Make the launcher warn against running Cheat Engine again

[auxy]

1 hour ago, Vaeldious said:

Except a hat is pretty harmless.

So is an unrelated application running on your PC. Are you suggesting people should be thrown out for wearing hats because they COULD have a gun under their hat? Because that's what is happening here.

[EnjaN]

This is a request I can get behind. While I don't use CE I run into stuff like this when having AHK(Autohotkey) running. Having blanket bans or getting kicked from the game just because something is running and not even hooking/touching the game is beyond lazy. Yes, my script that gives me a hotkey to swap between my audio sources is totally cheating in this game. Or the script I use to add back in a maximize/restore toggle that Logitech mouse software removed for some dumbass reason. A simple warning would be nice.

[dogbus]

You guys with absolutely amusing. Personally, I know the risks for having ArtMoney installed on my PC (since its not a hacktool because it doesn't have "cheat" in the name as the logic of this thread suggests). That doesn't stop me from checking to make sure it's not running every time I launch Warframe. Same with AutoHotKey. It's not on the company to make sure I'm playing by the rules that I agreed to, it's solely on me.

And all these "unfair permanent bans"? Yeah, I'm sure the playerbase is suffering really badly without all 4 of you "wrongfully" banned players.

If you're intelligent enough to use tools like memory editors, then you should have enough common sense to ensure they aren't running when playing games that have zero tolerance towards them.

[sam686]

2 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

And all these "unfair permanent bans"? Yeah, I'm sure the playerbase is suffering really badly without all 4 of you "wrongfully" banned players.

https://www.google.com/search?q=warframe+banned+cheat+software "About 1,350,000 results", I wonder how many was wrongfully banned?

[Hobie-wan]

50 minutes ago, sam686 said:

https://www.google.com/search?q=warframe+banned+cheat+software "About 1,350,000 results", I wonder how many was wrongfully banned?

That won't be 1.35 million people banned from Warframe though. Some will be multiple posts in a thread or some people talking about it on a forum, and reddit, and wherever else while they vent frustration. Heck the 9th result is "Fortnite pro faces lifetime ban for using aimbots in video | Ars ..." on Arstechnica, so not directly Warframe. Number 10 is about being banned from Dirty Bomb. A lot of page 2 of results is places advertising cheats for Warframe. A lot of results will be hits that don't include Warframe at all, just the other terms.

So yeah, that's a disingenuous post trying to imply millions of people wrongly banned from Warframe for having cheat software running. Is it more than 4? Probably. Way more will have been banned that were cheating. But your post is trying to muddle with unfiltered hyperbole.

[Pernix]

7 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

Or even simpler, don't be a cheater.

I constantly have Cheat Engine running for emulators and FoV fixes when I play older games.

Can you see how easy it is for someone who uses the software a lot to forget to close it before launching Warframe? Especially since people are already used to the WF launcher previously refusing to start if Cheat Engine was open.

[dogbus]

5 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

If you're intelligent enough to use tools like memory editors, then you should have enough common sense to ensure they aren't running when playing games that have zero tolerance towards them.

 

[Cloverdew]

Yeah, the head of our clan (level 26) was banned for forgetting to close this program, which he used to modify some kind of indie game. This is stupid.

[Hobie-wan]

1 hour ago, Vaeldious said:

 

I agree with don't cheat and pay attention to what you're doing, but if they're using it for something else, mistakes can happen. Sometimes mistakes even happen twice.

I guess you're perfect and never make any mistake ever?

[Pernix]

3 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

If you're intelligent enough to use tools like memory editors, then you should have enough common sense to ensure they aren't running when playing games that have zero tolerance towards them.

The problem is what was once familiar no longer is. The launcher previously didn't start if CE was open and now it does anyway. You can't fault people for forgetting, especially when there used to be systems in place to remind them.

No one's infallible. Why make this a hill to die on?

[dogbus]

11 minutes ago, Pernix said:

The launcher previously didn't start if CE was open and now it does anyway

I guess this all started last week when they released U26, right?

 

2 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

I guess you're perfect and never make any mistake ever?

Of course, isn't it obvious?

[Miyabi-sama]

Having a friendly pop-up reminder of the game suspecting you in hacking is very helpful to make your hacks unsuspucious.

Mind your PC.

[Test-995]

15 minutes ago, Miyabi-sama said:

Having a friendly pop-up reminder of the game suspecting you in hacking is very helpful to make your hacks unsuspucious.

Mind your PC.

Not really, the game only need to check if CE running or not, there is no need to detect actual hacking.

[Iily]

Just got banned because I left it open while opening the launcher, then closed it.

Uninstalled Warframe cause what I do in my other games is none of your business, and if I've played all 1.5k of my hours lawfully, hit MR 27, whelp that's on Warframe for turning away a good paying customer.

Steam sales gonna be good this year :)

Edited November 12, 2019 by General-Tennobi

[lesstalkmorerokk]

14 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

Sure, and I'll be glad to give this $100 bill to this nice homeless man that promises not to spend it on booze.

