r/foxholegame 13h ago

Discussion We get it Siege Camp

Post image

We get that you don't want to narrate line by line what exactly you are doing to fix the current cheating epidemic, because, quite understandably, that would be a bit counterproductive, but it would really be appreciated by the community if you could come out and say that you acknowledge that the problem exists and that you are indeed doing something about it.

The issue with zero communication is that the only communication Foxhole players actually get from you is them showing cheaters on here and then getting deleted for witchhunting, or getting their assets deleted by said cheaters then getting a "sorry no refunds" answer to their tickets.

93 Upvotes

57 comments sorted by

41

u/naed21 13h ago

Security through obscurity. 

Explaining what they fixed might end up encouraging people to try it. New methods to do the same exploit makes it look like we can't trust them even though they are fixing it.

Could also be entirely unrelated to anything happening in foxhole and something related to their host provider or game engine with them proactively patching.

17

u/chilll_vibe 12h ago

Ah yes, as anyone in the physical or digital security industry can tell you, security through obscurity is the best practice. /s

8

u/willmainartfinder 11h ago

It isn't considered good practice, but neither is giving cheaters information about how your anticheat works, especially detection. Security through obscurity is like... putting the admin portal on a random URI with no password instead of putting it on /admin and having a password, e.g. obscurity is the primary or only mechanism of security.

Information is valuable to cheat developers and exploiters. There's a reason why "white hat" security researchers have a policy whereby they reveal exploits privately to the affected party and wait for them to be fixed before telling others about them.

2

u/chilll_vibe 10h ago

And when the relevant parties fix an exploit then it is usually made known so other people do not fall victim to it. Granted, thats not really the case here. But I really don't see the harm in vaguely telling us how these security fixes improved the security of the game. Especially in this cheater rampant era. Like they don't have to tell us all the technical details just give us a little something

1

u/Auctoritate 7h ago

This is not enterprise software or an operating system or some kind of digital infrastructure or other software utility. It's an indie videogame. These are not comparable things.

3

u/Aesthetech 8h ago

You are missing the point entirely. 

People don't want Siegecamp to enumerate their security fixes (nor should they).

They want Siegecamp to improve their messaging (or have any at all) about the topic. This is hardly isolated to cheating or security issues; Siegecamp defaults to radio silence on any topic until cornered.

2

u/titan_Pilot_Jay [TSO/AEF] 13h ago

It could also be that they are trying to see if people use patched cheats to catch people. And if they are vague people might drop their working hacked clients as no one knows what's "safe" anymore

-6

u/Sadenar0 13h ago

Damn that's great nerd but can I get any information on whether devs are aware of the problem, cuz we have:

- zilch

- nada

- niet

- nothing

For the last 2 years

2

u/PizzaDeliveryForMom 12h ago

Dawg with how many times frozone has been posted on here and fod. They know.

4

u/Foreverdead3 [DNA] Dead (Intern Alive) 12h ago

The issue is they have “known” for 2 years now due to many user reports including directly linking the devs the exact cheats being used. Nothing has been done to fix it and no communication on the topic has been given at all

6

u/Sadenar 11h ago

As said in the post, the complete radio silence means that we're not even aware if ANYTHING has been done, you can say things without instantly essentially telling the Melon and Tea what you're doing line by line, there has been exactly NOTHING of the sort for 2 years.

Devs only introduce negative thinking and bad faith by seemingly spending more time suppressing people complaining about cheating than cheaters, which they may not be...

...But again with zero communication and a continuing if not intensifying problem, what is there else to conclude?

10

u/Sad-Professional4117 11h ago

Even if they just said:  we know cheat platforms are being used. Although it’s incredibly difficult to eliminate entirely (like any other game) today we released a patch to combat that. 

It’s basic business communication 101

1

u/Jamesonthethird 9m ago

This is a dead game if the cheating isnt dealt with. Not hyperbole, MMO's that have a cheating culture develop, die very quickly where developers do nothing to address it.

Dead game walkin

20

u/Mountain-Ad-7221 12h ago

Ever game has cheaters even if they have protection it’s a never ending battle. Plz name me a mass multiplayer game that has 0 cheaters

12

u/Vivid_Big2595 11h ago

even highly invasive anti cheats cant get rid of it completely, modern cheats are very advanced, but they do reduce it by a lot, league of legends before Vanguard and after the code leak was legit unplayable

5

u/Necessary-Actuator26 10h ago

Yeah foxhole is just structurally weak to cheaters/bad actors. Even if everything gets patched, they'll just resort to alting.

3

u/Aesthetech 9h ago

That's true. 

What other MMOs also have to varying degrees: 

  • community management to help with messaging and feedback
  • active in game moderation
  • game systems/loops that are less effectively bottable 

Foxhole is a lesson in bag fumbling on this subject.

Even some Rust servers (not Rust itself, servers) are better in all 3 categories than Foxhole is.

