Anti cheating countermeasures [semi Poll]
Hello @NIACHAOSMONKEY @NianticAkshay @NianticAndrew @NianticAustin @NianticBC
As you know a lot of cheating is going on lately. (Spoofing, commspam,)
From that we can derive that the anticheating system is not on the right side of the spectrum of quality.
What we ALL want as Agents is a game which not turns out that it seems that cheating pays. We have a lot of work in reporting (which IMHO is your guys work) which ofcourse us no likey since it is reactive.
so instead of finding new features to keep us quiet when tensions build up between factions i'd suggest that you go fix this and create proactive countermeasures. (please ask us how, we have techies in both factions which you can learn from.)
I am 100% sure that that solution is one Agents would want to pay for.
[If you Agents agree give it a like so it might indicate as some sort of Poll]
Comments
Autoban / auto-restore. Spoofers we see travel enormous distances in short periods of time, fighterjet speeds, and what we see it takes long to ban, and even longer to restore, which makes spoofing lucrative to do.
I have learned from another post that in India large fields were possible due to use of spoofers, Agents that abuse spoofers to create fields should be banned IMHO.
Also, make it more difficult in terms of what level you need to be to take down strategic portals of RES/ENL.
There are so many options you can think of to do this more efficient and quicker.
Build something that guards the lanes when a spoofer has come by, so you can not link through a spoofed lane.
And in order to **** those sites that sell items and accounts, sell all these items in the Ingress Store. Their money maker will go, and it will not be lucrative anymore to host such a site. I know a lot of agents oppose to this, but by having a paid service, and items you can buy, the eco-system of ingress can be paid for by money from ourselves, instead, this money now ends up in the pockets of cheaters and spoofers.
Think about it.
Why not restore portal and links to what it was before it got spoofed? you should see what was changed by an account right?
If you then need to delete legit links it wont be a big issue due to they where never possible if spoofer didnt visit portal so why should a link by legit player not be erased if it was not possible in the first place?
And if those links are sacred to keep you can still keep them if needed although it might give some crosslinks if someone linked before restores but there are also multiple cases that crosslinks are made for fieldart so having them after restore should not be a big issue.
Nothing will change - because neither niantic or the community is really interested in any effective anti-cheat measures.
The references above to spoofing only represent the tip of the pyramid. And anybody who knows anything about incident triangles knows that you do not start with mitigating against the tip and the worst outcome. You start at the bottom of the triangle to achieve an overall reduction. But neither side - community or niantic - have ever really been interested in addressing the 'near misses'; the 'minor incidents'. The focus has always been on the top ... worst outcome ... spoofing. With that approach you will never win a flower pot.
Examples:
How many blatant multi-accounters are reported without any consequences?
How many fake portal submissions were made during ingress times? And nowadays allowed by nia to be even made easier by just using a PoGo account so that fake submissions with stock pictures are no longer even submitted by ingress accounts but by 'unknown'. Because we all know that single pokestops in very strategic isolated locations is really what PoGo players go for, correct? (irony)
How many 'amended' portal pictures have been submitted which add nothing to the history or representation of the POI, but are only submitted to troll players?
How many fabricated location edits have been submitted with the intent not to improve the actual accessibility but only to troll or move a legit out with a reach of another player?
How many technology methods have been exploited to gain an advantage over the opposition? Location locking when playing 'flygress'; connectivity tampering to stack xmp; recharge bots; farm bots ... you name it?
At least with spoofing there is now a good chance that accounts get banned within 3 days and portals, links and fields are re-instated within 5 days. But the automatic detection is still shockingly bad. The recent spoof field by one account in the Northsea was a prime example. Any player with even the most basic understanding knew that it was a spoof after the first portal went down. And yet 90min later account showed up 550km away for portal No2 and another 90min later at another 540km distance for portal No3. Almost as if the spoofer wanted to test if the algorithm would trigger when flying at 350 km/h between 3 remote islands all a long distance away from any commercial or private air ****. You would think that a clever algorithm would pick that up, but no.
However as said above - spoofing is the tip. To address the issue you have to start at the bottom. Any player who has ever done any of the above cannot really complain about spoofing. Because those players are all part of the wider problem.
And niantic cannot really complain because over years hardly any of the issues above has been addressed in a satisfactory manner. How many players have reported any of the above, likely multiple times just to be fobbed off with a standard automated reply that "we will be looking into things and thanks for your report"? How many? Millions? Tens of millions?
The idea of ingress is brilliant; the game concept is fantastic. But the protection of fair play by nia and the implementation of fair play by many 'members' of the community over years has been shockingly bad. So it should come to no surprise that even in year 7 or 8 this is not even close to be fixed.
