I'm not sure if you are aware of a sad bunch of hackers called *****.

They are a group of immature people who's sole intention seems to be to try and ruin the online gaming experience in various multiplayer games.

Live For Speed is one game listed on their site for which they are intending to create cheats.

If you see any of these pathetic people doing impossible things with their cars don't get mad at them. They don't cheat to win or gain an advantage, they cheat to get a reaction from the other players. This they call "Raging" and it seems to be where they get their kicks. They record any messages they receive and post them on their forums. The more angry the responses the more these pathetic kids seem to like it and the more repect they get from their fellow members.

The problem is if we do get any of these pathetic people hacking LFS then it will make most open public servers unplayable unless someone develops some anti cheat software.

i always thought LFS was pretty much cheat proof?

Quote from nikimere :

i always thought LFS was pretty much cheat proof?

I sure do think that LFS is, now a days, uncheatable... But, it all comes down to if there are any loopholes... If you know what your doing, you can do alot... But I doubt that it is possible to cheat in LFS now...

How exactly should they do any harm? It's not like they can play on S2 servers. And if they have a S2 license AND hack and are a general nuisance... well goodbye S2 license. Or if the devs wouldn't want to do that... bans do work pretty well, too.

I've yet to see a game that is cheat proof.

The team of hackers I tried to mention (the name was auto censored, so I guess they know who they are) pride themselves on being able to bypass most anti cheat software. If you are familair with any of the Valve games, Counter Strike, Half Life 2 deathmatch etc.. you would know about them.

Valve have VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) which is regularly updated to stop the hacks and hopefully ban the account of anyone caught using them.
But you get periods when the sad hackers have bypassed the anti cheat and can cheat at will. Then the anti cheat software gets updated to catch the new hacks and it goes quiet for a while until the hackers bypass the system again.
This also happens on games that use Punkbuster anti cheat. You get periods where it cathces them and periods where it doesn't.

I can't see LFS being any different. I'm not aware that it has any anti cheat protection at all?

Android, what makes you think they couldn't play on S2 servers? They will bypass the license requirement as part of their hack. They do that with the valve games I mentioned for which you need a valid steam ID to play (akin to a licence). They create multiple fake but useable id's. When they get banned on that they create another. How will you be able to ban them if they continually return with a different Identity? This is what they do in other games and they have evaded all attempts by valve to stop them.

afaik there is no commercial anti-cheat software in LFS but i think Scawen has it pretty well locked down.
there have been cheats in the past but Scawen has brought out a patch and it's then sorted.
if the hackers use an S2 licence then their accounts will just get banned.
would seem like a waste of money for them to keep buying S2 licences just to go a bit faster down Blackwood straight.... but whatever floats your boat i ssuppose.

Jack, the way that LFS works means that hackers would have to hack the master server, not the client software. No amount of hacking the client software (i.e. the thing we run, to play LFS) will ever allow them access to our LFS S2 servers.

That doesn't mean they won't try. It's a fact of life that someone will always try to hack their way in.. but it does mean that they won't succeed.

Are these friends of yours jack ie. do you know them???

So Jack, the problem here is actually that you have the fear of myg()t doing something, but you haven't actually seen them on LFS? As SamH said, LFS works a bit different then most games, and short of invading the master server there is pretty much nothing they can do. They might be able to make superfast cars - but not on S2 servers.

I see your comments about not being able to bypass the S2 licence and that they would need to hack the master server but that hasn't stopped them from bypassing the Steam accounts on Valve software or punkbuster protected games. As far as I know they also has a master server used to verify the steam id and have a database of banned id's.

They wouldn't buy multiple licenses as they don't need to, they bypass the checking system.

I hope what you say is true and that the LFS system is capabale of stopping them but in my experience Valve and punkbuster anti cheat hasn't managed to stop them completely despite years of effort.

No they are not my friends. Like any normal person I despise cheats and will do everything I can to stop them.

Yes I'm concerned that the hackers may target LFS and No, I haven't seen any evidence of them ingame yet.

