EnEsCe's ping fraud.

[Farah]

So a few days ago, myself, pluck, mar77a and a few other people had noticed an inconsistency in pings in EnEsCe's servers. This issue was raised on soldatforums, which lead to a bunch of things which is explained in the post below.

What is this post about?

The problem:
A few days ago Farah created a thread on Soldatforums when he noticed that EnEsCe's servers were acting weird.
http://forums.soldat.pl/index.php?topic=35052.0 (thread deleted by enesce)
The issue was that the ingame pings were about 50 ms lower then the actual ping.
People from germany had pings of 50 to North American servers which by itself raised suspicion.

However EnEsCe said that this has nothing to do with servermodification and that the TS ping is the same like the ingame ping.
He said that he also blocked ICMP requests because of attacks which ping his servers before attacks. Thats why it isn't possible to determine the real ping that way.

There was also the question of why  didn't he add Selfkill as server host to the soldatservers readme.
EnEsCes answer was that he didn't get noticed by anyone on Sefkill to do that.
FLAB wrote that he added Selfkill to the readme.txt but enesce overwrote it accidentally
and should possibly commit more often to avoid similar stuff from happening.
Similar to the unzip-text, no mentioning of other hosts at all. http://clip2net.com/clip/m184/1246405196-clip-22kb.png

EnEsCe also noted that he should be respected for his work did for free because he was faced
with hate towards him and his position from some forum members.


My intention is not to annoy anyone. If you are offended by this you are free to contact me and discuss it in a friendly way.

This is not about flaming and bashing EnEsCe so please don't do it.
This is about how the truth of the issue we faced a day ago possibly looks like and nothing more.


NOTE: I (Shoozza) tried to contact EnEsCe but as I could read from quotes he decided to ignore me which is sad and doesn't help to resolve the issue.
My intention is not to make him look bad and I tried to help him to get out of this in a good way by telling the truth.

I'll show you the facts some people and I myself have found out when we were chatting for a few hours.

Facts:

EnEsCe said:
    Pings are calculated by the client and it's not possible to change them.
    TS ping is the same as ingame ping
    ICMP request blocks are there because people ping before they attack his server.

EnEsCe deleted the thread about his server ping issue two days later with no valid reason
(which was said by the mod of the forum xurich)
"Removed topic "Deleted - ID:35052" from "General Discussions" Today at 03:42:06 am EnEsCe Administrator 202.191.9.225"
and
Removed topic "" from "Trash Bin" Today at 03:42:20 am EnEsCe Administrator 202.191.9.225
This has been confirmed by jrgp posting the modlogs above.
http://i39.tinypic.com/2e0o7qr.png

This could be seen as censorship and admin position abuse.

Lobby ping is higher than the ingame ping.
(It is possible ot look up the ping in the Lobby when requesting serverlist)

EnEsCe's TS Server ping is higher than ingame ping
(you need to try it a few times until TS ping stops rising, this is caused by a bug in TS)
(http://img.imagedash.com/Zm9b.png )
(http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/9650/63309548.png )

EnEsCe has the resources and abilties to modifiy the soldatserver.exe freely since he has access to the source code of soldatserver.

Beanjo attached the soldatserver executeable EnEsCe was using on his eu server which shows lower ping ingame than  the unmodified one and said that he also noticed lower pings with that file.

Toumaz tested the modified binary and confirmed that pings were lower then with the normal server binary.

Shoozza could modify the soldatserver 2.6.5 binary to display ping 0, 16, 666 or any other common ping for  all players which rises up the question why EnEsCe said that its not possible.

(A few players joined the modified server i made and confirmed that it is possible to change the server binary to display lower/higher pings). Here are two screenshots which were initially taken to illustrate the inconsistency noticed as a basis for creating the topic:
http://your-images.org/pics/f3c0a00ab897a4dff8e58c6ced6fcefa.jpg
http://your-images.org/pics/bc0b8c05a972e878283abdd07b208f56.jpg

Shoozza found out that the modded server has asm code for reducing the ping which looks like this [asm, IDA]:

mov     ecx, ds:dword_8142E98                ; move ticks in ecx
sub     ecx, [edx+eax*4-28h]                       ; subtract something from them
imul    eax, [ebp+var_28], 0C105h            ; get addy where we will save ticks to
mov     ds:dword_82F7DDF[eax], ecx       ; save ticks
imul    eax, [ebp+var_28], 0C105h            ; get addy of ticks again
cmp     ds:dword_82F7DDF[eax], 5          ; compare if its 5
jle     short loc_80E7AF3                             ; jump to other code when its <= 5
imul    eax, [ebp+var_28], 0C105h            ; get addy of ticks
sub     ds:dword_82F7DDF[eax], 3           ; subtract 3 from ticks and save it

which is somewhat like this in delphi:
if ticks > 5 then
begin
  ticks := ticks - 3;
end;

and something like this in C
if(ticks > 5)
{
    ticks -= 3;
}


This is what Enesce had to say about the whole issue:

"Shoozza is able to modify the soldatserver and possibly modded it to gain access to the soldat sourcecode."  He supposedly threatened EnEsCe for the soldatsource and would not get it as a result.

