Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.
It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.
As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.
I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:
PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.
The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.
Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.
Whats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.
It’s easy to just handwaive and say “Server side will fix it” but here’s a major issue:
You have to render people in before they appear. How do you do that without the client knowing where people are?
but here’s a major issue:
You’re acting like other games have never successfully ran server-side before. Hell the whole net engine doesn’t need to be server-side at all. But you can run server side checks on shit at the very least. A player being 100 ft in the air is likely a cheater… A player making a shot through impenetrable terrain is likely a cheater. Tarkov is missing these basics. Forget ESPs and other bullshit.
If you should absolutely be checking for repeat issues and basics. Not trying to excuse that shit, just saying server side isn’t a silver bullet.
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That is just wrong. For example, increased movement speed. Just check every couple of seconds if the movement that the player actually did is possible with the allowed parameters. Yes there can be bugs in that too, but not trivial to bypass when you validate every packages.
It is resource intensive. But much more effective for things like movement then client side.
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Every. Single. Serverside anticheat ever implemented has been defeated with absolute ease.
Even if true (it is not) this does not proof anything other the that to less resources are invested in it. Client side Anti Cheat is cheaper because you just simply buy that product and yiu have not fix your broken game code which bately runs smooth anyway.
Client side Anti Cheat goes against basic IT-Security principles. Every single packet that is sent from the Client to the Server is User Input. It is not to be trusted. You have to validate it.
When you login to your Online account the check if your password is correct does not happen on your Computer. It gets sent to the server and the server validates it.
No they haven’t.
No they haven’t created games with server-side net code? Yeah you’ve just outed yourself as having NO fucking idea how any of this works. Most MMOs are fully server-side to put that in perspective. Very few usable cheats exists for these games that are not detectable.
Server side anticheats are absolutely trivial to bypass
Server side checks/anticheats are IMPOSSIBLE to bypass short of an actual flaw in the system/code.
You’re arguing that you can hack the code the server runs that you never see or know anything about. That’s absurd. Hell the game itself doesn’t even necessarily need to know that the server-side checks are a thing depending on the implementation. You can’t fuck with code you never even have a chance to directly interact with.
Change your health in a ram editor… Server receives the state of your character… see it’s invalid to the game state and drops you from the lobby/game. Do it enough times and you get flagged as a cheater, account ban. There is no “bypassing” this. Considering that game states have to be broadcast to all clients anyway, the server already has to touch all the states submitted to it anyway. A quick check on some sane things is simple and easy. A reference check from last known location to current state location and seeing that you’re clear across the map or your y value is impossible… This is trivial to check.
ESPs and other client side stuff is harder since you have to send game state information to the client at some point (including information on enemies)… but you could conceivably not send status updates about characters/objects that are not relevant to a player. That would cut the vast majority of usefulness of ESP hacks.
The most important part of ALL of this discussion. Tarkov does exactly NONE of this. They check nothing. They enforce nothing. The client side anti-cheats in place are useless.
Sure, the absolutely most blatant stuff can be detected, BUT
Stuff like aimbots and wallhacks are still very doable even in the presence of serverside anticheat. And for MMOs, the cheats used are different in nature, autofarms and scripts exist
Look at FairFight anti cheat for example, your fucking holy grail serverside garbage. People still developed aimhacks for it
But what do I know, some Lemmy dweebs apparently cracked the fucking holy grail code of developing anticheats, you guys should send some job applications lmfao
Sure, the absolutely most blatant stuff can be detected, BUT
No buts. Tarkov does NOTHING to address even the basic stuff. There’s no buts at all. You can’t say “there’s still hacks” when Tarkov is literally filled to the brim with hackers. Nobody ever claimed serverside is perfect. Quite the contrary. But holy fuck would the game be a fuckton better if they at least did literally ANYTHING.
A serverside anticheat could absolutely detect impossible flicks (autoaim). Especially since they’re too consistent.
But the point is that Tarkov has become a shit-filled game because of the rampant cheating.
Fairfight is an interesting example to take. Siege is a much better game comparatively. It’s proof that serverside works… and can work in real time. Except you claimed that would be impossible.
Edit: I’m calling Siege better in the aspects related to this conversation. You only run into cheaters on rare occasion. When I played Tarkov it would be damn near EVERY map.
