Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck(dev.epicgames.com) |
Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck(dev.epicgames.com) |
There should be no reason why I can't play online with Xbox and PlayStation players.
If they did, and you realized your game runs better on a real pc, you'd just defect and not beg/borrow/scam/hustle for a ps5 or new xbox (maybe for decent gpu still though).
You will take what they give you and be goddamn content with it. Unless you're Epic and even Sony gives up the GI Joe kung fu grip.
Fortunately my friends are PC gamers too so no locked down hardware in my house :)
That said, if I'm on a PS4 (a platform where cheating is much harder than PC) and the game is well populated, maybe I don't want to play against PC players, as I don't want cheaters.
There's also the mouse+keyboard vs pad thing for FPS games.
The pattern is that the player ahead doesn't want cross-platform and the one behind does. That makes sense to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21949201
I have softened on this a bit. I don't think that global/regional ladders are universally bad, I don't have anything against competition as a motivator, and I concede that for some games this is important. But I still think that current multiplayer games place way too much emphasis on global rankings, to the point of ignoring other very common player archetypes. And I still think for most games, the application of player psychology in multiplayer ranking systems and reward systems is shockingly primitive. Multiplayer games are doing a lot of advanced research and complicated work, but they're directing the majority of that work into optimizing in a very narrow direction that nobody ever questions.
Could be a longer conversation, but I am again reminded of the XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/810/
Completely fair games where players across an entire region are stuffed together into a single ladder system -- this is a legitimate design space, but it is a very, very narrow design space catering to what is honestly a kind of niche playerbase, and a lot of games would benefit from taking a broader, more creative view of why the majority of their playerbase is attracted to in the first place.
There are other ways that players could be rated and sorted that would (if not eliminate) at least significantly lessen the need for a lot of these rootkits. In short, if cheaters aren't noticeable, and if the reward structures of a game are such that creating an enjoyable match for all players is more highly rewarded than "winning", then a lot of motivation for the kind of destructive cheating that ruins current experiences would go away. But more importantly, a lot of the kind of cheating that would remain: griefing, hacking, and generally destructive, mean-spirited behavior -- that kind of cheating would become much easier to detect and its detection could be better grouped together with moderation of other destructive player behaviors that may not constitute cheating, but that are still annoying enough that you already should be searching for and banning them anyway.
Of course in some situations you have to try and guarantee completely fair experiences, and in some situations the purely competitive aspect of the game is the only part of the experience that matters. But the games industry currently treats it like it's a given that purely fair, region-wide competition should be the primary motivator for almost everyone playing multiplayer games, and honestly I just don't see it. The games industry is obsessed with something that is niche, most players don't want to try and work their way up a global competitive ladder beyond the impulse they have to unlock rewards and see a number increase. Many of those players want to win >50% of their matches, they want to be matched up against people who play interesting strategies rather than purely competitive ones, they want to play against people who force them to think and experiment, they want a constantly shifting meta where a dominant strategy doesn't very quickly become the only strategy, they want difficulty spikes to come in waves rather than randomly, when trying out new strategies they want to be able to slowly ramp into them, they want opponents to be playful and to try "fun" things during games.
Ladder systems for most games are not designed to encourage those behaviors or outcomes.
I am seriously skeptical that the majority of players in most multiplayer games today actually care about the integrity of ladders more than the other issues I raise above, and I wonder if this focus on fairness at all costs is a mentality that the games industry is going to eventually grow out of and look back on with the same kind of embarrassment as we already do with many other generally accepted practices in the past that were never questioned.
Epic move from epic :)
If your design allows you to shift your focus towards trying to fight toxic behavior itself rather than just cheats, you can use the same detection methods as you would for any other toxic behavior that doesn't involve cheats. And you should have those detection methods anyway; whether or not a cheat is involved in the abuse shouldn't be the deciding factor between banning or allowing toxic behavior.
