I played competitive level Quake 3/Quake Live for a number of years, during the height of its popularity. I also have friends who play more modern competitive FPS games, such as CS:GO. Even though QL was only a small online scene, the use aimbots, triggerbots, wallhacks, and similar tools was always very common at the competitive level. Quake Live had very limited anti-cheat functionality, so it was never relied upon for proving legitimacy. Despite this, cheaters generally didn't last long in competitive play before being banned. Even if the computer can't unequivocally identify the presence of these tools, skilled players could usually tell the difference. Even if skilled players couldn't tell by watching alone, other contextual factors usually gave hackers away. Such as lack of LAN experience, no history of natural skill progression, etc. I'm aware that this doesn't prove that we caught every hacker, just that we caught many of them.
These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.
Many years ago I used to run a games service [1] (spanning q1 to q3, plus Unreal and various mods for all engines) and often had people message me occasionally about player X or Y cheating in various ways (these were the days before PunkBuster, but it happened more or less continuously).
Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries.
A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]).
Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it.
(Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times)
Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative.
However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run.
Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson?
I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
> There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming...
Absolutely. One thing that I may not have made clear enough to people who have never played competitive online games is that it takes so much practice to master these games that your progression can't possibly go unnoticed, even in a large community. If you're good enough to take games off well-known good players, people will know you.
Cheating in video games is nothing like steroids. The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Steroids aren't magic and don't miraculously give the user abilities they didn't have prior.
Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
What you said about progression matches my personal experience. I jumped in the deep end of Q3 just before Quake Live came out with about 2-3 months of playing every evening for hours (vacation/between contracts -- I can't recall). I started saying, "Woah, this guy is so good he has to be a bot!" to the best player one evening early in my journey, after he fragged me for the 10th time in a row with nary a scratch from my pathetic efforts. By the end I was about as good as that, and other players routinely called me a cheat.
My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).
With you on progression. First time you see someone being super fast you call them a cheater. Then you learn about Strafe jumping and that it's just how q3 physics work (even if unintentional from the programmers perhaps) and you learn it suddenly you're called a cheater by n00bs. Same with jumping onto things of a certain height. If your graphics hardware could not do a certain framerate constantly it was impossible to do those jumps. Get a new graphics card that could render at the full frame rate cap constantly and you could literally just hold the forward key in front of that obstacle and jump and you were there. Someone with worse hardware would obviously call you a cheat because it was impossible. So at least back then it was also a hardware thing. Another one: I had a regular PS/2 ball mouse. I was just unable to do certain things. Until someone told me there was a setting in Windows to change the scan rate, which improved accuracy and also a USB infrared mouse. Huuuuge difference. In fact I still use that USB mouse today.
I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't.
Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating.
Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc.
Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
I still play QuakeLive on a regular basis; the problem is mostly fixed by playing on servers with a stable community.
AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat".
Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not...
(Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.)
Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected.
And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware.
I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago.
Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately.
In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.
> ...although some prefer to play using timenudge...
Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me.
The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear.
What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all).
Can confirm. I was playing Quake Live extremely well one day (for whatever reason??) and a couple of the guys specced me and announced that I, indeed, was not cheating. That led me to wonder how they knew and some searching turned up a few threads about various tools and tricks of the trade WRT that game specifically.
If you ever played OpenArena I would be curious what you think of the communities playing OA or QL. Coming from the small OA community when QL launched, I found QL players somewhere between hostile and mute, so I only played a few weeks before leaving that scene. There isn't always constantly friendly chatter in OA, but on occasion there is. In QL I often wouldn't even get answers to direct questions (I don't remember what, but I remember it was a thing I'd expect most players to know). The number of cheaters in OA was also, well, normal to me, but I suppose very low by other standards. The number of people that wouldn't stop and had to be banned from servers can be counted on one hand during the years that I had rcon on some servers.
