Enhanced cheater reporting
Every time we speak about cheaters and the hassle it is to report them, the same question comes to mind. Why can't we have recorded matches?
For a better report system, having matches recorded would be very helpful. It would also help identifying speed-hackers quite easily (among others).
The file would not need to be written on disk, it could be simply be kept in memory.
The recording would need to keep:
- the realm,
- a timestamp,
- a match id,
- a random number,
- map,
- map generation seed,
- 5 players with their match-local IDs (so they can only be matched against a real profile by BHVR), spawn position and orientation, perks, add-ons, skins, obsession status.
Virtually nothing ...
And then, for each tick (I'll assume it's 60 but it doesn't really matter), either for each player or only for each player having made an update that tick: timestamp followed by up to five [player-number,] position(x,y,z), orientation(x,y,z), state flags(crouching, running, walking, hurt, ...), action id + timestamp of the action.
For each second, that's about 4 + 5 * 37 bytes, times 60 so 11340 bytes per second of game.
A match lasts usually around 15 minutes, so that's 10MB. Even if the match was lasting one hour, it would only be 80MB : nothing, even for a phone.
That's just an example of course but the real thing it shouldn't be radically different.
There is of course the issue of tampering so it would need to be validated. The server recording the match would work but I understand memory could be an issue on the server. But it could be solved by streaming the (canonized) recording through a hash instead (e.g. keeping ids sorted per tick) on the server. That way the server would only need a few kilobytes of memory per match, including the hash, and a recording sent with a report could be validated by matching their hash with the one recorded on the server.
(Note that only a cryptographically secure hash should be used as it would be easy to craft a false report verified by only a checksum.)
With this feature, a cheater report would get that memory image attached (maybe asymmetrically encrypted for BHVR) and could be verified quite easily by the support team.
Given that some cheats could be automatically verified, it would also reduce their workload significantly.
The only way this wouldn't work is if each player gets a different view of the match and/or the server has no clue at all and is but a dumb relay.
Comments
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There should be a watchdog that prevents it in the first place. If someone is moving beyond reasonable speed (accounting for lag) or has zero cooldown or has over 20 perks, a survivor instahealing or changing their own hook state or carry status etc., the game should just automatically detect that and ban the account. There should be no need to report that in the first place
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Indeed, if they can do it server-side.
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ALL information about the person being reported should be pre-filled in, as well as your own - the mere fact that BHVR is too lazy to make this system more convenient for users and more accurate (no typos) is beyond the pale. They already have the information - why makes us leave the client to only have to return for info to paste/type in?
FFS it really isn't that difficult - let people upload or send in additional information after the ticket is generated.
And stop taking superfluous complaints about camping and tunneling as we already know you don't care and thus isn't an offense you should be taking in via complaints to begin with.
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To be fair, camping and tunneling are explicitly listed as not-reportable offense.
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they talked about it on the Q&A stream:
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Replaying the recording would indeed be a big task, but that's not really what's needed here.
As an example, a basic viewer internal tool could be made to represent the content of the record. As for the basic checks (speed, ...), they don't even need to be displayed.
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they could probably do a match recap system, where it displays what happened at this timestamp during the match (like survivor got hit at x minutes x seconds similar to Deceit game) but I dont see them doing it this year, they're most likely prioritising current year stuff like QoL, Archive changes, bug fixes, new chapter perks, killer etc
at best it could happen during year 7
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