The shift here is in realizing that for a significant number of your players, playing against someone who legitimately snipes them from across the map over and over while camping at a spawn point because they're just that good, and playing against someone who uses an aimbot to accomplish the same behavior -- both of those experiences are equally game-ruining for a lot of players. The legitimacy isn't the problem for those players, the resulting experience is. So trying to detect subtle aimbots kind of misses what the real game-ruining problem is for a lot of players.
Where a number of player archetypes are concerned, you can look for overt toxic behavior and ban it regardless of how that behavior is accomplished. Similarly, if you're not prioritizing ladder integrity over everything else, there's a case to be made that you can just ignore any cheating that's too subtle for people to notice or that doesn't result in overt toxic behavior.
A nontrivial number of your players don't actually care about ladder integrity, they want a number to go up and they want rewards released on a variable schedule as they get better at the game. For those players, it's not clear that playing against cheaters is actually a problem unless the cheaters ruin the difficulty curve or ruin the matches, and... again, you should think about banning people who do that stuff even if they're not cheating.
You can get adapters for older consoles that will convert mouse+keyboard input to control pad input. I haven't used consoles in years, so I'm not sure if they're available for newer generations.
On windows, a lot of the actions that "anti-cheat" software takes is indistinguishable from a rootkit.
There's a hardware cheat that's actually in the wild that uses a capture card, computer vision, and hardware input devices to run entirely outside the OS: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...
Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.
Examples?
That’s like the “Apple shouldn’t allow third-party stores because of malware” argument.
I mean this is why I use a console as my first choice gaming platform.
EAC is one of the most-used anti-cheat systems in gaming. Between EAC and BattleEye, you're hitting the Pareto Principle for anti-cheat support.
Four of the top 10 Steam games use anti-cheat and therefore cannot run currently. Two of those four use EAC.
Pertinent info on this change is in the Unreal dev docs here: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/services/en-US/GameServices/A...
It probably does require root/kernel access. If you're not a fan of that, your only option is cloud gaming.
Is this going to require a linux kernel module or something to work, or is it pure user space?
In any case, no mater how good your protection is, how deep in the system you go, the cheaters can go deeper. Like anti-virus and DRM evasion will always win from detection. The cheaters have complete insight into any/all client side protection mechanisms, more importantly, the cheater owns the machine and the environment where your code runs. There is not a checksum that can not be faked, and no way to measure if any of your protections have been circumvented, because the code you use to measure can (and will) be patched.
There are issues where new players will tend to get shafted by the scoring system but there can be certain routes to boost your score quickly such as providing some personally identifying information or spending more money within the game.
Losing 50% of your matches isn't fun. The alternative of losing 90% for months before winning 90% isn't inviting either.
I will only play competitive now if it is couch, or lan party, or otherwise with people I know.
State owned is problematic, I'm not in disagreement with you. But so is corporate owned. I'd like to see an industry standard anti-cheat root-kit developed as a publicly reviewable open source project at the very least.
Shooters aren't enjoyable enough to justify this shit. Other genres are more respectful of your time, money, and efforts than to dribble content you purchased at a rate just slow enough that you'll keep playing. Your time and attention are valuable non-renewable resources. Consider how well you're spending them.
Now I just need punkbuster.
If I can play Planetside2 on Linux I can just ignore games that don't work well on Linux.
I can't wait to delete windows, it does nothing for me professionally or personally outside of being a gamebox. I find between the spyware, bluescreens when trying to move a boot drive to a new box, explorer.exe is a miserable excuse of a desktop and... I could go on about the papercuts but... yeah.
I worry that EAC basically amounts to spyware, however.
Also, and this is off topic, but I think Windows Explorer is the best GUI file manager on any platform. Shoot me.
Does anyone even bother anymore with online gaming without using hacks? I've never strayed far from private servers for over a decade now.
I've yet to personally encounter any issues with more modern solutions like EAC or BattleEye, though I know they've caused issues with some exotic device drivers like RGB controllers.
> Does anyone even bother anymore with online gaming without using hacks? I've never strayed far from private servers for over a decade now.
