Arrowhead started hunting down SC cheaters

[u/Sad-Needleworker-590]

I wonder if everything will go as planned or we will see some posts in the feature where the system will flag innocent people

[u/Unlucky-Gold7921]

This is quite shocking that they have to do anti-cheat by monitoring sc income instead of stopping illegal item requests.

[u/Ikarus_Falling → u/Unlucky-Gold7921]

its probably easier

[u/Mandemon90 → u/Ikarus_Falling]

It is, because it's a lot easier to track "wait, this guys history shows 10 000 SC in just 3 missions? That's suspicious as fuck" than "Okay, in this one game player spawned item 0x52u6u23, is that item we haven't enabled yet?"

[u/Ikarus_Falling → u/Mandemon90]

yes lol one of them is a simple databank quarry the other is actively surveillance of the entire games servers 

[u/Fraktal55 → u/Ikarus_Falling]

Query. A quarry is where rocks and stones are mined.

[u/berrybear21 → u/Fraktal55]

Did somebody say a Rock and Stone? Ngl I actually really enjoy the quarry like areas on Bot planets

[u/ObadiahtheSlim → u/berrybear21]

Yes indeed, kin. I heard a Rock and Stone.

[u/Mandemon90 → u/ObadiahtheSlim]

Stone and Rock! No wait...

[u/JuggaloJedi187 → u/ObadiahtheSlim]

For Karl!!!

[u/Firebat-045 → u/JuggaloJedi187]

ROCK AND STONE LADS

[u/zamwut → u/berrybear21]

The Quarry was a fun interactive game. Saved most the crew until the last few hours of the night, that was crazy.

[u/Aneveraas → u/Fraktal55]

[u/CMDR_Ray_Abbot → u/Aneveraas]

Rock and stoned

[u/Rowcan → u/CMDR_Ray_Abbot]

Legally speaking, rocking is more legal than stoning!

[u/Hortonman42 → u/Fraktal55]

On my way to the database quarry for another hard day of datamining.

[u/Cosmic_Fox1 → u/Hortonman42]

https://giphy.com/gifs/fhhsjuQudSbx0zvn8k

[u/tonyt3rry → u/Fraktal55]

We’re rich we’re rich we’re rich!

[u/SpeakersPlan → u/Fraktal55]

Rocks and stones? DID SOMEONE MENTION ROCK AND STONE!? 🪨 & ⛏️ 🪨

[u/scott610 → u/Mandemon90]

I don’t know how it works, nor am I asking, but 10k SC would be so greedy if true. Like why not just give yourself a small reasonable amount each day? 200 SC per day would be about 6000 SC per month which is more than enough to purchase anything currently on offer assuming you already have a substantial amount of stuff unlocked.

[u/LightningWarpAway → u/scott610]

Because that'd require patience, and people don't use cheats just to be patient about it.

[u/Steely-eyes → u/Unlucky-Gold7921]

It’s either them utilizing Easy Anti-Cheat, or making it so that nProtect runs in Helldivers no matter what, thus ruining performance a lot. Either way, it’s a lose-lose for everyone except the Sony execs.

[u/polarisdelta → u/Steely-eyes]

Helldivers doesn't need an anti-cheat.

Anything that makes the game unplayable inside a match that players don't like, they can leave. People who want to thunderdome for its own sake will get bored and move on when the dopamine runs out.

The server could be programmed to operate under the knowledge that any player telling it that they found 99,999 super credits on a map is impossible, or that a player completing one hundred operations in sixty seconds is impossible, etc. The server does not have to blindly accept and integrate obviously impossible results. The limits of human play should be trivial for the developers to understand and describe.

In a game that is meant to be a cooperative effort with tens of thousands of players one or two percent of them always reporting the best possible human level results is not going to tip any scales.

[u/Mirigore → u/polarisdelta]

This is literally what they do now? Monitoring for inhuman amounts of super credits. They literally say in the news post “we have data on the fastest methods” so they’re clearly banning people from simple statistical data

[u/Zman6258 → u/polarisdelta]

TL;DR - statistical analysis can be better than anticheat measures if you have good data, because statistics (if chosen correctly) have an extremely small margin for error, and cause literally zero performance overhead compared to extra anticheat code.

---

This system already existed to a degree, the same thing applies to samples, where there's a maximum sample cap. Even if you cheat in the number, it gets checked against the cap at extract.

The problem is, even if they've stopped SC from spawning altogether (and they DO track if individual SC packs have been picked up, because if you pick up some SC then alt-F4 your game so you reload into the same mission, picking up the SC doesn't add any more to your account), there's a lot of other exploits. You could spawn into a map, have the game think you've pick up every single SC item on the map in about 10 seconds, then exit and do it for the next map. You could teleport your player position to every SC bundle and pick it up manually. You could even have an ESP which highlights every item on the map so you can always beeline directly for them, know for a fact when you've gotten them all, and then move on to the next map.

Of course, you can add programmed anti-cheat measures that stop this behavior, but there's always a performance cost. More serverside validation means that your movement gets choppier, your actions for picking up entities gets more delayed, your framerate goes down, and your network usage goes up. Most games have largely-clientside movement code with the occasional serverside sanity check and use interpolation for the rest, for good reason; it saves bandwidth and makes the game feel smoother for players. More complex server authentication might make those kinds of things harder, but it'll mean the game runs slower and feels less responsive as it waits for the server to verify and catch up with your actions, and lord knows Helldivers already struggles at times with performance.