But there is a relatively simple way as a first attempt to try to fix the wider issue.
Step 1 - Mirror ingress and create two separate server instances
Step 2 - Instance 1 remains free to play. But you reduce the link distance for P3 to P8 increasingly to only about 10% of the current one. So a P1 portal and P2 portal remains unchanged; P3 is maybe 80% of link distance and with a P8 portal you end up with ~65km. Maybe introduce some bonus multiplier for agents lv9 to 16. So you remove the ease for cheap lv8 accounts to link and create any larger spoof fields, but you do not affect low level players in remote areas too much. You could also tamper with removing vrla and sbul from this instance. Still allows local game play and local multilayer fielding; exploring; destroying etc. But it removes the strategic benefit for spoofing down or creating long, remote-remote spoof links or fields.
Step 3 - Instance 2 is fully pay to play. Each account requires full registration with credit card and bank details like any subscription to any other online game. Each account costs e.g. 100 USD to register and 200 USD per year subscription. Make it expensive. All rules stay the same. For the hardcore players who spend thousand of USD per year on travel, flight and other costs to explore and play with the remotest of remote portals - this money is small change. For any spoofers or item sellers - loosing an account will be a noticeable financial loss. And for the casual player - they can stick free to play and play in their local park without any change or without constant perma-fields well outside their area of influence to **** their game play or enjoyment. And nia gets an income from every accounts that is lost due to breaking ToS.
Will any of this happen ... off course not. Instead the same discussions will still be had in years to come. There may be a bit dabbling here and a bit outcry there, but nothing major is likely to change. Which is a shame. Because the concept of ingress remains brilliant and one which I immensely enjoy even after years of game play. Here is hoping for the future.
I agree that pay-to-play would fix a lot of issues. However, there are many dedicated players from countries where this is just too much money for them to be able to afford it.
I still think machine learning is the way to go.
Feed in player data, (movements, deploys, hacking, everything).
Then start flagging bad actors and good actors. Don't tell anyone this is happening.
The algorithm can then start to predict, with amazing accuracy what is a good player and what is bad. The more feedback you give it, the better it will get.
Yes, there will be false positives, but these can be handled and/or trial the system before it goes live to see the impact. I think the majority of players, even impacted one's would be willing to have flagged accounts and request support in return for a major cheat fix.
Oh, and suspend any account that has not appeared on COMM for six months. Require manual re-activation.
@SSSputnik I can say with absolute certainty that this has been proposed to Niantic before.
The problem is that it's a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse. When Niantic figures out the signatures of current spoofers the spoofers get smarter and evade the detection. I'm actually reasonably confident that Niantic has already built something like this. I'm guessing that they haven't invested as much in maintaining and updating it as it requires.
I did fraud detection in a previous job, so I know a bit about the cat-and-mouse game.
Please no machine learning. There's so many ways to play Ingress.
The only thing I can compare or see with throwing off spoofers is something randomly done to the scanner while using it. Maybe randomly rotate the scanner view (this would be a small camera change, like when you accidently fumble your phone) - the same random event can also be on the field of range.
I say random as maybe at most once an hour - something that you wouldn't really encounter unless you're playing Prime for a few hours. I know RuneScape (haha yeah I know) does random encounters against botting - it's not 100% foolproof but it detects the script kiddies.
@MoogModular What is your argument against machine learning for this? It's the approach that I would take for detecting patterns of cheating.
Have we got any evidence that machine learning has worked in any of niantic’s products? Any?
Remember all the hype that Prime will be so much better for detecting spoofers than redacted? That was 2019. What happened?
Machine learning will only be as good the manhours invested into programming and constantly maintaining and improving algorithms. I am not in IT. But I can spot that it only took a few month and all the problems from Redacted are back at Prime. So has not really worked has it?
And in any case the machine learning route will put the costs onto niantic for a free game. The sellers and spoofers still have NOTHING to loose. You will not achieve the goal with that.
Full pay the play is the only sustainable solution. It may be tough for players who could not afford the pay to play instance I mentioned above. But that is the same as for any other online subscription to any service coming from US, EU, NZ, AUS etc. Those players could still enjoy the free to play instance.
And if any hard core players really want to then they can crowd fund the registration and annual subscription for their not so well of buddies. Binds the community even closer together.
@ThreeCheeseTall We the players will never have evidence of that because Niantic does not give us details of their mechanisms for detecting spoofers. Having said that, I have absolutely seen evidence of Niatnic's anti-spoof mechanisms working. One of the last big fields I threw got partially taken down by a spoofer and the account was auto-banned in the middle of taking down the spine.