Don't listen to the haters, cheating isn't as widespread as people seem to think it is, as long as you stay out of APAC matchmaking servers. Smurf accounts are the bigger problem in the games I play regularly (Overwatch, Apex Legends).
That sounds like Proton is definitely not supported here. So if an EAC developer only supports Windows, Linux users are SoL.
https://www.protondb.com/app/578080
The thing is, part of the challenge is that we don't really know if the game itself will work because people can't get past the anti-cheat to see if the game itself works.
Both CS:GO and Dota 2 have a report+overwatch system where users watch a replay to determine if someone is exhibiting suspicious cheating behavior. The server side of this is VACnet where it uses heuristics like mouse movement or [in Dota] clicking out of regular camera bounds to detect these cheaters and expedite them to the Overwatch queue. You can readily download the biggest script client for Dota 2, and VAC ban waves for using it have been unheard of for years now (you only get an in-game ban when enough other players verify the cheating via Overwatch).
> You can readily download the biggest script client for Dota 2, and VAC ban waves for using it have been unheard of for years now (you only get an in-game ban when enough other players verify the cheating via Overwatch).
Does this mean you think the ban process is too slow and involved?
If I join warzone modern warfare… omg i sometimes die right after dropping from the plane due to aimbots. Or I could be inside a building not standing next to wall not in line of sight with 1 door. Boom dead from someone shooting outside with wall hack. I didn’t install it on my gaming laptop because it’s filled with hackers now.
I don't think the idea has merit. See how long it is taking the Real ID act to become enforced. People barely trust the government with this info, with the ability to get on a plane (among other things) at stake.
For instance, the third party gives you a nonce, you sign it with your private key, and they verify it with your public key.
The alternative is having to run third party closed source anti-cheat software on my computer that is written by god knows who, that has the potential to do an enormous amount of damage if a bad actor were to sneak in a backdoor.
If you look at how much how much time and effort and money people put into these games, it doesn't seem so unreasonable. Another commenter pointed out that you have to give a similar amount of personal information to get a car loan, or, as you say, to get a plane ticket. I suspect a lot of people spend comparable amounts of money and effort on gaming, and probably see it as a bigger part of their lives.
This sounds pretty similar to Steam's VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) system aside from how widespread you want the system to be. IIRC, owners of Source-based game servers can set a flag to allow/deny users with a VAC ban. I don't think this is available to non-source games, which would be needed for your idea.
> How do VAC bans relate to phone numbers?
> VAC bans are applied to all accounts sharing a phone number at the time of the infraction.
> Can I move my items and games to a different Steam account?
> No.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C...
I can't be the only one sick of what a sewer the internet, like multiplayer gaming and especially social media, has become.
Sure I can turn off the death mic, but there's been some really amazing interactions though it as well. For those not aware, the death mic in CoD is a feature where the instant you frag somebody in game, it turns their mic on, so you can hear their very candid reaction. Lots of times it's things like "no way what a shot how'd that guy get me!". Such a fun feature, if it wasn't for people that just utter the most offensive things imaginable on it.
Additionally, will it be any harder to get around a system like this than a traditional anti-cheat system? Theoretically - for the average player at least, it might make cheating worse - assuming the cheater runs their cheats in a realistic way, in your world, there is now no detection software pinpointing the cheaters!
In my mind it's much better than running N number of different anti-cheat software on my machine, assuming that this reputation management entity is very well respected. Again, it'd be very hard to get a system like this right, but I think it is certainly possible.
Some cheats run outside the OS and are basically indistinguishable from regular players. So anti-cheat won’t work. Good matchmaking + still catching cheats for impossible stuff + real tournaments requiring in-person attendance or heavy monitoring, should still work pretty well.
You might be severely underestimating how much comp gamers hate cheaters.
In your system I'd never be able to play an online game again, only because a single account of mine used an email / password combination that leaked god knows where. Needless to say I'm not a fan.
happened to me on pugb and the only way I could get my account back was with a paypal charge back. It's very typical that game companies refuse to tell users what triggered it or how to avoid it in the future. For all I know, it could have been a scam from the devs.