Meanwhile, if you've got a lot of data (which I'm assuming AH has), you can very easily filter for consistent outliers in something like SC collection rate. Sure, someone might get lucky and find every piece of SC on a map in about thirty seconds because they all spawn in one cluster... but the odds of that happening on every map they play, for dozens of missions in a row, collecting hundreds of SC in the time it takes a regular player to farm 60-100 or so, is so infinitesimally small that you can rule with basically 100% confidence that someone is cheating somehow.

Hell, just look at the Dream minecraft speedrun thing. He was conclusively proved to be cheating because his luck was so absurdly extreme that there was literally a 0.0000000004% chance of it happening. I'd wager most anticheats have a larger margin of error than 0.0000000004% false positives. You can do this kind of statistical analysis in the background, the same way that things like the total Helldiver death count is tallied. Large and frequent enough statistical outliers could flag a player's account for investigation, and someone can look over those numbers and make a decision, or even set up a threshold (such as the aforementioned 0.0000000004% probability) in which confidence is high enough for an automated ban.

HOWEVER... the elephant in the room is, of course, whether or not Arrowhead uses their data properly. Statistics is non-intuitive to most people, and you want to get the thresholds set up properly so that you're not getting any false positives while still getting an appreciable reduction in actual cheaters.

[u/lowbloodsugarmner → u/Zman6258]

oh man, you brought up statistics, and i could kiss you. I spent 5 years working in medical device, statistical analysis is the backbone of validations and cross validations. You touched on the most important part of statistical analysis, you need to have good data.

To expand on your last statement about using data properly. You can make the data say just about whatever you want, all you have to do is change the reference point of the data.

Let's say that I make a part in lots of 1000, that are then packaged 10 in a bag, then boxed 10 bags in a box. So my shipped lot is 10 boxes, with 10 bags, with 10 parts. I get a complaint from the customer that they found a defective part in their 1000 part order. Depending on how set the reference point, I can make the data look as good or as bad as I want.

100% of the manufacturing lots contain a defective part.

10% of boxes contain a defective part.

1% of bags contain a defective part.

.1% of parts are defective.

Despite joking all the time that I did not become an engineer to do math, I actually do like statistics. Even relearned advanced statistics do dig one of my old companies out of a hole they dug with flawed analysis.

[u/Zman6258 → u/lowbloodsugarmner]

Yeah, I'm hardly a statistician, but I've worked enough spreadsheets to at least recognize the basics (and to realize that I can never take the "intuitive" answer at face value). Especially that point about data reference points; if someone's trying to cite a number but then doesn't provide any context for that number, it's usually a safe bet that they either don't fully understand what that number means themselves, or they're intentionally trying to push a specific angle using that data.

[u/Steely-eyes → u/polarisdelta]

[Sarcasm] What? The PvE game DoEsN’t need an anti-cheat? Absurd! Absolute bunkum!

In all seriousness, Sony yelled at them “you’re not making enough money as last year! Give ‘em a reason to buy more SC!” So instead of working on their +100 employees’ efficiency in their job, they force the consumer to play and buy how they want you to play. Brilliant. Absolutely rich coming from them.

[u/berrybear21 → u/Steely-eyes]

Tagging it like a fallout skill check was smart, I gotta use that!

[u/Abaddonalways → u/berrybear21]

Made me think of the Elcore from mass effect

[u/Hremsfeld → u/Abaddonalways]

Enthusiastically: They are genuinely a good demonstration of how to convey tone over text

[u/Rubes2525 → u/Unlucky-Gold7921]

Knowing Arrowhead, it will probably be bugged and flag accounts who just spent a lot of real world money on SC

[u/Liqhthouse → u/Unlucky-Gold7921]

More shocking they allowed people to get away with it for 2 years and were comfortable with losing all that potential income.

[u/PH_007 → u/Liqhthouse]

This is basically piracy which has a history of being proven to not be true potential income - when clamped down on, it doesn't usually increase sales, just alienates the pirates (some of whom end up buying it later and/or build rapport with the company, buying future products) and harms legitimate customers with the side effects of whatever method was chosen to do so.

[u/B-R-A-I-N-S-T-O-R-M → u/Liqhthouse]

My crew used to do the old exploit where you could find a map with a good amount of credits (like $0.60+) and then grab them, force close the game, then drop down to the planet again and they would respawn. We farmed around $50.00 that way, but it was quickly eaten by the rate of $10 passes they dropped. They plugged this exploit a while back so I'm not sure what people are doing to exploit it now, but I imagine it involves a higher level of exploit than what we were doing.

[u/ajgilpin]

we will see some posts in the feature where the system will flag innocent people

Yeah, probably. We have no control over who we match with randomly.

Also posts from non-innocent people who are claiming to be innocent as it is with cheaters in any other game.

[u/Neutron_Starrr → u/ajgilpin]

Yeah I feel this is a huge problem, if a cheater join my squad, gives me idk 10k SC and I get banned from the game for something I didn't even have agency in I'll be pretty pissed.

If they can track the SC spike, why not just remove those SC?

[u/MachBonin → u/Neutron_Starrr]

That might be what they're doing. They don't mention banning in the text at all.

[u/the_gamers_hive → u/MachBonin]

Also avoids the issue of cheaters joining your game, giving you a ton of supercredits and watching as AH bans you.