That is not even remotely a fair comparison.

Actual cheaters aren't going to be stopped by this. They will just rename Cheat Engine, evade this particular autoban and call it a day. This "countermeasure" only serves to give a false sense of security while also autobanning innocent people in the process.

Warframe should never autoban you simply for having another idle process running in the background. It should only ban you for attaching CE to Warframe.

But since apparently that's too much to ask for, OP is instead asking for the launcher to warn you when you have cheat engine open in the background. You know, like it used to.

It's my PC, and if I want to use Cheat Engine for whatever reason (whether it be cheating in Fallout or fixing the game speed in Saints Row 2) then I will do so.

But go ahead and lick those boots harder, fanboys. There is no excuse for banning people based on the running programs in the background. As long as they don't tamper with the game they shouldn't be banned.

Edited November 12, 2019 by lesstalkmorerokk

[TenebraeAeterna]

Wait, the launcher used to do this and then stopped?

That seems like a silly thing to remove from the launcher...

[Namah]

3 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

I guess this all started last week when they released U26, right?

 

Of course, isn't it obvious?

I love it when people really think they know what they are talking about but really have nothing to bring to the table. This kind of stuff gets me laughing every time.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Namah

[BlackVortex]

20 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

It is practically impossible to determine if a cheat tool is actually connected to your game or not...the only thing you can reliably determine is that its running.  And even with stopping edits and having watchdog variables they aren't impossible to cheat without easily being detectable.
And all of that protection for a large increase in overhead...and for very little benefit to anyone involved.

there are ways to make it completely impossible to determine if you are running a cheat tool

albeit, not many people have this kind of setup available to them since this is a developer environment, but this is where the capabilities of anti-cheat detection end

 

Edited November 12, 2019 by BlackVortex

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, Vaeldious said:

And all these "unfair permanent bans"? Yeah, I'm sure the playerbase is suffering really badly without all 4 of you "wrongfully" banned players.

Let me tell you a story. Back in my day, we had a glorious tool for customer protection called StarForce. Games protected by it required players to install drivers which were supposed to detect virtual CD drives active on the system. If a virtual drive was detected, the game would refuse to run. If you happened to have multiple CD drives, the game would refuse to run. Sometimes if you had only a single CD drive, the game would refuse to run. And that's if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, StarForce would attempt to "disable" your "virtual" drive, which had the not-too-uncommong habit of entirely disabling physical CD drives altogether, sometimes on a permanent basis. But it's all people's fault for having multiple drives, isn't it? After all, why would you have more than one drive if NOT to have one of them spoof a virtual copy of an otherwise copy-protected CD-ROM? I mean, people had to have known what they were getting into by simply HAVING DameonTools installed... Or having multiple CD drives. It was clearly their fault. That's why StarForce remains the leading brand in digital rights management to this day.

I may be slightly sarcastic, but my point stands. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have "cheats" running on your machine besides cheating IN WARFRAME. Warning people to close them and potentially refusing the start the game until such a time is superior to letting people log in with such software and then banning them even if they aren't doing anything. Comparisons to guns and hats and such are entirely superfluous when we have nearly 20 years of failed copyright protection software, all of which failed for this precise reason. It failed to stop actual cheaters while at the same time causing no end of false positives for legitimate consumers. StarForce failed for the exact same reason - it was bricking people's CD drives while pirates where still cracking it just fine after a few days to a few weeks. If you think for a second that randomly banning people who forgot to disable their CheatEngine is doing anything whatsoever to stop cheating in Warframe, then you are provably wrong. I wish I had a polite way of saying this, but I can't think of one.

As others have said, there's no downside to reminding people to disable disallowed software, or indeed booting them out of the game if disabled software is detected. Banning people ought to be a last resort when resolving issues, except DE are remarkably ban-happy for no good reason.

[FireSegment]

On 2019-11-12 at 12:13 AM, Vaeldious said:

Wait, so you want the free-to-play game to handhold you and make sure you aren't doing anything that would violate the terms of use that you agreed to?

if the risk is high and the chance of accidentally doing it unintentional is also high (which as OP point out, is high in more than one case), then have the game trying to prevent it from happen rather than punish people regardless of if said action impact the game or not is simply good design.

And this is something DE already implement, OP just asking for it to return.

 

[xghozt55]

21 hours ago, Tsukinoki said:

First is that its nearly impossible to determine if something is looking at your memory or not.  And if you want to stop something from peeking its best practice to just see if a program that could look at thememory is running and flag it.
After all good luck to DE for trying to detect if I'm reading the RAM to determine spawns/other features.
I mean if I knew what I was looking for I could monitor RAM and easily determine if a sculpture or rare container had spawned into the mission, and DE wouldn't be able to tell in any reliable fashion that I had peeked.  It would make it trivial to farm those as I can just load in, check, and restart until the right conditions.