I can live with a 40 - 60$ loss on a game, but losing the ability to play all games on protected servers forever would be really bad
It's an impossible task for every game studio to get all those details right, that's why I think it needs to be centralized. That way game studios can just worry about making cool games, and not having to waste resources on this endless arms race of cheating.
An important thing to point out is that it requires a lot of reversing work and low level knowledge to make a cheat, and usually at the end of the day cheats all end up with the same core features anyways. This means that there’s a huge stigma amongst cheat developers around knowledge sharing, which makes a lot of that initial work all the more arduous. Anticheats further increase that initial work, and incur an ongoing maintenance cost since each update can break your cheat (especially of you specifically work to break the public methods that everyone is using).
Last time I looked at VAC, it was doing stuff like looking for stuff like modifications to the .text section to detect hooks implemented by writing e.g. jmps to some injected code, but never actually adapted when people started just modifying vtable entries (most source engine constructs are exposed to developers as pure virtual cpp classes). Since they stagnated, it got easier and easier to cheat over time as more and more people spread knowledge on how to hook in an undetected way. Hell, in gmod some lua anticheat developer (gmod is a sandbox game with a lua scripting interface) found a vuln in the clientside lua implementation that allowed arbitrary memory io and used that primitive to implement checks for injected dlls when people started cheating at that level in that game, which was far more effective than VAC ever was.
BE was another universe, it felt extremely prohibitive to touch the game in usermode & even in the kernel I started to feel cramped. You can still totally get past it, but it felt more like writing a very specific rootkit than actually making a cheat.
So, from the other side, anticheats raise the cost of initially developing and maintaining a cheat. If used effectively, they can also kill paysites. I think they have value, even if they aren’t achieving a 99.99999% success rate.
What is BE?
Valorant and Edan.gg's defender [1] has the best fog of war system I've ever seen. CSGO has probably the worst; in fact, at one point, the game had NONE and sent player pos's to everyone at all times.
I completely agree, but there are a lot of server-side mitigations that haven't been nearly as explored as I'd hope.
Like how someone wall hacking would behave differently from someone who is not. Maybe by reacting before the player is actually seen.
Maybe I'm just thinking it's more impressive than what it actually is.
Let me guess, you have not played CS:GO? There is an insane number of obvious cheaters, more than in other games I played.
Also, there is TeamFortress 2 that's just has been abandoned and they can not an anti-cheat to it, it seems.
It seems winnable so far if you look at the Xbox One and later, at least. I'm not aware of anyone successfully modifying game code on those consoles.
The downside is that it a requires a completely locked down system.
But on a PC? Where the user can install whatever software they like? Much harder.
It feels like stopping aimbots will ultimately fail as eventually we'll see bots that use machine-vision to spot heads and pick them off. You wouldn't even need to run it on the cheating machine, this could be a separate device doing passthrough on the mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
Yes, you're just a successful cheater as all cheaters are deceptive by definition.
It can work well enough if your goal is 'ban/hellban cheaters relatively quickly'. If the time/money cost of creating a new account is non-trivial, this can very well get cheating down to some acceptable level.
Server-side statistics can be used in addition to this kind of client-side monitoring, but there's only so much that can be inferred from statistics. It may not be too difficult to determine if someone is using, say, an aimbot from statistics, but it's very difficult to determine if they are using a radar - because the cheater still has to make fuzzy, human decisions, based on the information that radar gives them - and because its difficult to tell radar apart from good gamesense.
You can emulate an android and run snapchat and screenshot the emulator, but the screenshot reporting inside of snapchat is still valued by millions (and shapes the behavior of millions).
Server side cheat detection actually don't detect that much, like how do you known someone is wallhacking?
As for manual review it just does no scale, when you see that CoD banned 100k cheaters, imagine if one person from activision would have to review every cases.
Cloud gaming is the solution against cheats.
There are cheats doing CV on video stream and they work on consoles. I guess they would also work on cloud gaming services.
The solution to cheating is to stop playing with strangers.
