to run a game's physics, higher and higher every year. And if the server can't do "faster than realtime" analysis of the streams of inputs of the players, then by queuing theory, it'll inevitably get infinitely backlogged — the server will keep receiving new analysis work to do every timestep, and will fall further and further behind, never catching up until new work stops being generated — i.e. until the match is over. And then it'll have to probably sit there for five more minutes thinking really hard before spitting out a "hey, wait just a minute..." about any given match. Which is fine if there's a big central lobby server that the game is forced to connect to, and your goal is to ensure that some central statistic that that central server relies upon (e.g. match-rank ELO) gets calculated correctly, such that cheaters are prevented from climbing the leaderboards / winning their way into high-ranked play. (And that's exactly the situation the big eSports games companies are in.) But in the context of older games that use arbitrary hosted servers and random-pairing (or manual lobby-based match selection) — or in modern, but "dead", games, that only persist due to being modded to accept private servers — this "after-the-fact" punishment is useless, as most servers have no incentive to do this analysis, especially when cheaters can just hop around between servers. So there's nothing preventing people from being matched with cheaters, sometimes over and over again, if the cheaters can just tell their clients to roll up with a new key+IP for every match. ...and that's assuming there even are servers. You can forget about any of this working in a p2p context. (Think about what a Sybil attack means in the context of a federated set of individual tiny disconnected p2p networks.)
johnisgood 2y ago
> IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 was made specifically against people using VPNs. It was made for Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) where people kept evading IP bans, but it can be used for any other games. It is not my project, but I know the author, and I could personally fork it and make it suitable for specific (or any) games if there is demand for it. You may also use heuristics, too, in schachtmeister2: whois -10 "Hosting" whois -10 "hosting" whois -7 "Server" whois -4 "server" whois -10 "VPS" whois -13 "VPN" whois -3 "Private Network" whois +7 "residential" whois +7 "Residential" whois -20 "Dedicated Server" Edit: I noticed that the git repository returns 502, contacted the maintainer.
- lloeki 2y ago
  > IP bans only go so far with VPNs Even without this IP bans only go so far as they're both easily swapped (VPN offers, or rent a VPS to forward traffic, or even by design with an ISP handing out dynamic IPs on router reboot) AND overreaching: - NAT: ban household / campus - CGNAT: ban whole neighbourhood - IPv6: ban whole /64 => whole household (because of SLAAC + random privacy addresses)
- johnisgood 2y ago
  OK, https://redman.xyz/git/schachtmeister2 https://redman.xyz/git/schachtmeister2 now works (cgit), and it can be cloned, too.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    FWIW, the original author has no intentions improving it, so a mutual friend kind of took over its development: https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/ https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/
- Rohansi 2y ago
  Residential VPNs are more common now with cheaters to bypass VPN blocks.
- 2y ago
CSMastermind 2y ago
Wait, can you help maintain UT2004? Because I love that game. I don't play online anymore because I get destroyed but it's still fun to pop in for a quick match against AI when I have 30 minutes to kill.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.
- afavour 2y ago
  > Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. Cheaters, which is why they’re getting banned in the first place
- takoid 2y ago
  Using a VPN with WireGuard can actually reduce latency if your ISP has poor routing to the game server, as a VPN with better peering or routing paths can improve your connection. It’s not always the case, but with a decent provider, you might see lower ping in certain situations.
- hnick 2y ago
  Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game). IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  There's a bunch of services that can moderately reduce latency by using better paths. Specially worth it if you want to play with friends in servers farther than 1000km away.
- eptcyka 2y ago
  Lota of competetive players pay for a vpn to protect against DoS attacks.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  My VPN is always enabled, including when I game
- 2y ago
anticrymactic 2y ago
> The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders. No. VPN blocking is useless to stop malicious actors as most residential connections have DHCP and VPN subnets are added and removed somewhat frequently, it's not that hard to find a "undocumented" one. It also completely excluds anyone using a VPN for non-malicous purposes. Scanning files and folders is just ridiculous, not only an incredible invasion of privacy, but also trivial to work around.
- hansvm 2y ago