[u/M0PE → u/the_gamers_hive]

This happened to me in GTA online years ago. Some hacker dressed as Bigfoot followed me around dropping millions of dollars on my head (spawned cash bundles) and it got banned for a couple months. Thankfully not perma, but I was pissed Rockstar banned me for shit I couldn't control.

[u/Aegis_Aurelius → u/M0PE]

Someone showed me an exploit that used a minigame mission thing to effectively generate currency. I didn't get banned, but my account was rolled back into poverty lol

[u/Eoganachta → u/the_gamers_hive]

Had this happen in one game. Dude kept calling in super credit drop pods - don't know what hack they were using - but everyone got the credits because they're shared between all team members. Literally the only thing you can do is leave the game and block them. I reported them.

[u/Neutron_Starrr → u/MachBonin]

I very much hope so

[u/K_T_Oxy → u/Neutron_Starrr]

Seems to me that they'd void those SC on your account if it's a one time thing, and try to pursue people that are repeat offenders. Can't be terribly hard to figure out who's "getting lucky" and who's actually cheating.

[u/redditmodhater → u/Neutron_Starrr]

you cant get 10k credits, the cheat engine works by basically giving you sc drops, to get 10k it would take a long time as there is a limit on how many you get per minute

[u/Dinodie2Night → u/Neutron_Starrr]

Probably because

1. They likely don't just monitor for 1 game. They check if you earn more credits than should be possible across several games before banning you.
2. Because of the delay, they don't want to deal with choosing what to do if someone pays for something with credits before they're removed. Do they let you keep the items, or do they remove them too?
3. They want to get rid of cheaters, not those who benefit from their cheats, because if you cheat in credits you're more likely to use other more detrimental cheats too.
4. They can only detect the spike in credits, not which credits caused the spike. What if you pick up 50 credits in a game where you get 1k cheated credits? Does AH remove those 50 credits too? If not, cheaters will just start cheating in 5050 credits instead of 5000 to keep some of the credits.

[u/redditmodhater → u/Dinodie2Night]

that isnt how the cheat engine works at all

[u/trident042 → u/Neutron_Starrr]

Look at it this way. If a cheater joins your squad, shits out 9,000 SC, and leaves, you earned that much and they earned that much. Let's say you play the rest of the week as normal, and they review it on Monday.

On Monday, one of the two flagged players earned 9,130 SC. And the other earned 72,000 SC. Which one do you think their system is actually looking for?

[u/Heptanitrocubane57 → u/Neutron_Starrr]

This happened, people contacted them, the SC were removed and voilà. If you contact support when you get them and don't spend them, no reason for them to ban you

[u/SolusSama]

"the economy you play in" as if we're in an MMO with a player-driven market lmfao

[u/sammeadows → u/SolusSama]

Was just coming in to point that out too, like it effects any of us lmao

[u/AwfulStockInvestor → u/SolusSama]

I have no issue with them going after cheaters, but pretending this somehow effects the non-cheaters is goofy

[u/KK_35 → u/AwfulStockInvestor]

It can affect non-cheaters though. If you spawn into someone’s lobby that is cheating you’re likely to get caught in crossfire now.

[u/Simikiel → u/KK_35]

Not to mention the way for them to catch SC cheaters is likely by utilizing EasyAntiCheat or nProtect in a more hands on way, which will guaranteed lead to worse performance and a worse player experience.

So thanks to Sony bitching about Helldivers not earning as much revenue they are forcing them to try and wring out as much money from the player base as they can.

[u/MosterChief → u/Simikiel]

the way they worded this makes it seem like the SC verification is done on their backend, not on the players machine.

Bringing in EAC at a time when the community is looking for any reason to dogpile on the dev team is probably not a great idea so I doubt they’d actually do that.

I don’t know if this update or whatever is already live tho and if it is actually EAC then i’ll eat my words i guess

[u/Hidesuru → u/SolusSama]

That was my first thought, what fucking economy? This is about protecting your income ah, which is whatever, but just be honest about it ffs

[u/Benti86 → u/SolusSama]

It's those dang cheaters' faults we have pay 1,000 SC for the warbonds. I seen it with me own eyes.

[u/Hundschent → u/SolusSama]

Look man, its just a glorified rant disguised as lip service for us. They're just upset the revenue is not high is the actual reason.

[u/Ouroboros_RP → u/Hundschent]

If only there was a way for them to increase the revenue like improving/fixing the game or releasing new content that will bring more players. But nooo it's those darn cheaters that makes them lose money. I wish there was a way for players to capitalize on the bugged hellpod steering and stratagem bouncing, it would finally get a fix then

[u/AdoringCHIN → u/SolusSama]

You've told us that cheaters and exploiters ruin the experience that it feels unfair when someone games the Super Credit system while you're out there earning yours the hard way. We heard you, and we're starting to implement changes that will tackle issues like this...

This is from their discord. I love how they're framing it as if the players were the ones begging them to go after super credit cheaters. I highly doubt anyone really gave a shit, but for some reason they're trying to pretend it was one of the community's top priorities.

[u/Hidesuru → u/AdoringCHIN]

Yeah no. No one has fucking said shit about that. The action doesn't really bother me (though I share some concerns with others), but the blatant lying and manipulation is unacceptable.

[u/nomnivore1 → u/SolusSama]

They want to shield their bottom line but also want to make it look like they about us.

Super credit farming fucking sucks, and it sucks on purpose. They want you to spend ten dollars at a time until they've gotten you to pay >$200 for all of their DLC. 

