I’m going to clarify the hack situation for everyone. There were two types of cheater involved. The first type is the hacker himself representing 1%. The second type represented 99% of the players that were caught cheating. They enlisted or were offered the services of the hacker to increase their energy and cryonite count with a method that I will not disclose in public.
Some cheaters proclaim that the hacker had infiltrated their account and given the all the hacked items in order to get them banned. It is almost impossible to brute force hack the login system; the only reliable method for the hacker to enter their accounts is from being given their login details either deliberately or by mistake. In all cases, after being given these hacked items, they did not report it to us immediately so we can help them but instead decided to buy parsecs and other items. Use of hacked cryonite or energy is the same as using stolen goods or fake money which is an offence in every country that I know of. Unfortunately for them we have evidence that allowed the hacker in more instances that once to enter their account and give them more energy and crystals. Some even had enough to buy several parsec class ships with full armour to test their effectiveness but eventually selling all except one as an attempt to not arouse suspicion.
Since the server vulnerability that the hacker was exploiting has been closed and with our increasing countermeasures, he will not be able to service the other 99% unless he finds other server vulnerabilities. Therefore, any new accounts the cheaters make will not show any evidence tampering and cannot be banned until it does since they do not have the technical know-how to implement the hack process.
All accounts were banned using the “suspend” command which also bans the player’s IP. It is difficult to permanently ban a player since most ISP’s use dynamic IP within several IP ranges and if we ban all of the ISP’s IP’s, we end up banning everyone that plays from that ISP! Furthermore, it is very easy to spoof an IP making it nearly impossible for permanency.
We are only authorised in our terms and conditions to ban player accounts that show evidence of tampering by hackers. Thus, we cannot ban any new accounts as they would show no evidence of tampering. You may think that they are returned cheaters but you and we do not have concrete evidence of this matter. Any information you receive on them is purely unsubstantiated conjecture.
No online game has the manpower or time to dedicate themselves to investigating every account to ascertain if they are a cheater’s second account or not. All of them allow players to play again from a new account since it will be an never-ending quest to chase and ban which will ultimately prove futile since they can endless create new accounts.
They may be power levelled by their friends but they will not have the advantage they receive from the unlimited energy and cryonite and thus are on a level playing field to everyone else. With this in mind and since these accounts no longer contravenes our terms and conditions, the situation moves away from server policies to game politics with which we will not interfere with. You can help us if you so desire, by monitoring their actions and reporting any irregularities as we will be doing anyway.
Anti noob killing features are in development and will be implemented as soon as it is finished we are at the moment concentrating on more important problems like lag and CQ improvements. I will post a full rule set on noob killing soon so that we can enforce it until the features get implemented.
BP and cryonite stealing is a game politics issue that we cannot interfere with. If an item drops, it is your responsibility to retrieve it fast. If you are unable to collect the item in time; you may want to re-evaluate your hunting tactics. We do not and will not “care bear” a game with PvP and to do so would be ridiculous.
Anti-cheat programs are mostly useless and cause more lag, false positives and installation errors than it is worth. Punk Buster is so weak that it’s circumvention method is common knowledge. They will stop the general public from cheating but not the dedicated hacker or even a script kiddie. We are developing our own cheat detection methods but as all features, there will be teething problems due to the complexity of the programming. The hack countermeasure is proving successful but the cool down detection is a little too sensitive at the moment so will be optimized it for the next patch.
I would also like to take this opportunity to say that GM are employed by us even if they perform this role without pay. There is a stringent selection process and all successful applicant are trained for 2 weeks and then empowered to deal with problems and are closely monitored. Each GM rank has an increasing level of responsibility according to the command set they are given to use. We have changed the command set of all ranks from what it was like with Gamigo to eliminate all possibilities of abuse by standard GM’s. Senior staff GM have proven themselves to trustworthy and thus are given more dangerous rights.
I will write a simple guide to show players the common command types that GM's can do to players. Needless to say, my command rights are extensive and bear in mind that if an offence gets elevated to the point that it requires my intervention, it usually means that the ban hammer needs swung.
anyway, I hope this answers most of your queries and please let this be the end of the matter.