Depending on who you ask, its at ~2% today. If that feels high to you, remember: it includes Chromebooks.
As it grows, you'll absolutely hear people say "Chromebooks" or "Steam Decks should be their own category, they don't count". These arguments effectively reduce to "Linux cannot be popular, so I'll move the goalposts so it never is." Ignore them, and pour cement around the goalposts: running a distribution of gnu/linux.
Of course, if all we cared about was the "linux" part of gnu/linux, then its already the most popular operating system kernel in use by mankind. Its already won.
Except the "linux" part matters to the actual user not one bit.
Android is a fairly walled garden no matter what kernel it uses. It's an implementation detail.
It's not going to explode. It will creep up very slowly.
And lets not forget that Microsoft will combat it if it starts to take off. Game pass is already and incredible deal. We have it in our house for the xbox.
Only issue I've hit was Tableau Desktop has no Linux support (but hopefully we can migrate to Looker, as Tableau sucks anyway).
Desktop computers haven’t been relevant since 2008ish, and were struggling to maintain relevance after the 4th gen Intel GPU/Power-consumption changes.
Headless servers and consumer electronics are, already, largely using Linux.
People are plenty enough. Let them run their own servers with robust moderation tools and custom software and then the community can deal with cheaters effectively. And false positives can simply find another server, since availability in a popular game will be higher than developer provided servers.
Over a decade of locking online gameplay even further behind developer and publisher control has been one of the greatest boons for cheaters.
But I guess Epic has games besides Fortnite.
And clever game design
[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#MOK_generation_and_s...
> Does this mean you think the ban process is too slow and involved?
As VACnet and Overwatch reviewers become more experienced it really brings down just how much the cheats can help the player, to the point where using them barely makes a difference or only allows them to use informational cheats. I just don't think this will work for every game, and certainly isn't something every game developer wants to have to implement & maintain.
0: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
1: https://redd.it/psb7h7 - an example. In the second part of the video, the Invoker cheater targets the Axe with one of his items without moving his mouse to the Axe, which saves him from being disabled/taunted - but a human would have to click or hover their mouse on the Axe to disable him.
First of all, fuck you for assuming bad faith.
> we'd be more than happy to give full root level access if it means the cheaters actually vanish
Except it won’t - cheaters will move on to using other methods. There already exist external, undetectable methods for cheating that involve running the cheat software on other machines. Requiring this level of access is just pouring fuel on the fire of the arms race here, and the potential harm it will cause to non-cheaters is worse than whatever harm getting pwned by skriptkiddies in your bang bang shooty shoot live service Skinner box simulator can cause. This is an attempt at a technical solution to a social problem - you can’t patch meat and brain.
> You might be severely underestimating how much comp gamers hate cheaters.
Actually, I’m not. I’ve been on streams where competitive gamers meltdown and threaten to kill their opponents. But just like murdering people who beat you is morally wrong so is forcing everyone who wants to play a game to effectively give over control of their machines to the game makers through intrusive, kernel level anti-cheat.
You are right, though; my estimate is just personal experience
So please, let the cheaters turn to human-interface cheating methods. Force companies to deal with these problems in the proper way, like any other security problem: Don't trust the client at all. Infecting the client with your own agents is not an option. Can't make it work? Then use a different business model. Have your users put time and money into the game, and require more time and money the higher up the ranked ladder they climb. If they're buying as many in-game cosmetics as the average user, and playing for as much time as the average user must to reach a given level, then they never notice. If not, don't let them climb the ladder until they do. If they get reported by other players as cheaters, and manual validation confirms it, then they lose their investment. With that approach, you could have the most obviously hacked account in the world and it wouldn't be able to impact anybody for long without covering the costs of its own detection and banning.
Pure hogwash! There's no way a major company would decide to throw their users under the bus like this and subvert their best interests and there definitely haven't been recent events about one of the largest companies in the world doing exactly this thing! /s
Why bother trying to be the "best" (or even good) at a thing, if a robot can outperform you by leaps and bounds?
