“Fortnite” Publisher Epic Is Suing Two Alleged Cheaters

You aren't a good player until a server admin bans you for "cheating" but the real reason is that you are just too good. Myself and 2 other friends got banned from a Battlefield 2 server about 10 years ago because we were actually using teamwork to kill people. I also have played with people who I thought were cheating at first, but later found out that they really were just that good.

True true,. My oldest such memories were from playing Delta Force, there was a cheater where guys would be jumping like 200 feet into the air super fast, like warping fast, and they would use the machinegun and spray everyone going right for the spawn of course but you could kill them. Just aim for the tracers and do a little predictive aiming.
 
Good. Cheaters ruin the game for everyone. Fuck em, ban em, stick em in a stew.

Go after the cheat creators and maybe something will be done. Ban the cheaters, too.

This goes against my typical "people are sue happy" opinion. But, they are protecting their investment. If people like me stop playing because of cheaters, they lose money. If they have grounds to sue the cheat maker, go for it. It's a legitimate issue with them.
 
Simple solution: Ban the hackers PC MAC Address across all titles the company has.

Oh right, that affects sales. Nevermind then.
That assumes the MAC address is unchangeable, which is not the case (Device Manager > NIC > Advanced > Network Address / Locally Administered Address (or the like) ). As long as you don't duplicate a MAC on your own local network, you can keep changing it. If I did the math right, there are 184,884,258,895,036,416 possible MAC addresses (12 characters, 16 values per character).
 
I remember PunkBuster started doing hardware bans in supported games, back in 07-08. Wonder if that's still viable, or can be bypassed.

I used to play Wolf:ET religiously when it came out, but by 05-06, the game was completely overrun by hackers. PB did their best, but then kids started buying private hacks, that were made specific to their needs. The community wouldn't have known about them, if it wasn't for an idiot that decided to share his hack with several people.

I remember when CS:S was rocked by the ventrilo.exe scandal. That one was a shocker. LAN events were the great equalizer, when it came to dealing with hackers. Alas, even LAN events weren't restricted when it comes to clever coders. CS:GO had that scandal a few years ago with the Baking Bread hack. IIRC, players were paying thousands for these private hacks. You had to be a higher caliber/profile player, and then you might be able to get in touch with these coders.

It's one of the reasons I switched to consoles when it comes to FPS games. Don't really want to deal with those headaches.
 
I remember PunkBuster started doing hardware bans in supported games, back in 07-08. Wonder if that's still viable, or can be bypassed.

I used to play Wolf:ET religiously when it came out, but by 05-06, the game was completely overrun by hackers. PB did their best, but then kids started buying private hacks, that were made specific to their needs. The community wouldn't have known about them, if it wasn't for an idiot that decided to share his hack with several people.

I remember when CS:S was rocked by the ventrilo.exe scandal. That one was a shocker. LAN events were the great equalizer, when it came to dealing with hackers. Alas, even LAN events weren't restricted when it comes to clever coders. CS:GO had that scandal a few years ago with the Baking Bread hack. IIRC, players were paying thousands for these private hacks. You had to be a higher caliber/profile player, and then you might be able to get in touch with these coders.

It's one of the reasons I switched to consoles when it comes to FPS games. Don't really want to deal with those headaches.
It's a cat and mouse game. PunkBuster and it's like basically scans memory for signatures which match known cheats. Eventually good cheats would get popular and then added to the list of detected cheats and become useless. The risk vs reward is very different in a FPS compared to a MMO where time invested in an MMO can be killed immediately if found cheating, where as in a FPS maybe your trophies might be in jeopardy if caught but are a lot easier to recover if you had to start fresh.
 