Some cheaters proclaim that the hacker had infiltrated their account and given the all the hacked items in order to get them banned. It is almost impossible to brute force hack the login system; the only reliable method for the hacker to enter their accounts is from being given their login details either deliberately or by mistake. In all cases, after being given these hacked items, they did not report it to us immediately so we can help them but instead decided to buy parsecs and other items. Use of hacked cryonite or energy is the same as using stolen goods or fake money which is an offence in every country that I know of. Unfortunately for them we have evidence that allowed the hacker in more instances that once to enter their account and give them more energy and crystals. Some even had enough to buy several parsec class ships with full armour to test their effectiveness but eventually selling all except one as an attempt to not arouse suspicion.
Since the server vulnerability that the hacker was exploiting has been closed and with our increasing countermeasures, he will not be able to service the other 99% unless he finds other server vulnerabilities. Therefore, any new accounts the cheaters make will not show any evidence tampering and cannot be banned until it does since they do not have the technical know-how to implement the hack process.
All accounts were banned using the “suspend” command which also bans the player’s IP. It is difficult to permanently ban a player since most ISP’s use dynamic IP within several IP ranges and if we ban all of the ISP’s IP’s, we end up banning everyone that plays from that ISP! Furthermore, it is very easy to spoof an IP making it nearly impossible for permanency.
We are only authorised in our terms and conditions to ban player accounts that show evidence of tampering by hackers. Thus, we cannot ban any new accounts as they would show no evidence of tampering. You may think that they are returned cheaters but you and we do not have concrete evidence of this matter. Any information you receive on them is purely unsubstantiated conjecture.
No online game has the manpower or time to dedicate themselves to investigating every account to ascertain if they are a cheater’s second account or not. All of them allow players to play again from a new account since it will be an never-ending quest to chase and ban which will ultimately prove futile since they can endless create new accounts.
They may be power levelled by their friends but they will not have the advantage they receive from the unlimited energy and cryonite and thus are on a level playing field to everyone else. With this in mind and since these accounts no longer contravenes our terms and conditions, the situation moves away from server policies to game politics with which we will not interfere with. You can help us if you so desire, by monitoring their actions and reporting any irregularities as we will be doing anyway.
Anti noob killing features are in development and will be implemented as soon as it is finished we are at the moment concentrating on more important problems like lag and CQ improvements. I will post a full rule set on noob killing soon so that we can enforce it until the features get implemented.
BP and cryonite stealing is a game politics issue that we cannot interfere with. If an item drops, it is your responsibility to retrieve it fast. If you are unable to collect the item in time; you may want to re-evaluate your hunting tactics. We do not and will not “care bear” a game with PvP and to do so would be ridiculous.
Anti-cheat programs are mostly useless and cause more lag, false positives and installation errors than it is worth. Punk Buster is so weak that it’s circumvention method is common knowledge. They will stop the general public from cheating but not the dedicated hacker or even a script kiddie. We are developing our own cheat detection methods but as all features, there will be teething problems due to the complexity of the programming. The hack countermeasure is proving successful but the cool down detection is a little too sensitive at the moment so will be optimized it for the next patch.
I would also like to take this opportunity to say that GM are employed by us even if they perform this role without pay. There is a stringent selection process and all successful applicant are trained for 2 weeks and then empowered to deal with problems and are closely monitored. Each GM rank has an increasing level of responsibility according to the command set they are given to use. We have changed the command set of all ranks from what it was like with Gamigo to eliminate all possibilities of abuse by standard GM’s. Senior staff GM have proven themselves to trustworthy and thus are given more dangerous rights.
I will write a simple guide to show players the common command types that GM's can do to players. Needless to say, my command rights are extensive and bear in mind that if an offence gets elevated to the point that it requires my intervention, it usually means that the ban hammer needs swung.
anyway, I hope this answers most of your queries and please let this be the end of the matter.