One problem is that the uncertainty around hackers can lead to a toxic accusatory culture. I have seen multiple games where the high level (but below pro) gets bogged down in accusations of hacking; is someone genuinly more skilled or using aimbot (one is more comforting than the other). People giving up on a match because of some percieved inconsistency in the movement of someone on the other team etc. Or cases where someone is genuinly hacking but others not believing it "you're just mad" because of all the false positives.
One may wonder what exactly is the point in a human watching this auto-playing game system, and whether they'd be better off watching a movie... But another way to look at it is as a preview of the future.
Just picture this: a world of machines battling it out for supremacy, and somewhere off to the side there is an almost forgotten human brain. It seems to serve no discernible purpose, and yet it is actually the reason all the machines exist. What they are actually fighting to optimize, unbeknownst to them, is the dopamine release into a primate brain. Bonus points if the brain itself is a simulation :)
Cheats are about two things: money or prestige. People want to get back at the players who so rudely beat them normally, and get high competitive rankings that make them look better than other players in that games community. Or, they use the cheats to create high ranking game accounts to sell to players who want to look good, or they simply cheat to win prize money.
It should go without saying that this kind of activity destroys the interest in games affected by it. People don't like playing against superhuman enemies and having their progress impeded by it.
It doesn't make sense that it would be enjoyable to play except that you can enjoy making money or making other people feel bad.
First, people who cheat in multiplayer games are awful, and it's unethical and unconscionable.
However, cheating in single-player games is perfectly okay in my book.
When I'm cheating in a solo FPS or other game, I still enjoy the game. The cheating is a way to tackle some aspect of the game that I don't enjoy, while still enjoying the rest. I can actually put on god-mode and unlimited everything and still enjoy moving through the game and doing things. Even the battles can still be somewhat fun under those conditions, even knowing that I can't possibly fail.
So it doesn't surprise me that the rush of beating real people still exists even when you're having the computer do most or all of the work.
The analog to steroids and high-level competition is really interesting, something I've chatted with my friends about a bit.
In some of the highest tier bodybuilding competitions, some people will be using steroids, and because that went unchecked and unspoken, now everyone has to or else they have no chance of competing. If you want to compete and you aren't using steroids, you will lose, so you have to start using them too.
In the game Warzone right now, at least some of the high-tier players are using hacks in competition or at least to get their "High kill game" viral videos on YouTube. So if you want to compete in that space, say make an even more impressive "high kill" game and take that crown, you have to start using hacks too.
The money on the line is bonkers too, as well as the ad-revenue from popular YouTube videos, you've got real competitions dropping 300k on online comps where it's incredibly easy to get away with cheating, so of course people will do it. Because some people do it, others will have to as well, and it goes unspoken because of all the money and prestige involved.
Because it's advantageous for the competitions holders themselves to be hosting the highest level of competition for the sport, if Warzone comps or these bodybuilding competitions had to admit that all their most popular and highest performing participants were frauds, it would be incredibly embarrassing (and unprofitable) for everyone, and so it stays unspoken.
That's exactly what I meant by my "preview of the future" comment.
Imagine the same scenario, but in a higher-stakes environment than playing a game. Let's imagine there is a "leetcode aug" that lets one instantly pattern-match a problem and pumps a perfect solution into one's brain. That doesn't have to be very sophisticated AI. But once this kind of augmentation is available, the pressure is on for everyone to get it, or for the tech to be banned, or for the evaluation criteria to change.
Said primates have a dopamine down if they realize their life has no meaning, so the AI must provide them some meaning (illusion) so that they get back to the desired dopamine levels
EDIT: for example by pretending they are just crappy machines and they need a human to be really good at doing things
EDIT2: oh too much snow, I can't drive, please human help me out!
Create a super human rank that is so extremely difficult to achieve that only bots can compete there.
