Hellooooooo CubeCrafters,
It’s been a long time coming but I am very glad to finally be able to share something that we have been working on for a while, Sentinel. Yes, after months of development, testing and sitting silently on the network gathering data we’re finally ready to release Sentinel. In case you haven’t guessed Sentinel is our new anti-cheat.
It’s no secret that we grew very quickly in a very short period of time over the last few years and the downside to that was that we didn’t get time to implement every feature that we wanted as our players increased. This release marks the initial deployment of a completely new system for the detection of illegal client modifications.
OK, What is Sentinel?
What a great question! Sentinel is an in-house written system that is always listening to what players are doing and how they’re playing. It has a large number of detections that work together to detect any abnormal behaviour from a player which can then lead to identification of illegal modifications.
Great! Hackers get banned straight away right!
Not exactly. To help prevent a constant cat and mouse game between ourselves and the mod developers we just log that a certain username is to be banned. This is common practice in many other games and on many other Minecraft Servers. Upon initial release we will be running ban waves on a daily schedule and in the future we will be increasing the frequency. It's not impossible that in the future we may move to instant bans.
Wait, you've made a system and you’re just going to release it?
No. As I mentioned above, Sentinel has been running on our network for quite a while initially logging data for us to look at then aiding staff members in locating cheaters across the network. This release contains just a small section of the detection methods we have after all, science fiction is always telling us what happens when you let Artificial Intelligence run amok.
Sounds good! Anything else I need to know?
2 things. They’re really small and will affect about 0.00000001% of you.
1) We’ll be changing our knock-back in PvP just a tad. It will make sure that we are correctly identifying players who are cheating. The difference between pure vanilla and what you will get on CubeCraft is so small you shouldn’t notice it.
2) Butterfly Clicking is now a punishable offence on the server. Now in 1.9 PvP butterfly clicking is completely pointless so this isn’t a major change, just something to be aware of.
Butterfly clicking is the action of using multiple fingers to click the same button on your mouse. As you can see above it allows you to do so very quickly. This means that to us it looks like you're clicking way faster than you should be and will get detected as an offence. Butterfly clicking isn't really very useful in 1.9+ any way due to the changes that Mojang made to combat.
Cool! This is just the main network or 1.8 too?
For now we are actively rolling Sentinel out to our main network (1.9+). On our 1.8 network Sentinel will still be gathering data as there are a fair few differences in some of the core Minecraft mechanics.
How long will the bans be for?
In the short term we will be keeping ban times shorter. This allows Sentinel to get used to actual players. It also gives our community a chance to disable any modifications they have before getting long bans. If you have any illegal modifications in your client disable them.
Wait, even OptiFine?!
No. Any modifications that are on our “Allowed Mods List” are fine to use on our server. As a rule of thumb if it is a cosmetic modification and doesn’t change the way you play then it should be fine. However the only mods we can guarantee work fine are this on the “Allowed Mods List”.
We all make mistakes though, Sentinel will too!
Absolutely. Just rarely. We have every confidence in Sentinel because we have been testing it for so long but we know out of the hundreds of thousands of players and millions of sessions we get a day that there may be some false positives. If you are wrongly banned you will still be able to appeal. During your appeal you will have the option to flag the appeal as a “False Positive”. It should be noted though that when we are dealing with the appeal that it was not a false positive you will be permanently banned from the server.
I hope that you’re all as excited for this as we are. There's a long road ahead of us as we continue to improve Sentinel and I look forward to you all joining us. I’d also like to say thank you to the person who has been putting a huge amount of work in to this project @CrazymanJR.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an Egg I need to protect.
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