You guys can just move to South Korea or China if you want to live with that authoritarian BS
The google UI is such garbage that you can't undelete 1000s of files so I had to write a script against it's API that ran for a few days restoring everything. Sucked.
Even if they turn on HDCP, you could just get a low-lag monitor and point a camera at it.
but nowadays idk whether it stands
That said, all the people in my circle with remote jobs upgraded their desktops or lappies. It cannot be an insignificant number given initial pandemic panic and current delta resurgence. And between China cracking down on bitcoin ( check 3060s prices there and you will be left wondering why the prices did not drop significantly here ), Treasury issuing crypto guidance on ransomware payments, and eth moving to POS, it is harder and harder to blame crypto miners.
Frankly, they sound like convenient scapegoat.
I won't go into details, but I had the option of buying 3070 yesterday and 3090 2 weeks ago. I passed on both precisely due to recent uncertainty.
Wait until hands on videos show the battery and performance difference between Linux and Windows and see how many Deck purchasers don’t go ahead with their installation.
You're thinking "Great, problem solved, this kid will literally never be allowed to play another video game as long as he lives"
OK, in actuality, he's just going to use his mom's ID next time. And his dad's. And his grandparents' IDs. etc, etc
There'll be a whole gray market for IDs from all over the world to pair to your ridiculous Orwellian service, because thankfully it won't be backed up by penalty of death
Well that's horrifying. I'm glad I don't use Windows, and I'm glad my computer physically does not have a microphone for malware to enable.
Presumably, there's a commonly-trusted authority that signed your public key, attesting that the key corresponds to some "identity".
If you're concerned about revealing your identity to the third party, there are other schemes. Check out https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/
Game companies won't accept a system that has a non-recoverable state like a deleted private key.
If you can assign a new key to your account, then the private keys don't improve trust, and remove the point in having them instead of just OAuth.
In games like Dota 2, there's already an industry for account selling.
It's pretty simple really,
Find some Boomer's ID, who barely does anything but browsers facebook (or better yet, buy an ID of one of the billion in the 3rd world).
Sign up to this service using their id, hire some poor kids in the 3rd world to level up the account without cheats to build rep, then sell the account to a hacker.
Private keys don't solve any of this.
PS. Nice user name. But why pair those two? :D
Fair point, I say. But people will know that KDE and Linux exist a bit more now, since they're kinda intertwined.
> PS. Nice user name. But why pair those two? :D
You're the first one to notice! And I paired them since if they married at the end of arc 1, it'd be the the most satisfying ending for me. And also, their mental states and stuff seem to be weirdly aligned, so I feel like they'd be the best fit for each other. It's also what I feel that pairing is the one that the least number of people would expect (:
If they do marry I hope Brandon makes a sequel like Mistborn 2 and we'll see what a descendant of Jasnah/Kaladin could do.
An anti-cheat is one of the few areas that truly would ruin its security by going OSS. A cheater can quickly enumerate every method the AC uses to detect cheats, then they know EXACTLY which goalpost to kick into, per-se. 85% of Vanguard's effectiveness is their CONFUSING ban protocols, whether that's delaying a ban to confuse someone testing what's bannable, not divulging details about what avenues are tested, constant updates that aren't specified anywhere, etc.
Case in point, even in CSGO: Just changing the offsets of some game values will break some cheats for several days.
Obscurity can be a layer, but it can't be the only layer, and in general systems (such as web servers) need to be designed to withstand full-knowledge attacks. That isn't likely to be possible when it comes to anti-cheat, so obscurity plays a larger role.
Your cheat couldn't see those players because the server was doing a very cheap and primitive visibility calculation, deciding the player entities are dormant for you, and choosing to not send you the data for them.
This is different from the later-enabled player PVS system, which does more expensive ray casting once you get a certain distance away, which cut down on wallhack cheats a lot more [although they are still very useful]
Would an anticheat work if you did the opposite of this? Send the client random movement data above and behind them and if they spin and shoot towards it instant permaban forever
Random wonder. I have no idea in or around anticheating, please do feel free to shred it as an idea to pieces
Check out https://edan.gg/defender to see the comparison between CSGO and a better FoW system.