I think pay-to-play would **** the game.
@Hosette why would it be bad for the game? I know that almost all players think that. But what are the logical reasons and explanations why it would? And what are the workable alternatives?
Pay to play works for almost all other online games and services, correct?
And the recent questionnaire was effectively a poll on pay to play unless I misremember.
And I made it clear that I do not want to get rid of free to play. For 98% of my game free to play would be fine. But if you want to take the strategic advantage out of spoofing/selling/location locking etc - you need to reverse the table and burden the costs onto those loosing throw-away accounts. Not on nia to carry the costs for maintaining the high strategic integrity of the game which is only really used by very few players.
Virtually all suggestions to stop spoofing, bots and multi accounting are futile.
You only have to look at how bad cheating is in pgo to see how much of a problem it really is.
Approximately 50% of all pogo players cheat in some way, and brag about it.
Even in HPWU, spoofing and multi accounting is common. But fortunately the game design means that it doesn't affect gameplay for most.
If anyone can find a way to stop spoofing and bots. Then please write up a white paper for peer review in a notable journal, and forward it to Niantic.
All white papers I've read on the subject have been proven that it doesn't stop spoofing and bots.
Stop the quantum capsules and stop the ability to drop things. I would agree to key drops only. Everything else should stop. It's destroyed the game. Sure spoofing is bad but the backpacks full of breeding gear is ridiculous. And give us some way of reporting people that play with multiple accounts. Right now you cannot get banned for it. You can play with two phones and two accounts with no ban. You can't take pictures of players with two phones. So there's no way to prove it. Multi accounting has been normalized. But I doubt anything will ever change. The game is dying and it's sad to see it go. I've always said I wouldn't be the last player still playing and it's getting closer to that every day. Address the cheating before the player base totally disappears.
@ThreeCheeseTall It would turn Ingress into a game of haves and have-nots. It would basically turn it into a pay-to-spoof system, where for $100 I could spin up an account and do anything I wanted to until it got banned. Lather-rinse-repeat. It would mean that when I'm planning a large op I have to pay careful attention to who has a paid account and who has a free one.
As for machine learning/technical solutions, remember that doing this well is an investment not just in Ingress but in all of Niantic's games. You only have to build the core spoof-detection system once, as most of them would have a lot of commonalities. Once you've done that you can tailor the core system to an individual game with a relatively small amount of work. I would be surprised if this wasn't already the current state of affairs.
@VenomousToad I would agree that backpack accounts are seen or expected relative frequently. And reporting them has proven utterly useless.
But I am not sure how punishing normal players who help each other out with gear drop is going to help that situation?
The answer to people stealing bicycles is not to tell people they can only walk by foot from now on. It is either more expensive bike-locks or improved reporting and action by the police.
@Hosette I have to disagree almost entirely I have to admit.
1) ingress has always been a game of ‘have’ and ‘have not’. Travelling, large ops, pita portals, flygress, anomalies etc ... all costs money. Phone data costs money. The more disposable income a player has the easier it is to work on e.g explorer badges or buy vr load out cards on anomalies or have sufficient data to play all day and technical gear for pita portals. Has always been the case.
2) you say pay-to-spoof as if that would be worse solution than currently spoof-for-free setup? Which makes little sense to me. Sure if people want to register and subscribe an account for 300 USD to spoof once in the pay-to-play instance - technically nothing will stop them. But it is 300 USD (for example) for one spoof directly into the coffers of nia. To pay for - as example - an anti GPS spoof algorithm expert. I would think that is better than current situation in which throw away accounts are just that. Free throw away accounts.
3) large scale ops with hundreds / thousand km link length would only be possible in the pay to play instance. For the free to play instance you may end up with 100km link length max for example. Plenty for majority of play. Plenty for local ops for local community.
4) your argument about machine learning was pretty much the reason for prime was it not? One platform for Prime, Pogo and HPWU. One platform for improved spoof detection and better anti-cheat measures. That is what we got told why prime was coming. Has that worked well? Do we see less spoof and fewer seller bots now? Not in my admittedly subjective opinion. in theory it sounds correct what you are saying. But in reality it has not delivered what was promised. So there has to be parts missing from your explanation. And I suspect it is economics. It is tricky to pay for creation, installation and continuous maintenance of effective anti-cheat measures in a free game. You may be able to pay for a few algorithm experts based on in-store sales, but it does not appear that a handful of guys are sufficient to cope with the ever developing wave and technology of thousands if cheaters who have nothing to loose. Account creation is for free. Levelling an account is dead easy or done by bot. The benefit is sitting with the cheats. The cost is sitting with nia. Unless you fundamentally change that - nothing will change
@ThreeCheeseTall I believe it's the case that Niantic has not moved to the new back-end platform after all. I would have to work to dig out a citation, but I'm pretty sure it was posted in these forums by a Niantic dev. It also seems pretty obvious that Niantic has scaled back their investment in Ingress, which is probably why we are seeing an uptick in spam and spoofing.