  VPN blocking is a cheap mitigation that stops 95% of the problematic traffic without removing a meaningful number of legitimate users. Yes it doesn't "solve" the problem, and yes it removes some legitimate users, but it's by no means useless. Given the tradeoffs involved I'm not at all surprised it's so common. If you have a solution that's less invasive (e.g., some businesses can get away with not providing anything expensive till after a payment has cleared the normal fraud window, and many businesses don't have obscene levels of malicious traffic; in those cases you can just let bad traffic run rampant and ignore it till it's a problem) then that's probably better, but blocking VPNs or whole countries or whatever can be the difference between a successful business and bankruptcy.
- jamespo 2y ago
  Excluding someone on VPN from playing UT2004 on a specific server is not an abuse of their human rights
  - fazeirony 2y ago
    where was the parent mentioning this is a violation of one's human rights exactly?
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Privacy is a human right.
tomooot 2y ago
On a counter-strike 1.6 server I help with moderating, we have the occasional cheater roll by, surprisingly often "ragehacking" with no attempt at subtlety (e.g. making noscope sniper headshots in mid air). Since the server owner insists on allowing non-steam accounts (pirated copies) to connect we can't rely on SteamID bans, similarly to GUID in Unreal. It's a bit trickier to change the spoofed ID as I assume it's buried deep in the game install somewhere obscure, but still possible. It's actually a very popular game in northern Africa, the former Baltic states and surrounding areas as well as north and west Asia: without these players the server would be a ghost town. Anyway, our approach is twofold carrot and stick style: Steam players get near instant reloads and immunity to some of the more "enthusiastic" automodding/kick features: so for the price of a handful of VPN keys you can get a legitimate, allowed advantage over most of the server population as well as reserved username and "VIP" tag, plus you now own the game. Seems a great way to do it, as it's available to anyone instantly for that one time fee (which goes direct to the game dev), or for free by playing at least 1 game a week for 5 weeks, then contacting the mod team on social media. The other side to that (the stick), is that rather than simply kick/ban the player we usually take some time to have fun annoying them, to show them they're really not welcome, and make them actively not want to come back. Disarming them then giving F tier weapons, a few random teleports out of bounds or stuck in the floor, repeat amx_rocket to turn them into a firework, amx_drug to max out FOV and add "drunk" effect, and ofc a bit of teasing about what a lowskill looser you must be to have fun while AI plays the game for you. There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting! It's actually kind of terrifying that exists. For example this set of commands sets network baudrate to 1000 (that'll be fun for the cheater until they notice), changes name, wipes all keybinds, then binds the default chat key to close the game, while setting max FPS low enough to be bothersome without being obvious! There are pre-built macros that do far worse to your settings too: although easily fixable by deleting to restore defaults, would be very frustrating if you hadn't backed up your config files. amx_exec cheatername "rate 1000" amx_exec cheatername "name iCaNtAiM" amx_exec cheatername "unbind all" amx_exec cheatername "bind y quit" amx_exec cheatername "fps_max 50" On an intriguing side note: Many servers charge for VIP advantages, to the tune of up to $20/month! At first I thought this pretty shocking, until I found out that there's some kinda shady clique where to be listed in a reasonable spot on 3rd party server browsers, a hefty fee is required, and a significant proportion of this income gets spent on "boosts". When our server owner stopped paying for "boost" for two months, mean player count dropped from 14/32 to 3/32, and max players from a regular 28/32 on weekends, to 12/32 on a Friday night if lucky. The player count rocketed as soon as the owner started paying again... but the crazy thing is it's $180/month! Before getting involved with moderating, I thought running a fun, deathmatch, well moderated, low ping, high performance server dedicated to remakes/remixes of the 2nd most popular map in the game would be enough to be popular/busy. But no, apparently you have to pay extortionate fees to incumbent gatekeepers, if you want your server to be visible to the majority of the playerbase!
cookiengineer 2y ago
I don't understand why cheaters are such a problem when it comes to bans. Why ban them? Flag them as cheaters behind the scenes, and let them only join cheater-only servers. They'll stop soon enough. It's like telling a web scraper that its IP was banned. It's stupid cause you will have nothing to gain from that strategic move. A better way is to flag a web scraper IP behind the scenes, and give them only garbage data, randomly injected/inserted into the pages. That'll teach them not to scrape your website :D In my opinion the same goes for cheat detection. You will only lose the strategic advantage you have by banning them, because rotating IPs or CD keys or accounts is just a minor inconvenience for them.

