[h0v3r]

I hope Helios would hack this game.

They're claiming their game can't be hacked.

Hacks & Cheats - how to beat The War Z !

There's single worst problem that massively multiplayer online game can have - hacking. Game can look like shit, game can be unbalanced, game can be glitchy by itself, game can be not fun. But hacks are that will kill that online game. As soon as hacks start widespreading, players will stop playing game.

So fighting hacks are top priority for every game developer. Simplest approach is to use one of the comercially available "shield" programs - punkbuster, SShield, etc. Biggest problem with it, is that those programs are basically cookie cutter solutions that won't really protect your game. they will make it harder to hack it, but they won't stop cheaters or hackers.

There's only solution that works like 100% of the time and can't be hacked - for a game to process all of the game logic on server. Ie - just make your client to be dumb rendering "terminal". This approach will work for certain type of slower games - like League og Legends for example ( yet still you can create Bots - programs that are basically send keyboard and mouse commands to the game, emulating real person playing game ). it won't work for fast paced COD or CS style shooters, since those games are all about reaction time. And you can't process everything on server because of network lag. So you have to do some calculations on client and this is how hackers and cheaters will attack the game.

We first encountered massive hack attacks on our engine, when Online Warmongers Group released open beta of War Inc on Steam. On day one they've got around 300,000 registered users, so less than in a week after that both amateurish and professional hackers have delivered first versions of hacks and cheat programs. We ( tech guys at Arktos Entertainment - mothership for both studios - Online Warmongers and Hammerpoint ) have already protected base parts like calculating damage, processing what weapons you own and can use, ammo count, etc on server - so you wasn't able to create super gun or access items that you don't own for example.

Yet - speedhacks, teleports, wallhacks, aimbots, instant reloads, things like that started popping up.

We've fixed speedhacks, teleports, and people who basically kill players from other side of the map first. We also have fixed all small hacks like setting spread for guns to zero, negating effects of recoil, etc.

We've added layer of defense by running part of the client in safest low level "ring" of windows, encrypting memory areas - ie making it's extremely hard to create new hacks.

And it worked ! We basically emilinated all major game ruining hacks.

Our next step was to create early detection system - system that will allow us to detect if certain types of hacks are used and to automatically ban players who're using hacks or cheat programs. As of today this detection system is able to detect roughly 99% of all hack attempts and either will ban users automatically and kick them from server, or will notify GMs about hack attempt.

It will even detects system level hacks like wallhacks and aimbots, by analyzing tons of realtime data and matching it to certain patterns. Once those types of cheats are being detected, information is sent to our GMs, who can act upon it.

And it's funny nowdays to see people advertising paid cheat programs for War Inc, and read feedback from people who bought them and either found they never worked as advertized ( ie pure scam for money ) or they being banned as soon as they started using them.

Overall work that been done developing and perfecting this system for War Inc Battlezone ( www.thewarinc.com ) have layed out foundation for Version 2 of our "Shield.net" project that we're going to use for The War Z.

Since The War Z is a much slower paced game, we've been able to move more calculations to server side and for those we still have to do on client side, we have enough time to validate them before accepting information received from client or rejecting it.

Yes we know that there'll be more hacking attempts, there'll be new holes that we'll have to patch, but this is why we have dedicated coding team that sole goal is to fight hacking attempts.

Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z