If the trajectory and speed says either the client or another player will cross a wall soon where the player sees them THEN it could send the data to the client. You need some tolerance for ping up to maybe 200ms but that’s it. Wallhacks could give you at most a flash of a couple specific people.
You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You’d have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.
There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.
It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can’t just say they’re looking around every corner at once.
But then you’re adding extra latency to all visual calculations.
Your client needs to know if something is visible within the framerate of their PC.
You cannot do that fast enough.
Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that’s less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it’s not like modern anticheats don’t steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I’m not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.
We’re only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn’t worked, I just don’t put a lot of faith in modern game companies.
You do something called raycasting to determine visibility beforehand, and don’t render anything not visible.
lol raycasting isn’t optimized for server side deployment, it would increase the poly count of the mesh tenfold, which would in turn increase average ping and fps. Couple that with the client side rendering problem and I don’t know anything about development just kidding
Your suggesting the server maintain a real time render for every single player and somehow manage to get the data back to them in less than 17ms so that they don’t have empty frames that suddenly become people?
Because that’s a ludicrous requirement in terms of latency (ping is totally reasonable at any value under 100ms) and server capacity.
Because your solution sounds like it would cause popping constantly and be a major burden on the server, which is already the largest overhead on a released game.
By rendering people, as in sending data about an object that should be rendered, in a few pixels before they would be visible. And not at all on distances, without a scope (as they would not be visible). Footsteps etc. could be represented by two noise levels precalculated by the servers very roughly, so you can tell someone is there behind you, but a cheat could not determine where exactly.
You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player’s perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you’d need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear… Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.
True that, but I imagine such sudden flicking to seemingly random positions to be much more obvious than if the hacker had 10 seconds to see the player, tactically preaiming a corner pretending to hold an angle to then be lucky and hit a shot. Would be harder on games with smaller maps, CS like, as holding angles would be much more common than in open worlds - eg. Tarkov.
My point was that you’re multiplying server costs several times to do that complex rendering and still not solving the problem.
I don’t know game development but uh do you? What are you rendering when the player can’t see them? I might legitimately just not get what you mean
You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.
Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.
Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.
If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air
You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.
But to resource heavy to do that.
Edit: Thinking about it, you simply have to render the whole map with all players server side and based on that determine which players can see each other and based on that send the information to the clients.
You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.
That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.
That’s exactly what i said.
Still no reason to put a root kit on the customers PC.
Hell. I have enough trouble knowing where I am much less predicting where other people will appear.
I mean, i’d argue that a car costs a bit more than $150, but i see your point.
Call an Uber
Cheating is such a hard problem.
Like, this is what leads to invasive client-side anti-cheat. Which also happens to be one of the main blockers for OS portability.
But if you make it so that the server has to constantly validate the game state, you get terrible lag.
You really have to design your game well to deter cheaters. And you have to empower server moderators to ban cheaters. This sorta implies releasing the servers so that communities can run their own instances, because these studios don’t have the resources to handle moderation themselves.
the validation shouldn’t cause too much lag since game needs to sync up the game states anyways, which is an operation that is inherently way more expensive than any validation anyways (since each frame of the following game states need to adhere to the game rules anyways, there’s already inherently some form of validation). It’s more about not trusting everything the client says the game state should be.
Cheaters are a big problem in this game. To experience the cool parts of the game without all the bulshit, there is still SPT-AKI for playing solo and also the SIT mod for PvE multiplayer coop.
I’d rather pay someone else to slam my dick in a car door for 150 clams.
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Who the fuck is paying $150 for a fucking video game? Sounds like suckers who got scammed
*for a new game mode in an existing game
Actually the game mode is on a pack selling for 250$
People who already bought the 150$ price only get a 6 month free trial of the game mode.
Or they pay an extra 100 to upgrade
$250?! What?! Why??
Why are you concerned? It still costs 250 but if you already spent 150 then you can get it for 50. All is well
(Kill me)
You did well pig, you did well.
The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.
It’s all in the article.
Star citizen taught them well.
There’s nothing remotely close to this in SC history. Also full access to SC is actually less than the cheapest Tarkov package.
How much have you pledged?
I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.
It’s actually 250 euros for the top tier (267 $us)
I mean, seriously, what the actual fucking fuck?
My brother plays games with in app purchases and he claims to know people who have spent $100K on their profiles. I think building a fire using the cash would be less wasteful
Rubes.