And yes, over the years I saw Niantic significantly improve Ingress's anti-spoof and anti-spam technology. That it has regressed seems to me to be evidence of Niantic not investing in maintenance.
In any case, I think splitting Ingress into two games, one for rich people and one for poor people, would be an extremely bad idea. It would fragment communities so that people couldn't play together anymore.
this game needs proper support, spammer and cheaters etc needs to be taken care of quickly so they dont cause nightmares for the rest of us. and lots of performance issues etc with client the last months or more.. big question is when will the server migration to new backened servers be complete,, we are still waiting ?? also it feels boring with no events.. so long since we last had event that gave us a medal :( they should talk more open what we can expect in future not be this quiet....
Ingress Prime hasn't yet been upgraded on the server side. It seems unlikely this side of 2020 to see Ingress server migrated to the RWP.
Detection systems in place are shared between the various games. How? No idea.
It doesn't matter if Ingress is on the RWP server or classic server
It does matter when Niantic wants RWP as the future of their platform. I would have assumed Prime was going to be added to RWP for unity among their other games - especially now with the Niantic social profile.
well, whole gamedesign is forcing players to cheat. when you play in rural areaourside of covid19 situation you will never get L6 portals. since only R8 you see are ones that you get from leveling up.
if you disable item dropping, all people with backpack accounts will dissapear. not only ones with 2nd account operated by themself, but 2nd account that is L3, and its wifes/brothers/some random dude that just holds items. game design of this game is so outdated, that blocking workarounds people found about it will simply **** majority of remaining playerbase. and dont expect new players coming, they have no reason (if you think people want to play inventory management AR game, think again). if you wantr players playing, l8 items needs to be obtainable, and most of game experience should not be about item farming.
What makes you think they are using machine learning? There is not a huge cost involved.
With machine learning, you generally do not know how the algorithm decides what is good/bad player. It can pick up stuff that a human cannot. You just give it reams of data, tell it good/bad and let the algorithm sort it out.
I'd be willing to put up with a few temp bans a year as long as they were reversed quickly for a end to most spoofing and multis.
Tend to agree it's been normalized especially when that grandpa with all the phones on his bike rides around with a big grin on his cute old face. Pokemonners do indeed not seem to care. There are a number of 'raids' happening at my local park, I drive past and most of them have at least two phones running. Those hopping from Poke to Ingress generally need a good talking to as to why multiaccounting in Ingress is a lot worse than in Pokemon. A lot then still do it anyway.
Sorry, but backpacks would still be used to level up couch portals, this doesn't really solve it.
I'm not hoping anymore for the game to improve but to see how Niantic finally decides to let it go. And then some of us come up with a clean version. Communities and structures are already there, Niantic has nothing to do on that, and sure communities would put a real effort in preventing these things.
Farming should have always been based on player level. Not portal level. So many players have so many backpacks that unless you stop item dropping then that will never go away. And a solo player can create a level 8 portal by themselves with multiple accounts and there's nothing to stop them. I have zero faith that anything will ever be done. But yes I'm still waiting to see how they end up shutting it down. There's hardly any players left and there's no events anymore so what's the point? It use to be fun.
Would also want keeping detailed logs of intel requests. Spoofers need to have intel open to be able to do anything.
Would also like a level lock on intel to prevent the use of intel by any account below L6.
Would also suggest flagging 'teleporters'. The IDs that don't walk even a 500 meter distance but teleport instead.
Flight times should also be calculated differently. actual flight time + 2 hours is how a legit person flies. Curious about why Niantic doesn't use publicly available flight data. Several flight trackers give details on commercial flights.
Do you really think that the pay to play instance in your proposal would be able to maintain the critical mass of players needed to make the game worth playing?
+ 2 hours to flight time ? omg. did you ever flight to any ingress event ? people hack portal in flight hall and hack portal after arrival. 2 hours additional cooldown would cause a very huge dissapointment in travel experience with ingress.
what would prevent intel L6 lock ? L8 accounts on ebay goes for 25/30$. this would just open markeplace for L6 accounts that would be even cheaper. and would not solve anything. it would just create accounts wintrading on FS for intel access.
Do the NIA guys even react on support forums? Or is it us just discussing?
discuss the bans ? they will give a statement in a few days it said on their TG channel...