I'm going to take a stab and see what I can do as far as cheating in the game goes, rather than get on one day to see someone who made an autoit script in combination with some other things to gain a massively unfair advantage. Who should I report any findings (and possible solutions) to? Meanwhile I'll update (vague) findings here.

Looks like the devs did a great job on this game, first attempt and nada, going a bit deeper now.

IIRC there have been aimbots.. someone wrote a script that would fire their rails at the moment they had the best chance of hitting. Again IIRC, he got banned permanantly. The devs are aware of most ways to cheat. If you manage to actually manipulate the packets going to and fro THAT would be a serious issue, but basics scripts and the like have been done.

If you do figure something out, DO NOT report it on the boards and please DO NOT use it. Use the bug report link on the sidebar to send a report to the devs, and fire off an email to a1k0n.

I'm not doing "scripting", but rather some stuff which is a tad more complicated / lower level. If I do find anything, it would be immediately reported to the devs only, I'd simply say "Found a xxxx cheat" here.

that rails thing no longer works as it's impossible...all players have "aimbots" so no point in trying to "up" it's ability as it won't do you much good. There are bots that know how to jump and fly and move and trade...but since the coding required to get them to work correctly is extremely hard...the bots are made for fun. Like romirez's bot where we would push it and it manange to find its way back on course to the station. Was really cool yes, but pointless since trade prices drop. SaguratuS, if you do find something of course report it, but if you come onto the IRC channel you may have some vets who can see if it can also be used in a worse sense.

Ohh yea if you do find a bug, of course use it :) See what you can do. If this was retail yes then dont use it, but since this is just testing and I doubt you have something that can make you endless money you can't really do too much damage. Experiment(to a degree). We have had a few bugs exploited beyond what should have been within reasonable limits. But that's okay, we are here to test, break, and smash so that when Vendetta goes retail, all these problems are fixed. :)

Thank you, SaguratuS. We need more testers like you, but please disregard StarFreeze's advice and please don't use any cheats you've found. Even though this is a beta, cheats throw off the balance of the game, and could lead to a necessary, but premature reset.
If you find an exploit, report it using the bug report form (not the forum! Please!), along with how you got there, what tools you used, what you can do, etc. Anything and everything will be tried post-release, so they'd like to nip as much of it in the bud as they can.

I know many of you players have programming background and other stuff. So any readers of this thread, what ctishman said applies to you too. Find anything that can lead to cheating/hacking and notify the devs through the system ctishman suggested.

No worries ctish, I have no interest in cheating, only the process of breaking the game. StarFreeze, as I understand you're the one who did the majority (if not all) of the coding - my hat is off to you, an average person would be lost when it came to chipping away at the memory in this game, and so far everything I've tested has been serverside. I've almost finished with trying to get somewhere via memory editing, then I'll move on to packet crafting. After that, it's time for some fun with softice =)

Edit - On a side note, I have yet to find a single game where I didn't discover some type of exploit, either small or large (everquest probably being the worst when it came to major exploits). So far it's looking up for vendetta to be the first if I get nowhere with packets/softice.

StarFreeze codes stuff in PHP. That's all I remember.
Heh, he's not in the developing team, either.

Ah, ok, somewhere I saw that he was the only one of the listed dev's, which is kind of (very) surprising for such a large game. I'm confident I can break the warp ability the simple way, so we'll see =)

This I've got to see. What's your in-game handle?

Why SaguratuS of course =)
anyways, I found can-warp integer, but it's going to take more than that. Moving on to packet crafting to see what exactly is server side and what is not.

SF acts like a dev, but he's far from one..heh..

Haha, anyways, this is where I say "cute" to vendetta, packets are [large cement truck drives by]. Unfortunately I'm not under linux at the moment due to my 6800 fan not working properly under it, so I'm running off an old xp install I had laying around. Looks like it might just be time to hardwire that fan to the psu =)

Meanwhile, time to get on the ye ol irc server.

Edit:
Meanwhile, I can't find this ye ol irc server, would anyone care to direct me?
Edit2: Nevermind, found it

Edited for heavy machinery - Ku Genin

Good work SaguratuS, have the devs shown any interest in your what you are doing so far? I've been considering analysing the packets myself for some time, but could never be bothered to actually start, and also was unsure if it'd result in a ban...

I think most client-side decisions/actions are sanity checked by the server... did you get the in-sector warp going?

IIRC, the devs have said that the packet stream is encrypted SOO. :) Trying to force packets in could be "interesting" LOL.

Packets are simply compressed, and in the future if they are encrypted, it would be quite simple to retreive the encryption key from the game. I've already talked to Incarnat regarding a few things, and sanity checks will be implemented later on before retail, which should solve the majority of any hacks that should arise.

/me bows to the quite obviously superior SaguratuS

To quote Kevin Mitnick, I respect your skills.

The compression is crazy. It's damned near impossible to extract stuff from it. And the server does take a rather good size bit of sanity checks. I tried injecting some packets, which were just copies of previous packets, before, and the server kicked me off. So it's got a bit in there. :P A bunch of us also played with decompilers awhile ago. That was mildly fun.

"Thank you, SaguratuS. We need more testers like you."
Seconded.

Anywho, I remember being told in IRC by a1k0n that Vendetta uses some kind of custom Blowfish encryption, if that helps at all.