by snarfy 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ghxst 2y ago

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.

kelnos 2y ago
> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.
- Sayrus 2y ago
  Assuming obvious cheat, even 100ms or 200ms latency is unbeatable by a human. Especially since the cheat doesn't need time to aim. Even for non-obvious use-cases, it's hard to beat the advantage provided by knowing the position of players. On my own hotspot, I have less than 30ms of latency.
- ghxst 2y ago
  Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections. Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency. And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  I regularly played CSGO in Europe because the North American ranking system were screwed up. I got to Supreme (2nd highest rank) with 150 ms ping. The people I queued with hit Global. It's possible to play legitimately with very high ping. The higher ping put us at a disadvantage, but the skill gap between regions made it worth it to arbitrage.
  - Systemmanic 2y ago
    What was screwed up about the NA ranks?
    - xnyan 2y ago
      NA is (or at least was when I played) the most populated and visible regional zone, and attracts a lot of players attempting various kinds of rank manipulation. On the one hand you have smurfing, which is the practice of a relatively high skill player using a an account with relatively low rank so that they can dominate lower ranked players. On the other side you have boosting, which is a relatively high skill player ranking up new accounts for later sale. In practice this means at lower ranks, it was not at all uncommon to be matched with players with similar rank but vastly better skills.
      - ultimafan 2y ago
        This was my experience too years ago when I played CSGO. The difficulty at higher ranks (up to a certain point) felt significantly easier than the lower ranks. Getting out of the silver and gold ranks (can't remember the exact names) was a hellish grind with lots of matches that ended in one sided stomps with one or two guys on the other team racking up some insane k/d. Past that was smooth sailing for a long long way.
    - jjmarr 2y ago
      At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help. It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.
- eertami 2y ago
  It's not ideal but I lived half a year with unreliable internet and frequently played over a tethered 4G mobile connection (in Europe). Latency was around 40-50ms, which was still lower than the people playing from Eastern Europe who would play in EU West matchmaking. I imagine with 5G it could be even lower.
mouse_ 2y ago
The tactic 4chan uses: Regular IPs can post freely VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public. It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where you can't just block a /24 or a /16 because they're in some icky ghetto. Yes, I know there is abuse, but if this is the alternative, it doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of innocent people losing access. EDIT: Well, I guess the tribe has spoken. Pretty surprising. I think y'all are just assuming you'll always be the ones with the "good" IPs...
  - kbolino 2y ago
    We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peers at least since it was opened up to the public.
    - miki123211 2y ago
      > until serious illegal activity is committed What do they do in such cases? Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all. If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?
ec109685 2y ago
Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.
  - ec109685 2y ago
    I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.
- ghxst 2y ago
  You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.

gosub100 2y ago

Just curious if IP bans work with IPv6 or if they are fundamentally incompatible?