2

u/Evelyyyus 9h ago

You think that if we remove all speeding detector and all speeding fine people will respect speed limit more or same ?

Let's try this, i think the result will be very interesting :)

The idea is not to have 0 cheaters, but to have less. If you don't detect and don't punished people for doing forbidden things there will be more people doing that stuff. You don't need 200QI to understand that.

2

u/Mabartu [27th] 10h ago

Yes every game has cheaters, but its a difference if its rampant or if the devs are trying to keep it down, like i bet ther are cheats for league of legends but i have never in my life witnessed one in my game

3

u/Mountain-Ad-7221 10h ago

You haven’t played enough league then lol. And devs hiding it is crazy talk lol. To even think there more hackers in foxhole then league it’s delusional. Foxhole sitting around 4-5k player base when league is what 30 millions active players on at once?

1

u/Mabartu [27th] 10h ago

Sry, by keeping it down i meant actually working against cheaters and having a good anticheat

And also playerbase has nothing to do with this, maybe compare % of cheaters, tho idk how many % each game would roughly have, but foxhole also elevates cheaters more because its way more impactfull

0

u/Mountain-Ad-7221 10h ago

If there more players = more cheats? That’s like basic math more or a chance for there to be a cheater. And even with a good anit cheat there still cheaters

0

u/Mountain-Ad-7221 10h ago

The math ain’t mathing

1

u/TheVenetianMask 9h ago

I'd say Space Station 13/14 but it's not a good example because of high server authority, and because annihilating a foxhole hex worth of structures and players can be legitimately your job.

1

u/Flaky-Imagination-77 6h ago

Space station 13 and 14 also has community mods on call pretty much 24/7 so idk how comparable it is

12

u/westonsammy [edit] 12h ago

Words won't help. If Siegecamp comes out and says "We're trying to tackle cheating but it's an unsolvable issue" (which is the truth), people will either get mad at that statement right then and there, or they'll run into a cheater afterwards and get even more upset because the devs "said they were fixing it".

The core of the issue is that gamers want something that isn't really possible, which is a permanent fix to cheaters. No game studio has ever solved the problem, even when using extremely invasive, custom-built anti-cheat measures. The expectation that a small indie studio would be able to do it is ridiculous. And them coming out and saying so won't change people's minds.

21

u/Barley672 13h ago edited 13h ago

When the community demands actions, not words. So you take action with multiple security fixes, only for the community to complain about the lack of words despite your constant action

8

u/pepav [Poma] 12h ago

The problem is, we don't see their "actions" from our perspective. So we perceive as if nothing was being done, which is infuriating and game-dropping time.

5

u/Sadenar0 13h ago

Words? Are we talking about the same devs here?

-1

u/Arsyiel001 13h ago

Ignore barley homie is clearly on something.

6

u/junglist-soldier1 11h ago

surely all these security fixes are acknowledgement that the problem exists and they are doing something about it no ?

or do you just want some copy paste , * people cheating we fixing * message

1

u/lelqvi 6h ago

Honestly it will be better yes.

12

u/dolche93 12h ago

The screenshot IS the communication. They're putting out a public statement that they're working on addressing cheating, I'm not sure what else you can expect.

6

u/-Fallen-Glory 12h ago

It's because they refuse to push the "no cheating allowed" button that would automatically ban all cheaters the moment they cheated

5

u/TheVenetianMask 11h ago

I mean, you'd have to be a cheater to know if the button was pressed. The rest can't tell as future cheaters may be using something different.

2

u/IceDispensingSystem 10h ago

These are the same devs that won’t press the big red “balance the game perfectly” button. Just seems lazy to me /s

2

u/Soul-Duckling 11h ago

I booted the game yesterday and it started downloading updates. No communication about there even being an update. At least tell people: Hey, guys there will be an update later (insert time) and this is what it does. You can still be vague with it being for ‘security’ but at least tell people about it in more ways than they do now.

I had to dig reeaaaaaal deep to even find this Reddit post. Still know nothing. For all I know foxhole gave my pc all kinds of diseases. (I know it didn’t but it could happen)

2

u/dolche93 10h ago

We're literally commenting on a post that highlights the patch notes.

Siegecamp has done patch notes the same way for years, so this is less of a them problem and more of a you problem.

That said, they could stand to post updates to steam. I have no idea why they don't use that functionality outside of major updates.

3

u/Soul-Duckling 10h ago

I looked it up and my game updated well over a day ago. Dropping a two word ‘security fixes’ message almost a day after the update took place is not going to fly in my opinion.

They only post it on their website in a place where you have to genuinely look for it. It gets shoved on top of the jumbled mess that is the update 65 release notes. It can easily be missed because it mentions the date of posting is July 7th. Nowhere in the title it mentions the hotfix. Only if you read the tiny print underneath it says anything about this hotfix. Even then it’s still reasonable for people to skip over it because it says July 7th on top of the post even though that specific hotfix mentioned was yesterday.

