There must be some statistical method or honeypot method to reliably detect cheaters. Like present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating. I don't know, there has to be a way. Cheaters are disease in online gaming. I know that sensible people won't want to sacrifice their anonymity to provide ID to play a video game but if it is in the competitive scene and they are playing for money, surely it isn't a stretch to ask for ID and thus ultimate accountability.
This is a thing, yes. Statistical cheat-detection methods are more or less required for online chess, for example, because anyone can run Stockfish. A lot of that came out of academia, so you can just find papers like this: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf
The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway:
- Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat
- Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be
- Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.
Also, have tools to record and replay games, and knowlegable moderators who can identify signs of cheating and ban offenders. This will count for a lot, even if someone can cheat well enough to appear highly skilled naturally (which almost always requires at least moderate skill at a game), it won't be quite so rage-inducing. This doesn't scale very well, though.
In the WarCraft 3 community they have a custom client and third-party ladder called W3Champions. It adds a few quality of life improvements like allowing you to not get matched against the same player again for 8 hours. But where it really shines is in the ability to moderate the community by banning bad actors. Some popular Twitch streamers tried out WC3 recently and in the official battle.net ladder they got players trolling them by making swastikas with towers or deliberately deboosting in order to snipe them. Once they switched to W3Champions the trolls all went away, but if any showed up they would get banned pretty quickly. One of the biggest benefits of building smaller communities is that it's actually possible to moderate them and elevate the gaming experience of everyone involved.
Is this what happens with Call of Duty? My observation is I would play very good for a couple of days, often 1st or 2nd player in the 12 people group. Then, next few days I am placed with a bunched of assumed cheaters (seemingly seeing thru wall, headshot but not dead, jump slide then shoot mid air with a gamepad...).
Provided computers isn't part of "ultra high end of competitive e-sports" - it's pretty standard. The tourney just needs to pull enough eyeballs to interest a PC hardware company.
Reminds me many years ago I was playing online poker. The site I was on did this special anniversary giveaway thing. Every million hands or so, there would be a massive (in relative terms) jackpot. If you win the hand, you get the jackpot. It was so large, that you should never fold any hand, at all. (At these microstakes, normally a big hand was $5. These were like $300, so risking your whole stack of $2 was totally worth it).
At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on.
I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded.
That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.
Once they get you hooked, they can match you with the other whales. Until then it's just training your reponses even when it costs them 300 fluffmarks.
With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment.
I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.
Game devs take on the problem by themselves by not releasing a server component. Older games used to release the server component, so people could self host or make their own ladder system. That allowed each community to come up with their own set of rules and restrictions for how much moderation was desired. But in the modern era where the game developer controls the server everyone is subject to a single set of rules.
> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating
Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see
That seems… like, fine, right? Who cares? Most games do skill-based matchmaking anyway, so if players are using cheats to play at higher but still human skill levels, they’ll just get boosted up to higher ranks.
The main issue, I guess, is they’ll have lopsided aiming proficiency (due to the boost) vs game knowledge. But that’s basically a crapshoot anyway in mass-market “competitive” gaming.
The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to performance KPI’s. Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably discriminating those signals is a hard problem.
I think statistical methods are the best primary option. There are a lot of other tools you can use but this is the most impenetrable from the outside.
The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured.
There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.
Theres plenty of what you suggest going on all the time, loot spawning in unlootable places etc.
Problem is, theres always some difference between valid and invalid target, and if the game knows it, cheat extracts that information and acts "dumb" around those honeypots. It wont shoot targets that the game doesnt render because the bot checks that attribute. It wont loot that honeypot because its in manualy upkept white/blacklist.
Yep, the cheat engine designers get thousands and thousands of test cases. If the designer screws up your account gets banned, but quite often they can detect what did it.
Now, good cheat detection won't ban you immediately, it will allow you to build up a novel of sins and then ban so it's difficult to determine what action provoked it. Unfortunately that does mean those people are on the servers for some amount of time.
