Abusing De-Sync to Crash Everyone!

Hello, for most of you who casually play the game you might have ran into a few crashes in multiplayer matches here and there that end with the result “out of sync” or “de-sync” error… you might have thought oh it’s just the game or perhaps it’s just your pc or whatever the case is but it is not.

Players are causing this desync crash on Purpose!

How do they do it?-
using simple game trainers, these usually work only in singe player however in multiplayer there are protection mechanisms that are put in place which crash the game if certain things are tampered with, these guys obviously know this and know the side effects of using this online however the side effects are actually what they need… read and write to memory game trainers, by a click of a button that changes a value to the game such as resources, unit health, etc which causes a sync crash for everyone.

How does de-sync work-
to keep a game protected from cheaters ruining the fun for everyone, age of empires franchise for many years follows a side server based system. (multiplayer only) when you join a match, you and everyone else in that game keeps a copy of everyone else’s game. The system is in place so if a player in the game decides to “hack” the game it wouldn’t make sense to everyone else in the game and cause a de-sync error crash (because the hacker had tempered with memory of the game which doesn’t make sense to everyone else’s copy of the game)

Solution/Suggestion for Relic-
remove your sync feature I’m sure there are many new alternatives its 2022

Solution/Suggestion for Community-
there isn’t any but we can mitigate it by few steps like

  1. play with people that have dignity
  2. play with friends you trust
  3. if you don’t have friends then gg
  4. hope Relic finds a solution

Thank you bye

4 Likes

would love to hear what you think about this

bumping this thread so devs can see

To be honest, I don’t get your point. According your orignal post AOE IV has a working feature to detect if someone tries to manipulate the state of a match. However, you want it to be removed!? Why? Shouldn’t they keep and even enhance it? For example trying to use it to decide whether certain players force de-syncs on purpose and finally ban them?

He is trying to suggest a solution…

you have just made up that they can use it to decide whether players for de-sync’s. To me that sounds very, very unlikely.

Then my post wasn’t clear. By enhancing I meant they could try to find a way to decide who is causing the de-sync. In team-games it could be checked whichs players reported game state doesn’t match up with the remaining players reported game states.

A solution for what problem? I really don’t understand the intention of the original post. That the game crashes if a de-sync appears (their current way to handle it)? Or that it is somehow possible to manipulate the state?

Ideally it is not possible to manipulate the game state. However, even then a check if the state of every player is in sync isn’t wrong, is it?

Fair enough. I only replied because your post just seemed quite rude and dismissive. I was trying to show you how it feels to have someone dismiss your ideas. Lets be kind to our fellow forum members.

Oh, then I apologize. This was not my intention.

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No worries, I am probably being a bit dramatic. I do get what you are saying and taking out the sync feature doesn’t seem like a great solution. I expect you are correct in saying it would be useful to help work out who the people are using this exploit.

Hopefully it is just a problem with the code or an oversight that can be patched out and we won’t have to worry about it anymore.

i was only making the point about de-sync how it works and whats causing it, as for solutions im not the dev to sit here and think of solutions just an opinion and im sure there are many others

they will need to fix this and maybe invest in an anti cheat instead of ■■■■■■ security checks

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Relic are you going to ban those synchack A Hole or not?
You were suspending people even with flaming/trolling in COH2 and did nothing to hackers here?

Wake up, it is mid Jan already, I don’t want anymore Christmas excuse.

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Wtf… Game is unplayable currently on European servers. I am trying to find a match since 1 h and so far didnt come up with 1 solid connection. Please fix this!

No need to bump, we see it. We are aware and working on it.

If you experience this, please do contact support.

Thanks, all!

1 Like