Anticheat system
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2025 11:20 pm
Dear Broken Arrow Development Team,
I hope you’ll forgive the directness of this message—I write out of growing concern for the state of fair play in our strategy community. Over the past days, it’s become painfully clear that the client-side handling of critical gameplay variables has opened the door to rampant cheating. Scores, unit fire-rates, respawn timers—these numbers are all entirely at the mercy of unverified data packets sent from the player’s machine. Bad actors exploit this flaw to wildly inflate their performance, leaving honest commanders struggling against opponents who move and fire at impossible speeds.
In parallel, your official Discord has seen a surge of ban appeals from players who never tampered with their clients. One such appeal came from a user running the game through GeForce Now—an environment where local modification simply cannot occur—yet he were flagged as cheater. This disconnect between reality and your anti-cheat’s verdict undermines trust, and no one enjoys having hard-won progress wiped away by a false positive ban.
Adding to the chaos, intermittent server connectivity issues are causing mid-battle disconnects and crashes. We in community suspect that packet loss or partial desynchronization is occasionally misinterpreted by the anti-cheat engine as evidence of foul play, triggering abrupt bans or in-game penalties. This not only disrupts individual matches but fuels resentment across the entire player base.
Compounding these problems is the absence of an in-game replay system. Without the ability to review matches from another player’s perspective—verifying whether they actually saw the units they destroyed, or confirming that their score gains and unit deployments were legitimate—both developers and community volunteers are left with scant evidence when investigating suspicious behavior. Since not every player records each session, innocent participants have no easy way to document their side of the story, and seasoned moderators must sift through fragmented reports instead of clear, verifiable snapshots of gameplay.
To restore balance and confidence, I’d like to suggest a few concrete measures that have proven effective in other competitive titles:
1. Server-Authoritative State Validation. Move all core game logic—scoring, unit statistics, and respawn mechanics—onto the server. Clients should act purely as input/output terminals, reporting only player intentions (movement commands, target selections) rather than final state data. This shift eliminates the primary avenue for direct manipulation.
2. Cryptographic Checksums and Rolling Hashes. For any data that must travel between client and server, employ secure hashes and rolling nonces to ensure packets cannot be replayed or altered en route. Modern protocols make this overhead negligible while drastically improving integrity.
3. Adaptive Desynchronization Recovery. Implement a lightweight rollback system or state reconciliation routine to remedy transient network hiccups without imposing bans. By periodically snapshotting authoritative game state and re-syncing lagging clients, you can distinguish true cheats from lag-induced anomalies.
4. Third-Party Anti-Cheat Integration. Consider partnering with some such software providers. These platforms offer kernel-level integrity checks, heuristic monitoring, and rapid update cycles—features that would bolster your own detection algorithms without reinventing the wheel.
5. Transparent Ban-Appeal Workflow. Establish a clearly documented process for disputed bans, complete with human oversight. An appeals form that records session logs, reconnection history, packet-capture evidence, and—once implemented—replay files will give your moderators the context they need to overturn false positives swiftly.
I understand these proposals represent significant architectural work, but the payoff—in elevated player trust, a thriving user base, and fewer support tickets—is considerable. Broken Arrow has the potential to stand among the great real-time strategies of our time. Ensuring a robust, accurate anti-cheat system is essential to that ambition.
Could you please share any plans or timelines you have for tackling these challenges? Are there specific milestones in your roadmap where server-side validation, replay functionality, or middleware integration might appear? Any insight into upcoming improvements would be greatly appreciated by those of us still committed to commanding Broken Arrow’s battlefields honorably.
Thank you for your attention and for all you’ve done to bring this thrilling strategy experience to life. I look forward to your response—and to the day when every victory in Broken Arrow is won on equal footing.
I hope you’ll forgive the directness of this message—I write out of growing concern for the state of fair play in our strategy community. Over the past days, it’s become painfully clear that the client-side handling of critical gameplay variables has opened the door to rampant cheating. Scores, unit fire-rates, respawn timers—these numbers are all entirely at the mercy of unverified data packets sent from the player’s machine. Bad actors exploit this flaw to wildly inflate their performance, leaving honest commanders struggling against opponents who move and fire at impossible speeds.
In parallel, your official Discord has seen a surge of ban appeals from players who never tampered with their clients. One such appeal came from a user running the game through GeForce Now—an environment where local modification simply cannot occur—yet he were flagged as cheater. This disconnect between reality and your anti-cheat’s verdict undermines trust, and no one enjoys having hard-won progress wiped away by a false positive ban.
Adding to the chaos, intermittent server connectivity issues are causing mid-battle disconnects and crashes. We in community suspect that packet loss or partial desynchronization is occasionally misinterpreted by the anti-cheat engine as evidence of foul play, triggering abrupt bans or in-game penalties. This not only disrupts individual matches but fuels resentment across the entire player base.
Compounding these problems is the absence of an in-game replay system. Without the ability to review matches from another player’s perspective—verifying whether they actually saw the units they destroyed, or confirming that their score gains and unit deployments were legitimate—both developers and community volunteers are left with scant evidence when investigating suspicious behavior. Since not every player records each session, innocent participants have no easy way to document their side of the story, and seasoned moderators must sift through fragmented reports instead of clear, verifiable snapshots of gameplay.
To restore balance and confidence, I’d like to suggest a few concrete measures that have proven effective in other competitive titles:
1. Server-Authoritative State Validation. Move all core game logic—scoring, unit statistics, and respawn mechanics—onto the server. Clients should act purely as input/output terminals, reporting only player intentions (movement commands, target selections) rather than final state data. This shift eliminates the primary avenue for direct manipulation.
2. Cryptographic Checksums and Rolling Hashes. For any data that must travel between client and server, employ secure hashes and rolling nonces to ensure packets cannot be replayed or altered en route. Modern protocols make this overhead negligible while drastically improving integrity.
3. Adaptive Desynchronization Recovery. Implement a lightweight rollback system or state reconciliation routine to remedy transient network hiccups without imposing bans. By periodically snapshotting authoritative game state and re-syncing lagging clients, you can distinguish true cheats from lag-induced anomalies.
4. Third-Party Anti-Cheat Integration. Consider partnering with some such software providers. These platforms offer kernel-level integrity checks, heuristic monitoring, and rapid update cycles—features that would bolster your own detection algorithms without reinventing the wheel.
5. Transparent Ban-Appeal Workflow. Establish a clearly documented process for disputed bans, complete with human oversight. An appeals form that records session logs, reconnection history, packet-capture evidence, and—once implemented—replay files will give your moderators the context they need to overturn false positives swiftly.
I understand these proposals represent significant architectural work, but the payoff—in elevated player trust, a thriving user base, and fewer support tickets—is considerable. Broken Arrow has the potential to stand among the great real-time strategies of our time. Ensuring a robust, accurate anti-cheat system is essential to that ambition.
Could you please share any plans or timelines you have for tackling these challenges? Are there specific milestones in your roadmap where server-side validation, replay functionality, or middleware integration might appear? Any insight into upcoming improvements would be greatly appreciated by those of us still committed to commanding Broken Arrow’s battlefields honorably.
Thank you for your attention and for all you’ve done to bring this thrilling strategy experience to life. I look forward to your response—and to the day when every victory in Broken Arrow is won on equal footing.