> theres always some difference between valid and invalid target
This information does not necessarily need to be made available to the client. Latency compensation can treat the phantom just like the real deal and the server can silently no-op any related commands (while recording your naughty behavior).
Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.
$5-500 monthly payments just to bypass a decent anti-cheat...Cheaters must reflash their BIOS, wipe their PCs, reinstall Windows, and create a new account to play again...every few weeks
This is fun? If it's eSports for $$ I understand the incentive, otherwise pretending to be good, all the while likely having not a twinge of irony hit you as you 'git gud the opposition... It's a mindset I don't understand.
one of the scenarios is the person that is not looking on the enjoyment of "winning", but instead diving on the "trolling" realms of ruining the fun of others.
its irrelevant if he gets a ban because when he hears someone getting mad at him or sad, he gets a boner.
the mentality of "trying to punch people that cant defend themselves" is the description that i give of these to people that dont play video games. (because most wouldn't cheat without the anonymity)
Peer pressure is hell of a drug. If your friend group mainly plays competitive shooters and you suck at them you can easily gain status by paying for a aimbot.
Also current hustle culture’s toxic “your time is valuable and should not be wasted” mentality plays a role. Many people hate playing video games and losing because they then feel like they didn’t achieve anything and wasted their time. With cheats you can make sure you win so you “don’t end up wasting your time.”
This is in the same vein as trolling and griefing: Some people give up at the first difficulty. Others will see it as a challenge and get a thrill out of overcoming it. The more challenging it becomes, the more invested they get.
As someone who used to cheat in online games until I got a real job...
I could create my own story. I would cheat on servers where other people wanted to play in that story too. Eventually cheats become mods and mods become permitted. Once everyone has access to that story then the story is boring.
Think about a dungeon master who brings their own tools and props to some other board game and then invents a whole new game. Plenty of games or game mods kind've started in similar ways.
Plus it was fun to sometimes exact revenge upon other cheaters.
I think a lot of people are simply delusional. "My teams are holding me back, I only turn it on when they're throwing the game" or "I have the game sense of a masters player, I just don't have time to practice execution / grind rank". Boosting account ranks is the same deal, and it's a big industry.
Oh absolutely, used to see it in LoL, people would complain about their teammates holding them back and really deserving to be two leagues higher.. all I could say was that if you watched better players you'd see that the game they are playing and the game we are playing are only superficially similar, and that if you were playing on that level it'd be obvious (cause you'd be winning). Don't think it ever penetrated though.
It is the self-deluded individual who enjoys abusing and torturing others, and has willfully blinded themselves to anything else.
More beast walking on two legs than human, and meets a relatively objective definition for evil people.
Willfully blinded through acts of false justification, repeated acts of destruction and active torture on others.
These are things if they did it physically they would go to prison or be put to death under capital punishment. Psychological harm isn't being treated with the same rigor as physical harm though.
Sadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're not the ones who paid for / installed them.
In my defense, I was playing Bedwars (competitive Minecraft mini-game with floating islands, ability to make bridges across them, purpose being to break other team's beds), and once I found out there was a cheater in my team, I left my team's bed with no protection, to make the game easier for the "clean" players. It didn't work, the cheater in my team eliminated all the other players.
There is a solution, but no one wants to hear it. Anonymity is the problem and the only way to curb cheats like these are to have extreme meatspace penalties and some sort of central ID mechanism that requires some sort of real and personal identification
Those people will next use their mother's ID, their grandparents' IDs, and so on. Then move on to stolen IDs. Which is not preventable unless you do full-on hardware attestation tied to real ID, which means China-level surveillance.
Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)
You mean a system where when you get misidentified (this will almost always happen at scale) you get effectively banned forever, across multiple games? Yeah... I think I know why people aren't keen on that.
(And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)
That is not a solution because it blindly solves one problem in isolation while creating a whole host of other problems that are equally if not more destructive.
It is improper to say this is a solution when you swap out the problems for something worse as a surrogate at the same time.
When you are tied to one physical ID, you give disproportionate power to the game manufacturer, which enables them to monopolize, and engage in coercive, and corrupt behavior more readily.
