Tides of War

Would be a pity for a great game to be easily hacked by cheaters.

Yellow submarines and neon green corvettes.

500 knots per hour.

Unlimited ammo.

HMS Invincible.

Nuclear depth charges.

20,000 leagues beneath the sea and loving it.

You get the idea. What's being built into the game to detect and prevent this from happening?

Server side authority. All decisions for the pieces you are talking about are server determined.

Neon colors...well, eventually someone is going to crack our volume security and then there isn't much we can do...except trickle updates, crc checks, mandatory volume keys with random key refresh periods.

Even hiding the ocean so you can see won't help much....we only show you what you could actually see anyways.

Will there be cheaters? YES.

When we catch them they will get fined AND banned. (it will be in the Eula)

there isn't much we can do...except trickle updates, crc checks

Those are things that came to mind.

Will they be implemeted from the start?

Yup....in the multilplayer client

Good at least that will put the hackers behind for a while cuase this is a kick ass game and for it to be ruined by cheaters would be a crying shame

What about implementing PunkBuster?

Nuclear depth charges.

Those would be sweet if the game had them, but alas nuclear bombs weren't created until '44/45

What about implementing PunkBuster?

Well worth looking into I'd imagine.

/bux

There are ways to cheat even in Massive Online games. But TesserAction Games do have one very large advantage. As East mentioned, TAG control's the content of the game and with player's logging onto their server's, hacking directly into the mechanic's of the game where you can change the envirnment will be impossible.

Still there are way's to cheat. Even with month's of beta testing, Enigma Rising Tide will probably have bug's, and hopefully bug's that will be minor. But there will be occurance's where player's will find a bug that they can exploit and use it to their advantage. Example's of this could be world wraping bug's where player's can take advantage of fault's in a zone to attack a player without the said player being able to retaliate.

Its really up to the playerbase to respond and provide feedback to the developer's so they can catch bug's like these sooner and bring out patches quickly.

Player's should also realize that hacker's will try to come out with trainer's. A trainer is software developed by the hacker to hack his side of the client software. What this means is that a hacker can manipulate what information/packet's get's sent to the server. An example of this is in Asheron Call, a fantasy MMOG that came out a few years ago. A hack program called "Gear" was created to allow player's to lag out the server so when they use it, they "speed" up and the other player's look like they are standing still. In a PvP envirnment, you can understand that this tool was very powerful, so powerful that fully over 80% of the playerbase in Darktide's, the PvP server of AC were using it. Many of them just had to follow the hacker's lead since for a very long time the develper ignored the problem and did not patch it.

I have a feeling though, that player's of ERT shouldn't be worrying about an extreme case like that on AC. If there is one thing to learn about this, is if third party hack software's are not combated, then a company will find that they will lose many of their subscriber's. Also companies like TesserAction Game's do have tool's to fight hacker's, especially trainer's. Any program that change's the client side's information can and will be picked up on the server side. The consequence's of cource can be warning's or banning's if they are serious violation's.

If anyone still play's Diablo 2, Blizzard after many month's of warning player's who are hacking/duping and so forth, a new policy has been taking into effect recently. For player's that were and continued to hack item's, banning's have gone into effect and many of them have lost access to play on Battlenet. And more importantly, duped item's that have been the main staple of the economy in Diablo 2, many player's are finding out that whole set's of equipment are now vanishing as Blizzard has brought in a program to look for and wipe out duped item's.

So as you can see developer's have a slew of tool's themselves to fight a hacker. But for them it's really all about the economic's since for a developer, is it really worth spending the resources to fight a hacker when their product has already reached its shelf life? For most companies that answer would be no, but it's in a developer's best intrest for a game like ERT to keep a product well protected from a hacker since they are getting residual income from their subsciber base. (or as campanies for whatever reason call it their "install base.")

It's why I have high hope's for this genre, I just want to see more strategy game's move to this genre since I believe it can work.

Duma

Here's an interesting question that may not have been asked before....

Will details of "kills" be logged so if somebody is suspicious of their death and thought the person who killed them were cheating, the logs could be examined? And by details I mean a whole slew of data on all ships involved, ie. type, speed, rate of fire, rate of impact, etc.