I'm mentioning it because I've seen LFS listed as a target game to be "Raged" as they put it. I monitor their forums so that I get an idea of what to look out for.
I thought it would be useful to give you all a heads up on their intentions and not to be complacent in thinking that an S2 licence is necessarily any protection. If they do manage to hack remember not to respond to any of their goading or send any abusive coments back to them, this is what they want.

Quote from JackSun :

I'm mentioning it because I've seen LFS listed as a target game to be "Raged" as they put it. I monitor their forums so that I get an idea of what to look out for.

I figured that
My guess is that the only thing they will be able to "rage" is the demo community.

Isn't it so that if you have a superfast car, you go out of sync (Mechanic etc.)? Afaik, there have been cheats where you could drive an LX6, that would appear to be an RB4 on LFSWorld, back in the S1 days, but apart from that I havent really heard about performance-improving cheats.

And never say something is impossible to hack, everything is.

Quite honestly, it's a moot point Jack. The fact that they succeed in cheating other games is no basis for fearing them attacking LFS.

You may as well post about the sky falling in, or armageddon, or some other such internet claim or urban myth. Wrecking or cheating on LFS S2-licenced servers is, and always will be, a waste of £24.

Indeed i just checked their website and LFS is on the 'rage list'. Although if its S2 then they've wasted their money as they'll soon be banned from all servers or booted from LFS im sure.

Quote :

Isn't it so that if you have a superfast car, you go out of sync (Mechanic etc.)?

That may well be, but I think you misunderstand they purpose of this sad bunch. They won't hack to win by getting faster cars etc.. they will hack to annoy and make the game unplayble. They do it to get an angry response and the perverted pleasure from ruining someone elses fun.
If you take a look at their forum you will see that they have Rage sections where they post the angry responses they get from the other players. They even have a league table for the top rages with videos etc...

- Every game is hackable to some extent, crying about it will neither help nor fix the situation.
- There will always be cheaters and abusive individuals. Again, crying about facts of life will not blaablaablaa. Ignoring them and removing the cheat or exploit in question is the best reaction, defence and attack.
- During my 10ish years of multiplayer gaming, I've only met one game which multiplayer experience was ruined by hacking (Rogue Spear) and it didn't have even the simplest form of protection against it (you could edit .ini files so your pistol would shoot rifle caliber rounds without recoil). Counter-Strike is always dragged into the cheat & hack discussion and I couldn't give a crap as the number of rounds ruined by a hacker can be counted with lumberjack's fingers what I've personally witnessed.
- LFS's development and this community around it is quite special in gaming world. Unless something catastrophical happens, it's quite impossible for hardcore hacking or game ruining to gain foothold here.

"See that S2 license of yours? It's gone now, you're back to demo days bieotch!"

EDIT: Fixed some typos and cleared text.

Quote from JackSun :

That may well be, but I think you misunderstand they purpose of this sad bunch. They won't hack to win by getting faster cars etc.. they will hack to annoy and make the game unplayble. They do it to get an angry response and the perverted pleasure from ruining someone elses fun.
If you take a look at their forum you will see that they have Rage sections where they post the angry responses they get from the other players. They even have a league table for the top rages with videos etc...

Then the question is answered.. they're limited to Demo servers, and S2 servers are safe. On S2, we have a very effective community-run system of defending our servers, called the Wrecker Barricade. Anyone caught "raging" on S2 servers can be reported, and in minutes is likely to be banned - often for life, depending on the server.

In the 4 or so years I have been racing LFS, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times a race has been ruined deliberatly.

If they haven't managed it in the last 4 years, whats to say they will manage it in the next 4 years?.

Edit : just to clarify, licensed servers, of course, demo servers are a lot more vulnerable

Dan,

Quote :

You may as well post about the sky falling in, or armageddon, or some other such internet claim or urban myth. Wrecking or cheating on LFS S2-licenced servers is, and always will be, a waste of £24.