The next problem is that cheaters may decide to cheat 100% in one match and 0% in the other until they hit human ranks again. You'd have to write the scoring algorithm in a way that weights performance within individual games higher than average performance over multiple games. If cheaters insist on fighting human players they must lower the performance of their cheats to a human level. This allows people to cheat up to any rank they want but from the perspective of other players the game is still fair.
yeah no. A machine does not have motivation. It does not have urges and desires. It may solve a problem perfectly buy it’s gonna be a while until they can grok why solving problems is worthwhile to begin with.
This is just one example of the "analogue hole" [1] problem shared by all anti-cheat/DRM systems.
At least in theory, there is no technology that can prevent exploits like this short of dystopian levels of surveillance and locking down computing devices even further.
By that I mean encrypted communication on all computer buses (including USB, HDMI), and only allowing access to those busses via physically hardened "secure" enclaves, up to (in the end game) big-brother-like surveillance (think electronic proctoring solutions).
I think that this is exactly the problem with such DRM schemes---the ensuing cat-and-mouse game will inevitably lead to trampling the user's freedoms, because locking down computing devices and environments to ridiculous levels is the only way in which DRM can be made to work.
Of course, for now, cheats like the one featured in the article should be fairly easy to detect (at least from what I've seen in the linked video).
The motion of the bot is extremely jerky; a simple rule-based system, or, if you want to be fancy, a neural network based anomaly detection system should be able to detect this.
On the side of the cheat authors, this could be easily circumvented if they include a "calibration phase", where user input trains a simple neural network to stochastically emulate the dynamics of the user's sensor-action loop. The cheat could then act slightly faster than the user, giving them an edge while still using their unique dynamics profile.
I wonder where this will lead eventually, and I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who pour their heart and soul into competitive gaming; I don't think that this kind of cheating is something that can and should (see above) be prevented in the long-run.
The best possible outcome I can imagine is that online gaming becomes more cooperative or once more converges back to small groups of people who know and trust each other.
The solution is really simple - make all competitive gaming events LANs with standardized hardware that is not touched by players before the event starts.
For regular online gaming, you can train a neural net to detect cheats like this, biased by the players score. If the cheat is introducing enough error for the player to be killable, its not ruining the experience for the rest of the players.
>By that I mean encrypted communication on all computer buses (including USB, HDMI)
That only delays things since in the end you still need a human being to be able to play. So you can have a camera looking at the screen and a mouse/keyboard with some wires soldered to the key points.
Indeed. Or a robot arm moving the mouse. The analog hole will always exist. However, it may prove hard to make a computer move the mouse like a human, and type like a human. Heuristics will likely be able to separate human from bot input for quite awhile still.
The game makers probably enjoy a large advantage in size-of-dataset vs cheat makers.
>will inevitably lead to trampling the user's freedoms
People keep saying this but it happened 20 years ago. This reminds me of shit like the postal service requiring photo ID to receive a package and people complaining about NSA hundreds of years later. Now you need a phone to play a game and some of the most popular need literal photo ID checks. Imagine, sending your photo ID which if stolen people can steal your money, to a bunch of newgrads running a game studio. This is what people (kids and manchildren) accept to address the overstated problem of game cheating. I played thousands of hours of games for 20 years and the number of cheaters I ran into is around 10 or 20. Most players of games (including the ones who complain about "cheaters") do not even have a clue what a game cheat is. They think some guy has some cheat that only works in this weird scenario that happens 1/100 games. Yeah, can you guys stop making me need photo ID for to play some stupid game? This is no different than every obnoxious statist concern that gets addressed by some charlatan who purports to be saving the world by ruining everyone's day (almost any time I install or configure a game my day is ruined, imagine a typical dependency hell but 10x worse). And no, I haven't ran into little cheaters because of "sophisticated anticheat" (stuff like punkbuster is extremely incompetent), it's because public hacks simply get blacklisted once they become big enough to matter.
On a way more simple level, back in my days I wrote bots for flash/browser games basically by detecting specific pixels on the screen and acting according to it. Sounds stupid, but with simple games this could work very well.
