[Question] Hacking detection and ban rates

[Baldurian]

Greetings

What a surprising discovery! I had no idea that not only people manage to fool around with DF, but with such potent hacks too.

I have some questions, and would love a few responses. They're about ingame antihacking measures, detection algorithms and ban rates.

1. First and foremost, has any of you received a permanent ban? If not, what's the longest ever?
2. Any other punishment besides banning, like resetting of monies/exp?
3. Theories of detection systems? Highly doubtful anybody 'watches' over a player, especially in Single Player, but if one raises too many flags, either the system autopunishes or a mod gets called. I had read about 1,5-2mill exp per 20-30 min safeguard, are similar ones also for looting?
4. IP/MAC flagging and proxies, are they necessary? I don't like using them, and I don't think they would help any - a mod can just check a suspicious account's logs to see to whom items/money was transferred.

My main interest is utilizing hacks to procure far more loot than normally via using an alt, then supplementing the main with the stuff once made sure it's 'clean' and 'unflagged'. If there would turn out to be no exp resets/permabans from users' experience, then maybe an exp exploit, but that's a side thing.

Oh, and I also would like to ask about hacking tools and a few tutorial repositories? I'm asking for anything other than PR2 youtube channel.

Cheers!

[Ghaladh]

My main interest is utilizing hacks to procure far more loot than normally via using an alt, then supplementing the main with the stuff once made sure it's 'clean' and 'unflagged'. If there would turn out to be no exp resets/permabans from users' experience, then maybe an exp exploit, but that's a side thing.

I can't answer to your questions because I lack the knowledge to give an informed answer. They would be mere conjectures and speculations.

However, concerning your interests, I can tell you that procuring "far more loot than normally" is the easiest way to be banned from the game. There is an automatic ban mechanism that takes into account the frequency of looting and the amount of looted spots per area that will prevent your character from looting and gain experience for 24 hours once you triggered it. It's not an heavy punishment, yet it will defeat the purpose of having used those kind of hacks.

The most common "lethal combination" of hacks is the one that enables all loot spots joined with the fast-loot hack. Unless you are able to pace yourself and limit you pillaging rampage, you will trigger the ban automatism in a few minutes. I am unaware if, after a few times you incur in the 24h ban, you might be banned manually by the moderators for repeated hacking. My main character has been banned 3 times so far, with no permanent consequences.

Exp hacks are not detectable unless checked manually. Unless you gain much more experience that how you are supposed to with your level and equipment, you shouldn't raise any red flag. Keep in mind that if you happen to be the Top Survivor of the week, your account WILL BE checked manually and you might be permanently banned. I suggest to use Exp hacks with moderation, being careful of not attracting too much attention (like being in the Top 15 survivors, statistically the most watched positions by the other players). If someone gets suspicious he will report you.

The most lethal combination, in this case, is the x900 damage multiplier hack along with the XP bonus, because together they would allow you to destroy hordes of enemies and bosses in just a few seconds, dramatically increasing the XP gain. I am not aware of any player banned for using those cheats, though.

A generic advice regarding the use of hacks is to never use them in PvP and Multiplayer. Many people hate cheaters and will not hesitate to report you. Do not overdo and be wise.

[Aghjax]

1.5 mill+ gained withing X amount of time < 30mins = Ban.
Oddly enough you can also be legit with no hacks banned for farming FBT's if know how to make them glitch spawn with lower health and can kill them quick enough.
If you travel too fast from instance to instance you will get a security error.
If you loot too many times in one area or loot too many nodes too fast you will get loot banned.
If you are withing the top say 200 in TS you risk being banned.
Speed hacking in the arena = ban.
Sending items/money/credits from hacked account to another will get you next account banned too "idiots who think their safe lol".
I'm not entirely sure if the duplicating items can be done, still I haven't tried to see since cash credits and loot went server side. But a mysql search would probably get ya.

[Ghaladh]

If you are withing the top say 200 in TS you risk being banned.

Entering the top 200 is a piece of cake because not many people are dedicated grinders as many of the habitual players are top level now. No one will bother to check a #36 in the Top Survivor list, because that would only be done by someone who has a personal problem with you.
Once you get in the top 15, however, you will be considered a competitor for the first positions and the more ranks you climb, the more people will monitor you, especially those that have almost surpassed you or that you are near to beat.

