This post is mainly for the new players or players unfamiliar with the reporting process and/or commands, but I encourage ALL players to follow this. Alternatively, this can be done just by posting suspicious player names on shoutbox or Royals discord but unfortunately staff isn't always available. In that case, a report has to be made with the ign and ideally some SS/recordings to go with it for staff to later get to. Of course I want to spread the message to all players about doing this to help mitigating the amount of hackers out there. Also important to note, cropped screenshots and offscreen recordings aren't valid forms of evidence. Theres a popular bot program going around made with the knowledge given by an ex-gm. So naturally, the hacking methods used tend to go undetected by the current system. These botting characters will also auto-cc, auto-dc, or go into cash shop at intervals when they detect another player entering the map. Some will most likely auto-login as well after dcing when some time passes. Some of these hacking characters will try to be discrete by staying at towns or fms for a set amount of time. Wouldn't hurt to keep an eye out for the suspicious ones and report them. So I recommend that all players use ~mapowner command when entering any training map to capture IGNs, no matter how obscure the map may be. For SS's and recordings, it can also help to do the ~servertime command and /find player to check where the player is to confirm your suspicions. Some cases like Vac hacking will be obvious just using ~mapowner, but other methods like fly hacking, rushing, full map attacking etc. will be harder for normal players to capture evidence, so it helps to cover more bases. Spoiler: Simple Commands To make things easier, you can set the ~mapowner command to a skill macro so that it can be easily triggered. It is important to note that the ~mapowner command has a delay before you can use it again within the same map and channel. I personally don't think its too obtrusive since the command can't necessarily be spammed. Spoiler: Macro Command Heres an extra tip. To expand on what KWJ mentioned on this post, I have shown a way to capture evidence on hackers using limited draw distance to your advantage. Keep in mind, this mainly applies to larger maps. As you can see in the video, a player can't be seen in the same map if they are too far from the other players distance drawn. Hackers will auto-cc/dc if they detect you within that range only. For some hacking activities, you can still capture details this way by staying out of their range and maybe move in quick enough to get them in the act. So this should help for some of the trickier cases. Spoiler: Extra tip for tricky hackers Also, this is for the new players who seem to be confused about the reporting process. The section is greyed out because it is made private, and that may cause confusion. Heres some steps to navigating through it, and the guidelines for writing up a report are already available in that section. After reading the format and evidence capturing posts, just click on Reports and then Post New Thread on this link. https://royals.ms/forum/forums/reports.7/ Spoiler: Report This post may become obsolete once things are improved and auto-ban is enabled, but generally hackers may still find a way. These activities are the main source of RWT fundings and such so its best to try and mitigate it. By no means am I forcing anyone to do this but I'm hoping many of you will and it would really help the server lessen the amount of illegitimate players. Thank you!
From the hackers I've caught, I noticed that they only auto cc/dc when you appear in their minimap or screen. There's still a pretty good chance of catching them cc away if you're recording (FJ/Tele are good for this).
If you guys happen to pass ulu maps and see anything weird, put some doubts because the chances are very high that they are hacking but in a "smart" way (not really). This was recorded today by a friend and you can see how the hackers try to pretend as if they are grinding in a normal way.
Friendly add on about another ulu 1 bot. Interestingly, this is the first time I saw one with very refined behavior. Bot would walk to position itself correctly to teleport up and down, would jump up and climb the rope, and even detected every single equip drop on the ground and would manually loot them! So for other people who watch bots, having very complex behavior that seems like a human player must be controlling it can be botted in very sophisticated ways. ouo
Thought I'd suggested a recording and video editing software I use in case some of you may not yet have one. https://obsproject.com/ - This is a pretty well known recording/streaming software that many of you are probably aware of. However, some of you may not be aware of the Nvidia shadow play like feature built into this known as replay buffer. It functions similarly by constantly recording the last, set X seconds. This feature may really help some of you for more than just finding hackers. https://shotcut.org - This is a free video editting tool that has enough to edit clips for this purpose. You can do more with this as well, but in case some of your recordings have too much fat, this can help you trim them into clips so that its easier to focus on the parts of the recordings that matter. This works on all operating systems, but if you use macOS you'll have more free options for video editing tools. Both are open source and free, and have enough tools to get the job done. Appreciate you all for helping! (Also need more active staff to help please, thanks)