I never got 'detected' how would they? And some of my bots easily got more skills than I ever had
I did something like this with Dota2 where I'd have it monitor the opposing team to save their locations when they appeared on the minimap in a shaded color on a 2nd monitor on that 2nd computer. I used an HDMI splitter and HDMI capture card to send the input to the second computer. I did the CV stuff with opencv library. Taking it a step further as shown in the article could be done to do stuff like auto creep killing vs human and stuff like that.
Dota 2 is probably the most complex game I've ever personally played. It takes hundreds of hours of play just to learn the basics of the rules. There are over a hundred distinct hero characters to play, each with mostly unique skills. At a few hours per hero just to learn the essentials, it can be upwards of 500 hours before you even have a good idea of what's going on. Getting a feel for the overall flow of the game, where to be and where not to be, etc... can take thousands of hours.
There is no sport and few other pre-computer competitive games that even approach this level of depth and complexity.
But speaking of playing the meta-game more than the game, I had a ton of fun making a "hero picker".
At the beginning of each match there's a mini-game where each of the ten players gets to choose their hero out of the available pool of 119. Some heroes combo well others on their own team, and others counter the enemy choices well. This leads to an explosion of possibilities, with something like 4e20 possible distinct combinations, so choosing well is... difficult.
I downloaded the outcome of 30 million games (just a few days' worth!) and tried a bunch of ML/AI algorithms to come up with an optimal hero picker: Given 'n' current picks, choose the best hero for the nest pick.
That produced high win rates but boring games: it just picked the overall strongest characters with very little variance.
I then tried to make it pick the hero with the highest differential win rate. That is, it would sometimes recommend a hero that would decrease your chance of winning, but increase your chance for that hero relative to other games. This would give the opportunity to play weak heroes in games that suited them best.
That was okay, but still not optimal, because it used the win rates from very bad players.
I then took my 30M games, and produced an automatic chess-style ranking for all players. I threw away all "weird" games and players only seen a few times, giving me a clean learning set of regular players with a known skill set. I then filtered it to my personal ID number +/- a 10% skill range (still millions of games!) and trained the ML on that, hoping to give optimal recommendations for my own skill set.
That was a good try, but it turned out that people in my skill range are terrible at the meta-game of picking heroes.
I then threw up my hands and simply had the ML train on the top 10% of players. That was amazing! It was like having the knowledge of the best players distilled into an AI. It recommended some amazing combos, and generally stopped recommending heroes that are strong in the mid-tier "pub" games but weak against skilled opponents. My skill went up, and I slowly climbed the ranks to about the top 20% or so.
Cheating in the game "Warzone" has been a really interesting thing to watch unfold. It makes the game really frustrating to play and I have stopped playing it, but outside of that it's interesting to watch players, even high-visibility streamers, attempt to play without getting caught and succeeding at that.
In Warzone the map is huge, and 150 players are split up in to competing squads of 1-4 players. So it becomes very much an information heavy game. Knowing where people are, even when they're hundreds of meters away, is extremely valuable, and that's one of the hacks people have. They see nametags, hitboxes and information for players overlaid on their screen. They also change colour based on if they're in line-of-sight, so you can say "I see that squad, but they can't shoot at me, so I am safe" and that's extremely valuable.
Second to that, they can use aim-assist but the highest-end aimbots are really quite nuanced, and they allow you to smooth out the assisted movements and only auto-aim in specific scenarios, and that makes it really hard to tell they're using an aimbot. It just looks like a really good player. Gone are the "snap to head" aimbots of Counter Strike that were so obvious.
You can report someone all-day-long and they may never get banned because the hack software is competent, and it's hard to demark the difference between "Knowledge you shouldn't be able to have" and "Intuition of a good player".
