• Naz@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.

    It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.

    As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.

    I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:

    PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.
    

    They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.

    The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.

    Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.

    • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Whats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.

      • huginn@feddit.it
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        4 months ago

        It’s easy to just handwaive and say “Server side will fix it” but here’s a major issue:

        You have to render people in before they appear. How do you do that without the client knowing where people are?

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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          4 months ago

          but here’s a major issue:

          You’re acting like other games have never successfully ran server-side before. Hell the whole net engine doesn’t need to be server-side at all. But you can run server side checks on shit at the very least. A player being 100 ft in the air is likely a cheater… A player making a shot through impenetrable terrain is likely a cheater. Tarkov is missing these basics. Forget ESPs and other bullshit.

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            4 months ago

            If you should absolutely be checking for repeat issues and basics. Not trying to excuse that shit, just saying server side isn’t a silver bullet.

        • 30p87@feddit.de
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          4 months ago

          By rendering people, as in sending data about an object that should be rendered, in a few pixels before they would be visible. And not at all on distances, without a scope (as they would not be visible). Footsteps etc. could be represented by two noise levels precalculated by the servers very roughly, so you can tell someone is there behind you, but a cheat could not determine where exactly.

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            4 months ago

            You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player’s perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you’d need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear… Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.

            • 30p87@feddit.de
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              4 months ago

              True that, but I imagine such sudden flicking to seemingly random positions to be much more obvious than if the hacker had 10 seconds to see the player, tactically preaiming a corner pretending to hold an angle to then be lucky and hit a shot. Would be harder on games with smaller maps, CS like, as holding angles would be much more common than in open worlds - eg. Tarkov.

              • huginn@feddit.it
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                4 months ago

                My point was that you’re multiplying server costs several times to do that complex rendering and still not solving the problem.

        • ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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          4 months ago

          If the trajectory and speed says either the client or another player will cross a wall soon where the player sees them THEN it could send the data to the client. You need some tolerance for ping up to maybe 200ms but that’s it. Wallhacks could give you at most a flash of a couple specific people.

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            4 months ago

            You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You’d have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.

            • ColonelPanic@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.

            • ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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              4 months ago

              It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can’t just say they’re looking around every corner at once.

              • huginn@feddit.it
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                4 months ago

                But then you’re adding extra latency to all visual calculations.

                Your client needs to know if something is visible within the framerate of their PC.

                You cannot do that fast enough.

                • ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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                  4 months ago

                  Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that’s less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it’s not like modern anticheats don’t steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I’m not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.

                  We’re only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn’t worked, I just don’t put a lot of faith in modern game companies.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          4 months ago

          I don’t know game development but uh do you? What are you rendering when the player can’t see them? I might legitimately just not get what you mean

          • huginn@feddit.it
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            4 months ago

            You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.

            Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.

            Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.

            If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air

            • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.

              But to resource heavy to do that.

              Edit: Thinking about it, you simply have to render the whole map with all players server side and based on that determine which players can see each other and based on that send the information to the clients.

              • huginn@feddit.it
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                4 months ago

                You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.

                That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.

                • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  That’s exactly what i said.

                  Still no reason to put a root kit on the customers PC.

    • ℍ𝕖𝕝𝕚0𝕤@social.ggbox.fr
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      3 months ago

      Cheaters are a big problem in this game. To experience the cool parts of the game without all the bulshit, there is still SPT-AKI for playing solo and also the SIT mod for PvE multiplayer coop.

  • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    If only there was a way for dedicated fans to run their own servers for PVE co-op with friends…

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        No. And considering how they are gatekeeping the feature behind a 250$ purchase, it is very lucrative for them to keep it that way. Unless shit hits the fan and the players decide they won’t pay.

        • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          Apparently there is! There is a mod for SPT called MPT (now renamed to fika). It has a github but the download is only available through their discord. Took me a while to find it. Gonna see if we can get it working tomorrow.

  • bastonia@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Not one of the stupid people whod pay for that. So whats the problem?

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      The previous most expensive option ($150 I think) included all future DLC. Now they added this game mode and charge $250 for it, and the players who payed extra earlier don’t get it included.

      Also, I’d totally return to the game for a while for this mode assuming there aren’t wipes ever. That’s my issue with the game. I don’t like losing all progress every few months. I don’t want to play the game enough at once to reach the end game in that period. I only payed for the standard edition though, and I sure as hell am not paying $250 for this.

      • DarylDutch@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Look into the SPtarkov mod. It is regretfully only single player but you can just relax and sometimes do a mission or 2. It also has mod support to remove the things about the game you find tiresome.

        Every now and again I fire it up and play a map or 2. I have had the same character for over a year now.

      • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Actually the game mode is on a pack selling for 250$

        People who already bought the 150$ price only get a 6 month free trial of the game mode.

        Or they pay an extra 100 to upgrade

      • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.

        It’s all in the article.

          • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            There’s nothing remotely close to this in SC history. Also full access to SC is actually less than the cheapest Tarkov package.

              • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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                4 months ago

                I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.

    • digdilem@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      It’s actually 250 euros for the top tier (267 $us)

      I mean, seriously, what the actual fucking fuck?

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        My brother plays games with in app purchases and he claims to know people who have spent $100K on their profiles. I think building a fire using the cash would be less wasteful

    • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I play hearthstone and spend more than that every 3 months to get a complete set of the expansion (well actually now that I think about it, it’s about $150 every three months or so).

      I play a lot so my value to time ratio is pretty good but yeah…I don’t really buy any other games.

  • HowMany@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Interesting aside - gamers continue to enable these thieves by “leasing” their products. Boycott? No?

  • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Grey Zone Warfare is almost done, why would I give money to tarkov devs, especially now that everyone can plainly see they’ll do shitty shit to their playerbase?