Dealing with cheaters/hackers - Need advice

[MustangSVT]

Hi there. I'm looking for some advice on how to deal with some players that are trying to cheat on my server. What I am trying to find out is how I can make use of the "CD Banned Behaviour" setting in the nwn2player.ini file. My understanding is that if this is set to 1, then any CD Key that's not on the list would not be able to connect to the server at all. I've played around with it, and had trouble getting it to work.

Is there anyone that has been able to get this to work, or knows of a similar technique to block out new CD-Keys? Or is there a plug in I can use to stop a new CD-key or new character from connecting onto the server in the first place?

[MustangSVT]

Basically, I'm looking for a technique to completely block someone using a new CD-Key onto the server. Perhaps this is possible through the XP_MySQL plug in?

[eeriegeek]

See this thread on the main Bioware site http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/199/index/7846801 for Funky's solution to this problem. There might be a thread on it here too, but I couldn't find it quickly. It should be fairly easy to modify the code so that it requires the server admin to enter the CD key if you wish to take that route.

[MustangSVT]

[PlasmaJohn]

Hi,

As an extreme measure, you might just want to block the IP range he's coming from at the router. Some large ISP's have multiple blocks so it might take a few tries if he can cause his address to get reallocated. Obviously you'll need to make sure that this won't affect any of your existing players.

Authentication hooks have been a big wishlist item for me but that doesn't seem to be an area that gets a lot of attention. Funky's scripts are ok, but like you noticed it only works once they've logged in. This gives them time to harass other players via tells, use exploits to work around scripted enforcement or cause other disruptions.

You might want to look at elven's MasterServer emulator project http://www.nwnx.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1810 . Note that it's for NWN, it may or may not work for NWN2. If it works it will reject a client connection very early in the connection negotiation.