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UT2004 is on archive.org already, fully patched with some modern additions.

I'm very hopeful this will get Epic's blessing too.

What is strange is that they approve of the archive.org download, instead of say, OldUnreal hosting it themselves. The archive.org uploader could update it with malware. It would be nice if they allow OldUnreal to host.


UT2004 shipped with its Linux binaries in the 3rd disc. I remember playing it a ton until migrating to 64bit system.

Wish they GPL that one, too, so we can build a 64bit version of that.


There's a Flatpak package for UT2k4 on Flathub that launches on modern 64 bit systems. You just need to provide game assets and enter CD key.


A quick glance at the headline makes me think this is about electron spins in elemental chromium. I know, naming things is hard, but c'mon people.


One of the solutions listed to discovering this is to investigate /proc/mounts and look for these type of mounts. Couldn't you use the same trick on /proc/mounts itself?


/proc/mounts is a symlink to /proc/self/mounts. And /proc/self is a symlink to /proc/$PID. Those symlinks could be trivially bind-mounted, but you don't have to use them.

Instead, you can do something like "cat /proc/$$/mounts" - that will check the mounts file directly, from location like /proc/14102/mounts. That location is much harder to bind-mount over, as there are many processes and process IDs are hard to predict.

That said, to bind-mount, malware must have a root; and if malware has a root, it can do much better than playing silly tricks with bind-mounting over /proc - it can load a kernel rootkit to hide itself very effectively. That's why all investigation of potentially compromised machines must be done from known-clean OS.


I had the same thought, but I suspect that would break the mount. It might make the entire /proc/mounts directory appear empty but none of the mounts would work.


> Couldn't you use the same trick on /proc/mounts itself?

Unfortunately, yes. 'bind' allows mount to bind over individual files and not just directories. Which is a little bit insane.

In any case, if you are suspicious, 'umount /proc/mounts'. It either returns ok or it returns "umount: /proc/mounts: not mounted."


Nobody got promoted for improving core functionality.


Nobody got promoted for improving core functionality.

It depends on the company.

If you work for a hyper-scale tech company that only cares about money money money, then yeah -- nobody's getting promoted for improving core functionality.

But I've worked at several companies where that sort of thing is not only rewarded, but celebrated. One was a factory. Another was healthcare. Tech is the aberation, but on HN we pretend that it's normal and good.


People get promoted for improving key metrics. Like Revenue or Retention or Installs or whatever. Metrics can be abused and gamed ... but you can do a better job aligning them to improvement than the de-facto metrics of "number buzzwords in a new shiny toy"


I honestly don't care if they spend it on drugs and think addiction is another ill of society like any other. Fear of giving money to an addict is an excuse we give ourselves. I always give them money, but I only do it once for the same person, so that the next person has an opportunity.


In the mid 90's I knew a guy with a few soda machines. I recall him saying he would buy soda from Costco and made about 8-10k/yr from each machine. The machines were about 2k each. I think he had 4 machines for about 40k/yr passive revenue.


How did the soda get from Costco to the machines, how was the cash collected? Might be low effort but don't think you can call it passive revenue.


For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days.

The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders.


> IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days.

https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 was made specifically against people using VPNs.

It was made for Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) where people kept evading IP bans, but it can be used for any other games.

It is not my project, but I know the author, and I could personally fork it and make it suitable for specific (or any) games if there is demand for it.

You may also use heuristics, too, in schachtmeister2:

  whois   -10     "Hosting"
  whois   -10     "hosting"
  whois   -7      "Server"
  whois   -4      "server"
  whois   -10     "VPS"
  whois   -13     "VPN"
  whois   -3      "Private Network"
  whois   +7      "residential"
  whois   +7      "Residential"
  whois   -20     "Dedicated Server"
Edit: I noticed that the git repository returns 502, contacted the maintainer.


