There is a plague taking over minecraft servers across the world, It's not a loss of interest in the game, or p2w taking over. No, this is much worse, this plague is the ever evolving, and spread to people of all ages, This horrible plague is Hacked Clients, and If we don't work fast they will become too strong to stop.
Alright, I know i'm not one to complain about Sentinel and all, because i am very aware that the staff team is working so hard on it, but there is a serious issue. I decided after a very long break from SkyWars to give it another chance, and in my first 3 games, I faced 3 unique cheaters and played against all except for one of them in all three games. And these were not minimal hidden cheats, these were full on flying, teleporting, scaffolding, and bhopping clients. I have heard every excuse possible for why these people are not immediately banned by Sentinel, but there is honestly no excuse for any hacks this blatant. To combat this issue I have decided to come up with a few different options that could be used together or alone to combat this problem.
For this example I am going to talk about how the anticheat could become more sensitive to B-Hopping. B-Hopping is one of the oldest hacks in existence, and therefore has so many bypasses and backdoors making it very difficult to detect. I am going to assume that the Sentinel is using an SMAC-style bhop detection. This is the easiest anticheat possible to bypass because all you need to do is add a few non-perfect jumps into the sequence and suddenly it will no longer detect you. This could easily be fixed by starting a timer and counting the percentage of perfect jumps after a trigger (maybe 3-5 perfect jumps in a row). Now instead of counting a streak of perfect jumps it will check for a high percentage (60%+) of perfect jumps in a 5 second span. This would do a lot to reduce b-hoppers but would also lead to more false bans. Although this is annoying I feel like it would be a necessary change to improve gameplay on the server. (Note that this would be done with all cheats not just B-Hopping but I didn't want to bore everyone with technical stuff :p) With this comes option 1b, adding an appeals team.
I know, I know. Ew more staff roles nonononono. But! Hear me out, This team would be a group of trusted members that sort through the wave of appeals and filter out the blatant trolls or obvious hackers to lighten the load on the Moderators, I personally believe that this team should be kept private from the server to prevent bullying in-game if someone’s appeal gets denied. This job could also be a responsibility of Helpers because with the growing team size I believe that Helpers could take on more responsibilities.
As of writing this post the punishment track is: 7 day ban (Sentinel only) → 30 day ban → Permanent ban. I feel like the 7 day sentinel ban should be removed, why does it make a difference if an anticheat catches you or if a person does? Nothing! So why are you punished less if you are caught by the anti cheat. But because this makes the Permanent ban close in pretty fast, I feel like they should add a 3 month ban to the track. This would make the new punishment track: 30 day ban → 3 month ban → Permanent ban. By accelerating the punishment track it wouldn’t allow people to just wait out the 7 day ban so easily, a one month ban is a much more substantial punishment and would help discourage cheating. If you see this start your response with “moo”. With this I feel like there should be a second appeal possibility at 7 days where you are no longer saying that you didn't cheat but are not saying that you won't cheat again. There would be a downside to this tho, by bypassing the last 3 weeks of your first ban you will skip the 3 month ban and go straight to Perm Ban if caught cheating again, this would not be possible on a players second ban. I feel like this would substantially reduce the amount of people cheating to “try it out” or “mess around with friends”. Sadly I don't believe that this would help with people cheating with malicious intent. But would overall substantially reduce the cheating on the server.
Cheating on Cubecraft has gotten way out of hand and I feel like major changes need to be made. This server is not in a good place rn and even though all the stone ranks insist that unranked players being unable to vote is the reason that the server is losing popularity, I personally believe that it's the excess of cheaters. If either of the options are implemented i personally believe that this plague could be extinguished and cubecraft could return to its former glory.