ghxst 2y ago
IP bans are fundementally flawed since you can't assume a static IP in the vast majority of cases anymore, if you rely on an IP blocklist then it's inevitable that you will end up hurting the experience of small amount of unlucky but innocent players. I suppose this might be more of an issue on ipv4 than it could be on ipv6, but really you should always expire IP bans to avoid issues like these, or you want to combine another data point with the IP such as a hardware ID (or a hash of a combination of hardware IDs). Cheaters do know this so even if we could assign everyone a static ipv6 they would likely just disable ipv6 support on their NIC and rely on their ipv4 exit ip. Edit: If you don't think this is an issue I urge you to Google "pokemon go belgium ip ban" for a fun rabbit hole.
toast0 2y ago
Sort of. Doesn't make sense to ban a single v6, you'd start by banning at the /64 level and move on to banning shorter prefixes from there. You quickly run into the same kinds of problems you do in v4 though; most users have access to a shared pool of addresses, and you may need to ban the whole pool to ban an abuser, but then you also ban everyone else in that pool, and the abuser is more likely to have ability and motivation to use other pools. It's better if you have multiple factors... if you don't like the IP, don't ban it, but be stricter on other measures, etc. So a well behaved client from a 'bad ip' can still play, but enough suspicious things and you can't play anymore.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

How about just a whitelist? I can't imagine there are a ton of legit ut2k4 players left?

snarfy 2y ago
Yes, we have a whitelist ability also, but it is definitely a last resort. The game is mostly dead and difficult to discover for new players. We don't want that roadblock if we can avoid it.
- Syntonicles 2y ago
  TIL people still play UT2004. I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...
  - ghffjgff 2y ago
    Ut99 with the matrix mod was where it was at for LAN parties...
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Is this game online/multiplayer only? I mean, people still play Galaga and PacMan and other older classic games so why would you think someone wouldn't still play this one too?
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      It is not online only as we would now understand. But it is certainly only multiplayer game. Well you can play against bots, but even then it is multiplayer.
  - hypercube33 2y ago
    I still play Quake 1 and 2 online, randomly pop into Tribes 2, Counter Strike 1.5....usually the community is clicky and toxic to outsiders but sometimes you bump into really neat people.

dietr1ch 2y ago

What about banning VPNs?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

project2501a 2y ago

sorry for the not-so-smart question. the cheats are software, software has certain quirks, like the way it aims or the way it tracks. And I'm willing to bet it has enough distinctiveness from human aiming to be classified. Couldn't a classifier work on the behavior of the cheating software itself, rather than use IP bans?

snarfy 2y ago
It's more effort than it's worth. There are server aimbot scanners which do something like this. There are also aimbots written to thwart this type of detection, adding delays, random drift, etc. It's a cat and mouse game. We don't have a lot of players left so it's not that much of an issue.
treyd 2y ago
This is part of what Valve does in CS. It works pretty well but it does have false positives so it requires user intervention for confirmation of bans.
derefr 2y ago
In order to actually catch a cheater mid-match rather than long after the match is already over, you'd need the servers that players are interacting through to have enough CPU grunt-force to do that kind of analysis "faster than realtime" — i.e. for the server's CPU to be able to run the game's physics faster than any client can, so it can run the physics with extra math in the same time it takes the clients to just run the physics. Which might be something you could guarantee, if the game were locked to wimpy console hardware; or if the game had minimal CPU physics such that it was effectively never running CPU-bottlenecked and there were massive gaps in frame-time where even the client CPUs are sitting idle, that a server running in lockstep could cram that kind of analysis into. But gaming is a race-to-the-top, hardware-wise. The CPU in a gaming rig might not have as many cores as your average server CPU, but it's almost certainly going to have higher single-core perf. And part of the reason for that, is that games really do try to use your whole CPU (and GPU), with AAA studios especially being factories for constant innovation in new ways to make even the minimum requirements just to run a game's physics, higher and higher every year. And if the server can't do "faster than realtime" analysis of the streams of inputs of the players, then by queuing theory, it'll inevitably get infinitely backlogged — the server will keep receiving new analysis work to do every timestep, and will fall further and further behind, never catching up until new work stops being generated — i.e. until the match is over. And then it'll have to probably sit there for five more minutes thinking really hard before spitting out a "hey, wait just a minute..." about any given match. Which is fine if there's a big central lobby server that the game is forced to connect to, and your goal is to ensure that some central statistic that that central server relies upon (e.g. match-rank ELO) gets calculated correctly, such that cheaters are prevented from climbing the leaderboards / winning their way into high-ranked play. (And that's exactly the situation the big eSports games companies are in.) But in the context of older games that use arbitrary hosted servers and random-pairing (or manual lobby-based match selection) — or in modern, but "dead", games, that only persist due to being modded to accept private servers — this "after-the-fact" punishment is useless, as most servers have no incentive to do this analysis, especially when cheaters can just hop around between servers. So there's nothing preventing people from being matched with cheaters, sometimes over and over again, if the cheaters can just tell their clients to roll up with a new key+IP for every match. ...and that's assuming there even are servers. You can forget about any of this working in a p2p context. (Think about what a Sybil attack means in the context of a federated set of individual tiny disconnected p2p networks.)