(3:53am) (SpiltCoffee) <SpiltCoffee> That's just gonna make people think you are doing it...
(3:53am) (SpiltCoffee) <EnEsCe> I dont care anymore. They employ the services of hackers to create false binaries (I wouldnt be surprised if Shoozza was the one that created it for them); so its not worth the effort to me.

What does this all mean? After deleting the thread in soldatforums after beanjo posted the binary EnEsCe used to reduce pings of players pings higher than 100, he still tries to save face by claiming that that the people who made this issue public faked the binary and are trying to make him look bad. The reason that this defence does not hold water is because  you can add resources to change a binary's size - but in this case the code was changed, which is almost impossible to do.

This post was compiled using etherpad by a bunch of people who had different insights into the issue in #Shoozza.

[14:24:43] <Poop> Farah in the thread post that if you post stupid shit in this thread poop will ban you for a week

[Mrpluckpluck]

Well so far there is a huge amount of evidence against EnEsCe. So far the only defence he has managed to construct is to claim that Shooza is creating the Binaries that were posted on the soldat forums that EC used while running his 1.4.2 servers. However that does not explain why his servers have a sudden ping reduction once a player has a ping of over 100ms, and he also has no evidence whatsoever for this being the case.

His persistence with deleting topics on soldat forums makes him look even more guilty.

[xst1le]

MM should make soldat open source. I mean this shit is just ridiculous

[Poop]

Unless the entire soldat scene is mired in a conspiracy against Enesce, there is no chance that Shooza made the binaries, because Beenjo is the one that posted it, and he had shown/talked about that binary with chariot about a week ago apparently (Before the thread was even made).

The important things here are the following:

1. Enesce defrauded his customers and abused his position as soldat developer to artificially lower pings on his own servers. Not only is this pathetic in and of itself, it is also illegal because people are paying for his servers.

2. Enesce has shown an escapist attitude before full proof was posted, and has acted like a child for this most part in the whole issue. He was saying shit like "Why do you guys disrespect me after all I have done for soldat... I have spent $5000 on soldat and never made enough profit to buy a beer" etc etc bullshit bullshit.

3. After the proof was posted, Enesce is now claiming that he is being framed or some other nonsense,  and he deleted the entire thread on soldat forums.

[Spec Ops]

The deleting of that thread was the last bit of proof I needed but its not very likely anything will come of this unless MM himself does something. Otherwise the end of soldat could be near.

[Leygolas]

haha internet. serious business.

so he made the ping of his server's look better so people go buy them?

[xilef]

I also noticed the ping irregularitys before but i thought they just rent some superserver. Even though the lag was equal to any other servers with worse ping.

I'm not a lawyer but i doubt he can be charged for doing anything like that.
The way he acted is really disappointing...

[PQ]

Even if the soldatserver is fake.. http://img.imagedash.com/Zm9b.png

Google cache attached. multiple posts are missing.

[mar77a]

Needless to say our server sponsor will be replaced, most likely with soldatcentral and u13 servers.

[Grishnak]

I wounder if anyone has contacted MM and brought this to his attention. Mebey everyone should do it, and get his ass kicked off the dev team? Because if he is doing this to his server binarys, who knows what hes going to do to the game its self, or the other server binarys?


Edit:

Apparently linking to this topic on SF just caused me to get a 4 day ban for Continuing in flaming or defamation.
How is it defamation if its true, and he deletes any topic about it? Sounds like I need to create a few more Accounts and spam this link. > As its impossible to ban me with my hugely dynamic IP, unless ofc they want to ban half of the east coast of the US hahaa

[]{ing]

I think everyone thats concerned about this should just e-mail MM with the link to this topic or the pasted text from the topic and what they think about it, maybe it will get his attention.

[Mrpluckpluck]

MM is already aware of the situation, he read the entire thread last night just before it was deleted, so he knows what happened. Spamming him with the link will just annoy him with no real gain, I'm guessing he is quite busy on other things and deciding what to do about EnEsCe in this situation may take some time....

[Farah]

also i was perma banned from sf for posting this topic

so eC is pretty much guilty.

[Mrpluckpluck]

Well 'mysteriously' after a year of getting 83-100 ping in-game on enesces servers I now get 150ms in-game (which is what it should be at since the latency for me to EC's servers is 155ms).

So now presumably EC is no longer faking the pings after he realised he got caught....

[Fubister]

wouldn't even expect it.. but in let's look on it in reality, can we do anything about it? he is a soldat developer..