> IP bans only go so far with VPNs

Even without this IP bans only go so far as they're both easily swapped (VPN offers, or rent a VPS to forward traffic, or even by design with an ISP handing out dynamic IPs on router reboot) AND overreaching:

- NAT: ban household / campus

- CGNAT: ban whole neighbourhood

- IPv6: ban whole /64 => whole household (because of SLAAC + random privacy addresses)


OK, https://redman.xyz/git/schachtmeister2 now works (cgit), and it can be cloned, too.


FWIW, the original author has no intentions improving it, so a mutual friend kind of took over its development: https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/


Is there still an active tremulous community? I have fond memories of that game.


Unfortunately not anymore, everyone moved to Unvanquished[1] (made by ex-Tremulous players).

You are very welcome on their Discord server, or Der Bunker's[2] (Zittrig) Discord server, too!

We may know each other. :)

[1] https://unvanquished.net/ (https://unvanquished.net/chat/)

[2] https://discord.gg/nubnh8PGnG


Residential VPNs are more common now with cheaters to bypass VPN blocks.


Wait, can you help maintain UT2004? Because I love that game.

I don't play online anymore because I get destroyed but it's still fun to pop in for a quick match against AI when I have 30 minutes to kill.


On a counter-strike 1.6 server I help with moderating, we have the occasional cheater roll by, surprisingly often "ragehacking" with no attempt at subtlety (e.g. making noscope sniper headshots in mid air).

Since the server owner insists on allowing non-steam accounts (pirated copies) to connect we can't rely on SteamID bans, similarly to GUID in Unreal. It's a bit trickier to change the spoofed ID as I assume it's buried deep in the game install somewhere obscure, but still possible. It's actually a very popular game in northern Africa, the former Baltic states and surrounding areas as well as north and west Asia: without these players the server would be a ghost town.

Anyway, our approach is twofold carrot and stick style: Steam players get near instant reloads and immunity to some of the more "enthusiastic" automodding/kick features: so for the price of a handful of VPN keys you can get a legitimate, allowed advantage over most of the server population as well as reserved username and "VIP" tag, plus you now own the game. Seems a great way to do it, as it's available to anyone instantly for that one time fee (which goes direct to the game dev), or for free by playing at least 1 game a week for 5 weeks, then contacting the mod team on social media.

The other side to that (the stick), is that rather than simply kick/ban the player we usually take some time to have fun annoying them, to show them they're really not welcome, and make them actively not want to come back.

Disarming them then giving F tier weapons, a few random teleports out of bounds or stuck in the floor, repeat amx_rocket to turn them into a firework, amx_drug to max out FOV and add "drunk" effect, and ofc a bit of teasing about what a lowskill looser you must be to have fun while AI plays the game for you.

There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting!

It's actually kind of terrifying that exists. For example this set of commands sets network baudrate to 1000 (that'll be fun for the cheater until they notice), changes name, wipes all keybinds, then binds the default chat key to close the game, while setting max FPS low enough to be bothersome without being obvious! There are pre-built macros that do far worse to your settings too: although easily fixable by deleting to restore defaults, would be very frustrating if you hadn't backed up your config files.

amx_exec cheatername "rate 1000" amx_exec cheatername "name iCaNtAiM" amx_exec cheatername "unbind all" amx_exec cheatername "bind y quit" amx_exec cheatername "fps_max 50"

On an intriguing side note: Many servers charge for VIP advantages, to the tune of up to $20/month! At first I thought this pretty shocking, until I found out that there's some kinda shady clique where to be listed in a reasonable spot on 3rd party server browsers, a hefty fee is required, and a significant proportion of this income gets spent on "boosts".

When our server owner stopped paying for "boost" for two months, mean player count dropped from 14/32 to 3/32, and max players from a regular 28/32 on weekends, to 12/32 on a Friday night if lucky. The player count rocketed as soon as the owner started paying again... but the crazy thing is it's $180/month!