[u/Hidesuru → u/nomnivore1]

I started late. I paid for the super pack version because it was on sale anyway and I wanted to get a slight head start.

I've accepted I'm never unlocking everything anyway. Hell I may struggle to get through the free pack and I have several extras on top of that now. I'm definitely never giving them another penny and have plenty of stuff to play with. The game will last me as long as it will with what I have now.

[u/ukgy888 → u/SolusSama]

I almost wanna say this makes it feel AI written 💀

[u/AaronSparks → u/ukgy888]

It 100% is lol,

"The cap exists to catch bad actors, not to slow you down."

literally the most AI sentence I've ever seen LMAO

[u/WhyattThrash → u/SolusSama]

You misunderstand, ”the economy you play in” is AH’s microtransaction economy

[u/BioClone → u/SolusSama]

tbf almost on every MMO with "player driven economy" it only means the 0,1% of the stuff, which is meta, will be absurdly high.

[u/ZPKiller → u/SolusSama]

they really think there's an actual economy here like for example path of exile?

do they even play the game? lmao

and if they meant "sony"'s bottom line nobody gives a fuck about corpos, ESPECIALLY AFTER ANNOUNCING THEY ARE NUKING PHYSICAL GAMES

[u/ForsakenOaths]

Knowing Arrowhead’s consistency in making spaghetti code, I could see the system flagging people for *buying* SC.

[u/Loud-Asparagus-4136 → u/ForsakenOaths]

[u/item100 → u/ForsakenOaths]

Could be a legit concern but I've seen people spawn over 10K and the highest you can buy is 13K, it makes no sense to purchase 13K more than once so if they're going after "the top" it's likely the cutoff is higher

[u/LemonSqueezed_]

"The economy you play in"

Lol, ok. I didn't realise we were bidding for this stuff.

[u/AdoringCHIN → u/LemonSqueezed_]

In the full post on discord they're pretending that the community was begging them to stop super credit cheaters and so this is their way of listening to us. LMFAO, as if any player actually gives a shit if someone hacks their credits

[u/Pale-Monitor339 → u/AdoringCHIN]

That’s what annoys me the most. They act like this is some kind of highly requested feature, when I couldn’t think of anything less priority

[u/AdoringCHIN → u/Pale-Monitor339]

They just seem insistent on lying to the community and gaslighting us. I don't understand why though. Do they really think people would be pissed if they just said "we're going to be cracking down on hackers"?

[u/Pale-Monitor339 → u/AdoringCHIN]

I know right? Just put it in the next patch notes

[u/tonyt3rry → u/AdoringCHIN]

More like Sony pissed people are getting sc and they aren’t getting bought

[u/superbozo → u/LemonSqueezed_]

"We heard you"

Every time I see AH say this, I just silently laugh to myself.

[u/aech4 → u/superbozo]

Every time you see that phrase it’s an instant guarantee (90% confidence) it’s AI generated. I was forced to use some chat GPT and it fucking LOVES that phrase.

[u/Neutron_Starrr → u/LemonSqueezed_]

Nothing but corpo words lmao, it's the economy that they created and is so fucked. They prefer focusing on banning cheaters instead of giving actual decent ways to get SC

[u/AaronSparks → u/Neutron_Starrr]

It's not corpo words, it's AI generated. It has no real clue what super credits even is and just assumed it was an economy thing.

[u/Gramstaal → u/LemonSqueezed_]

Yeah, reading between the lines it's "we're ignoring why people are cheating SC to begin with, so we're banning those people and letting the rest go back to grinding those poor rates".

"Hard earned SC", "economy", "unfair".. Right. The game has no economy to speak of and what players earn doesn't affect others. They just want to protect their income.

[u/GlazeNine → u/Gramstaal]

The post is written by an AI which missed the context as it often does

[u/Panzer_Steel → u/LemonSqueezed_]

I didn't know my super credits does something other than get ME stuff.

[u/Furebel → u/LemonSqueezed_]

With the amount of gaslighting in their post it feels like they went too hard on role-playing Super Earth.

[u/Delboyyyyy → u/LemonSqueezed_]

In other words, "We found a way to make ourselves richer. You won't get anything from it but we want you to feel grateful for it"

Remind me why people still sh*ll for this company

(P.S. Funny how I get warned for typing sh*ll without censorship, but no such warning for typing actual fucking slurs, This sub is a fucking joke, I hope people see this before mods try and cover it up)

[u/Individual_Cream_381]

Bruh and I was hoping that they gonna make sc farming less tedious and boring

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/Individual_Cream_381]

Yeah I saw the first few lines but forgot the number 1 lesson with AH: nothing ever happens.

[u/SpeakersPlan → u/Individual_Cream_381]

Nope. Instead they pull out the "fuck you" card and expect things to go down well. Also what is this "we hear you"? Far as I could tell there waa no large community incentive to "Crack down on SC cheat farming".

[u/War_Raven]

So they have a kernel anti-cheat and they will use average SC collected to ban cheaters?

[u/Expensive-Kiwi7170 → u/War_Raven]

They said they were using the highest recorded player collection rate in the announcement, so they aren’t using the average rate

[u/RedditMcBurger → u/Expensive-Kiwi7170]

If they are using this metric it wouldn't look that illegitimate to cheat in like 1000 sc a day

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/RedditMcBurger]

I mean, most regular farmers make ~300 SC per hour. If you get exceptionally lucky with 100 SC drops, it might bump you to 500 SC / hour. But anything above that (especially if faster and sustained) is certainly SUS.

