Big problem with chinese cheaters

[Seal]

I've been in Scum since day one. I stopped playing for a few months, due to experience with cheaters in official servers.
Upon returning, I was surprised to see that the activity of these cheaters has increased considerably. Official european servers look like chinese servers...
This time I had the opportunity to witness four assaults on my base in one week. I was online each time, so i was able to see what they can do.
Of course these activities were reported and the cheating teams were banned very quickly. Very grateful to the devs for this quick action.

I'd like to list what I've seen so people can take action when building bases.

- BCU lock has no effect. They can just remove it.
- They can respawn in an area very close to the base. They can reappear in a matter of seconds.
- They can build base elements, as if they were the owners. This way they can solve heights.
- They can open three golden locks in about ten seconds.
- Advanced electrical protection is useless
- They can shoot through concrete walls
- They can find your base without having been there before, as if they could see it on the map
- They have full control over their weapons. If you kill one and steal a rifle, it disappears from your hands or chests.

It seems that the night protection on the European servers has worked perfectly. But I wonder why the devs don't allow us to buy more base protection time on the official servers.
The game has some frustrating bugs, typical of a game in development. It seems normal to me and the quick and effective work of the devs improving the game is admirable. But the biggest and most serious problem I see in this game is cheaters.

Personally, I'm immune to discouragement and love this game, but I find it sad when I try to get a friend into the game and they end up abandoning it because of cheaters.

I don't have the slightest interest in playing burying chests, dedicating my time to a battle royale game to earn fame points. i think Scum is not about that. I like building bases. And right now cheaters are ruining this experience.

So, in this post, I humbly ask the devs to solve, once and for all, this big problem by giving effective tools to loyal and fair players.

On the other hand, I ask the community to contribute their ideas to improve the bases against these cheaters. Surely we can all make it more difficult for them.

Thank you very much in advance!

[insettoinfetto]

Very good post with a lot of info I did not know.

As I posted few days ago, cheaters are the main problem in SCUM now.
I can accept bugs but not cheaters.

While war against cheat is hard to win, I think devs should think out of the box.
Not just ban them, but ways to nullify their actions.
Ban is for sure a good way to punish them but this won't solve the other big problem as you said, people leaving the game.
That's the main goal devs should focus, not just punish cheaters but avoid people leaving the game for that.

Few examples.
They raid your base by cheats and exploits and stole your stuff? Track that stuff using item IDs and return them to the owner. BB is restored to a previous state like nothing happened.

Do they kills you? Items are brought back to you and FPs you lost restored.

Do they stole a vehicle using cheats? Vehicle will be at the mechanics inside outpost where you can claim it back.

I know it's hard to implements these features, but maybe devs find other ways to implement this idea, to reduce / nullify cheater's damage.
I think his would be the best way to win the war.

[Des]

SCUM has gone a long way to prevent cheating, the fact that they've integrated EAC is a major improvement. But what more could they possibly do that they haven't already done? It's a cat and mouse game and always will be.

@insettoinfetto, You can't expect them to track item IDs. Who's going to be the one to do that, on each server? It requires manual work, and you're not really solving the problem any more than banning the cheaters will. I don't think the devs' priority should be focusing on mitigating the damage caused by cheating by tweaking the game design itself.

So, in this post, I humbly ask the devs to solve, once and for all, this big problem by giving effective tools to loyal and fair players.

They already have. They gave us EAC and the ability to report cheaters. Realistically, what more can you do? Name any game that has successfully solved its cheating problem, or mitigated them enough to make cheating practically impossible.

The only thing I can think of to prevent cheaters is by playing on custom servers, ones that have fostered a friendly community built on respect and common sense, with rules, and validate players where necessary. This is just a workaround, but it's all we've got I think.

The elephant in the room is, where are all these cheaters located? If they're nearly all located in a very specific region of the world, would it be feasible, and fair, to block that region? I have no answer.

[Des]

This is more a problem with Unreal having a free Dev kit out in the world. It's great for Indie devs but games like this you get all kinds of cheat programs, EAC is useless for most cases and punishes people who don't cheat more often than not.

They can do a lot more then the above, To put it bluntly, The cheaters if using the correct paid for program have Admin access to the game.

Region locking and black listing VPN's would solve most of the issues but they'd lose a good portion of the player base.

As I was told by one such cheater in chat, "We play on US servers because we win more" Take that as you will.

[Des]

Originally posted by Des:

We play on US servers because we win more

Just shows what their priorities. I don't even know what "win" means on SCUM. It's not Call of Duty. Of course, they didn't get the memo on that one.

There are plenty of legitimate use cases for using VPNs, unfortunately they get a bad rap and that's a damn shame.

[PepsiMontana]

Do not play on regular servers! Its like waste of time.

