GamersFirst CTO and COO Bjorn Book-Larsson is continuing his commitment to keeping fans and players of APB: Reloaded apprised of all that is being planned by the new dev team. This week's blog post addresses one of the biggest concerns that players had with the original iteration of the game: Hacking and cheating. This is an informative article and one filled with candor. Check it out!
First the good news; as a mostly server-driven game APB is naturally much more resilient to cheaters than most other F2P MMO's. There is a good reason F2P games usually don't use server driven architectures; they cost a lot more per CCU to operate than P2P communication solutions, so in APB we are going to run a giant experiment to basically determine if hardware costs/specs have progressed far enough to make F2P server-driven games financially viable. Our current calculations seem to support that it will in fact work. By avoiding using P2P to transmit action data, the ability to attack or hack the core APB functions drop significantly. This is true for all types of hack attacks except one key category of cheats; aim-bots. Because aiming relies on visual data that by necessity HAS to exist on the client (after all - if you didn't have this data, you wouldn't be able to shoot anyone, since you wouldn't be able to see them) it makes them the trickiest category to protect against. But even here there are some good news; before APB was shut down most aim-bots were actually actively being detected. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the data was not being acted on for various reasons (analysis was on of the reasons).
Read more here.