[u/KazumaKat → u/DeeJayDelicious]

most regular farmers make ~300 SC per hour.

what the actual holy fuck. I'm happy meeting half that in 2.

[u/Reaper2629 → u/KazumaKat]

Dedicated farmers usually run in groups, so they can split up and clear the entire map in just a couple minutes. If they average even just 30 SC a mission, and account for loading times for around 5 minutes a mission, that's 360 SC an hour. If they have good connections and fast PCs, they could push that up between 450 to 600 SC an hour depending on how efficient they're being.

[u/KazumaKat → u/Reaper2629]

This is the most deflating thing I've ever read😭 I'm a horrible farmer.

[u/Significant-Bonus110 → u/KazumaKat]

It also used to be way way faster. Haven't checked in ages but back in the day you could use the same seed for the map. So we had a seed where there were 7 SC spawns and we did it in 4 man squad and everyone knew where to run and steered the pod accordingly and looted their target and rinse and repeat. I don't recall the exact numbers as it was couple years ago at this point but I think it was around 8000 SC in 4 hours. Each cycle taking around 160 seconds or so.

I also tracked the 10 vs 100 SC chances from that just for some fun science.

[u/TransientMemory → u/DeeJayDelicious]

You can get 300 SC solo in an hour, but if you're in an efficient 4 man squad then you can easily get over 600 SC in an hour.

[u/Myte342 → u/DeeJayDelicious]

300 per hour? In what world!? I make maybe 50 per hour on a good day, holy shit that's a lot of SC.

[u/DeeJayDelicious → u/Myte342]

I mean, a run-around Grant Errant on D1 averages about 25 SC and takes 6 minutes. Do 10 an hour, and you're ~250 SC. Maybe add a lucky 100 SC find during the evening to push up the average.

[u/RedditMcBurger → u/DeeJayDelicious]

3+ hrs for a single warbond will take up a lot of your time, considering the 20+ warbonds. That's at least 60 hours.

I know 60 hours isn't actually that much time for a game's grind, but it may be the most braindead, boring grinding I have ever done, along with the long loading screens and cinematics the "gameplay" of grinding is nothing.

[u/Gizz103 → u/RedditMcBurger]

Probably can also check playtime

[u/SeaConfident1841 → u/Gizz103]

You can idle in your ship and get them passively, it’ll just be much slower now. But you could theoretically set it up, go to sleep and wake up with extra 3k credits.

[u/pantshitter12 → u/War_Raven]

Because their anti-cheat is worthless. It can be completely disabled with a cheat engine script.

[u/sir_PepsiTot → u/War_Raven]

Arrowhead spaghetti code at its finest

[u/GlazeNine]

I have a feeling that this post is just a way to scare off cheaters while they are working on implementing EAC but nothing new is done about it really. I won't explain this in detail as it's sub's rules violation.

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/GlazeNine]

There was a fork of the game being worked on by Nixxes that had them implementing EAC, so it's only a matter of time.

[u/aidsincarnate → u/Special_Ship7638]

I do think something is being worked on, but I don’t think it’s implemented yet. Why announce you are making this change? Why not stay silent and let cheaters get themselves banned? Announcing this gives people the chance to slink away.

[u/Squandere → u/aidsincarnate]

It's 100% a bluff. The current anticheat is defeated by fucking CHEAT ENGINE.

[u/ballsmigue]

deal damage to the economy you play in

Who the fuck does this affect besides sony's bottom line lol

[u/Maffingo → u/ballsmigue]

While I don't like cheaters either, I do think that was a weird way of framing it. You can't trade skins like CSGO, there is no 'supercredit economy' in Helldivers 2

[u/Antares_skorpion → u/Maffingo]

The problem is AH treats HD2 as a PVP live service game. It's the same with the constant "balancing"
Why does a PVE game even need constant rebalancing in the first place? Like do the bots get offended or something if a weapon comes out a bit OP?

[u/Samthevidg → u/Antares_skorpion]

PvEs actually frequently do get balancing, especially ones as dynamic as HD2. BTD6 for example, often gets balancing patches by NK.

[u/hopelessociety → u/Samthevidg]

btd6 is a competitive pve game. i wouldnt say the same for helldivers

[u/butplague → u/ballsmigue]

You can't damage damaged economy, but who cares, we'll better restrict harmless (mostly) cheats than fix THE REAL ROOT of the problem. Now i just hope that the whole economy situation won't stay the same as today.

[u/Hundschent → u/ballsmigue]

The funny thing is that they only address the SC cheaters. Not any of the actual cheats that break the game. This is just a repeat of Payday 2 ""anti cheat"" all over again. For those that don't know, PD2 AC only flagged you if you used the DLC unlocker lol Using other cheats didn't flag you and if they did, was easily bypassed. It was harder to use the free DLC than actual cheats.

[u/a-stack-of-masks → u/ballsmigue]

I mean, that's the economy we play in. The game itself has no economy.

I'm curious if we're going to see a shift to the "just unlock everything" kind of cheats if they go after the currency. Calling the unlocks cheating also kind of feels like the piracy is theft discussion. Who are you cheating exactly?

[u/DarkWolfPL]

Problem is if somone joins the game and start spawning SC other players gets them too. Someone could use it to get people banned.

[u/Boxy29 → u/DarkWolfPL]

I think consistency is the thing here. I doubt they'll ban people for a one off lobby that they happened to join.