I did this for the FPS game Valorant, not for cheating, but to see if I could make a 100% computer-controlled opponent.[1]
It involved some weird Logitech mouse hacking for the control side of things and was overall really rough, especially with how much latency was involved.
With a normal USB capture device, the latency is around 50-100ms, so it’s hard to do lightning-fast reaction. Even more so if your view is moving at the same time. Everything that normal aimbots do by directly accessing the game’s memory suddenly becomes much harder when you don’t have memory access.
For anyone interested though, the computer vision models publicly available are both very good and also easy to fine-tune for a specific use case (e.g. a specific game).
I remember over a decade ago doing something far less sophisticated to "cheat" in a turn-based projectile physics game --- I used a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram printed on transparency and just put it on the monitor to quickly calculate parameters between turns.
At a LAN party a few years ago one of the games being played was Modern Warfare 2, a game where your gun is almost always going to hit in exactly the centre of the screen, but that’s made more difficult by requiring you to look down the sights to get an aim point, which slows you down.
One of the people near me worked around that by taking a few shots down the sights and then sticking a blob of blue tack on his monitor where the shots hit, creating an instant targeting reticle available at all times.
Game developers should stop trying to police this and let the bots fight each other. The game becomes, who can tune their bots better. Train the bots for team work or more strategic level play.
In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy some co-op gaming against some easy bots, or play competitive matches against just friends and family.
If some random person on your server is no fun to play again, just kick them.
If you are really into the competitive gaming and want to take the games more seriously, I'd like to see players go meet other players face to face. Join a local league and play on hardware you don't own with other people watching. I used to love playing Quake down at the local internet cafe with a bunch of friends. We had a small 4v4 league going.
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These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.
Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries.
A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]).
Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it.
(Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times)
[1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/games/quake_iii_arena
[2]: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600
Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative.
However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run.
Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson?
I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
Absolutely. One thing that I may not have made clear enough to people who have never played competitive online games is that it takes so much practice to master these games that your progression can't possibly go unnoticed, even in a large community. If you're good enough to take games off well-known good players, people will know you.
Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).
I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't.
Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating.
Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc.
Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.)
Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected.
And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware.
I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately.
In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.
Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me.
The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear.
What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all).
There's some good information on how this system works here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is...
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Just picture this: a world of machines battling it out for supremacy, and somewhere off to the side there is an almost forgotten human brain. It seems to serve no discernible purpose, and yet it is actually the reason all the machines exist. What they are actually fighting to optimize, unbeknownst to them, is the dopamine release into a primate brain. Bonus points if the brain itself is a simulation :)
It should go without saying that this kind of activity destroys the interest in games affected by it. People don't like playing against superhuman enemies and having their progress impeded by it.
It doesn't make sense that it would be enjoyable to play except that you can enjoy making money or making other people feel bad.
However, cheating in single-player games is perfectly okay in my book.
When I'm cheating in a solo FPS or other game, I still enjoy the game. The cheating is a way to tackle some aspect of the game that I don't enjoy, while still enjoying the rest. I can actually put on god-mode and unlimited everything and still enjoy moving through the game and doing things. Even the battles can still be somewhat fun under those conditions, even knowing that I can't possibly fail.
So it doesn't surprise me that the rush of beating real people still exists even when you're having the computer do most or all of the work.
In some of the highest tier bodybuilding competitions, some people will be using steroids, and because that went unchecked and unspoken, now everyone has to or else they have no chance of competing. If you want to compete and you aren't using steroids, you will lose, so you have to start using them too.
In the game Warzone right now, at least some of the high-tier players are using hacks in competition or at least to get their "High kill game" viral videos on YouTube. So if you want to compete in that space, say make an even more impressive "high kill" game and take that crown, you have to start using hacks too.
The money on the line is bonkers too, as well as the ad-revenue from popular YouTube videos, you've got real competitions dropping 300k on online comps where it's incredibly easy to get away with cheating, so of course people will do it. Because some people do it, others will have to as well, and it goes unspoken because of all the money and prestige involved.
