Geofiltering is bad actor status?

Games Halo Infinite
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I am referring to Unysheks recent tweet about geofiltering. John Junyszek on Twitter: “@iSpiteful I just confirmed that this was because of players geofiltering in your matches. That is not intended and the team is working to address this quickly due to the rough experience these bad actors are creating for everyone else in the match. We’ll share even more info soon :+1:” (Cant include the link for some reason)

I myself have not used this trick because my router is too basic for me to do so, but if I were able, I would have. That being said, if what Unyshek said is true and geofiltering is causing issues, I would like to know exactly how that is possible.

It is my understanding that geofiltering is just telling your PC or router to not make a connection to certain servers. I do not see how that would cause high ping to happen to players, since you are being matched with people on the servers that you have whitelisted.

Can anyone explain it to me? And also, is this going to be a bannable offense? The thread that told me about geofiltering, on reddit, has over 1.4k upvotes. Is this going to result in over a thousand people being banned for something they had no idea was causing issues?

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You can find a few posts with informationin this thread:
https://forums.halowaypoint.com/t/plz-deal-with-the-gio-filtering-cheaters/489420/37

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Thank you for that link, but it really didnt help me understand why using it is bad. Far too many people using opinions instead of facts.

The only takeaway I can see is that its “not officially supported” which is not a good answer, since this has been used since MCC launch.

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I actually laughed when he called people geo filtering bad actors, when it’s the game’s fault people are resorting out of desperation to prevent high ping matchups because there is no server selection option in-game. Also, Unyshek’s reply about banning cheaters saying to just report them with how terrible their report system is and tickets not getting viewed for weeks/months. Even if you can get through their report system cheaters will ruin countless games before the ticket gets to them. Just shows how out of touch they are about the issues affecting the game.

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What it also shows is that their studio is not working together and instead is scattered which it’s no wonder the end result of this product is this. I thought I was being ignored with my support tickets not to long ago, guess it was just their poor customer service as usual. Sad… my ping most matches is 60-120 and when it is an East coast server the games desync and lag does the rest to provide a sub par experience. Keep pouring the money into them and making excuses everyone! Remember it’s not selfish because YOU love the series. Lmao

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I’ve done it for years. I’m from the EU and 9 times out of 10 I’ll be put on an american server which for the most part blows the entire point of playing when at such a disadvantage. So I started. It’s not really even cheating, it works just the same as the region select on MCC.

It’s more their problem than ours, if they would give people the option then it wouldn’t be happening and to be quite honest if it’s playing on 100+ ping or not playing at all, I would choose the 2nd option without a doubt.

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I don’t get it either. If this is for competitions then the extra scrutiny sounds deserved but who is losing when someone geo-filters? Isn’t this done to make sure that players have a good connection? Someone also might do this to make sure that they connect to a different server with more players on it for faster matches.

Because this is about connections it might be possible to do this without even modifying or injecting anything into the game itself.

Edit: I figured it out. It’s bad because the players not geo-filtering get stuck playing a match on a server they have bad ping with.

https://twitter.com/Unyshek/status/1485800469096108035?cxt=HHwWhsCo-fHpz54pAAAA

Kait0s! @Kait0sXD Jan 24, 2022
. . . . the way it works in Infinite is that, because you can be matched with any server, if there is 1 player doing it and 7 others not, that 1 player will force the match to be played on whatever server he set to. Making others have bad ping.
That’s why the game needs a server selector ASAP. I’m from Brazil, the only way to play on my regional server is if i queue with 4 people from here (doesn’t work 100%) or if i geofilter. Otherwise i’ll have to play with 130ms on NA or even worse 250+ on EU/Asia…

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That makes sense. Thank you!

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Yes. The way i heared people explain it, they are alterering something in the game files. This is hacking and when caught you can get a perma ban for that. And since it’s hacking, you could technicly even get your xbox locked from playing online (this isn’t done for cheating, but could be done for hacking).

Although i do agree with you that there should be server selection, this argumentation here is laughable. A bad player could use this same argumentation and say '“it’s the games fault i play with way better players and i have to use this aimbot/wallhack to have a fair chance”. It’s simply not allowed, so if you use a cheat/hack to still do it, you are a bad actor. You disagreeing that it’s not in the game doesn’t allow you to put it in yourself.

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Ok, first of all that is not the same thing. Obviously anyone who uses aimbot or wallhacks should be banned. The problem here is the matchmaking is so bad it puts you in 100+ ping ranked matches putting you at a clear disadvantage, I am on East coast and even got 180 ping games. How does that happen in a game that just came out with a big player base? Aussie players being forced in games with NA players getting 200 ping games, if they geo filter they get sub 50 ping like they are supposed to if the game was matchmaking correctly.