Before getting involved with moderating, I thought running a fun, deathmatch, well moderated, low ping, high performance server dedicated to remakes/remixes of the 2nd most popular map in the game would be enough to be popular/busy. But no, apparently you have to pay extortionate fees to incumbent gatekeepers, if you want your server to be visible to the majority of the playerbase!


> There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting!

Yes, we have something similar for UT2004, but only a handful of people are even aware it exists. It's too powerful and too easily abused. I have yet to share it, even with other admins.


Isn't this a huge security vulnerability for the client?


It can be. There have been in-game commands with code execution vulnerabilities that turn into RCE because the game server can make clients run commands.


Yes, it's why I don't share knowledge of it. There are less than 300 people actively playing this game (maybe fewer) so any impact of something like a RCE running wild is relatively small.


Changing steamid is easily doable on most nosteam cs 1.6 copies through a cfg file.

I used to administrate CS 1.6 until a few years ago. I got a question concerning amx_exec. I thought cl_filterstuffcmd basically killed any usage admin slowhacking?

or is it that most nosteam cs 1.6 client have it set to 0 ?


I'm not sure about the pirate copies, but weirdly, my Steam install had it set to 0, and it's quite a fresh install too!

It seems like yes most of the "slowhack" methods have been patched out, but knowing the demographics of the playerbase I wouldn't be suprised if there are some semi-secret 0days.

Honestly I wasn't aware of cl_filterstuffcmd being a thing, though when set to 0 it's still possible to change the settings it protects (motd_write,cl_filterstuffcmd,bind,unbind,unbindall,connect): I expect you could just run a command to create an alias containing one of those, and then run the alias, or include a malicious .cfg in the mod content and exec it remotely.


It seems to me that what is needed is a "provisional" server that grants you access to the "good" server.

So an GUID accumulates reputation after some amount of play in the provisional server. If you get enough reputation by not cheating, the GUID gets whitelisted for the "good" server. You can have multiple tiers, so the really good/fun people get to the third of fourth tier of demonstrated non-cheating.

If they cheat, get banned, they need to climb the tiers with GUIDs again. The cheaters will want to cheat, they won't want to pay the dues. The legit players will happily try to get to the second and third tiers, so you could probably just require 1 hour of not-cheating for the first tier of server, and then maybe 8 hours to get to the third tier.

You could shadowban/honeypot after the first tier, so you shut all cheaters that you detect to their own cheater server where the cheaters can all get shunted to.


Not really feasible though: even now where players don't even need to buy the game, the server owner has to pay hundreds of $ a month for advertising/promoted ranking on serverlists just to get a decent population.

The VIP system somewhat works for this anyway, regulars who hang around long enough to become familiar to admins, as well as everyone playing through steam, get a couple extra seconds grace in anti-camp areas, reload their guns in 250ms instead of 1800ms, and get green chat text and a "VIP" tag.

Plus, some of our regulars have played the game since release and are so good it's suspicious sometimes. Several regularly have cheating accusations leveled at them cause they're so good. The server automatically records a demo every game and gives admins ESP in spectate mode, so it's simple to spot cheaters, and easy to prove innocence in the case of a false ban.


I don't understand why cheaters are such a problem when it comes to bans.

Why ban them? Flag them as cheaters behind the scenes, and let them only join cheater-only servers. They'll stop soon enough.

It's like telling a web scraper that its IP was banned. It's stupid cause you will have nothing to gain from that strategic move. A better way is to flag a web scraper IP behind the scenes, and give them only garbage data, randomly injected/inserted into the pages. That'll teach them not to scrape your website :D

In my opinion the same goes for cheat detection. You will only lose the strategic advantage you have by banning them, because rotating IPs or CD keys or accounts is just a minor inconvenience for them.


This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.


The tactic 4chan uses:

Regular IPs can post freely

VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public.

It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far.


I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where you can't just block a /24 or a /16 because they're in some icky ghetto. Yes, I know there is abuse, but if this is the alternative, it doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of innocent people losing access.