As I said I hope your confidence in the LFS anti cheat system is well founded.
But the other games I have mentioned e.g. Counter Strke, Half Life 2 multiplayer etc... all have similar client and server side components and you would have hoped that the hackers were paying £30 for another copy of the game to get a new code, but they don't.
Valve have spent a lot of time and effort in producing VAC2 to stop the cheating and to ban steam id's that are caught. But it hasn't stopped this particular bunch from continually getting back in to ruin games.

I ran a HL2DM server for a a few months and had 3 of them on my VAC protected server. They were caught eventually by updated VAC2 protection but they returned the next day with different accounts and continued to do so every day for about 2 weeks. They also posted a set of instructions on their forums on how to bypass the steam id validation. This was again fixed in a VAC update but it meant they could hack for about 3 weeks before valve managed find a fix.
This cycle continues to this day.
I'm sure if you guys have some way of stopping them from bypassing the server side S2 licence (steam id) validation then you could make some money by letting Valve and punbuster know how to do it.

@danowat (somewhat related) & JackSun

LFS will never cater to massive amounts of people, so the community will stay relatively small and tight -> even more difficult for hackers and game ruiners to stay welcome on S2 servers.

Didn;t IDI do this for some time? So we have been here before haven't we

And Guess what, it will happen, over and over and over..... you get it.

Quote from JackSun :

... Counter Strke, Half Life 2 multiplayer etc...VAC2... HL2DM... VAC... VAC2.. hack.. valve..fix.. This cycle continues to this day...steam id..

Sorry, Jack, but.. different game, different system, different basis for development, different method and ethos of development, different community. No relevence to LFS in any way. Scaremongering about this, in reference to LFS, is just completely pointless and totally irrelevent.

There are potential exploits within LFS still, one in particular did the rounds recently and you can still connect with U18 and run the hack on S2 licensed servers. There's a few other curious hacks, I havn't experimented but I can foresee an 'excellent' wrecker hack that allows a wrecker to continue after an incident without effect - it's a theory I havn't proved, and you'll forgive me for not posting details of my thoughts on it. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box to catch cheats.

I can say that LFS is suprisingly resillient to cheats, recently I made the tuning bay and so I had to check that everything editable wasn't useable online and only worked in single player and, given what I was doing (directly poking into LFS' RAM space) it detected everything and kicked me off the test server. I only hope those are not logged as bans on my LFS World account!

In terms of hacking for a free license, I understand that it's already known there has been/is an Asia-based LFS community that had/have their own master server for S2 racing, if they couldn't crack LFS to play on S2 for real, then I doubt these hackers will get past the license system either.

When it comes to piracy protection it now is possible to prevent it, unlike all previous attempts to block piracy (code booklets, lenselocks, manual word entry etc), as Everquest descovered when they ran their MMO game with a monthly fee ... it required a credit card, and that's total protection. Save for the fact that a group of hackers then wrote their own server software and played on that ...

The difference between the mentioned FPSs and LFS is that I don't see even what kind of cheat you could have to have an advantage in LFS. Surely neither transparent walls nor an aimbot will help you at all.
So it seems to be limited to litte exploits like the one Becky mentioned..
What destroys online games are cheats where you do not know, whether your opponent uses them - not the ones that are really obvious.
So if it was possible to add let's say 40 extra bhp to your car - yeah that would be evil - but then it was already mentioned that the calculations are all performed on the server.

Look Jack, I think what you're doing now is also one thing they actually like. They want you to be concerned, fearing of being hacked and paranoid.

Until we have an actual case where they somehow managed to intrude an S2 server without 1) hacking an existing S2 account, or 2) hacking the master server, there is really nothing to be worried about.

It's one thing to hack the local LFS client code to allow using S2 content, or creating a fake master server to unlock there, but it's a completely different thing when you connect to a server, which in return asks the master server if it is a valid user, and if not, refuses the connection. You cannot make *your* client stop chatting with the master server, because your client says isn't relevant to the connection at all. You then in return would have to hack the server you'd want to connect to, but not just on one place. There is constant chatter between the master server and normal servers (for all the stats and stuff...). Now, I'm not sure if this is 100% correct, but it's a vastly different system from common video games and almost fool proof.