People that grind hard without using cheats are understandably very sensitive and extremely biased against unfair competition. I wouldn't be worried to be in the Top 200, though. Just stay away from the top ranks.

As stated by the game rules, the first position in the weekly Top Survivor list will be checked manually by the moderators for irregularities. If you happen to be #1 without using any XP cheats, but you used any other cheat not necessarily related to your achievement, they will discover it and ban you for it; you can be sure of that.

[Eszares]

Greetings

What a surprising discovery! I had no idea that not only people manage to fool around with DF, but with such potent hacks too.

I have some questions, and would love a few responses. They're about ingame antihacking measures, detection algorithms and ban rates.

1. First and foremost, has any of you received a permanent ban? If not, what's the longest ever?
2. Any other punishment besides banning, like resetting of monies/exp?
3. Theories of detection systems? Highly doubtful anybody 'watches' over a player, especially in Single Player, but if one raises too many flags, either the system autopunishes or a mod gets called. I had read about 1,5-2mill exp per 20-30 min safeguard, are similar ones also for looting?
4. IP/MAC flagging and proxies, are they necessary? I don't like using them, and I don't think they would help any - a mod can just check a suspicious account's logs to see to whom items/money was transferred.

My main interest is utilizing hacks to procure far more loot than normally via using an alt, then supplementing the main with the stuff once made sure it's 'clean' and 'unflagged'. If there would turn out to be no exp resets/permabans from users' experience, then maybe an exp exploit, but that's a side thing.

Oh, and I also would like to ask about hacking tools and a few tutorial repositories? I'm asking for anything other than PR2 youtube channel.

Cheers!

1. No, permanent ban usually occurs after the player has been banned X times for multiple cause. Like causing a chaos in the forum or scammers. The reason why they can't do perma ban to hackers is because they afraid the ban system might hit an innocent player. Due to the "Junker" explosive, there's ton of reason why someone's exp could spike up in a short time. The longest I ever get is 30 days, and that is the only ban I've ever get.

2. Until now, not yet. If you're asking about a rollback on the exp/money then no. However, there's been a situation where the exp you accumulated will be 'canceled' out like you've never got it. This happen when abusing exp hack too much.

3. Basically the anti-cheat system ran all the time and always watch the player. But sometimes it chose to not take any action, probably just reporting back to the server. Like the Inf Ammo situation.

4. That is true, everything are recorded. Changing proxy or ip would be pointless except for dodging ip-ban. They can track your exp and money, but they won't do anything if it's money-related. If you're using your alt to hack and get profit, then transferred to your main account, it is totally safe. Even if they know it's a hacked money, they still won't ban or even forfeit it. Make it look like you're buying some expensive stuff from someone. Basically, they are too lazy to check player transaction that they don't even care what you're doing with it.

If you're asking about DF hacking, then the pr2hack is the only sources you need. However, if improving hacking skill is your concern, then I suggest learning everything that related to making game. Basically if the game are created by C++, then the best way to hack/destroy it by using the language itself. So it depend on what you want to do.

[Baldurian]

Thank you all very much for your help and answers! I'll take them all into consideration

I already have a guideline for safe exp hacking. Even if it's 1,5kk per 30 mins it's still a massive timesaver if you spend only 5 mins to get it.
But what about looting? How much spots per map, at what delays, to maximize profit and minimize risk?

Even though it might be not "far more than normal", I'm sure hacking it slightly is also a time saver, not to mention conveniece when combined with DZA.

[Eszares]

I don't have much experience with loot hack, but some people says it's best to loot from different spot. Such as, body > car > trash > body again > trash > body again.

If you didn't use fast loot, then it's probably fine.

[Baldurian]

I watched pr2 videos, and I found his tutorial here.

In the video there was a moment when pr2 used a deobfuscator to 'clean' an obfuscated file. I managed to install the same addin, but obfuscator search winds up with no results. Did something change or am I doing it wrong?

Moreover, I'm told to use IL, but I browse through the script with C# for readibility. Is that misleading to use C# interpreter to find a code, then switch to IL to find out the AoB?

Eszares:
Do you by chance are successful in finding AoBs? If yes, could you tutor me a while, through Skype or something?

The same question to anybody else who has some spare time and can help me understand the decompiled mess. There's a lot of WHYYOUNOSTOPHACKING's with random series of letters and numbers Very confusing, since I don't know what to look for.