EDIT: Well, I guess the tribe has spoken. Pretty surprising. I think y'all are just assuming you'll always be the ones with the "good" IPs...


We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peers at least since it was opened up to the public.


> until serious illegal activity is committed

What do they do in such cases?

Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all.

If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?


Reputation matters.

On some Japanese BBSes, spammers tend to use non-Japanese IPs or data center IPs. A good chunk of the spam goes away by blocking non-Japan IPs (easy to do with BGP data) and disallowing data center IPs (these often host VPNs, scrapers, etc.) from posting.

Posting from overseas thus costs money or is not possible. The trade-off is 1-100 extra users or significantly reduced spam for little effort. It's not surprising that most website operators choose the latter.

I also know of a file uploader that recently had to block overseas IPs due to such IPs repeatedly uploading illegal content. This is an example of a few bad actors ruining things for everyone.


I understand how you feel but IP blacklisting is really the only tool we have. I'd much rather deal with that than some kind of forced state level verification/ID system where even pseudonymous browsing becomes impossible.

Blocking IP ranges by country or ISP is pretty much always going to have to exist as long as certain countries and ISPs turn a blind eye to abuse.

Even with as poor a solution as IP blocks are, it's the best we have and alternatives seem worse.


About your edit: I think you are overlooking the Realpolitik behind running a public forum. Admins are fighting a constant war against spammers and trolls. It doesn't sound fun to me. Yes, you are right, we now live in the era of "upper class" IPs now. A bit sad, but is there a reasonable alternative?


Ever read Pirate Cinema?

Anyway, it's a tradeoff between dealing with bad actors effectively and not impacting common users. There's a lot more bad actors than common users running into those sorts of IP bans though.


> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies

Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.


Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections.

Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency.

And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.


Assuming obvious cheat, even 100ms or 200ms latency is unbeatable by a human. Especially since the cheat doesn't need time to aim.

Even for non-obvious use-cases, it's hard to beat the advantage provided by knowing the position of players.

On my own hotspot, I have less than 30ms of latency.


I regularly played CSGO in Europe because the North American ranking system were screwed up.

I got to Supreme (2nd highest rank) with 150 ms ping. The people I queued with hit Global.

It's possible to play legitimately with very high ping. The higher ping put us at a disadvantage, but the skill gap between regions made it worth it to arbitrage.


What was screwed up about the NA ranks?


NA is (or at least was when I played) the most populated and visible regional zone, and attracts a lot of players attempting various kinds of rank manipulation. On the one hand you have smurfing, which is the practice of a relatively high skill player using a an account with relatively low rank so that they can dominate lower ranked players. On the other side you have boosting, which is a relatively high skill player ranking up new accounts for later sale.

In practice this means at lower ranks, it was not at all uncommon to be matched with players with similar rank but vastly better skills.


This was my experience too years ago when I played CSGO. The difficulty at higher ranks (up to a certain point) felt significantly easier than the lower ranks. Getting out of the silver and gold ranks (can't remember the exact names) was a hellish grind with lots of matches that ended in one sided stomps with one or two guys on the other team racking up some insane k/d. Past that was smooth sailing for a long long way.


At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help.

It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.


Yep - same story here with Nuke (the old one, but then it happened again on the new one too). Got to global and it was a ghost town save for the same 5 man we ran into every night.


It's not ideal but I lived half a year with unreliable internet and frequently played over a tethered 4G mobile connection (in Europe). Latency was around 40-50ms, which was still lower than the people playing from Eastern Europe who would play in EU West matchmaking. I imagine with 5G it could be even lower.


Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?


Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.


I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.


You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.


Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.


Using a VPN with WireGuard can actually reduce latency if your ISP has poor routing to the game server, as a VPN with better peering or routing paths can improve your connection. It’s not always the case, but with a decent provider, you might see lower ping in certain situations.


> Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN..

