Facing hacked ships in Challenges

Had been skirmishing back and forth with this fella without peaking at any of his ships. The he posted a Challenge to all today (5191000) and decided to look at one of his ships. This is what I found:

Finally looked through all the retaliations I’ve recieved from zhOul and found that pretty much every ship he’s got has weapons in support slots. Here’s a cruiser:

For the record all of those Sledgehammers in support slots have a 360 degree firing arc. These hulls could be more prevalent too - we have no way of knowing if someone never posts their retaliation or challenges All.

I treat these exploits as an arms race, if he’s gonna do it, I’ve got to do it better so I went through and one shot all of his hacked fleets with this:

I posted a Challenge to All exposing these ships because it really breaks the game having these cheaters out there with no way to spot them most of the time. If everyone knows it’s happening, something may actually get done. I personally will never use exploits in games unless it’s to beat a blatant cheater, but that’s not your average players disposition. And full disclosure - yes I’m already drunk on power with this ship and it has tainted the fun of building a ‘regular’ ship a little bit, but I’m aware of this phenomenon and knew it would happen. Yet I find it so hard to resist beating cheaters…

TLDR: I’ve seen so many games I love poisoned by exploits and I don’t want it to happen to GSB.

its hard to regulate this game because its mod friendly. simply put the vanilla ships use that same file structure as mods. all you have to do is open a text file and change something and that’s it. I imagine it would take way too much effort (and wasted money) to put an anti cheat system into this game where the online challenges give you no bonuses. (at that you don’t even have to play the game to unlock everything, you can just change some text files here too.)

Basically my point is (IMHO) that if anything it is more important to fix the game’s bugs that screw up play than to get anti cheat systems up.

yeah i know it looks like i’m brushing it off, but think for a second, we can use mods on the challenges. that fact makes it a lawless area to fix it would require that entire part of the game to be recoded. and somehow i doubt that it’s a financially sound idea for cliffski to rewrite a main feature in an already published game, nor would it be a popular choice for the community.

furthermore, if we did put all these safeguards in it still wouldn’t matter. as previously stated, all data is client side and un-encrypted. all that anyone has to do is change a few values, make some clever ships that exploit the new values, and his ships would beat everything even though if you loaded up his ships they would probably fall flat on their faces.

this is just something we have to accept and cope with. as a stopgap we could just delete those challenges, but more will come. It’s simply not possible to enforce anything with the way the game is built (AFAIK).

so (because this is more of a mission sharing thing that an actual online system) i say hack away if its fun, make overpowered modules, knock yourself out. you will still always be able to find some of us who welcome unaltered challenges and stay within vanilla.

Well, it seems like all the game would have to do is try to re-create all the challenge’s hulls in a server-side ship designer, and if it can’t, or if there are stat disagreements, it rejects the challenge.

but then we cant do any mods without continued updates forever

Yup, hacked ships cannot be detected or rejected. This is good in a sense, because it means you can play hacked ships with your buddies, and experiment with modding. I think the plusses outweigh the minuses.
This, BTW, is precisely why the ‘enjoyment’ rating is separate on a challenge to difficulty. If its a public challenge that doesn’t declare hacked ships, feel free to rate it as 1/5 for fun as punishment. That’s what its there for :smiley:

I don’t see it as that big of a deal honestly. I fought that selfsame hacked fleet and crushed it handily with a couple different (non-hacked) fleet arrangements. I mean, look at the paper-thin defenses on those vessels. With the razor-edge balancing of power, crew, defenses, offenses, and counters that occur on every single hull, I don’t think you can really make hacked ships that are that much more effective than non-hacked ones.

Now if you could hack MODULES, that would be a different story entirely. But from what I can see, it’s impossible to change the numbers or behaviors of modules without modding the game outright, and modding is likewise impossible to hide.