I play hearthstone and spend more than that every 3 months to get a complete set of the expansion (well actually now that I think about it, it’s about $150 every three months or so).
I play a lot so my value to time ratio is pretty good but yeah…I don’t really buy any other games.
If only there was a way for dedicated fans to run their own servers for PVE co-op with friends…
Is there?
SPT with MPT mod.
No. And considering how they are gatekeeping the feature behind a 250$ purchase, it is very lucrative for them to keep it that way. Unless shit hits the fan and the players decide they won’t pay.
Apparently there is! There is a mod for SPT called MPT (now renamed to fika). It has a github but the download is only available through their discord. Took me a while to find it. Gonna see if we can get it working tomorrow.
They are a Russian Developer with contacts to military units who support the war in Ukraine and also mocked Ukrainian with screenshots in their game…so why expect you no shitty behavior from them?
Stop supporting them and let their game fail.
Sources:
Source? I would love to confirm this. If it’s true I will stop playing instantly
From what I found they have made no comment other than “they will not leave any markets due to war”
As for being Russian
“We have a mix of talent, some veteran developers, some new to game development. But everyone loves guns and FPS games. One of the studio leads is actually a former Spetsnaz officer, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Special Forces.”
I am aware they are Russian, and I don’t expect them to actively condemn the invasion, as it would be dangerous for them. If there is proof they were actively supporting the war or mocking Ukraine, that’s a different story.
I am aware they aren’t Russian
they are a Russian developer, they moved their office to london but still maintain their office in St. Petersburg
Sorry typo.
Thank you
They moved their office to London (wonder why…) but part of the team still works from their origin in Russian St. Petersburg. And here is what I’ve found:
And this happened more than once, so that is a long-term partnership. Buyanov recorded joint videos with Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov, a Russian translator and blogger known for his anti-Ukrainian stance. And Puchkov himself was a guest at the Battlestate Games studio.
Nikita Buyanov and his company actively partnered with companies in the Russian military-industrial complex. This group actively funds and supplies separatists, they ask for donations to supply their members who are going to fight in Ukraine, they participate in podcasts from occupied cities and Tarkov’s developers prop up their platform by including them (in no small capacity) in their game.
One of the new traders they are planning to add into the game is named “Khokhol” which is an anti-Ukrainian ethnic slur used by russians. There is also a feature in the game where you can become a character called a “Scav” when you become one you are assigned a random russian name, sometimes they are memes like “garandthumb” or “robokop” but in their depravity, there is a chance that your character can be named “Hohol” which you see when you die, or other players see when you kill them.
The developers of Escape from Tarkov, the Russian studio Battlestate Games, have published several new screenshots of the game. As Artem Lys noticed, on one of them the character shows the middle finger to the player in pixel uniform and with yellow tape on his hand, which clearly symbolizes the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Fellow gamers, if you don’t push back against this nonsense now, you will be living with this treatment as customers for a long time, if not forever.
This. People paying hundreds for a skin in CS and hundred for a new game mode that they might not even get into are the reason things we get games like Suicide Squad.
I’ve been seeing this for a while, why do you put a cc notice on your comments?
I’ve been seeing this for a while, why do you put a cc notice on your comments?
This comment by me explains why.
This makes me happy I never got to play Tarkov.
Grey Zone Warfare is almost done, why would I give money to tarkov devs, especially now that everyone can plainly see they’ll do shitty shit to their playerbase?
I was a big fan of the game. Always thought it had potential to be great. I had already quit this wipe pretty much as soon as I hit Max traders. Don’t think I’ll be returning back next wipe.
Interesting aside - gamers continue to enable these thieves by “leasing” their products. Boycott? No?
Many streamers are actively boycotting right now
Not one of the stupid people whod pay for that. So whats the problem?
The previous most expensive option ($150 I think) included all future DLC. Now they added this game mode and charge $250 for it, and the players who payed extra earlier don’t get it included.
Also, I’d totally return to the game for a while for this mode assuming there aren’t wipes ever. That’s my issue with the game. I don’t like losing all progress every few months. I don’t want to play the game enough at once to reach the end game in that period. I only payed for the standard edition though, and I sure as hell am not paying $250 for this.
Look into the SPtarkov mod. It is regretfully only single player but you can just relax and sometimes do a mission or 2. It also has mod support to remove the things about the game you find tiresome.
Every now and again I fire it up and play a map or 2. I have had the same character for over a year now.
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