How many cheaters are there?

Hey OverHash,

Players have complained multiple times about cheaters and the anti-cheat.
Believe it or not, we have had an anti-cheat for the longest time; despite what others say.

Recently the anti-cheat has been updated/tweeked/modified. The side effect of this is that a lot of hack clients are able to bypass the current anti-cheat.
This puts into perspective how effective our previous anti-cheat was. There is active work on the Anti cheat, trying to get it to the best state we can get it.

You may have noticed in the last ~2 months that Minecraft has surged in popularity. This also means hackers have surged in popularity too.

Whilst I can't share statistics or data, I can tell you that our staff ban literally hundreds if not thousands of accounts daily.
The problem we face is that people buy hundreds of alts and use and share them for hacking. IP bans don't always work as people with a dynamic IP range can bypass this.
This issue is not just something we deal with, but every Minecraft server has the same thing to deal with.

You will find that the reason there are so many hackers on MCC, is because MCC is popular.
If MCC had a player count of 20, there would be no hackers, as it wouldn't be popular enough to attract hackers...

 

This isn't something that you should be bragging about... This means the AntiCheat is miserably failing to do what it was made to do; get rid of hackers.

Yeah, that's how it's been for years believe it or not. And even when they introduced a new minigame backend, this STILL wasn't added into it. I mean it doesn't seem like it should be such a big issue, even me personally with my minimal Plugin Development experience can think of a few ways to make this happen. For one, you could give staff a command in lobby to join & ongoing games and have them put in spectator mode. If need be, make the bungeecord send the minigame server a message saying "hey, this staff member is joining, make them a spectator".

Although while a lot of people, including me and you, have jumped on the staff team to tell them that they aren't doing a good job, you still need to give them credit; they're trying as hard as they can. They didn't invent Alts and VPNs, and there's almost nothing that they can do to stop this.

 

Ankh - The number of players we ban is nothing to do with the AntiCheat.
The AntiCheat does not automatically ban. The anticheat stops clients functioning, such as fly hacks, and reduces the ability to use certain hacks. It does not auto ban, nor is it fool-proof. Take a look at any basic hack client on YouTube and you will see they all have options for bypasses of certain revisions of anticheats for almost all popular servers.

Whilst I can't give away any details, believe it or not, things are indeed always being worked on.
Proper working systems take time and effort. There is literally only one server (y'all know which one it is) that has a 'proper' anticheat. And even so, it still gets bypassed; A LOT.

Popular server = players want to hack = clients built specifically to bypass anticheat.

OverHash - As of right now, we have 56 staff members. (Including owners, admins, etc)
We can only grow the staff team as fast as people wish to join the staff team. The staff team, if anything, is very large.
If you want to help. By all means, apply for staff. Help us. Nothing stopping you applying.

 

The entire point of an AntiCheat is to automate the process of dealing with hackers, but yes I am aware that the current anticheat just kicks and notifies staff online. Which is kind of stupid in my opinion, since they can't spectate someone who was just kicked. Even in my time as mod I missed almost half of all hackers because they never came back on when kicked (at least, not on that account). I know that MCCAC is just supposed to stop clients functioning. The problem is that it can't even do THAT right.

I've never seen a client with a bypass for MCCAC, probably because it can be bypassed with pretty much any standard client. Would be a waste of the client developer's time to make a bypass for it.

If you can't give details, then there isn't really a point in even mentioning it... Especially when we've been waiting literal years to see some improvements, with promises they would come.

Is 2 years long enough for you? And yes they get bypassed regularly, but they also update their AntiCheat regularly, unlike this one other server (y'all know which one it is). Last time I tried a hacked client with a bypass for this "other server", the bypass didn't even work, because they update their anticheat. MCC has had plenty of time to make a good AntiCheat, but instead they've just given hackers plenty of time to find ways to bypass it.

Also, because I just feel like throwing it in there, the server doesn't need to be popular to make people want to hack on it. I've played on multiple closed-circle servers where people still hack.

 

Hey OverHash,

On top of what everyone else said, I'd like to say that anti-cheats can cause a huge problem. About 8 months ago (or more) there was a huge problem on the server and especially KitPvP, Potlag. Basically, when you would splash a health potion while fighting, the pot wouldn't even count as it splashed or sometimes it would splash 5 if not 10 seconds after you would splash it and despite whatever, it would take it out of your inventory. This happened close to 50% of the time for me when I was fighting. It was horrible and it was known that it was caused by the anti-cheat.

The true fact is, even if the anti-cheat was programmed to ban all the hackers despite the fact that clients just bypass them, it will also ban players that aren't hacking but are really good (this is the problem with hypixel for example) and this is why screen sharing is amazing. There are so many factors as to why there are so many hackers, it is impossible to ban all of them.

 

Just read somewhere that the network uses bungee which is not true. MCC is running on lilypad which has far less support than bungee. Anyways, just wanted to correct whoever said the network is running on bungee

 

To give you somewhat reliable data from 2015 when minecraft was arguably at it's lowest point popularity wise, let's take a look at my player bans from that year alone. I want to show you that regardless of which year you play on or how good the anti-cheat system is, hackers will find a way to continue their antics.

So this data is definitely biased and one person orientated since I've manually banned these players. To add to that, this data only consists of bans from January 1st to June 1st. This is also on a separate server from McCentral that I cannot mention without breaking rules. That being said, I will say that this is a factions server with a developer team that eats a lot of money to develop a good anti-cheat system. Either way, let's get into the data!