Check for servers here: https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/scum

[insettoinfetto]

Originally posted by Despair:

@insettoinfetto, You can't expect them to track item IDs. Who's going to be the one to do that, on each server? It requires manual work, and you're not really solving the problem any more than banning the cheaters will. I don't think the devs' priority should be focusing on mitigating the damage caused by cheating by tweaking the game design itself.

You can if the item database take into consideration that an item is inside another at a certain time.
Something like "list recursively all items that were inside wardrobe ID 1234567 at time DDMMYY"

Banning cheaters do not avoid people quitting because of them.
And this is the priority, if you want the game to be "healthy", as cheaters won't stop coming, even if you have the best anticheat system around.

Originally posted by Despair:

The only thing I can think of to prevent cheaters is by playing on custom servers, ones that have fostered a friendly community built on respect and common sense, with rules, and validate players where necessary. This is just a workaround, but it's all we've got I think.

So you're saying to devs "stop investing money and time against cheaters in official servers as you can't solve the problem. The only solution is to push players to private servers." ?
Am I wrong?

[insettoinfetto]

Originally posted by Des:

As I was told by one such cheater in chat, "We play on US servers because we win more" Take that as you will.

You mean that admins are less present there or there is much more opportunities based on server population?

[Des]

Originally posted by insettoinfetto:

So you're saying to devs "stop investing money and time against cheaters in official servers as you can't solve the problem. The only solution is to push players to private servers." ?
Am I wrong?

Yes, you are wrong, because you misrepresented what I am saying. I never said they shouldn't invest their time to combat cheating. I said, tracking item IDs is a process that requires manual labor, which would otherwise be spent on banning cheaters. I don't see how adding more work to their plate is going to solve the issue. It's banning cheaters, but with extra steps. Who will enforce this?

[Andi]

They already stated they´re working on a way more aggressive anti cheat of their own. Let´s just hope this aggression won´t end in a witch hunt and result in unjustified bans.

[GamerBeast]

Banning cheaters does sometimes take time but we have some internal processes which help us in the finding and banning of cheaters so its a swift process. Of course we make sure that the bans are justified.

I can also concur with Andi's message, we are looking at more aggressive approaches, but we are threading this carefully to avoid any false positives. Of course we don't want innocent players to be banned.

[Seal]

For the moment, it would be a great advance if the tools that were designed to compensate for the activity of cheaters, such as the BCU lock and the Dial lock, fulfilled their function. I think those tools should be readjusted to be inaccessible to cheaters' tools.

Another option would be to incorporate base protection in official servers, using gold because, from what I have been able to see, this protection is being really effective.

For some reason, cheaters have a hard time using their tools inside the killbox. There the golden locks cannot be opened by cheats. Maybe this is an interesting fact for devs.

Cheaters have difficulty entering bases that require a lot of stairs. This is a good remedy, but once at the top, the player cannot destroy the base of the ladder, making protection difficult for solo players.
If we could have a solution for this, many players might enjoy building protected bases. Maybe a manual elevator that can only be activated with a unique key...

Thank you very much for your work and your posts

[ImYourHuckleberry]

Region lock servers. Americans can play on NA servers, UK can play on EU servers, asia can play on asian servers etc. I don't know why this isn't a thing to begin with. I mean, I don't even want to play on a server outside of my country because the ping would be atrocious... Hardware ban cheaters so they can't create another account and family share the game.

[CrankyOldMan]

Originally posted by I'mYourHuckleberry:

Region lock servers. Americans can play on NA servers, UK can play on EU servers, asia can play on asian servers etc. I don't know why this isn't a thing to begin with. I mean, I don't even want to play on a server outside of my country because the ping would be atrocious... Hardware ban cheaters so they can't create another account and family share the game.

Steam allows you to select your region.

I live in the US but I can select Asia as my region, they can do the same!

I live closer to US Central than I do the US East servers but I still ping well within playable ping limits to German servers! Not even using a vpn!

[insettoinfetto]

Originally posted by Seal:

For some reason, cheaters have a hard time using their tools inside the killbox. There the golden locks cannot be opened by cheats. Maybe this is an interesting fact for devs.

Wow did not know that!
Sound interesting, maybe the KB code is already "consolidated".

[CrankyOldMan]

I have not heard anything about cheaters having a hard time inside killboxes.

From all that I have seen and read I think the cheats somehow incorporate a lot of the admin abilities such as admin remove lock, teleport, spawn item etc.
Knowing where players are also can be from the admin ability.

Admins can open the killbox and all rooms inside the kill box so I do not see why hackers couldn't.

Why would they though? Loot inside the killbox is still very limited whereas a players base is a seat at the buffet!
They just won't waste their time there imo.