Also, pr2 mentioned nop'ing the debug.log scripts to disable anti-cheat-system - is that still possible? That particular post is pretty old.

Cheers and thanks!

[Ghaladh]

I can tell you the way I use the loot hack. I enable Fast loot and Enable all loot spots. As I already stated, that's a lethal combination because it requires a lot of self-control.

I usually loot exteriors only, walking, never running, in between one loot spot and the other, killing everything on my way as I proceed using a low aggro weapon (melee, pistol or rifle).
Killing zombies delays my movements and walking makes me waste some more time. If the loot spots are very near, I wait 5 seconds before looting the next.

Why do I use the fast loot hack if I take my time when looting? That's because if I meet a boss (I also use the damage x900 hack) I want to be able to loot it in spite of the aggro that it attracts. I decide a route that passes through all of the cells in the Black Zone and I loot only the straight street between the entry point and the exit; that's because I don't want to activate too many loot spots in the same area.

I did that for one week and I never incurred in the 24h ban. Half an hour of looting like that, picking up only items to scrap or sell, 14mm, 12.7mm and heavy grenades (I am a GM) grants an average of 300k$ (sometimes much more than that, sometimes a little less). In particularly lucky runs I've been able to make 1M$ in one hour.

[Baldurian]

I see, that's very intriguing news

Any way, as I stated in my previous post, I'm having trouble getting my head around:
A) How to deobfuscate, or go around obfuscation to find out which scripts do what
B) How to know what to modify in order to achieve hacks like DZA,FastLoot,AllLootSpots
C) How to change that once it's just an AoB.

Would love assistance with that, as I care little about AoB codes that will get patched sooner or later.
Give man an AoB code and he will hack for a day. Give man a tutorial with tools, and he will hack for life

[SnRolls]

I just got permabanned for using "exploits", so as my friend. PLEASE BE AWARE, DO NOT USE CHEATS RIGHTN OW

[Ghaladh]

It seems like Neil started a witch hunt on cheaters and hackers, judging by the news on this forum.

[Baldurian]

Ghaladh:

Not necessarily. He could've 'surprise banned' those that were already flagged before. A delayed ban.

[Eszares]

I see, that's very intriguing news

Any way, as I stated in my previous post, I'm having trouble getting my head around:
A) How to deobfuscate, or go around obfuscation to find out which scripts do what
B) How to know what to modify in order to achieve hacks like DZA,FastLoot,AllLootSpots
C) How to change that once it's just an AoB.

Would love assistance with that, as I care little about AoB codes that will get patched sooner or later.
Give man an AoB code and he will hack for a day. Give man a tutorial with tools, and he will hack for life

1. No idea, I didn't get into this stuff.

2. The pr2hack videos is a tutorial how to use .net reflector to read DF data. Basically what you're reading is how the game works, if you want to get loot hack, then find the "how loot system works" inside there. And exploit it.

3. Using CE, I assume you already know about aob and assembly. But in case you don't, learn it. You can't do anything without the knowledge even if you found the correct aob's. I probably can't give a link to another hacking forum, but the guy name is "Rydian". He's on youtube and Cheat Engine website, his aob's tutorial are very detailed and easily learned. Find him.

[Baldurian]

I am a pretty intermediate CE user I managed to create fairly complex (only a notch above basic, though) AAscripts, like the one in Gothic 2 where I modified the mov [ecx],eax that accessed a lot of things, to make it affect cheatingly only one thing.

AoBs and how to incorporate them isn't that hard.

About how to exactly exploit the system by fiddling with scripts, I already now. I asked because I'm having a lot of trouble 'understanding how the game works', and therefore I asked for advice - what to look for, theories on it, and so on.
I did a little experimentation with exploiting some script by looking for MoveNext occurrence. What I managed to do is create untargetable zombies () so the usefulness is pretty...nonexistent in that case.

EDIT:
From the recent bans and post by "supergamay", I am concluding that Infinite Ammo is insta detectable, and so is damage multiplier hack (e.g. dmgx900). Since it can send packets like "damage was done, no Unlimited Ammo flag, ammo didn't get used up - something is wrong" or otherwise "damage that exceeds a possible threshold".

The question remains whether similar packets are used to circumvent other hacks.
Anybody has thoughts regarding that?