Here's the total bans seperated by hack type:
https://prnt.sc/opkcng

The way I got this data : I scraped all of the videos from the playlist I had them on and then imported it to a csv file. Afterwards, I used python and some data science modules to clean the data so that it only includes ban type and user count. Finally, I graphed them with matplotlib.

Now we can clearly see that Killaura and Freecam were very prominent on this server. This is because it was a factions server as I previously mentioned and then we can see that the lowest two are Fly and Xray respectively because these two are the most easiest to defend against with anti-cheat. In a 6 month period where I wasn't even actively banning people, I managed to find and personally ban 710 people. Admittedly, some where definitely ban evading people which I tried omitting from the data but it was the same either way. Now, why am I showing you this data? Well, the "hacker flood" as people deem is not at all uncommon for large servers. Anti-cheat only obsolves the problem to a degree. There's still dozens of staff members actively running around banning hackers as quickly as they can. It's a little more blatant right now because the bottom two from my data don't have any restrictions placed on them. Once the anti-cheat system is optimized, I'm sure you'll notice a severe decline in the number of hackers.

 

I see that you play on factions, but I'd like to add that those statistics only come from 1 subserver of factions. There is still KitPvP, Prison, Survival, Skyblock, Creative (sounds weird but I sometimes see hackers on there,) Minigames, UHC, wager duels and ArenaPvP. I play KitPvP mostly and I would like to say on an educated guess that 75% of the time they are bhop hackers and if they are not then at least 50% of the time the non-bhop hackers have speed hacks and no slow down, always guaranteed 5+ xrayers on every UHC game, usually 1+ hacker in a skywars game and almost always some xrayers on Survival. Arenapvp, duels, prison and skyblock usually have PvP hackers. And that's only within a couple of minutes (except for the UHC game and duels.)

Now just like I said previously, the anti-cheat won't help a lot. Other innocent players will get banned and the anti-cheat will cause more bugs. As KierenBoal said, clients will easily bypass it. I would also like to say that a lot of those hackers that you got banned were 1) Only by you (I think from what you said) and 2) The same person on an alt and/or IP changer. I am not trying to attack you, just my opinion. There are too many hackers and too many different ways to hack and bypass safety programs and people (staff, anti-cheat.)

 

This isn't necessarily directed towards anyone.
These servers anti-cheat does indeed needs to be improved which is a more noticeable argument, however, as they said people will continue to get more alt accounts and figure out other ways to bypass. Minecraft servers has a huge player base of people who understand coding and how to actually use computers so its no surprise its the biggest game with hackers. Another thing to consider is that perhaps these children have nothing better to do and its summer so people are significantly more free and bored enough to do whatever with their time. I do feel there should be a cheat detection such as there is a blacklisted word detection but i dont know much about that kind of thing. I also dont expect too much from a server because i could never be able to do all of this. Running a server is hard and managing it is no different.

on another note. If your server is in need of more staff then its standards should be lowered. Ive been playing on this server for about 3 months and I used to play on it long ago as well maybe 2 prison seasons ago. Despite this I didnt have a website account but now I must wait about another month and a half to apply for staff. Another this is I need 50 accepted reports. There is no way that i know of to view my reports. Ive also asked other staff and they arent sure either. I would love to help out the server but i cant for a while which is annoying. I dont believe some of the rules for apply for helper are very good, but they are understandable. But the role of helper isnt even one that has too big of an impact so there goes the reasonableness for all the requirements. This is just my opinion tho and i will be nothing more than a player for quite some time anyways so might as well voice whats on my mind :/

 

I mean yeah, it's inevitable that you're going to find hackers that use different hacks to do what they need to do on different subservers. I'm taking factions as an example due to the data but it's honestly applicable to just about any other server out there. You'll find that a lot of the hackers you see one day are gone the next. Ban evading isn't a sustainable option for most people and I can guarantee that after 5, 6 accounts getting banned, you'll stop trying. My point is that the system isn't perfect (and frankly it won't ever be) but it's being optimized and we should take this current spike of hackers with a grain of salt. It'll go away eventually, along with further improvements that come with each update.

As for this, I can understand that you want to help out but the requirements restricting you aren't even that difficult. They're the barest of criteria you need to be fully capable of to be a staff member. You need to be used to sending in reports, since you'll be doing that a lot more often once you're staff. You need to be consistent on the forums to interact with the community and help develop the server. I can go on but all of the requirements stated on the application portion aren't necessary things they're putting in to make it difficult for you but rather a check-off list to make sure that you're ready to even become a staff member. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from!

 

That was more of an example. Although the same thing could still be accomplished with LilyPad.

 

i never meant for all of the requirements just mainly the have a website acct for 45 days since people could have been playing on this server for god knows how long but just never made an account. The time you had an account and the time you've been apart of the server should correlate especially since it doesn't affect anything. And i never said anything about the number of reports its just that you cant see how many you did to know if you qualify

 

There are soooooo many hackers

 

Usually, the alt accounts used are not new accounts, but old ones stolen from other people. It's way too expensive buying an alt every time you wanna hack. It's not the most simple way to just add a system to not allow accounts that are under 24 hours old. On top of that, the hackers will just wait the time required to play on the alt if it was under 24 hours old.

I would also say that the requirements aren't hard to get staff, I once got 15 reports in 1 day and 12 in 1 hour. Another thing is even if the requirements were harder, the point of hiring staff is to have a mature responsible person that knows what to handle and what time and when and not to have a lazy person that got staff for the title. I honestly think the requirements should be higher but that is just my opinion.