Because it's advantageous for the competitions holders themselves to be hosting the highest level of competition for the sport, if Warzone comps or these bodybuilding competitions had to admit that all their most popular and highest performing participants were frauds, it would be incredibly embarrassing (and unprofitable) for everyone, and so it stays unspoken.
Imagine the same scenario, but in a higher-stakes environment than playing a game. Let's imagine there is a "leetcode aug" that lets one instantly pattern-match a problem and pumps a perfect solution into one's brain. That doesn't have to be very sophisticated AI. But once this kind of augmentation is available, the pressure is on for everyone to get it, or for the tech to be banned, or for the evaluation criteria to change.
Or accomplishment. Some people cheat just to accomplish something.
EDIT: for example by pretending they are just crappy machines and they need a human to be really good at doing things
EDIT2: oh too much snow, I can't drive, please human help me out!
The next problem is that cheaters may decide to cheat 100% in one match and 0% in the other until they hit human ranks again. You'd have to write the scoring algorithm in a way that weights performance within individual games higher than average performance over multiple games. If cheaters insist on fighting human players they must lower the performance of their cheats to a human level. This allows people to cheat up to any rank they want but from the perspective of other players the game is still fair.
Of course, for now, cheats like the one featured in the article should be fairly easy to detect (at least from what I've seen in the linked video). The motion of the bot is extremely jerky; a simple rule-based system, or, if you want to be fancy, a neural network based anomaly detection system should be able to detect this.
On the side of the cheat authors, this could be easily circumvented if they include a "calibration phase", where user input trains a simple neural network to stochastically emulate the dynamics of the user's sensor-action loop. The cheat could then act slightly faster than the user, giving them an edge while still using their unique dynamics profile.
I wonder where this will lead eventually, and I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who pour their heart and soul into competitive gaming; I don't think that this kind of cheating is something that can and should (see above) be prevented in the long-run. The best possible outcome I can imagine is that online gaming becomes more cooperative or once more converges back to small groups of people who know and trust each other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
Edit: Spelling, grammar, and clarity
For regular online gaming, you can train a neural net to detect cheats like this, biased by the players score. If the cheat is introducing enough error for the player to be killable, its not ruining the experience for the rest of the players.
That only delays things since in the end you still need a human being to be able to play. So you can have a camera looking at the screen and a mouse/keyboard with some wires soldered to the key points.
The game makers probably enjoy a large advantage in size-of-dataset vs cheat makers.
Valve has already been doing that for a few years: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
People keep saying this but it happened 20 years ago. This reminds me of shit like the postal service requiring photo ID to receive a package and people complaining about NSA hundreds of years later. Now you need a phone to play a game and some of the most popular need literal photo ID checks. Imagine, sending your photo ID which if stolen people can steal your money, to a bunch of newgrads running a game studio. This is what people (kids and manchildren) accept to address the overstated problem of game cheating. I played thousands of hours of games for 20 years and the number of cheaters I ran into is around 10 or 20. Most players of games (including the ones who complain about "cheaters") do not even have a clue what a game cheat is. They think some guy has some cheat that only works in this weird scenario that happens 1/100 games. Yeah, can you guys stop making me need photo ID for to play some stupid game? This is no different than every obnoxious statist concern that gets addressed by some charlatan who purports to be saving the world by ruining everyone's day (almost any time I install or configure a game my day is ruined, imagine a typical dependency hell but 10x worse). And no, I haven't ran into little cheaters because of "sophisticated anticheat" (stuff like punkbuster is extremely incompetent), it's because public hacks simply get blacklisted once they become big enough to matter.
I never got 'detected' how would they? And some of my bots easily got more skills than I ever had
There is no sport and few other pre-computer competitive games that even approach this level of depth and complexity.
But speaking of playing the meta-game more than the game, I had a ton of fun making a "hero picker".