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It’s both something that is not allowed and hurt other players…

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Just another way 343 wants to punish people because they won’t (can’t?) fix their game.

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It’s not altering game files, they are windows files, your pc couldn’t connect to the servers even outside the game

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For Xbox players to do this they need to make changes on their router, not their Xbox.
It’s not hacking and doesn’t have anything to do with their Xbox. They just set their router so it will only connect to specific regions.

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The way it works is not in the way it was explained to you, none of the game’s files are touched. The list of the Halo Azure servers are publicly available online for each individual region. People are pasting those servers IPs in their hosts file and removing the servers closest to them. For example if you are from NA, paste all the server locations outside of NA in your hosts file in Windows and it blocks your computer from connecting to them. Same thing on Xbox but they have to put those same servers on their router settings. It’s the same thing a server selection would do if they had one in-game. Never put them in games outside of their selected region.

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Standby was also a bannable offense… and that was literally just a button that a few select routers had on it.

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This is the same argument shoplifters use when they get caught. “These big retailers aren’t hurt by my shoplifting!”

Why should you get special treatment, huh?

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I make no claims on whether 343 will ban people for it. Just clarifying that it is by no means “hacking.”

If 343 does ban people for it, then it is just another way 343 punishes people for their own incompetence. 343 could put region selection into Halo Infinite, just like they have done in MCC, and people wouldn’t be forced to do things like this just to have a playable game.

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This is such utter horse shoot.

Its also super contradictory.

Matchmaking finds 8 players… any 8 players and then sticks them on a server closest to the majority of the players. If I in the UK happen to be searching at the same time as 7 Americans, ill get put on a 200+ ping where I’m cannon fodder and rubber banding back and forth.

Without geofiltering, I’m more or less guaranteed a high ping, high latency, laggy experience. I didn’t even know what a geo fence was until I got sick of playing on servers based in 1995.

Now you are telling me I’m a back actor, cause I don’t want to lag?

Matchmaking is at fault here, pure and simple. Not me.

If you are fixing the matchmaking so that it prioritises the search for players close to me then that’s fine… if it means me having to play in 200+ ping lobbies however, I’m done.

Does it suck that’s others will get a high ping if I’m geo filtering? Most certainly, is it my fault? Hell no, its matchmaking mismatching players from different regions. I’m not the bad actor, whoever set up the matchmaking parameters is.

Most other games have an option to select your closest datacenter, or its determined automatically. Those geofencing are simply enabling an option 343 were too lazy to implement.

Just another sign of 343s ineptness at making working title, glad I read about this before looking at the new store and potentially spending money on this trash tier studio.

This is very much potentially the nail in the coffin for me and many other users that dont want to play on transatlantic servers. Watch that playerbase fall further once this is implemented without a way of catering to those that dont want to game like its 2001.

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Given that someone asks how this works and how this might affect others. Lets do a quick rundown on how Matchmaking and connecting to servers works (the names, etc. are examples to help in understanding and not the actual ones).

All devices on the internet communicate based on IP-adresses. Those are hard to remember and might need to change over time given that they are a technical detail. So you have the Domain Name System (DNS) which can be queried by computers with a name (e.g. eu-server-22-halo.343i.com) and it will reply with the IP address for it.

What people are doing when they change the hosts file on Windows or the DNS entries on their router is they redirect that name to another IP address (it’s a local change, so it doesn’t affect people on other PCs or in other home networks). Given that there is no halo server at that IP address the connection attempts will fail and the game assumes that the server is down.

So what now happens is the following. The game performs matchmaking (taking into account the current skill factor, team sizes, region) to put together a lobby. Then it finds a free server to host the game and tell all player’s devices (consoles, PCs) to connect to it. Now if there are 7 US players and 1 EU player and the one EU player has the DNS entries changed he won’t be able to connect to a US server. The player can’t join and so the matchmaking system starts looking for a server that all players can connect to and that will be in the EU.

The original issue is of course that players from different regions are getting put into the same lobby to begin with. As long as it does this someone will always have a bad connection. And that’s also where this differs from server select inside the game. That setting can be seen by the matchmaking system. It prevents those mixed lobbies in the first place.

Now where it could get interesting is if you put people from two regions into the same lobby who both have the DNS entries altered. In that case there won’t be any server that everyone can connect to. It’s possible that this is indeed connected to the BTB issues as with more players it gets more and more likely that the issue of mutually exclusive filters occurs.

It’s hard to block this on the servers though as there might be legitimate issues connecting to servers as well. Game files themselves don’t get tempered with and connection errors can result from loads of different conditions (inside your local network, on the internet itself and in the datacenter hosting the servers).

Hope this explanation helps. I cannot guarantee that all processes inside matchmaking and reconnecting work exactlly as described but it’s the most likely implementation.

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