Maphack won’t stop, it’s intrinsic to their engine, since the same maphack can be used in CoH or any other game developed by Relic.
I’ve investigated so far and the conclusion is they must change their whole engine if they want to address this, or implement a VAC like in other steam games. This won’t happen because they have been suffering from it since CoH and they haven’t addressed it.
I digged a lot into forums about hacking and reversal engineering, and I’ve found a lot of shit right there. I will just say that more people than you think uses it (just being cautious, not blatantly detectable).
Before my investigation I thought that in team games near 20-30% of my games there was someone hacking, after investigating, I think in 80% of them there’s someone doing it. I’ve also analyzed the way people using hacks being cautious and I’ve discovered somethig pretty interesant. They NEVER explore properly the map. If you see a replay and there’s someone that, despite don’t being looking at the fog of war, or bases, just don’t follow a normal pattern to explore the map, then ding ding, he’s maphacking.
Why? Obvious. They got the map full revelead (despite they can deactive it and return to normal map), so they just go around and when they see sheep, they in a disguised way go for them.
Other way to detect them is in the transition from feudal to castle age. Depending of the game, the gold or other resources in their bases may have been exhausted, so they go to other gold vein or deers or whatever but… Have they explored this zone? Then you changed to not revealed map, and you can see a lot of villagers go directly to unexplored zone(where will they go?), then taaa taaaaan! A gold vein! wow, he must be so good if he can know where are resources without even expore, sure? Well, no, he’s just maphacking.
There are tons of ways to detect it. I’ve also thought about developing a simple computer vision algorithm that can be inserted into game code to check each players map. It seems like it’s easy to inject some custom code into the game, because much of the variables are stored into client side.
They can also implement this algorithm (I don’t know if this is legal to execute a thing that constantly checks, but I think in other games it’s just called VAC), but as all the other things they can execute client side, it will be spotted by hackers and took down from the game code just modifying some memory addresses. You know EVERYTHING that is in client side, can be manipulated.
Some anti cheats are so aggressive and they analyze portions of game code changing the encryption randomly so it is harder to get bypassed.
Since they must implement a third party anti cheat or change the way their engine works related with some client side operations it performs right now, I don’t think they can solve this, at least not in short-term. They have done a few attempts to make it more difficult to bypass, but with the last “big update” where they added a few layers of security, I’ve found that hackers just took 3 days to bypass the maphack.
Also, what I can’t understand is the silence among these additions to the game. No patch and no communication has been related to these additions to the game, so community still thinks that developers are doing nothing about maphacking, but that’s not true, in every big update they added or changed their way to detect hackers.
Sadly, is not enough…