Which is fine too, but the solutions for that problem may ultimately need to extend our be situated beyond the game software itself.
https://www.techspot.com/news/70552-openai-bot-beats-world-b...
I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. Draw enough attention and I think it's not unlikely someone would find evidence (not evidence of how your system works, but video proof that shows cheating).
And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected... then better players with more knowledge and game sense will consistently still win. You'd need to be a good player in the first place - which is actually where the danger lies. A pro player with an undetectable cheat they can toggle on momentarily, even just once a series at a crucial moment, could make all the difference.
I've given up relying on technical anti-cheat solutions for online games. If it is apparent someone is cheating by watching them play then that's enough for me (and I've seen some _very_ subtle cheaters get banned from leagues for the most minor of slip-ups.) The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
The goal of good anti-cheat should never be to eradicate it entirely, since that is obviously impossible. You just need to make it so the vast majority of players rarely encounter it.
doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?
I'm not saying I'm for any sort of cheat, including the built-in aim-assist for people who choose to play with a controller, but if I absolutely had to play against an unknown number of cheaters, I would prefer they were at least playing with the same deck as me.
The cheating in the game is out of control and has been for half a decade. People still play and can find little pockets to play in to avoid cheaters (namely playing with friends or on paid services, that cut down on cheating due to the barrier to entry of cost), but it's inevitably unavoidable to consistently run into cheaters
My approach has been to run no client anti cheat outside of that built into the game (VAC), as I don't believe invading people's privacy (e.g. always-on kernel level detection) for the illusion of reducing cheating is worth it. There are better ways of hindering cheating than on-client detection, in my humble opinion.
Do you have links for EAC & FACEIT?
I think your server could check for several cvars that are only enabled for cheaters using some cheats, to auto-ban them. Though this precludes externals and some better internals.
And yes, hacks are "rootkits". It's kind of funny how they work. Some of them work at the memory level, or packet level. They require you to disable anti-virus, all firewalls, etc. The only incentive for them not to hack the user is a recurring subscription cost that's often more expensive than the game itself (leading to rage hacks where they are known to detected but the delay in detection-ban lets the user play still and farm RMT items).
Producing identity verification documents that many times over and over is not something a 13 year old will likely be able to do, relatives would certainly raise questions from those relatives as to why they need them.
I see the ridiculous Orwellian service is being the anti-cheat software we have to run already.
And that is great, why? Is it okay to hold people accountable for their whole lives, for actions they did as literal children?
Hard agree here. There's always been people accusing semipros of cheating (see r/VacSucks for more) though, so unless it was pretty concrete, it wouldn't mean anything.
>And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected
It's not that the humanization is good, it's that the cheat is poorly designed enough to be only as good as a really good consistent human. Though you're right that it's not going to be the holy grail.
>The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
Hard agree as well. I've been hoping for online majors to be called off, but alas.
smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.
* New account
* K/D ratio that’s multiple times better than the best players in the game
* Using incredibly off-meta “cheater builds”
* Consistent record breaking total kill count
* Inhumanly low TTK and headshot ratio
* Speed hacks that allow you to move around the map much faster than you should be
* Time to lock on/switch between targets
All of those are incredibly easy to statistically analyze. I play a fair amount of Warzone, and I often run in to cheaters that would fail a very basic “definitely cheating” stats check. You can even get a rather reliable indication of whether there’s an obvious cheater in the lobby by how quickly the surviving player count goes down.
A 3rd party implemented an app that looks up the stats of every player in your lobby, that players were using to detect the more obvious cheaters. There’s no non-cheating explanation for a double-digit K/D player getting 50+ kills for the past few matches in this game, but you’ll find players like that in your games routinely. The developer response was to declare the app against ToS and modify the public end points that provided those stats, breaking the app.
That’s one of the biggest games in the world, they’re clearly not utilizing even simple statistical methodology, and they don’t want users doing it themselves to decide what lobbies to back out of.
