Speeding in Spar
 

Recently, there has been an increase on the % of people speeding in spar.
By speeding I don't mean the obvious one's that move super fast. There are a lot of people going slightly faster than the normal speed.

Is there any way to solve this issue? Git Gud?

Make time go slower and realize every possibly sequence and combo that can be done to overcome the speedness

This has become a problem for sure and I'm also seeing an increase in it. I've seen many people doing it including lots of noob accounts and it seems they are being careful about when they toggle it.

I know it's always kind of been a problem but as of lately it seems to definitely have an uptick and the worst I've seen it since I've been back (1 year).

If these noobs wanna speed, they should do it like Meta-Sonic(The obvious ones that literally warp around the arena like crazy). I guess the only solution for this is for the admins to buy some kinda speeding calculator that calculates pixels per seconds lol

Why hack graal? lol. Your much better off hacking mw2 and doing more fun ****

As someone who spars late into the night (early morning for US players about midnight for pinoys) I see a lot of brazillian and pinoy noob accounts speeding blatantly and sometimes toggling mid spar.

Its a huge problem always has been and always will be, there really isn't an easy Fix for it considering most gps won't come near spar rooms unless a player is reported. (more often then not newer players sparring against cheaters don't know you can report others)

Maybe those guys have extremely terrible wifi problems cuz imo, almost all of those sparrers lag and speed like that. Just my guess lol.

@thallen @carly @othernoobs

Just say "lol pinoy" if u lose

I was banned for joining a challenge lobby : (

Would be nice to see some sort of detection put in place

James' was streaming a few weeks back so I downloaded CE and set my speed to 20x the speed limit and ran up and down the side of the spectator area for a couple minutes to see if it would auto-detect and nothing happened when I was going the full length of the room in just a matter of seconds, now just imagine someone who is smart about it and the speed they choose

tbh i respect the honesty. But on the real side more people figuring out there is no true detection right now and how to be safe with it which is why there is a huge uptick. So now people have learned about toggling and not going too far and it's getting out of control

Probably a lil bit irrelevant but I just caught Abood doing some weird crap. I was able to hit him rly easily in spar and halfway, i hit the corner and abood just got hit from nowher lol. That's how he beat me

It's irrelevant in the fact there is no detection and players have found this out so tons of people right now taking advantage of this if they are careful.

But for the call outs right now it's a full witch hunt which proves nothing.

*reads previous threads regarding same*

Dusty said, at one point or other...


"The problem with speed-hacking detection is it's fairly easy to catch false-positives and at least on Classic we tend not to do much banning via automatic processes for this reason. The more obvious the speed the easier it is to detect but as it's been said, it's the subtle hackers that are the problem... and that makes it even harder to reliably detect. Typically detection is done by keeping track of your movement, and if a "step" is farther than naturally allowed flag it. But there is a lot that can throw it off. For example, diagonal movement is much faster than horizontal and vertical movement. Also, what about if you're on a horse, or a draisine? What about if you snap around(for example entering a house, then when it finally updates warping you to the entrance)? Things like low framerates and such can throw it off too. When you have all these variables to account for and you're trying to catch minute differences in speed(.65 tiles/second instead of .6 tiles/second), it can be easy to flag non-offenders."

really great that the guy before posted that as it absolutely solves ****ing nothing.

sounds reminiscent of whining about issues that are already addressed and not fixable.

False positive catches on players who lags out for like a minute than warp **** around the ring. It should at least trigger an alert for GPs.

I'm sure there would be an option of specifically coding areas primarily focused on spar or pk. Battle arena, dojo, pubs with gs, etc.

Limiting the detection to key competitive areas may be a solution.

Imagine if every important thing was handled by the server instead of client.
Would completely ruin the game for anyone with laggy internet though as they would barely be able to walk if it requires the server to receive and respond with data

We should re-enable the FB server and allow players to enter it if they have over 1000 spar wins. And that server primarily focuses on the sparring channels. That will reduce the amount of lag and speeders at same time.

