Better Anti-Cheat#8658

Research shows every 6th player in official servers is cheating or has sometimes used a cheat in the past to gain a unfair advantage, grim.

there is so many hackers in rust its so amazing getting triple headshot 500m-1000m while in your base or roaming then you report the hacker and nothing gets done even if he gets banned he just goes and buys a new account for $2.5-10 depending on the hours to make it look legit hahahahah i love rust anti cheat my god fix this facepunch get something better get a hacking tester that downloads-buys all hacks on the market and test the bypass system because this is fucking ridiculous we put in alot of hours to learn your patterns and you let hackers just come and fuck up our progress and break our community you are losing players supporters since legacy

What reasearch? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but please elaborate with some evidence on this reasearch, otherwise it’s just empty words.

go experience official servers yourself, ray. they are loaded with cheaters.

this game have soooo many cheaters with mouse bloddy

What research? I want links.

bro I have seen admins developing their own script detection software as plugins, why on earth cant eac be better. How is it possible to for these guys to bypass it that easily, did someone at eac make a backdoor in their code and sold that to the hackers or how cuz as it is, it is useless. I dont have research but just yesterday, played against a clan openly admitting to using scripts and showed us while spraying a ak at 280m through a armoured door peak hole. Claims the scripts runs on a VM-machine and therefor undetectable. I dont have knowledge bout this is that true, is it undetectable ? and I told them we are reporting them all, he claimed Facepunch feels a fuck bout reports ?

@Goldking Account price shouldn’t matter, logically cheaters should be banned while trying to turn on the cheat, not after 2 days of aimbotting. Sadly that’s not the case in rust.

I’m glad to see so many of you calling them CHEATERS!!!
(Coz that’s what they are! It irks me when ppl call them the ‘H’ word…Coz that’s what the filthy cheating scum likes, they love it when you call them..h*ckers… It’s like a badge of honor to them!)
Cheaters are morons, who couldn’t code to save their lives.
YES please Facpunch, develop a BETTER ANTI-CHEAT!

Copy and paste from a older post I wrote but still relevant:

Anticheat is a hugely complex issue, and it’s a topic we have to be vague discussing deliberately.

Recently we’ve seen more cheats become active, which happens more often during this time of the year with the growing player base and holiday period. Unfortunately, EAC did fall behind the curve as of late, I have voiced my concerns to them last week and this week. Monday and today the majority of cheats were hit with ban waves and efforts against the others continue.

Over the last 12 months, systems have been put into place to collect and analyze player data to combat aggressive cheat play styles to prevent an impact on the larger server population, and these are often known as the three-day temporary bans. There are many plans to expand on this data collecting to make it more accurate and quicker.

Reports are fed into this system, so I encourage anyone who believes they encounter a cheater to report. Players cannot be temporary banned based on reports alone, and spam reports are filtered out to prevent abuse.

I agree we do need to take more aggressive action against players associating with cheaters - we’re already collecting this data internally and do act upon it daily but needs improvement. We’re going explore ways to automate this process.

Server moderation is a hot topic - When we ban cheaters from Facepunch servers we have to know without a shred of doubt the player is using third party problems, there is no room for mistakes when we’re applying permanent game bans. We do not have the luxury like community servers and only applying server bans.

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for players to contact our support stating they’ve been banned from X server by X admin for cheating when in fact they’re just playing good. We can see our side they’re not cheating and they were having a good day and played above average, this is always disheartening to see.

Without giving moderators access to our tools, systems and EAC moderators in their roles on Facepunch servers would be limited to only spectate, which is extremely inefficient and only catch a tiny proportion of cheaters.

Across Facepunch servers, you’ll rarely see staff member online because we can access, read and act on the player data without ever joining the server. In the time we’ve connected to a single server we could have banned multiple confirmed cheaters based on the data we’ve collected and had access too - this also presents problems in itself that we’re not acting on the larger problem with cheater association/groups which I’ve touched on already above (we need to improve this).

Hiring staff to monitor and act on the data we collect I believe would be a much more practical and efficient use of our resources, hiring just server moderators with the number of servers we operate and to cover 24/7 is not practical to do so efficiently.

IP Banning/HWID Banning - The vast majority of cheaters spoof these vectors of detection. IP’s are generally an unreliable indicator of a user is cheating.

Edit#1:

Here some “fun” stats:

553 121 player reports in the last 30 days
Nearly 20k accounts banned in the last 30 days
Edit#2:

I want to note I’m extremely happy to be working with EAC and grateful for the work they do. They do a difficult job but I look forward to working with them for many years to come.

Honestly as a member of the rust community I couldn’t have asked for a better response honestly thanks @Alistair McFarlane

What people need to remember is that anti cheats need to only ever ban people who are 100% cheating and it can be hard to code that. Rust hasn’t only got a cheater problem but also a accusation problem. Lots of people who get destroyed instantly think without a doubt its cheats but that isn’t enough evidence to ban someone for. Online games in general have a cheater problem it’s not only rust.

Although I would love a report system that can report players you haven’t played on a sever against. Reason being is I have seen cheaters get multiple accounts with the same name and the same friends making it blatently obvious it’s them but there is no way to report this ingame.

@Alistair McFarlane
Please start investing in proper anti cheat / active anti cheating measures. Have admins active etc. Or copy what some modded servers has as it works awesome and isolates hackers. They give every player playing with a hacker a 15 day ban aswell.
Start fixing the hacking issues instead of tossing out useless updates like pipe lining and drones wtf? There is so much more important stuff to get in order first!
Step it up FP! Expecting more from you

And as we are on the topic. Region lock russia, if not for the better of this game, do it in support of ukraine.
Look at the official servers, this game is not played how it is intended. Every official server you join theres russians spamming you to join their discord, they are 70+ on the server teaming. When you join their discord you get offered free cheats as every group has atleast 1 cheater with them which gets banned daily but just joins back in on a new account.

Get a “Playing with Hacker” punishment in place.
Sort the issue with russians.

Get rid of recoil for rust eliminate zen

@Alistair McFarlane

Just make please, that if some player was BAN-ned, then ALL locks on ALL doors he was logged (enter password or has virtual key) will be bloacked for ALL players till wipe. This code lock will be lightning with orange example, all players to know that it blocked permanently. Only blasting door. This can stop help players allie with cheaters for build raid-bases together and etc. It’s very simple, i just point at this.

And then when some from team cheating, or just cheating alone - no one will play with this shit or will play not so comfortable. You even not need ask EAC-team or do something another, cause data about banned players already stored on each servers to prevent re-logon, That can help stop just buying new account “for 2$” (they proudly sayd in chat), re-login in code lock and 2 minuts later start play with cheats again. VERY EASY, you don’t think so?

@Alistair McFarlane

could hours provide and intressting relationship to report systems?

if a player has tons of hours and cheats he loses the ability to join servers that you need X hours for. This would make 100-500-1k-2k-3k hours players join a few explicit servers that maybe even streamers play on.

this would give more integrety to players that stay vs new accounts. Even slower que if you have more hours? just to irritate people from cheating.

also if there was an authenticator you could tie to a real person this would make it horrible problematic for them to reenter the game trying to find a person that would give up their acc to permban.