Java What happened to Sentinel?

[cubelegit7621]

Sentinel has been the worst its ever been lately and there is a really simple reason for that



Sentinel was made to run alongside NCP (No Cheat Plus) which it used for several years before being removed in the end of 2022 for seemingly no reasons
The state Sentinel is in at the moment is absolutely horrible and has definitely seen better days

Sentinel was at its peak when Hulk_ developed it in 2021-2022 since then he has moved on and is currently working on Watchdog

After he left someone who i assume is @Redned removed No Cheat Plus from the Java edition of CubeCraft which is the worst update ive ever seen cube make since removing 1.8 support

a really simple solution to this problem is either readding the NCP that hulk made/configured to work well alongside Sentinel since sentinel because as i said earlier it was meant to run alongside NCP

Or adding the current Updated No Cheat Plus from Github which Hulk has contributed in

or of course completely throw NCP out of the window and use another anticheat solution which is not the best idea because sentinel would need ALOT of configuration to work alongside it
Hiring another Anticheat developer would not be a bad idea because it would improve the situation alot but if that is out of the budget

No cheat plus is the best option

If @Redned sees this post Please consider this as it will help the Java server ALOT :)
Thanks for reading!

 

[Matriox]

Can you explain what no cheat plus contributes to the anticheat capabilities of Sentinel? Is it an anti-cheat itself?

 

[Eli]

Can you explain what no cheat plus contributes to the anticheat capabilities of Sentinel? Is it an anti-cheat itself?

It's important to understand the difference between an anticheat and a cheat-detection system.

Anticheats like No Cheat Plus (NCP) are meant to block players from cheating. So for example, if someone with a hacked client tries to fly in the CubeCraft lobby and it doesn't work, it's likely because of an anticheat plugin like NCP.

On the other hand, Sentinel is a cheat-detection system, what that means is that it ALLOWS players to cheat, and after establishing whether the player is cheating or not (using a method called checks), it administrates a punishment.

As far as I know, NCP is widely regarded as one of the best anticheats out there for Minecraft, not only because it generally works, but it's also open source. Therefore, for a server like CubeCraft that also has a lot of other development costs, opting to use NCP as a baseline works well, and what their dedicated anticheat developers used to do is that they added additional custom features onto NCP, and further developed Sentinel.

However... NCP has not been officially updated for a couple of years, hence why they might've departed from using it. Or perhaps the anticheat developers and CubeCraft leadership expected they would be able to keep up with the cost of dedicated anticheat developers and decided to venture onto their own anticheat plugin? This of course, is all speculation.

To try and answer your question... the relationship between NCP and Sentinel was sort of symbiotic, both plugins carried out different tasks guided toward the same goal: getting rid of cheaters in CubeCraft. Whether or not the removal of NCP from the network was detrimental to the whole hacker situation in CubeCraft, is very unsure, since NCP has been a questionable option for an anticheat for some years now, and only someone from the Staff Team would be able to let us know.

Hiring another Anticheat developer would not be a bad idea because it would improve the situation alot but if that is out of the budget

It's strange to me why we currently have no anticheat developers working on CubeCraft, granted that four years ago the anticheat development team was the largest development team in the server. So one would assume it's an important branch of development. Something tells me there's just not a lot of trustworthy talent out there!

 

[cubelegit7621]

Can you explain what no cheat plus contributes to the anticheat capabilities of Sentinel? Is it an anti-cheat itself?

No cheat plus was used alongside sentinel for a few years before being removed in 2022 because of horrible decisions no cheat plus is the thing that made you rubberband/tp back if you flagged it sentinel is simply responsible for banning at a certain vl which you build up by flagging enough
nowadays anyone can just fly around at mach 10 with sentinel not caring a tall

It's strange to me why we currently have no anticheat developers working on CubeCraft, granted that four years ago the anticheat development team was the largest development team in the server. So one would assume it's an important branch of development. Something tells me there's just not a lot of trustworthy talent out there!

Reason is cube does not care about sentinel anymore
Bedrock sentinel is just as bad as the Java one
sadly funke elevated and hulk has been let go a while ago which sucks because they were pretty good at their job