It does

IDK considering I never got banned for it and it clearly wasn't a false positive, either the system doesn't work or whatever GP saw it just didn't care which is just as big of a problem

It's not like the auto-detection has to auto-ban them, it can just record the flags and if somebody gets a lot then someone can look into it


Can't you just have it so if someone is flagged it records the duration of time they had increased movement speed or distance traveled? grab what level the player was in, and then you could tell if someone was moving much faster and they were in a BA level then obviously they aren't using a mount, and if someone is flagged on an outside level isn't there a way to tell if the player is mounted? if they are speeding on a mount they are always going to be faster than the default 6 mount speeds so it's obvious if they are speeding

also, while diagonal PC movement may be faster it definitely isn't fast enough to look like someone is speeding so I don't see how the two could get confused, I'm sure there's ways to check what device someone is on (like how you have a unique hat for whatever device you are on) so the minimum movement speed for a flag could be set a little higher for those on a PC to make up for the diagonal movement

IDK what the possibility/probability of any of those is since I'm not a dev, but they are just a few ideas I had on the top of my head, would be nice to try and discuss ways a working system could be implemented

Even if it might be hard to catch people who toggle and go only a little faster, there are still some people who go way over it and it's completely obvious, could just have flags and then a GP goes and monitors

From what I remember it was a script that would echo something along the lines of "Graalxxxxxx was caught going too fast 1/3. Third time will result in ban." Of course it never actually reached a third time.

Horizontal and Vertical speed is .6 tiles/sec and diagonal is .84 tiles/sec. That's a big difference, especially to a script that can only see numbers. Changing your normal speed from .6 to .84 is a big difference, visually. It's just harder to see because it's diagonal.

Detecting speed hacks in general play(outside of closed environments like sparring) is practically impossible because of the variety of ways a player can move outside of just walking. It would take quite a lot of work to script it to exclude all these methods. Players jumping down cliffs, players being hit and flying back, changing levels, being warped but not changing levels so on and so forth. Not to mention hacks these days tend to exploit framerates instead of changing players position. Graal runs at 20fps(frames per second). Hack it to run at 40fps and suddenly your player is moving twice as fast as everyone else.

The problem aren't obvious speed hackers, it's the not-so-obvious ones. The ones that change their speed only slightly faster and toggle it constantly. Since Classic doesn't implement autobanning a staff has to see the warnings and check it out. If it's toggled or something they may just leave after a while of not seeing anything. Assuming a staff is on to see the warning at the time.

Also gotta remember it's insanely easy to dodge a ban on Graal. It gets tiring banning the same speed hacker 5 times in an hour. I suppose while banning from the game automatically is too much, temporary bans from sparring could work but that's more of FP4's territory.

Yeah this is the trend that seems to be on the uptick.

Also couldn't you technically isolate a more strict speed detection primarily for the spar rooms since none of those other things really apply in the spar room (in spar room you can walk and swing...)

Oh my bad, yeah it definitely didn't seem that big of a difference but I see what the issue is with that now, I guess the best thing is for just people to record speeders and call them out

Is there a flag system in place at all? That just indicates someone may be speeding? I could see the trouble with that though if there is a ton of false flags it would be pretty time consuming for GP's to check them all and by the time they reach the speeder they may not be doing it, it could be limited to the BA but that still leaves out other areas where some people speed (PK, BK)

It's at least good the community knows for the most part who speeds so even if someone does do it and doesn't get banned it's still pretty pointless because they lose all credibility

problem is how to detect speeders...

Decided to spar tonight, was pretty active then this happened:



Been going on for about 30 minutes, still going on and about 10 reports.

It sucks.

Sparring these guys is more fun than most of the laggy rabble that gathers in BA these days

Need a spar moderator. Don't allow them to ban people, but allow their report to be highlighted or something so that its taken into more consideration, perhaps invite them to the admin discord or skype chat. Someone like Thallen or Brett, people who don't display bias (if they do it's minimal) would be suitable.

Someone who has an insight on spar mechanics is going to be able to detect speed hackers straight away, opposed to admins who have a total of 50 wins. Additionally, for example xxx (any sparrer) spends the majority of his/her time in the BA, allowing them to monitor spars more frequently than an admin who has to patrol the entire map.

Nope, wouldn't work. Some people who lag out frequently, particularly Brazilian and Filipino players will freeze, and then rapidly skip across the spar, exceeding speed limits due to their lag. Would be detecting people who aren't even hacking.

Assigning a sparrer as spar moderator to have an unbiased judgement?
Lol ???