Further detecting an edit is easier...but adds a lot of overhead.
Basically for any value that is somewhat important and might need protection?  Watchdog variable, which would very quickly consume a lot more memory and worsen performance as now every update to a variable also needs to update the watchdog variables.
And then you need to add some form of protection to the watchdog variables to prevent tampering with those...after all if someone updates both the watchdog variable and the normal variable at the same time? It looks legit.  And sure there are ways to protect those...but it just adds more overhead.

Basically:
It is practically impossible to determine if a cheat tool is actually connected to your game or not...the only thing you can reliably determine is that its running.  And even with stopping edits and having watchdog variables they aren't impossible to cheat without easily being detectable.
And all of that protection for a large increase in overhead...and for very little benefit to anyone involved.

So, there's a few things you should know:

Quote

First is that its nearly impossible to determine if something is looking at your memory or not.  And if you want to stop something from peeking its best practice to just see if a program that could look at thememory is running and flag it.

You're half right. In this case with cheat engine, it's very possible to determine if it is currently being used on warframe. In order for cheat engine to manipulate warframe's memory, cheat engine must get a handle to warframe.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/handles-and-objects

The steps to doing this is as follows:

1. Query the system for handle information using NtQuerySystemInformation. Information class 0x10 is SystemHandleInformation. (https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/ntoskrnl/api/ex/sysinfo/class.htm)

2. Using the SystemHandleInformation structure, enumerate and call DuplicateHandle for the desired access level.
(https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/ntoskrnl/api/ex/sysinfo/handle.htm)
(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/handleapi/nf-handleapi-duplicatehandle)

3. Use NtQueryObject to receive the ObjectTypeInformation structure of that handle to determine if that handle is a process handle.

4. If that handle is a process, you can now check if that handle is owned by cheat engine, and if that handle is to the warframe process using GetProcessId and GetCurrentProcessId.

The only programs in these cases that you're concerned about are the ones with open process handles with read/write access to warframe that have been flagged (normally using a list of hashes) that are determined to be capable of memory modification. That's the simplest form of dealing with that type of detection.

Quote

After all good luck to DE for trying to detect if I'm reading the RAM to determine spawns/other features.
I mean if I knew what I was looking for I could monitor RAM and easily determine if a sculpture or rare container had spawned into the mission, and DE wouldn't be able to tell in any reliable fashion that I had peeked.

Solving that problem is mostly unnecessary to stop most cheaters in this game, but it's not an impossible one to solve. Doing so from usermode is impossible without the assistance of a driver (as far as I'm currently aware), and doing so at all is poorly documented by Microsoft. This also isn't a very good method of dealing with dynamic memory.

If you're outside of usermode, there's the possibility of monitoring certain api calls I won't list here, but it's certainly possible.

Quote

Basically:
It is practically impossible to determine if a cheat tool is actually connected to your game or not...the only thing you can reliably determine is that its running.  And even with stopping edits and having watchdog variables they aren't impossible to cheat without easily being detectable.
And all of that protection for a large increase in overhead...and for very little benefit to anyone involved.

The overhead involved in the first case is rather minimal and solves the problem of false positives, and preventing the second bit is unnecessary in most cases. The first case can solve most of the second problem, but doesn't touch on the issue of injections. You can deal with dll injections and manual mapping in a very similar way.

In reality, an anti cheat is meant to stop 99% of would be hackers in their tracks, and for those familiar with these methods, the best practice is to prevent many of the important hacks from being possible at all. It's hard for warframe, considering players are the host, but there are a few ways I can imagine most of these tamperings can be dealt with using seeding and determinism.

I also want to note that cheat engine is a very competent debugger when you don't need something as heavy as ollydbg or x64dbg, and also has a host of very useful features that make it a go to tool for a few career fields, as well as debugging certain targets. It's not strictly a cheating tool.

Also, if this post breaks any guidelines, please feel free to remove it. Just felt like being educational!

[Hobie-wan]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Let me tell you a story. Back in my day, we had a glorious tool for customer protection called StarForce...

I almost said something about dealing with old CD checks (for games I owned) in a earlier post, but opted not to. But yeah, What a farce a lot of that was.

[luthor112]

On 2019-11-12 at 9:15 AM, General-Tennobi said:

what I do in my other games is none of your business

This is my opinion too.

[Andele3025]

On 2019-11-11 at 6:13 PM, Vaeldious said:

Wait, so you want the free-to-play game to handhold you and make sure you aren't doing anything that would violate the terms of use that you agreed to?

TOS and EULA which cannot be enforced because they are void ab initio by breaking the law and requirements of bindable contracts.
Realistically the only bans in WF that should be allowed to happen are if someone manages to hack into the damn main server database with account info, linked payment methods, etc. because of customer protection regulations.

Not that the CE thing matters since warframe client clearly doesnt check for actual hex editors, decompilers, debuggers, etc because if it did it would scream alarms and ban you for everything from NP++, blender with addons, most versions of UE, N3, Visual Studio, etc.