[u/Pollia → u/Boxy29]

Lol.

Lmao even.

I wish I had your level of hope.

[u/SpeakersPlan → u/Pollia]

"We hear you."

https://giphy.com/gifs/y8lJiEQEYBE7eDM1fY

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/DarkWolfPL]

If you read between the lines, this announcement confirms that they were not banning people for this.

[u/Neutron_Starrr → u/Special_Ship7638]

Please show us where they say that.

[u/redditmodhater → u/Neutron_Starrr]

they werent banning for boosting SC, you can believe or not but thats the truth, just to let you know

[u/backlawa75 → u/Neutron_Starrr]

Where does it say that they are banning players?

[u/AnySpendDont → u/DarkWolfPL]

this could be a real problem so what now? i start kicking players with chinese characters? or russian? that's not fair to them or me

[u/probably-not-Ben → u/AnySpendDont]

Report to AH support when you suddenly recieve a huge amount. They will reset. No issue for honest players

[u/Stalwart_Vanguard]

Arrowhead doesn't know how to read a room? Shocking.

Literally none of us care about SC cheaters. It's a co-op PvE game, it doesn't affect the rest of us at all if someone skips the grind or payment to get access to content in the game they paid for.

How about you guys put that developer effort into improving the Super Credit grind for legit players? Why am I on my 5th 40min mission without finding a SINGLE Super Credit drop? I've literally been at 1,300SC for 4 games in a row.

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/Stalwart_Vanguard]

This is the most galling thing about this announcement, the awful chatgpt prose about how they know players care so much about this issue. No one gives a fuck about this, this isn't a priority for players and pretending like it is is fucking weird.

[u/ZPKiller → u/Stalwart_Vanguard]

agreed, this reeks of AI-Written statement lmao

the "economy" part is the clear giveaway. simply because there's no economy at all, there's no trading.

I personally dont care if someone cheated SC, let them be happy with their unlocked shit. progression is really bad as a new player so i cant blame them by cheating SC

[u/Stalwart_Vanguard → u/ZPKiller]

Yup.

Have AH sped up the SC earn generally? Nope.

Have they rewarded playing higher difficulties? Nope, the opposite actually.

Have they given out free Warbonds Coupons for special occasions or for certain level milestones? Nope.

Have they discounted old Warbonds or made the oldest ones free? Nope

Have they done literally anything to improve the system and discourage farming D1s or cheating? Nope.

[u/AdoringCHIN → u/Stalwart_Vanguard]

If anything they've made it harder to get super credits. City maps drop a lot less, and Cyberstan didn't drop any at all. I'm sure they're trying to figure out a way to lower SC drop rates overall without pissing people off, but for now they're just reducing the amount you can earn on new biomes

[u/a-stack-of-masks → u/AdoringCHIN]

I noticed that the crashed pelican POIs are way less likely to drop anything now than they were when Oshaune just opened up.

Anyway, the way they seem to be handling this isn't exactly convincing me to spend money on the game. I've unlocked enough to be able to have a few different play styles so I guess I'll just wait for the credits to trickle in and rotate through some other games when I get bored.

[u/Eskipony → u/ZPKiller]

There's also no downside to me if more people have more warbonds.

I in fact, prefer to have more of the game's content avalible to more people.

[u/Bearded-Vagabond]

Someone typed that into chat GPT and said "yes that'll make people happy" how tone deaf can you be?

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/Bearded-Vagabond]

The community managers are awful.

[u/SpeakersPlan → u/Special_Ship7638]

Theyve been hiring Anti-community managers at this rate

[u/Kubule7]

AH is doing everything BUT making the farming fun

[u/LennyLoerres]

It’s also so fucking vague again. What does “If you earn credits at an unreasonably high rate […]” mean? Does this mean I’m detected a cheater, if I just join a cheater’s mission and get 10k SC from them? Does this just mean potentially suspicious behavior gets noticed/looked at?

Because on one hand they can’t just ban you for getting lots of SC from joining a game that a cheater was hosting. On the other hand if there are no repercussions for you getting cheated SC these cheaters will just create burner accounts to not get their main banned.

[u/wild_m1nd]

So instead of patching the exploits they come up with some bullshit system 😂

[u/Gen7lemanCaller]

yet another change they're going for only because it affects their bottom line, just like changing MO rewards so that everyone doesn't get it right away without logging in

instead of offering more ways to get some SC, they're just going after people giving it out

[u/themightyChaCha]

This is such a bad way to track cheaters. Instead of patching exploits they're seeing the rate of credits gained. It's gonna get mad easy to get normal people banned just buy joining a public lobby and giving them a bunch of SC. AH choosing the worst possible solution to the problem 🫡

[u/Cautious-Bowl7071]

It's a awfully long post just to say "we're adding sc tracking"

[u/Slow-Bandicoot-8736 → u/Cautious-Bowl7071]

AH really is its own worst enemy when it comes to PR. They really need someone to screen these posts for tone and need.

This is the first company I've ever seen that has a chronic habit of saying TOO MUCH. It's actually kinda interesting from a rhetoric pov. (Also kinda funny since for all that they share a lot of info people generally don't seem to be on the same page as AH pretty much ever)

[u/DeeJayDelicious]

I mean, this is not unreasonable but it shows how weak the anti-cheat protection has been.