Fun fact, some people like that exist. There are people that I like that I think speed

That's the purpose of a moderator. They must toss aside all inner bias to emit a fair judgement. I'm friends with Colin and he still deletes some of my posts because that's his job. He can't let his friendship with me effect his moderation of Graalians.

That's what I'm saying, almost all sparrers are biased or have an attitude lol
It'd be like giving a soccer player the right to hand out yellow/red cards

This is why i dont agree with the removal of the mobile device spar room. If pc's want to speed hack they can do it versus each other.

Speeding on a phone is almost as easy as on pc

Unfortunately a sparrer that is unbiased doesn't exist so this wouldn't work

I can only recommend lord narwhal, best spar moderator with prior experience.

This guy? Him becoming a spar moderator on UN was about as confusing as unixmad hiring NaS as a PWA after he effectively keylogged the entire server

People like Thallen, Brett and Fulgore seem mature enough to not abuse powers and to put bias aside, could work. Better than nothing for sure.

From what I hear, admins just avoid patrolling the battle arena because theres always drama or something ban worthy- don't want to deal with it. Making the need/request for a spar moderator seems reasonable.

Disagree esp after reading that one thread.

Very informative post, thanks for sharing

Disliking someone is one thing, but enough to the point that they would ban them is another. Besides, this could easily be controlled by only allowing "arena mods" to ban players from spawn temporarily. After that, a higher up could double-check to see if there was any sort of mistreatment, or change the temp to a perma-ban.

I think the smartest way, that someone already stated, is to have the account in question be monitored. The system flags them, and then someone can check where and how frequently their speed gets increased.

Aren't there any logs like ?
00:01:01 Player joins the spar queue
00:09:39 Player is flagged for probable action against the code of conduct

When you are determining someone for speeding you have to be 100% unbiased. That's not including if your guild agrees if the person is speeding, determining if someone is speeding carefully is completely opinion based so there is no such thing as being unbiased especially if it's someone already with a bad reputation.

The real only way is to have speed hacking scripts that atleast can back up some flags with the accusations, one persons opinion (or a guilds) can easily be inaccurate especially since players only can see the server side of things (which literally can have so many false positives). There has even been people I thought were speeding that I have admitted I am wrong about accusing them because of how weird iClassic is.

I know speeding is a significant problem right now but with how things are it will just be a witch hunt with no proof to back it up.

Like who? I'm sure they wouldn't mind since you'd be effectively stamping your endorsement on them not being a speed hacker

I am releasing one of the most comprehensive proof videos soon and it's not the person you're thinking.

The problem is which a lot of people don't understand these kind of videos take a lot of time and accuracy to make sure it's done right.

People will still disagree with your video lol.

I don't see how you releasing a video like that shows any less bias than if staff were to have assigned spar moderators. That puts you in control of a lot of things: who to and who not to record, the conditions that you're recording under, etc.

So, what if you tell this person that you're recording them and that they shouldn't speed? What if I were to queue up in a spar against you and set my own speed to 95% and try to make others draw conclusions based off of that recording? The recording of Enmity has been around for years and you get laughed at if you ever accuse that guy of hacking at one point.

There was never even a fix for speeding on PC Graal. All it did was detect a few cheat windows and automatically close Graal if the process or window title was detected. If you ever hacked the speed of the process by more than ~10%, the window would also automatically close. At 10%, speed hacking should already be blatantly obvious to anyone without vision problems. Those measures were basically useless.

Ruxxter scripted pretty good speed detection for UN, but it was prone to false positives (as all will be) and you'd have to manually inspect the log to really know who was speeding. It'd send a triggeraction to the server from the client every second, and if the server sees that it's receiving 1.05 triggers per second, on average, then they're hacking their process speed by 5%. Any type of server or client lag bothers the script, and that's even considering that UN's server was way less laggy than iClassic's.

So regardless of what happens, there would have to have to be manual intervention. The "no one is unbiased enough" approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me when you consider that we already have GPs that have had ties to the community yet still manage to their job properly. I'm pretty sure the only person that gets openly accused of speeding by a large number of people is Carly, and it's for good reason.

To counter the "no one is unbiased enough" issue, when accepting the role as moderator, the admin in charge and the player accepting the role could agree to some contract. If powers are abused the outcome will be a ban.