Say they decide after the fact that they don't like your objective review of a game you bought because shocker it was "unfinished". They decide to ban you, that ban alerts all other manufacturers, and they block you as well. Or someone who can issue those bans decides to blackmail or extort you.
If you don't comply, in the process, they revoke access to all your licensed purchases. It is tied to a real ID, so there's no way around it. You've just been cancelled from games/entertainment as a whole.
If this touches on physical aspects like interfering with your ability to get food, hold a job, etc, you've just been forced into the dregs of society with no due process outside a rule of law. "There are plenty of people that haven't had this scarlet letter attached, ... we'll just choose anyone but them", is how it will go.
This is not a new concept, in fact it is one of the common elements found in Maoism and collectivism in general.
So the solution you propose is communism by another name. Any educated person knows Communism fails in common ways intractably, and as a result this cannot be a solution.
A good rule of thumb is, if it involves a centralized hierarchy structure; its more likely than not going to be some form of communism/socialism (fabian/globalist/its gradual neighbor)/or collectivism, and one must consider slippery slopes where once you adopt one thing, you slip all the way down to another.
Ludwig von Mises wrote a book back in the 1930s-1950s covering all of the intractable failures, under the title "Socialism". The detailed problems he describes are intractable, and naturally occur in such systems.
Communism and its derivatives are all about obscuring its origins deceitfully to trick you into thinking and agreeing its a solution. They don't give you the whole picture and they strive to mislead towards pipe dreams which never happen in practice, towards control you can't take back.
I would love if Valve developed a multiplayer server system for CS2 (and maybe generalisable beyond that) that only sent other players' locations when they were very close to being visible to the player, and sent audio and damage events in a way that only gave soft information away as well.
So if you snipe through a wall, instead of sending the location of the shot source and direction, the server has to do slightly more work - calculate who got hit and what noise everyone should hear, but then the client doesn't need to know the location of the firing player.
I know it's not the only way to cheat, but the fact that the client has all the information has to be a large factor.
This is a really old idea. It was implemented in CS:GO in ~2015 [0], although community anti-cheats like SMAC have implemented it for years before then [1]. Riot have an article about their implementation of the same idea in VALORANT's that a good read from a technical perspective [2].
solos doesn't solve cheating, but it removes the team dynamics and social meta games that team modes bring. like wondering whether your teammates are cheating, or failing to compete because you can't find a good team.
obviously cheating is cool. we all love to code, to build, and to hack. there should be a place to cheat, even in pvp games.
there should be a league with open cheating. cheaters need a place to game too!
there should be a league with moderate anticheat, like what you see in games today. it kind of works, and stops all but the most motivated cheaters.
there should be a league where cheating is impossible. where one doesn't have to doubt, ever, whether they died to a cheater or a god. this is where kernel level anticheat is not enough, and solos only should be required.
cheating is about validating inputs and outputs. valid screen displaying into human eyes. valid output out of human hands to mouse and keyboard.
if we take a step back, this is very achievable. it's not like doping in the olympics, we don't need bloodwork. we just need a little more information than we get from anticheats today.
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The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway:
- Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat
- Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be
- Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.
Cheating still happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z-kmSF5Qxk
At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on.
I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded.
That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.
I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.
Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see
The main issue, I guess, is they’ll have lopsided aiming proficiency (due to the boost) vs game knowledge. But that’s basically a crapshoot anyway in mass-market “competitive” gaming.
The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured.
There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.
Problem is, theres always some difference between valid and invalid target, and if the game knows it, cheat extracts that information and acts "dumb" around those honeypots. It wont shoot targets that the game doesnt render because the bot checks that attribute. It wont loot that honeypot because its in manualy upkept white/blacklist.
Its just another level of cat and mouse game.
Now, good cheat detection won't ban you immediately, it will allow you to build up a novel of sins and then ban so it's difficult to determine what action provoked it. Unfortunately that does mean those people are on the servers for some amount of time.