Cheaters, which is why they’re getting banned in the first place


When I was in the dormitory (~6-8 years ago), I used VPN (OpenVPN on my private VPS) over UDP port 53 to omit the firewall which was configured to block big parts of ports.


Oh wow that takes me back. I remember complaining to the university that I couldn't download files via FTP. A few months later they answered me explaining file sharing protocols had no legitimate uses at a university. I was working in a research lab and needed to download standardized datasets to validate that the software worked as intended. At the time, only FTP was used.


Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game).

IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.


Lota of competetive players pay for a vpn to protect against DoS attacks.


There's a bunch of services that can moderately reduce latency by using better paths. Specially worth it if you want to play with friends in servers farther than 1000km away.


My VPN is always enabled, including when I game


sorry for the not-so-smart question.

the cheats are software, software has certain quirks, like the way it aims or the way it tracks. And I'm willing to bet it has enough distinctiveness from human aiming to be classified. Couldn't a classifier work on the behavior of the cheating software itself, rather than use IP bans?


It's more effort than it's worth. There are server aimbot scanners which do something like this. There are also aimbots written to thwart this type of detection, adding delays, random drift, etc. It's a cat and mouse game. We don't have a lot of players left so it's not that much of an issue.


Some “aimbots” don't actually assist with the aiming, they just fire the trigger any time the user gets on target.


This is part of what Valve does in CS. It works pretty well but it does have false positives so it requires user intervention for confirmation of bans.


In order to actually catch a cheater mid-match rather than long after the match is already over, you'd need the servers that players are interacting through to have enough CPU grunt-force to do that kind of analysis "faster than realtime" — i.e. for the server's CPU to be able to run the game's physics faster than any client can, so it can run the physics with extra math in the same time it takes the clients to just run the physics.

Which might be something you could guarantee, if the game were locked to wimpy console hardware; or if the game had minimal CPU physics such that it was effectively never running CPU-bottlenecked and there were massive gaps in frame-time where even the client CPUs are sitting idle, that a server running in lockstep could cram that kind of analysis into.

But gaming is a race-to-the-top, hardware-wise. The CPU in a gaming rig might not have as many cores as your average server CPU, but it's almost certainly going to have higher single-core perf.

And part of the reason for that, is that games really do try to use your whole CPU (and GPU), with AAA studios especially being factories for constant innovation in new ways to make even the minimum requirements just to run a game's physics, higher and higher every year.

And if the server can't do "faster than realtime" analysis of the streams of inputs of the players, then by queuing theory, it'll inevitably get infinitely backlogged — the server will keep receiving new analysis work to do every timestep, and will fall further and further behind, never catching up until new work stops being generated — i.e. until the match is over. And then it'll have to probably sit there for five more minutes thinking really hard before spitting out a "hey, wait just a minute..." about any given match.

Which is fine if there's a big central lobby server that the game is forced to connect to, and your goal is to ensure that some central statistic that that central server relies upon (e.g. match-rank ELO) gets calculated correctly, such that cheaters are prevented from climbing the leaderboards / winning their way into high-ranked play. (And that's exactly the situation the big eSports games companies are in.)

But in the context of older games that use arbitrary hosted servers and random-pairing (or manual lobby-based match selection) — or in modern, but "dead", games, that only persist due to being modded to accept private servers — this "after-the-fact" punishment is useless, as most servers have no incentive to do this analysis, especially when cheaters can just hop around between servers. So there's nothing preventing people from being matched with cheaters, sometimes over and over again, if the cheaters can just tell their clients to roll up with a new key+IP for every match.

...and that's assuming there even are servers. You can forget about any of this working in a p2p context. (Think about what a Sybil attack means in the context of a federated set of individual tiny disconnected p2p networks.)


You should be able to limit analysis for this type of detection to only the input leading up to a kill/hit and ignoring everything else. The majority of the time players are not shooting could be used to do the analysis with plenty of time to boot midway in a round let alone a full game.