At the beginning of each match there's a mini-game where each of the ten players gets to choose their hero out of the available pool of 119. Some heroes combo well others on their own team, and others counter the enemy choices well. This leads to an explosion of possibilities, with something like 4e20 possible distinct combinations, so choosing well is... difficult.
I downloaded the outcome of 30 million games (just a few days' worth!) and tried a bunch of ML/AI algorithms to come up with an optimal hero picker: Given 'n' current picks, choose the best hero for the nest pick.
That produced high win rates but boring games: it just picked the overall strongest characters with very little variance.
I then tried to make it pick the hero with the highest differential win rate. That is, it would sometimes recommend a hero that would decrease your chance of winning, but increase your chance for that hero relative to other games. This would give the opportunity to play weak heroes in games that suited them best.
That was okay, but still not optimal, because it used the win rates from very bad players.
I then took my 30M games, and produced an automatic chess-style ranking for all players. I threw away all "weird" games and players only seen a few times, giving me a clean learning set of regular players with a known skill set. I then filtered it to my personal ID number +/- a 10% skill range (still millions of games!) and trained the ML on that, hoping to give optimal recommendations for my own skill set.
That was a good try, but it turned out that people in my skill range are terrible at the meta-game of picking heroes.
I then threw up my hands and simply had the ML train on the top 10% of players. That was amazing! It was like having the knowledge of the best players distilled into an AI. It recommended some amazing combos, and generally stopped recommending heroes that are strong in the mid-tier "pub" games but weak against skilled opponents. My skill went up, and I slowly climbed the ranks to about the top 20% or so.
Fun times, fun times...
In Warzone the map is huge, and 150 players are split up in to competing squads of 1-4 players. So it becomes very much an information heavy game. Knowing where people are, even when they're hundreds of meters away, is extremely valuable, and that's one of the hacks people have. They see nametags, hitboxes and information for players overlaid on their screen. They also change colour based on if they're in line-of-sight, so you can say "I see that squad, but they can't shoot at me, so I am safe" and that's extremely valuable.
Second to that, they can use aim-assist but the highest-end aimbots are really quite nuanced, and they allow you to smooth out the assisted movements and only auto-aim in specific scenarios, and that makes it really hard to tell they're using an aimbot. It just looks like a really good player. Gone are the "snap to head" aimbots of Counter Strike that were so obvious.
You can report someone all-day-long and they may never get banned because the hack software is competent, and it's hard to demark the difference between "Knowledge you shouldn't be able to have" and "Intuition of a good player".
It involved some weird Logitech mouse hacking for the control side of things and was overall really rough, especially with how much latency was involved.
With a normal USB capture device, the latency is around 50-100ms, so it’s hard to do lightning-fast reaction. Even more so if your view is moving at the same time. Everything that normal aimbots do by directly accessing the game’s memory suddenly becomes much harder when you don’t have memory access.
For anyone interested though, the computer vision models publicly available are both very good and also easy to fine-tune for a specific use case (e.g. a specific game).
[1] https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-l...
I remember over a decade ago doing something far less sophisticated to "cheat" in a turn-based projectile physics game --- I used a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram printed on transparency and just put it on the monitor to quickly calculate parameters between turns.
One of the people near me worked around that by taking a few shots down the sights and then sticking a blob of blue tack on his monitor where the shots hit, creating an instant targeting reticle available at all times.
Game developers should stop trying to police this and let the bots fight each other. The game becomes, who can tune their bots better. Train the bots for team work or more strategic level play.
In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy some co-op gaming against some easy bots, or play competitive matches against just friends and family.
If some random person on your server is no fun to play again, just kick them.
If you are really into the competitive gaming and want to take the games more seriously, I'd like to see players go meet other players face to face. Join a local league and play on hardware you don't own with other people watching. I used to love playing Quake down at the local internet cafe with a bunch of friends. We had a small 4v4 league going.