Ways to detect speedhackers?

[bpare]

Is there any proven ways to detect if someone is using some sort of 3rd party program for speedhacks or anything? There is a growing number of complaints about people using speedhacks on the shard I play on. How can staff go about detecting these things apart from having to watch and notice.

The main problem with having to watch and notice, is if you are not accustomed to how to detect it from players. You can watch them with the idea that they are cheating already planted in your mind so everything is going to seem like a cheat.

Any tips would be appreciated, thanks.

[Midnightdragon]

The million dollar question heh. I have seen a few shards with an auto speedhack detection system that jailed players who were moving faster than they should be. The problem I saw was that players on a super fast connection were wrongfully jailed and accused along with the players actually speedhacking.

Short answer is that no there is no real sure fire way to detect and deal with the issue if there was you would see it done on OSI already and I can tell you it has not been fixed there either. OSI can catch speedhackers pretty well to an extent but it sure is a long ways from 100%

[mordero]

I thought RunUO had a packet throttlling technique that is used to help stop speed hacks? This way even if you are on a faster connection, it wouldnt matter because the server controls how quickly you can actually get packets... Of course this doesnt stop them all, but its probably the best method other than installing a program on the clients computer to check for running processes and such...

[kmwill23]

RunUO's method for detecting Speedhackers may sometimes trip up someone with a good connection. However, if you disable the punishments for violating, the throttling becomes transparent. The good connection guys aren't jailed or frozen, and the speedhackers are controled.

It may not acurately detect the problem, but why detect it wen you can simply prevent it?

[Zippy]

Packet Throttling is 100% effective. There is no way to circumvent it.

[Midnightdragon]

Originally Posted by Zippy

Packet Throttling is 100% effective. There is no way to circumvent it.

Right I guess I should have mentioned that this does work but the question was can they be detected and perhaps punished for cheating then again hard to cheat if the server will not allow it to happen and thus no reason to detect or bust out the ban hammer.

[Hyru-hybrid]

Originally Posted by Zippy

Packet Throttling is 100% effective. There is no way to circumvent it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. In a default RunUO installation, you can get 0.4 second speed bursts by throwing movement packets at the server. A player running in a straight line can get a full screen ahead of someone before being throttled (I've proven this). Corners are where RunUO throttles well.

[Zippy]

Originally Posted by Hyru-hybrid

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. In a default RunUO installation, you can get 0.4 second speed bursts by throwing movement packets at the server. A player running in a straight line can get a full screen ahead of someone before being throttled (I've proven this). Corners are where RunUO throttles well.

Setting PlayerMobile.FastwalkThreshold to 0 or about 0 easily fixes this problem. You are right it is not set that way in the distro, but when that is set correctly it is 100% effective, and there is no way to circumvent it.

[bpare]

So this packet throttling will have no real adverse affect on people with a good connection?

[Malaperth]

Originally Posted by bpare

So this packet throttling will have no real adverse affect on people with a good connection?

I guess that depends on if they are trying to cheat or not

[Nevaeh the Genie]

one way to check also is a speedhacker one thing it does is makes them run all the time so if they dont have it set to run all the time but they are running when there are situations that a player would normally walk then thats a sign of a speedhacker. just check and see if they have it set to run instead of walk....their running is very jumpy. i never knew about the adjustment in the distro script will definately be doing this.

[mordero]

I dunno about you, but unless Im inside of a building or talking to someone in UO, i usually run everywhere I go... (most of the time at least)

[noobie]

as far as I remember how packet throttling works, it might actually affect people with bad connections not good ones.

[Thistle]

makes them run all the time

players can set themselves to "always run" in the game options so I don't see how that can be used as a guideline for speedhackers

[Nevaeh the Genie]

because if they arent set to run all the time and they run all the time then its possible they might be. the running looks very different than normal running. hard to explain unless you have done this yourself before or have definately seen others use it. have tried this on osi. they are basically jump running.

[tophyr]

Originally Posted by Zippy

Setting PlayerMobile.FastwalkThreshold to 0 or about 0 easily fixes this problem. You are right it is not set that way in the distro, but when that is set correctly it is 100% effective, and there is no way to circumvent it.

Listen to Zippy, he knows his stuff With the way packet throttling is set up, it's impossible to definitively tell if someone is speedhacking or not. However, the packet-throttling system as shipped is, like he said, totally bulletproof. Don't set the threshold to 0.0 seconds, though, as that'll cause normal, non-cheating clients to f up (even when running over LAN). For my shard, I found about 0.2 seconds to be the lowest value that wouldn't mess with honest players.