Also simple analysis of only the input streams as you stated really doesn't have to do with the phys rate of the game server and should be alot cheaper computationally. It can be offloaded to another process even if it was found to be too impactful to run alongside the game server directly. Something all those extra cores might be good for.


Cheats nowadays can and do

a) run on 2nd pc passively capturing the screen and commands to a fake mouse device plugged into both machines,

b) "humanise" the aim with ai models trained on professional players

c) add random variances within the limits of human reaction times

So it doesn't solve things, really it'd still be playing catchup.


And I'm not refuting that. I was just pointing out a solution to a problem the GP proposed as intractable when trying to analyze player input data streams for cheating. The points you made are valid as far as the evolution of this cat and mouse game is progressing (probably still closer to the end end of can then do for now).

That being said, the vast majority of cheats are not that sophisticated. "Simple" analysis of player input should still be used to make low effort cheats less or ineffective. Especially if used to compare consistency of mechanical play by a player. I doubt most cheaters want to just turn on a full bot that plays by itself for the whole game. You can build a model of play customized for an individual player to look for changes in mechanical skill during critical plays. Then even if that was incorporated into the cheat client so that its 'actions' can't be definitevly detected against the players baseline, it would at least be limited to cheating as that player always playing like it's their best day. Either that or the cheater would have to go fully hands off for that account which I imagine is not as appealing for most cheaters.

Input analysis, even much simpleler approaches, can still be a valuable tool to make cheating more difficult and less opportunistic. The goal would be to raise the barrier of entry to cheating without immediately getting banned beyond downloading and running a client. If people who consider cheating in a game have to: order, wait for, and setup additional hardware then aquire models trained for the latest version of the game that are also trained on pro play in a way that lets the cheating be humanly plausible to remain undetected; it will reduce the total number of people who cheat in that title. Will needing to aquire additional hardware stop all cheating? No, I had a friend as a kid that owned a GameShark that I used and ended up corrupting the save on one of my Pokemon games. But if all of that is what is required to be able to successfully and consistently cheat, it will raise both the cost of development of cheats as well as their price to cheaters.

For top level professional play, in person tournaments on managed setups will remain the gold standard for the forseeable future (and besides they are attractive as events for their own sake). And for the rest of us, we will continue to be trapped in the labyrinth with both the cat and the mice.


The CPU being overwhelmed with physics sounds sus to me. CS has a few mechanics more than Q1, but not that many. It's a few collisions and should be possible to check in a tiny fraction of today's CPUs capabilities. Even with some advanced movement physics, it's just a handful of entities - Marbles does hundreds more per frame. Am I completely missing something significant here?


CSGO doesn't do P2P matchmaking and Valve _are_ working on real-time heuristics based cheat detection to kick cheaters mid-match


Not to mention the most sophisticated cheats are now running on second computers


How about just a whitelist? I can't imagine there are a ton of legit ut2k4 players left?


Yes, we have a whitelist ability also, but it is definitely a last resort. The game is mostly dead and difficult to discover for new players. We don't want that roadblock if we can avoid it.


TIL people still play UT2004.

I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...


Ut99 with the matrix mod was where it was at for LAN parties...


I still play Quake 1 and 2 online, randomly pop into Tribes 2, Counter Strike 1.5....usually the community is clicky and toxic to outsiders but sometimes you bump into really neat people.


Is this game online/multiplayer only? I mean, people still play Galaga and PacMan and other older classic games so why would you think someone wouldn't still play this one too?


It is not online only as we would now understand. But it is certainly only multiplayer game. Well you can play against bots, but even then it is multiplayer.


Do you happen to have a link for a good manual on "how does one get into the modern UT2k4 multiplayer"? I.e. must-have modlist, servers, etc.


The unrealtournament subreddit is your best bet.

You can find links to download the game, get a cd key, and configure for the new master servers so you can find servers online. Game tracker still lists this game, so you can check there to find the most popular servers which are still active and have players.