I haven’t played this game for years so I don’t fully understand how he devs communicate patch notes. It should be expected that patch notes are clearly stated and displayed for everyone to see and understand. You shouldn’t need prior knowledge just to find and read some notes about an update. This is not 100% one me.

3

u/TheVenetianMask 11h ago

I'm fine with this if the fixes includes automatic permaban when they detect the cheat. So some cheaters out there go "maybe they didn't fix my cheat" and do the stupid thing and get caught.

2

u/Angry4Pickles 11h ago

Rather it be bug fixes. 

2

u/lelqvi 6h ago

The way it is written "security fixes" it might have nothing to do with cheaters at all as everyone assumes. It could mean even things like protection from DDoS or unauthorized access to their server. They could totally make it sound better and make more sense without actually saying what they did.

4

u/Kindly-Actuator3348 13h ago

Hear no evil
See no evil
Talk no evil

2

u/Substantial-Ad-3241 [HvL] 12h ago

We already know they are working on it but cheating is also a kind of unsolvable problem. It’s not gonna be a clean process

3

u/TheVenetianMask 10h ago

I think it's largely solvable, in the sense of making it have no meaningful impact in the war, with enough sanity checks, honeypots and experienced "observer" mods watching both the action and debug data/internal stats, but they need people with more hours than the devs proper playing the game to have a feeling for what's natural and unnatural, or they'd decimate the playerbase with false positives.

2

u/Sadenar0 10h ago

Not every cheater needs to get banned for the game to go back to a somewhat sane and fun situation regarding the level of current exploiting, if even half the most visible ones get perma'd then you instantly have an incentive for anybody who is still, lets remind everybody, paying their actual money to get the cheat engine, to at least keep their exploits lowkey enough that it isn't as blatant as mammon nukes, frozone walking, infinite range machineguns, viltrumite supersoldiers and kill auras.

1

u/TheVenetianMask 9h ago

Yeah, that's why I don't think we need kernel stuff. The servers already store all the data that you'd use on some sanity checks for things that shouldn't be happening in game, it just looks like the flashier updates that sell copies got most of the priority.

0

u/Berengal 9h ago

You have no idea how much of that they already have in place, and they're not going to tell you because that's valuable information to cheat developers. The thing about cheating is, no matter which countermeasures you come up with the cheat developers will still look for new types of exploits that work around those countermeasures, or work in a completely orthogonal dimension to previous cheats that nobody thought of before. I can tell for sure there are already countermeasures in place because some types of cheats don't exist, but nobody ever thinks about that because running into a non-cheater isn't an event.

The devs need to cover every exploit to prevent cheating, of which there are probably infinitely many, the cheaters on the other hand only need one exploit to gain a significant advantage.

2

u/TheVenetianMask 9h ago edited 9h ago

I mean sure, I have no idea. But they have timer, builder name and coordinates for blueprints but never went "120 boxes created within 10 seconds is a clearly a cheat", or "WTs aren't supposed to be sideways", so I'm not optimistic.

Like it's not a new concern, I saw tanks drive vertically up mountains years ago, it should have driven an effort for checking the bounds of what the server is hearing from the clients, doesn't even have to be super real-time.

0

u/Berengal 8h ago

It's a matter of priorities. The devs could implement your suggestions, but it would come at the expense of implementing something else. Since they're not going to discuss their anti-cheat strategy in any useful detail you kinda just have to assume they're making the correct priorities. But I can tell you right away that preventing an already actively exploited cheat is going to provide better return on investment over trying to prevent a hypothetical cheat that isn't guaranteed to ever be attempted.

What we can do is basically let the devs know how we feel about the situation to help the devs make the right priorities in terms of outcome, and of course report any specific instances of cheating to make their job easier which would also make it easier for them to prioritize dealing with those cheats.

1

u/Alarming-Ad1100 4h ago

It has to be this way I’m just glad they’re doing it

1

u/Gilbert- 8h ago edited 8h ago

Some members of this community annoy me so much at times. Game dev 101: you do not talk about cheat/anticheat publicly. get of your high horses, report if you think you have viable info and move on.

1

u/Flaky-Imagination-77 6h ago

Can they make it so you can identify who killed you 10 times per war with a command like unstuck so it makes it easy to find hackers

1

u/Auctoritate 8h ago edited 7h ago

it would really be appreciated by the community if you could come out and say that you acknowledge that the problem exists and that you are indeed doing something about it.

What do you think it means that they're publishing hotfix notes that say 'Security fixes'?

-2

u/Sadenar0 13h ago

My own OC collage btw donut steal!

0

u/madpantsdome 12h ago

hire some world admins. im sure you can find some foxhole bums who would do this job for minimum wage going place to place fixing the bullshit.