admin (1 ship allowed per player unless you donate)???

A giant 300-500m wide face of the dad from Wild Thornburry's just appeared near my factions fleet and swiped the whole thing out of the sky... There were no engines, no power source, and nothing else except what looked like heavy armor blocks. It wiped out everything. Was named
"admin (1 ship allowed per player unless you donate)" but has no antenna or beacon to project the words.. they were just in the middle of the mass of blocks. Wouldn't mind getting an answer to what happened.

 

Actually can't find one mention or bit of info on servers being hackable by outside sources. So I'm starting to make an assumption that a server admin pulled some kind of god-ability to destroy my factions entire fleet. And if there was some rule that I missed about only 1 ship per player, we were only up to 6 or 7 ships, so with 13 members, we seem to have been griefed by an actual server admin. Doesn't seem like Shadecrest behavior. That's not what you represent through your name is it?

 

Sounds very odd.

I don't know much about the Space Engineers server, but I can categorically say that this won't have been done by ShadeCrest staff.

I'm sure CyberVic will investigate when he gets a chance.

 

This is a hacker, reports of them on Keens forum (link below) where they somehow spawn a large flat wall made up of some image and attach a block ship with thrusters to it and fly around, they know exactly where everyones stuff is. Glad I blueprint my ships every night before I log off.

http://forum.keenswh.com/threads/hacker-sighting.7357118/

 

I would like to suggest we go whitelist. Server is attached to a steam group and anyone within the steam group is approved to play on the server which sadly limits who can play. Hopefully we could find everyone we know that has been playing this past week or so and add them.

Also, any chance the server does daily backups?

 

Let me start by saying that the loss of your fleet is very unfortunate, but this might be the funniest thing I've ever heard of.

Sent from the Space Phone.

 

I'd second this. The issue likely comes from the fact that space engineers seems to do almost all computation client side and let the server worry about updating clients and merging the different interpretations of what the current game state is. This means that a fix for this exploit is probably several weeks away, not to mention that Keen has show very little interest in the issue. This is not to say that they don't care about it as they could be working on it quietly, but they have not shown any hints that they are aware that these attacks have been happening.

 

I'm sure it is for someone who did not spend a whole week building a ship. I'd rather lose it in battle than some troll.

My guess is Keen hasn't bothered wasting their time on patching it since they are redoing the netcode which is currently in the works. So we just have to suffer through till they release this new netcode.

 

I would also like to mention the guys name was Dag that did it

 

We can't say for certain that Dag pulled the act off... There were 5-6 other people on the server that I was not familiar with, and there were people coming and going during the 5 or 10 minutes of the attack.

 

Sigh, I don't have a lot of time to deal with this but I assure you whoever put that there was a giant troll, there is no policy like that.

As far as making it white listed, it's the kind of thing which kills servers. I'd advise hiding your base better, but I can ban people who need banning and willing to make more admins if we need more people online more often who can ban people.

I can (using admin tools) restore your ships the best I can from backup. If you know the last time your feet was around I can grab a backup and then restore your stuff. It is clunky and takes time but I can do it.

 

If the community wants to go whitelist we can do it, but getting new players is much harder when you switch to white listing.

 

Also if the community wants we can do a massive rollback in combination of white listing if a lot of people got hit (seems to be the case after seeing the other thread made by Bio). I just put aside the backups from the last week so we can pick whatever backup we want as a point in sand to roll back to. In terms of if we made it private, we would tie it once again to the ShadeCrest steam group.

 

From what i've gathered about these hackers, there is no hiding from them, they somehow know where to go. They appear to be growing in numbers. I understand whitelisting would stop new comers, but so does having your ship wiped out. Imagine if you played for a month straight and had the same thing happen in such a manner. That right there would probably kill most peoples morale and they go back to single player or not play at all.

The new netcode could very well stop this behavior for all we know, so whitelisting could be just a temporary fix until then.

I went offline at around 9:30pm EST and everything was still fine, what is the closest to that of a backup do you have?
Restoring a backup kinda defeats the dynamics of the game as we all will have to accept loss at some point to other players, but I feel these circumstance are an exception in that it wasn't done in a manner that is within reason.

 

Alverni Co ships are still working but the backup station was the only way to spawn and players are stuck in t mode

 

The "players stuck in T mode" issue is probably something that is not just our server, probably related to the new model update for characters. I removed all skins / animations, so that's all vanilla at this point, nothing else I can do. I'd expect a hotfix for that tomorrow.

Honestly I guess at this point it makes sense to whitelist the server and roll the server back to a previous backup.
I'm not going to care about creative though, that can stay public. It's for temporary collaboration only anyhow and people should use blueprints.

 

T mode is fixed thank you for that, so I am just wondering when are you going to roll back the server?

 

Would be nice if people let me know when is a good time to roll back to. We do backups twice a day for 10 days. What day and approximate time (afternoon or night) do you want me to restore back to?

 

Bio said it happened around 7-7:30 pst, so what ever the closest backup is just before that.

 

Vic, they simply appeared roughly 100m off the station and flew at us. Prior to that the face appeared 100km away by another one of our other ships and demolished that... it was a two stage attack involving spawning in close proximity. That was after spending 4 hours moving all of our equipment to hide the station and ships from pirates who'd been given coordinates by a member of my faction I had kicked before the move.