It's a cat and mouse game. PunkBuster and it's like basically scans memory for signatures which match known cheats. Eventually good cheats would get popular and then added to the list of detected cheats and become useless. The risk vs reward is very different in a FPS compared to a MMO where time invested in an MMO can be killed immediately if found cheating, where as in a FPS maybe your trophies might be in jeopardy if caught but are a lot easier to recover if you had to start fresh.
I think PB uses heuristics now, but they used to use strict signatures which led to some hilarity when hacker groups flooded IRC with the memory strings of known hacks, leading to bans for non-cheaters, simply because of a string match in memory (PB was indiscriminately scanning memory). PB hardware bans appear to take MAC address and HDD serial numbers. MAC Addresses are readily and easily changeable. For HDD, I don't know. But I did find that there are apparently plenty of hardware spoofers around specifically for bypassing a hardware ban.
 
I wish more companies would do what blizzard did with overwatch, which IIRC was hardware based bans.
 
I wish more companies would do what blizzard did with overwatch, which IIRC was hardware based bans.
I don't know how i feel about blizzard keeping track of computer hardware running their game. It should really be based on the user/license of the game and not follow used computer hardware for obvious reasons.
 
I don't know how i feel about blizzard keeping track of computer hardware running their game. It should really be based on the user/license of the game and not follow used computer hardware for obvious reasons.

Yeah, that is a problematic edge case. I'm not sure which is more beneficial to the community as a whole. CS:GO is a good example of how just account banning can be problematic. The game is cheap enough that people who hack can justify just making a new steam account and buying the game again. This is beneficial to Valve as it's a way to continue sales of a game that has paid for itself many times over already, but does it hurt the non hacking playerbase too badly?
 
Simple solution: Ban the hackers PC MAC Address across all titles the company has.

Oh right, that affects sales. Nevermind then.
MACs are easily changeable...not sure what that would accomplish.
 
Simple solution: Ban the hackers PC MAC Address across all titles the company has.

Oh right, that affects sales. Nevermind then.

LOL, you can't ban a MAC address from an internet service. Study up on your OSI model. MAC addresses aren't routable; they don't traverse across networks. MAC addresses are used to keep track of the physical location of a given network interface on a given network; as soon as a packet traverses across a router, the packet will be encapsulated in a new frame with a new MAC address corresponding to that of the router. The only MAC address Epic would be would be that of the last router the packet passed through.
 
This world is too sue happy. Cheating sucks but at the end of the day show me one online game without it.
So because some bad behaviour is commonplace we should just ignore it?

It's just kinda mixed.
On one hand, i should be able to run whatever i want to on my computer. If i want to run a special driver that allows for wall hacking by not rendering some walls, then that's up to me. You have zero right to legislate what i can do or can't do on my computer. I don't think running a cheat is illegal.
What the company has a right to do is to deny service if cheating is found. They should refund and say the person isn't welcome, that's perfectly fine. Suing over a violation of terms of service is kinda odd. If the company isn't proactively protecting their own service from what they consider violations, then they're at fault, not the person who's cheating.
Fuck no, do you have the right to go into the tennis court and start building brick walls on your side so you always win? No, if you play with other people on a public arena then there are rules, you can't just change the rules of the game in secret to have an advantage. Cheating in multiplayer is not just on your computer. It also affects other people's computers indirectly. So it should be considered hacking and should have similar repercussions. That would stop all cheaters dead in their tracks, noone would risk it if you can get jail-time for it. Is it overkill? Yes, but the self-righteous bastards have asked for it, if you don't understand you will UNDERSTAND it in jail that you can't fuck with other people indiscriminately.

Basically i feel as if they're utilizing the legal system to scare people into not cheating, which won't work since i'll assume that most cheaters are teenagers who don't quite think through the consequences of their actions. It's the same kind of strategy utilized by the RIAA to scare mp3 torrent users who get caught to stop sharing music. Even for cheat makers, it's a lucrative business, especially when the exploits they use is from a generic engine and has been available for a long time. You don't have to make anything new, just wrap it for the game and market it.
If you're old enough to pay for a cheat, you're old enough to learn the rules of being civilized. And make no mistake, just because there is no physical contact online cheating is hurting other people. And you should learn sooner rather than later that's not gonna fly in a civilized society.
 
So because some bad behaviour is commonplace we should just ignore it?