Thanks!


Small number of players works in favor of a whitelist. People shouldn't be playing with randoms, they should be playing with friends.

Game companies invade our privacy and destroy our computer freedom with ineffective malware tier rootkit solutions only to fail to solve the problem in the end. Their business model depends on enabling people to play with any random from anywhere in the world. They are forced to trust untrustworthy clients. The truth is people should not allow their computers to talk to strangers.


>People shouldn't be playing with randoms, they should be playing with trusted friends.

People should be able to play with whomever they wish.


I presume "whomever they wish" means anyone who is not a cheater. In that case they need a whitelist. Because without one, every player is a potential cheater. Non-whitelist solutions don't match what I presume they want. They asked for NotCheater, server returned MaybeCheater.

Without a whitelist, it's only a matter of time before an actual cheater joins their server and ruins their fun.

Enumerating badness just doesn't work.


Suggestion: Anybody can play against bot(s). Whitelist can interact with real players.


> The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders.

No. VPN blocking is useless to stop malicious actors as most residential connections have DHCP and VPN subnets are added and removed somewhat frequently, it's not that hard to find a "undocumented" one. It also completely excluds anyone using a VPN for non-malicous purposes.

Scanning files and folders is just ridiculous, not only an incredible invasion of privacy, but also trivial to work around.


VPN blocking is a cheap mitigation that stops 95% of the problematic traffic without removing a meaningful number of legitimate users.

Yes it doesn't "solve" the problem, and yes it removes some legitimate users, but it's by no means useless. Given the tradeoffs involved I'm not at all surprised it's so common.

If you have a solution that's less invasive (e.g., some businesses can get away with not providing anything expensive till after a payment has cleared the normal fraud window, and many businesses don't have obscene levels of malicious traffic; in those cases you can just let bad traffic run rampant and ignore it till it's a problem) then that's probably better, but blocking VPNs or whole countries or whatever can be the difference between a successful business and bankruptcy.


Excluding someone on VPN from playing UT2004 on a specific server is not an abuse of their human rights


where was the parent mentioning this is a violation of one's human rights exactly?


Privacy is a human right.


Not when you are willingly connecting to a server. The server owner didn't force you to do it.


I'm clarifying the prior two comments, not advocating for anything.


Just curious if IP bans work with IPv6 or if they are fundamentally incompatible?


IP bans are fundementally flawed since you can't assume a static IP in the vast majority of cases anymore, if you rely on an IP blocklist then it's inevitable that you will end up hurting the experience of small amount of unlucky but innocent players. I suppose this might be more of an issue on ipv4 than it could be on ipv6, but really you should always expire IP bans to avoid issues like these, or you want to combine another data point with the IP such as a hardware ID (or a hash of a combination of hardware IDs). Cheaters do know this so even if we could assign everyone a static ipv6 they would likely just disable ipv6 support on their NIC and rely on their ipv4 exit ip.

Edit: If you don't think this is an issue I urge you to Google "pokemon go belgium ip ban" for a fun rabbit hole.


Sort of. Doesn't make sense to ban a single v6, you'd start by banning at the /64 level and move on to banning shorter prefixes from there.

You quickly run into the same kinds of problems you do in v4 though; most users have access to a shared pool of addresses, and you may need to ban the whole pool to ban an abuser, but then you also ban everyone else in that pool, and the abuser is more likely to have ability and motivation to use other pools.

It's better if you have multiple factors... if you don't like the IP, don't ban it, but be stricter on other measures, etc. So a well behaved client from a 'bad ip' can still play, but enough suspicious things and you can't play anymore.


What about banning VPNs?


It was Jobs specifically that was anti-gaming. I'm not sure where Cook stands.


I'm overloaded with notifications. I don't want any more.


Because the EU required them to.


I’ve read that story, it inspired my question. Such a requirement wouldn’t be out of bounds with the regulation


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