johnisgood 2y ago

> IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 was made specifically against people using VPNs. It was made for Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) where people kept evading IP bans, but it can be used for any other games. It is not my project, but I know the author, and I could personally fork it and make it suitable for specific (or any) games if there is demand for it. You may also use heuristics, too, in schachtmeister2: whois -10 "Hosting" whois -10 "hosting" whois -7 "Server" whois -4 "server" whois -10 "VPS" whois -13 "VPN" whois -3 "Private Network" whois +7 "residential" whois +7 "Residential" whois -20 "Dedicated Server" Edit: I noticed that the git repository returns 502, contacted the maintainer.

lloeki 2y ago
> IP bans only go so far with VPNs Even without this IP bans only go so far as they're both easily swapped (VPN offers, or rent a VPS to forward traffic, or even by design with an ISP handing out dynamic IPs on router reboot) AND overreaching: - NAT: ban household / campus - CGNAT: ban whole neighbourhood - IPv6: ban whole /64 => whole household (because of SLAAC + random privacy addresses)
johnisgood 2y ago
OK, https://redman.xyz/git/schachtmeister2 https://redman.xyz/git/schachtmeister2 now works (cgit), and it can be cloned, too.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  FWIW, the original author has no intentions improving it, so a mutual friend kind of took over its development: https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/ https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/
Rohansi 2y ago
Residential VPNs are more common now with cheaters to bypass VPN blocks.
2y ago

CSMastermind 2y ago

Wait, can you help maintain UT2004? Because I love that game. I don't play online anymore because I get destroyed but it's still fun to pop in for a quick match against AI when I have 30 minutes to kill.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.

afavour 2y ago
> Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. Cheaters, which is why they’re getting banned in the first place
takoid 2y ago
Using a VPN with WireGuard can actually reduce latency if your ISP has poor routing to the game server, as a VPN with better peering or routing paths can improve your connection. It’s not always the case, but with a decent provider, you might see lower ping in certain situations.
hnick 2y ago
Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game). IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.
dietr1ch 2y ago
There's a bunch of services that can moderately reduce latency by using better paths. Specially worth it if you want to play with friends in servers farther than 1000km away.
eptcyka 2y ago
Lota of competetive players pay for a vpn to protect against DoS attacks.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
My VPN is always enabled, including when I game
2y ago

anticrymactic 2y ago

> The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders. No. VPN blocking is useless to stop malicious actors as most residential connections have DHCP and VPN subnets are added and removed somewhat frequently, it's not that hard to find a "undocumented" one. It also completely excluds anyone using a VPN for non-malicous purposes. Scanning files and folders is just ridiculous, not only an incredible invasion of privacy, but also trivial to work around.

hansvm 2y ago
VPN blocking is a cheap mitigation that stops 95% of the problematic traffic without removing a meaningful number of legitimate users. Yes it doesn't "solve" the problem, and yes it removes some legitimate users, but it's by no means useless. Given the tradeoffs involved I'm not at all surprised it's so common. If you have a solution that's less invasive (e.g., some businesses can get away with not providing anything expensive till after a payment has cleared the normal fraud window, and many businesses don't have obscene levels of malicious traffic; in those cases you can just let bad traffic run rampant and ignore it till it's a problem) then that's probably better, but blocking VPNs or whole countries or whatever can be the difference between a successful business and bankruptcy.
jamespo 2y ago
Excluding someone on VPN from playing UT2004 on a specific server is not an abuse of their human rights
- fazeirony 2y ago
  where was the parent mentioning this is a violation of one's human rights exactly?
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Privacy is a human right.