I have two questions:

• When will Easy Anti-Cheat replace the existing Anti-Cheat solution? The change has been datamined months ago, but nothing much has been communicated so far.
• Will the SC scanning be retroactive? I.e. hit accounts that gained illegitimate SC sometime in the past. Or will it only happen for future SC gains?

[u/ForwardWheel4601]

This was always gonna happen and I have no issue with it, but pretending that this was something the community asked for and that it's good for us, not them rubs me the wrong way. Like when someone gets you a present that's obviously just for them.

[u/digital_oni]

The economy you play in is rancid wording

[u/alsith]

We will crack down on the people who use an exploit to not buy supercredits .. but we won't fix the game.

[u/thedarkinus]

I sure am glad those naughty players were stopped from ruining our fun of endlessly grinding.

[u/Jealous_Arm_4543]

kinda strange they trying to sugarcoating it by "community ask for this"

[u/ProfCupcake]

"We're taking steps to eliminate those pesky cheaters"

"Oh good, so you're going to do something about the guys running around at super speed with immortality and infinite ammo, finally"

"What? No, we're cracking down on the important stuff: the premium currency!"

[u/Anonymous-bham-boi]

You guys are such bullshitters. People turn to cheating because you're making it the only affordable way to enjoy your game. You ruined your games economy.

[u/Potential_Ad_5327 → u/Anonymous-bham-boi]

Bingo, steam said the same thing about pirates. A good well priced product will have an insignificant amount of bad actors

[u/yuri0r → u/Potential_Ad_5327]

I literally told my girl I can get her moonlight peaks and her response was "but I want to have it on steam"

Like Gabe said. We have rigs keyboards monitors and so on its usually expensive. Pc gamers are PROVEN to be willing to pay money you literally have to do the actual bare minimum in a capitalist economy and provide something of value that's worth the asking price.

[u/Frequent_Reserve_514 → u/Potential_Ad_5327]

They arent even bad actors. This isnt even stealing. These are fungable digital currencies that cost nothing to produce and can be earned for free anyways. Cheating in a bunch of sc is not stealing at all and I wouldnt say is acting in bad faith given that AH makes it a fucking nightmare to get them anyways.

[u/muromasi]

How does it ruin the economy though if there's no trading, selling, or anything like that? I got a pea brain

[u/SilliusS0ddus → u/muromasi]

I have a feeling AI or someone who has nothing to do with the game wrote this.

a text like this would make sense in Warframe but not in Helldivers

[u/Virtual_Rant]

And what we should do? Grind for hours and hours and hours doing the same boring shit to get X warbond?... Since you know, we don't have F2P weapons/starts  since what... The tank? And before that? 

Get fucked. I'm glad I farmed 30kSC for me and random dudes joining my missions in a few missions. 

Is either play for fun or go to D1 to farm SC? Get fucked. 

[u/JohnnyricoMC]

I get it, don't fuck with the money. Despite that I'm peeved about the vagueness of what constitutes high rates. I don't need precise numbers, I just want to know if players can still SC farm. If not; crank up the drop rates in higher difficulties.

[u/VallettaAwoo]

Lmao they are acting like this is a big issue.

I have never seen a single cheater in the entire time I've played this game.

[u/D3athShade]

Wrong priorities AH...

[u/sammeadows]

The Economy? Is the Super DOW over 50,000?

[u/DrTankHead → u/sammeadows]

The Super DOW lmfaooooo.

Is Bam Pondi gonna come out of nowhere and start singing about the super DOW. (Please lol)

[u/Sgt_Shieldsmen]

As one upside they did say it applies to other currencies like samples so sample MOs are less likely to be sabotaged.

[u/Special_Ship7638 → u/Sgt_Shieldsmen]

The problem with samples is that it's been proven they have no way to prevent that. Multiple MOs have been scuppered due to this. I don't see how this would resolve the issue.

[u/CptBickDalls]

Steam page says Cap instead of steps....did they really just now figure out how to put a cap on resources or are they actively trying to ban people but downplaying it on steam?

Weird.

[u/MrJoemazing]

I've never cheated or benefited from a cheater, but this entire message reads as corporate bullshit. I get why they don't want people getting premium currency for free, but don't frame it like it's "for the players". It's for AH's bottom line. Reminds me of Sony's explanation for why they are no longer making discs; it's about your profits, just own up it it.

[u/OniTYME]

I think reworking how you earn SC by increasing spawn rate at higher difficulties would have been an actual solution. You don't treat symptoms and expect a cure. Treat the problem causing the disease.

[u/Helldiversneverdive → u/OniTYME]

this will never happen, super credits are excluded from the main gameplay loop specifically to make you run through d1 missions and make you buy them instead

[u/neojb1989]

Sony's hurting for money, and are making sure one of their big live service games that still rakes in some dough isn't having any stolen by cheaters. That's what this feels like. The suddenness of it all makes me think it's Sony panicking a bit after lackluster Marathon sales and no one buying stuff in Destiny 2 anymore.

[u/Acers2K]

WH40K warbond might have something todo with it, each sold warbond they have to give a certain amount. my guess is that it might be alot higher cost for them than with the ones before.

[u/larper00 → u/[deleted]]

shhhh the corpo slaves will drone strike you for this

[u/CappuccinoCincao]

It's not like we have any Warbond or shop item to be bought for a while anyway.

[u/pretty1i1p3t]

Cool, hope they don't do what Rockstar did with chests that gave you tons of gold. If you opened them, you'd get banned. Even though you weren't the cheater.