Fuck no, do you have the right to go into the tennis court and start building brick walls on your side so you always win? No, if you play with other people on a public arena then there are rules, you can't just change the rules of the game in secret to have an advantage. Cheating in multiplayer is not just on your computer. It also affects other people's computers indirectly. So it should be considered hacking and should have similar repercussions. That would stop all cheaters dead in their tracks, noone would risk it if you can get jail-time for it. Is it overkill? Yes, but the self-righteous bastards have asked for it, if you don't understand you will UNDERSTAND it in jail that you can't fuck with other people indiscriminately.


If you're old enough to pay for a cheat, you're old enough to learn the rules of being civilized. And make no mistake, just because there is no physical contact online cheating is hurting other people. And you should learn sooner rather than later that's not gonna fly in a civilized society.
Lol. You can't use a physical analogy to equate it to cheating in a video game.
If someone starts building brick walls on your side, it's visible. There's no way you don't know their cheating. It's also a permanent defacement of the tennis court.
Cheats are no such thing. They're invisible, they don't cause any damage (other than egos).
You make the statement it affects other people's computers and should be considered hacking with repercussions? That's insane. Please rethink your position because it's nuts.
Jail time. Can't wait to see how that interaction will go "What are you in for?" "I killed a family of four and ate them, you?" "I cheated in fortnighte, powned bitches for 2 weeks straight"

People cheat in real spots all the time. Baseball players and steroids, cyclists and steroids, weight lifters, etc etc. Even in the Olympics they dope. There is literally no sport or hobby in which cheating doesn't occur. Are you going to start jailing those people to teach them that it's not being civilized as well?
 
II used to play Wolf:ET religiously when it came out, but by 05-06, the game was completely overrun by hackers. PB did their best, but then kids started buying private hacks, that were made specific to their needs. The community wouldn't have known about them, if it wasn't for an idiot that decided to share his hack with several people.

Same. Ran a pub clan for years. Hacking got so bad that I ended up speccing games more than playing just catch botters and wallhackers.
 
LOL, you can't ban a MAC address from an internet service. Study up on your OSI model. MAC addresses aren't routable; they don't traverse across networks. MAC addresses are used to keep track of the physical location of a given network interface on a given network; as soon as a packet traverses across a router, the packet will be encapsulated in a new frame with a new MAC address corresponding to that of the router. The only MAC address Epic would be would be that of the last router the packet passed through.
It may not need to traverse the network if the local client makes note of it as part of some checksum or anti-cheat or something & then sends that to the server to verify...
 
These payed for hacks have existed for a long time. People will continue to pay for them.
If a hack company gets sued, another will pop up in it's place.

I try to stick to single player games now if i can help it.

Playstation 4
 
So because some bad behaviour is commonplace we should just ignore it?


Fuck no, do you have the right to go into the tennis court and start building brick walls on your side so you always win? No, if you play with other people on a public arena then there are rules, you can't just change the rules of the game in secret to have an advantage. Cheating in multiplayer is not just on your computer. It also affects other people's computers indirectly. So it should be considered hacking and should have similar repercussions. That would stop all cheaters dead in their tracks, noone would risk it if you can get jail-time for it. Is it overkill? Yes, but the self-righteous bastards have asked for it, if you don't understand you will UNDERSTAND it in jail that you can't fuck with other people indiscriminately.


If you're old enough to pay for a cheat, you're old enough to learn the rules of being civilized. And make no mistake, just because there is no physical contact online cheating is hurting other people. And you should learn sooner rather than later that's not gonna fly in a civilized society.

It's sue happy logic like this why an intruder can break into your home, slip and cut themself and sue you for it. When you constantly lower the bar for what you can sue over it screws over everybody.
 
It's sue happy logic like this why an intruder can break into your home, slip and cut themself and sue you for it. When you constantly lower the bar for what you can sue over it screws over everybody.

This would be extremely hard to win FYI.
 
Does it really matter ? Lawyer fees and court costs themselves can bankrupt some well before they would ever win or lose.

Well you’d probably be suing their insurance company.

Secondly, why would you assume a burglar in jail would have more money for lawyers than a homeowner?
 
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