tomooot 2y ago

On a counter-strike 1.6 server I help with moderating, we have the occasional cheater roll by, surprisingly often "ragehacking" with no attempt at subtlety (e.g. making noscope sniper headshots in mid air). Since the server owner insists on allowing non-steam accounts (pirated copies) to connect we can't rely on SteamID bans, similarly to GUID in Unreal. It's a bit trickier to change the spoofed ID as I assume it's buried deep in the game install somewhere obscure, but still possible. It's actually a very popular game in northern Africa, the former Baltic states and surrounding areas as well as north and west Asia: without these players the server would be a ghost town. Anyway, our approach is twofold carrot and stick style: Steam players get near instant reloads and immunity to some of the more "enthusiastic" automodding/kick features: so for the price of a handful of VPN keys you can get a legitimate, allowed advantage over most of the server population as well as reserved username and "VIP" tag, plus you now own the game. Seems a great way to do it, as it's available to anyone instantly for that one time fee (which goes direct to the game dev), or for free by playing at least 1 game a week for 5 weeks, then contacting the mod team on social media. The other side to that (the stick), is that rather than simply kick/ban the player we usually take some time to have fun annoying them, to show them they're really not welcome, and make them actively not want to come back. Disarming them then giving F tier weapons, a few random teleports out of bounds or stuck in the floor, repeat amx_rocket to turn them into a firework, amx_drug to max out FOV and add "drunk" effect, and ofc a bit of teasing about what a lowskill looser you must be to have fun while AI plays the game for you. There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting! It's actually kind of terrifying that exists. For example this set of commands sets network baudrate to 1000 (that'll be fun for the cheater until they notice), changes name, wipes all keybinds, then binds the default chat key to close the game, while setting max FPS low enough to be bothersome without being obvious! There are pre-built macros that do far worse to your settings too: although easily fixable by deleting to restore defaults, would be very frustrating if you hadn't backed up your config files. amx_exec cheatername "rate 1000" amx_exec cheatername "name iCaNtAiM" amx_exec cheatername "unbind all" amx_exec cheatername "bind y quit" amx_exec cheatername "fps_max 50" On an intriguing side note: Many servers charge for VIP advantages, to the tune of up to $20/month! At first I thought this pretty shocking, until I found out that there's some kinda shady clique where to be listed in a reasonable spot on 3rd party server browsers, a hefty fee is required, and a significant proportion of this income gets spent on "boosts". When our server owner stopped paying for "boost" for two months, mean player count dropped from 14/32 to 3/32, and max players from a regular 28/32 on weekends, to 12/32 on a Friday night if lucky. The player count rocketed as soon as the owner started paying again... but the crazy thing is it's $180/month! Before getting involved with moderating, I thought running a fun, deathmatch, well moderated, low ping, high performance server dedicated to remakes/remixes of the 2nd most popular map in the game would be enough to be popular/busy. But no, apparently you have to pay extortionate fees to incumbent gatekeepers, if you want your server to be visible to the majority of the playerbase!

cookiengineer 2y ago

I don't understand why cheaters are such a problem when it comes to bans. Why ban them? Flag them as cheaters behind the scenes, and let them only join cheater-only servers. They'll stop soon enough. It's like telling a web scraper that its IP was banned. It's stupid cause you will have nothing to gain from that strategic move. A better way is to flag a web scraper IP behind the scenes, and give them only garbage data, randomly injected/inserted into the pages. That'll teach them not to scrape your website :D In my opinion the same goes for cheat detection. You will only lose the strategic advantage you have by banning them, because rotating IPs or CD keys or accounts is just a minor inconvenience for them.