Literally no game does this, because ?????
The real interesting take away is it is always a mouse and cat game. The hackers will adapt, instead of reading memory they might just read packets, or use a m.2 memory reader card, because they have to -- and so will the anti-hackers. I am interesting in machine learning to simulate COD -- I saw a video of it and it's like a young child was playing the game -- not good but obviously on the path to competence.
Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)
Since my users are mostly just playing friends I don't really have rampant cheater problems like other services.
Naive aimbots will still have some artifacts (eg jumping to a new target as soon as the current one is occluded), but making an undetectable aimbot really doesn't seem hard, given the incentives involved.
I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected?
e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically
so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen
When my platform launched 6 years ago, we were the first to approach the problem of preventing cheating via non-invasive methods. We required you to have played several hundred matches in-game before being allowed to join our platform. ESEA, who are widely considered to have the best client side CS:GO anti-cheat, just recently implemented something similar, proving that clientside anticheats alone don't solve the problem.
Typically games will either avoid putting low play count players in the pool with established or paying players. Both because they don't want the guy playing for the first time to be constantly creamed by heavily invested players which would drive them off but also because real time and real dollars are strong deterrent to most and at least an extreme slowdown to the remaining. The net result of anti-cheat is to make it unviable to continually cheat, not to never have hacks that temporarily work.
CS's problem is Valve has shit anti-cheat that doesn't really care to detect cheaters and even when it does it doesn't have strong new player segmentation to delay them from coming back. Both of these are reason's Valve is lax with cheaters not reason's anti-cheats aren't effective.
That is you came in on an account that had existing game time or existing purchases or you hop on with a friend in good standing or you bought something in game or anything to indicate your account is actually valued by a legitimate player in some way you won't even see this process.
On the other hand if you're a fresh account with 0 time, 0 spend, and the only people that will friend you are accounts that accept every request or are known for accepting new cheaters expect you aren't just going to be dumped into the clean player pool on your first night. Not only are you the hardest type of player to prevent false positives for but you're the least likely to ever be profitable to server anyways.
Even if you aren't immediately uplifted some strategies mean you may not care if your initial nights had a higher risk of cheaters anyways matter. E.g. Fortnite is F2P but your first night you aren't likely to run into many real players. Both because they want you to get some wins to get hooked but also because it dilutes the amount of cheating new players will see.
Just because something is possible doesn't make it profitable.
Cheaters have to keep re-buying the game when they get banned.
The incentives are for publishers to ban cheaters... but not too fast... and that's exactly what we see happening in practice.
Kinda interesting huh
I was 4 when the first DOOM came out, 7 when Quake was released - I LOVE me some fps games.
But I don't find playing online fun anymore - The first 3 days are great, then you've ranked up a bit and start hitting the rampant cheating, and you realize it's just a waste of time sitting for 20 minutes in a game where some 12 year old (or much worse, some 30 year old) has just bought hacks to feel good.
To be honest - I actually blame the automated matchmaking systems more than anything else.
Give me the good ol' server lists back, where a real person is an admin, and you can make a group of friends. This monotonous, automated, matching bullshit sucks the soul out of most games. It's not fun anymore, it's designed to be a chore to prove that you're "better", with an intentionally game-ified rewards systems built to trigger gambling impulses.
Another good niche game with virtually non-existent cheating is Midair. It's mostly old-school FPS players reliving their Tribes days with good admins global banning the rare cheater.
As an aside it's recommended to keep latency under 20ms to stop motion sickness in VR.
Singlehandedly killed my desire in multiple games.
Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B)
It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all.
Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now.
It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.
Apex legends does in fact do fully simulated bullet dropoff server side with temporal rewinding, and it doesn't stop hackers from just shooting you with 99% accuracy.
The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.
At that point the barrier to entry would be so annoying that online cheating will be reduced significantly, and pro tournaments will be done in person to let you prevent usage of robots. Also everyone will be using the same equipment probably provided by tournament organizers.