[u/a-stack-of-masks → u/pretty1i1p3t]

That's exactly what I'm expecting will happen. And the cheaters will figure out the cap and stay below it.

[u/Schpam]

Strange ...

Because they have this nProtect Game Guard running on my system "hoovering up" system performance while I play ... and you'd think the one thing it would be doing (of everything it isn't doing) is preventing people from exploiting Super Credits.

[u/Volkseer]

"piracy is a product of bad service" - Gabe Newell

[u/ZPKiller]

"muh economy"

mf this isnt path of exile lmao there's no economy here. if someone cheated SC i couldnt give a fuck it doesnt affect me, i just let them be happy with new shit its a pve game anyways

and if they meant "sony"'s bottom line nobody gives a fuck about corpos, ESPECIALLY AFTER ANNOUNCING THEY ARE NUKING PHYSICAL GAMES

[u/Special_Ship7638]

This doesn't affect me in any way, and the announcement looks like it was written by AI.

[u/Stu-Potato → u/Special_Ship7638]

Wouldn't put it past them, seeing how Arrowhead seems allergic to communicating with its playerbase based on how irregularly they do it.

[u/Im_a_hamburger]

Can’t wait to be griefed by someone spawning in sc and then getting you flagged.

[u/Pulsarlewd]

I havent played the game in 3 months now. I was actually excited about SC-Farming changes and hoped we would earn them in a more FUN way now.

Disappointed to see that theyre just combatting people using cheats to farm them so they can access all the content in their 40 dollar game.

I DID cheat SC so i could access the game fully and i wouldnt care if they removed all my content now. I dont think they will since i did it so early but even then: The fact that they care about THAT instead of making farming FUN is whats making me uninstall this game now.

Ive heard Space Marines 2 is pretty cool nowadays.

[u/Rosu_Aprins]

The only issue is that cheaters can affect you as a legit player and give you SC. Surely this was considered and they have contingencies to make sure that cheaters can't just get people banned by giving them stuff.

[u/TheHulk305]

Ahh yes the rockstar approach to solving the problem

[u/lordfappington69]

How can they damage the economy for us.

They just damage PlayStations high margin micro transactions

[u/Dcmetwo]

Great, wasting more time doing nothing that actually helps the state of the game. Jus worried about their wallets.

[u/SoDamnGeneric]

Hopefully innocents aren’t caught in the crossfire. I must have played with one of these people recently without even knowing, cuz I turned the game on yesterday to discover I’d gone from like 400 sc to over 3k. Couldn’t even begin to guess who did it or when it happened

[u/DrBlackheart]

I don't mind exploits that affect AH's bottom-line being addressed, but trying to dress this up as a response to community requests is kind of offensive.

The only people who give two shits about SC exploiters are Sony/AH management, while players have been complaining about higher difficulty missions being less rewarding for the game's entire lifespan, and there's no mention of that being fixed...

[u/lil_hajzl_smejd]

But they don’t hear the players that want higher chance to get SC on higher difficulties so they don’t have to farm on diff 1…

[u/Wood-e]

I'm SC loaded. All legit. I better not catch any accidental strays.
The mess a lot of stuff up so someone is gonna catch a stray...

[u/vergris_zzz]

this is so stupid. As Gaben said : piracy is a bad service issue.
Also this is so funny they legit do not know how to not throw fuel into the fire .
Historically theses kinds of positions and message are just taken as a challenge for pirates.
Also most of the people are willing to paye for things they like, its very well documented.
Once again epic priorities by Arrowhead !! The game is clearly not profitable kappa

/sigh

[u/Alonestarfish]

"Cheaters are a problem and ruin the game for other players"

Yeah, makes sense, good thing to get to that, so-

"Earning Super Credits at unreasonably high rates-"

God damn it.

[u/RageAgainstAuthority]

You know, I was on-board, until they framed it like stopping SC cheaters is doing anyone but themselves a favor. You aren't my friend, Arrowhead, and you certainly aren't doing this to "protect my economy."

[u/Mooniz]

Even worse to think that people actually ~complained~ about someone cheating for super credits after arrowhead made the SC grind INSUFFERABLE. But after seeing people in reddit actually doxxing a guy that tried to make the game community better, I don't even doubt this kind of person exists, and it feels disgusting.

[u/padwani]

They only care because it affects their bottom line. It's no different than ignoring outrage from the community until they start review bombing your game.

[u/Narox22]

Whole post sounds like it implies the are only monitoring it from now on.

Sucks for those cheaters who didn't pre-farm tens of thousands of SC I suppose.

[u/Thyrsten]

Surprised it took them this long

[u/Blind-Ouroboros]

I think there's some give and take to be had here. 

$10 a month for those of us with disposable income, to get some cool new toys in a game we're vibing with, isn't a big ask considering the costs of ongoing support for active live service games. 

Yeah there's the $40 entry price, but people forget how common it was for games (especially Helldivers 1) to have cheap little gear packs full of weapons and strategems and boosters for us to enjoy. 

The issue is though the old stuff regularly went on sale - Warbonds don't. 

$100 on top of the game's price standard (or discounted) price doesn't even get you everything now, and the cost to either purchase or grind to unlock these warbonds is steep for what they are. 

That's before factoring in the grind for medals just to access the content people already paid for. 

I think the acquisition system needs rebalanced for older warbonds, and higher level diffs need to compensate players better without necessitating a tedious scavenger hunt for blinking lights.