[2020] Hacking has gotten worse. I want to fix it.

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.

The distance of the projectile as seen in the combatlog can be manipulated via the client and thus unreliable data compared to the data seen by the server. Unreliable data cannot be trusted to a high degree but can be used to build up a larger dataset which takes time.

No problem - it's not always an easy subject to address.

would the Rust+ verification idea work?

Possibly - it's something we'd need to discuss internally and weigh up the pros and cons.

Third-party applications to combat recoil are regularly detected, EAC bans hundreds of users weekly - this is not an area we're ignoring.

In November we saw over one million unique accounts.