This information does not necessarily need to be made available to the client. Latency compensation can treat the phantom just like the real deal and the server can silently no-op any related commands (while recording your naughty behavior).
This is fun? If it's eSports for $$ I understand the incentive, otherwise pretending to be good, all the while likely having not a twinge of irony hit you as you 'git gud the opposition... It's a mindset I don't understand.
one of the scenarios is the person that is not looking on the enjoyment of "winning", but instead diving on the "trolling" realms of ruining the fun of others.
its irrelevant if he gets a ban because when he hears someone getting mad at him or sad, he gets a boner.
the mentality of "trying to punch people that cant defend themselves" is the description that i give of these to people that dont play video games. (because most wouldn't cheat without the anonymity)
Also current hustle culture’s toxic “your time is valuable and should not be wasted” mentality plays a role. Many people hate playing video games and losing because they then feel like they didn’t achieve anything and wasted their time. With cheats you can make sure you win so you “don’t end up wasting your time.”
As someone who used to cheat in online games until I got a real job...
I could create my own story. I would cheat on servers where other people wanted to play in that story too. Eventually cheats become mods and mods become permitted. Once everyone has access to that story then the story is boring.
Think about a dungeon master who brings their own tools and props to some other board game and then invents a whole new game. Plenty of games or game mods kind've started in similar ways.
Plus it was fun to sometimes exact revenge upon other cheaters.
Dead Comment
It is the self-deluded individual who enjoys abusing and torturing others, and has willfully blinded themselves to anything else.
More beast walking on two legs than human, and meets a relatively objective definition for evil people.
Willfully blinded through acts of false justification, repeated acts of destruction and active torture on others.
These are things if they did it physically they would go to prison or be put to death under capital punishment. Psychological harm isn't being treated with the same rigor as physical harm though.
Deleted Comment
"Jon is a drug dealer, but his money still spends"
"Tom is insider trading, but I'm not since I don't actually 'know' that"
etc, etc
There are pro players who get caught cheating, this game is rotten to the core.
Valve doesn't seem to care because apparently, players don't care about cheaters since they are so addicted to gambling with skins.
Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)
(And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)
It is improper to say this is a solution when you swap out the problems for something worse as a surrogate at the same time.
When you are tied to one physical ID, you give disproportionate power to the game manufacturer, which enables them to monopolize, and engage in coercive, and corrupt behavior more readily.
Say they decide after the fact that they don't like your objective review of a game you bought because shocker it was "unfinished". They decide to ban you, that ban alerts all other manufacturers, and they block you as well. Or someone who can issue those bans decides to blackmail or extort you.
If you don't comply, in the process, they revoke access to all your licensed purchases. It is tied to a real ID, so there's no way around it. You've just been cancelled from games/entertainment as a whole.
If this touches on physical aspects like interfering with your ability to get food, hold a job, etc, you've just been forced into the dregs of society with no due process outside a rule of law. "There are plenty of people that haven't had this scarlet letter attached, ... we'll just choose anyone but them", is how it will go.
This is not a new concept, in fact it is one of the common elements found in Maoism and collectivism in general.
So the solution you propose is communism by another name. Any educated person knows Communism fails in common ways intractably, and as a result this cannot be a solution.
A good rule of thumb is, if it involves a centralized hierarchy structure; its more likely than not going to be some form of communism/socialism (fabian/globalist/its gradual neighbor)/or collectivism, and one must consider slippery slopes where once you adopt one thing, you slip all the way down to another.
Ludwig von Mises wrote a book back in the 1930s-1950s covering all of the intractable failures, under the title "Socialism". The detailed problems he describes are intractable, and naturally occur in such systems.
Communism and its derivatives are all about obscuring its origins deceitfully to trick you into thinking and agreeing its a solution. They don't give you the whole picture and they strive to mislead towards pipe dreams which never happen in practice, towards control you can't take back.
So if you snipe through a wall, instead of sending the location of the shot source and direction, the server has to do slightly more work - calculate who got hit and what noise everyone should hear, but then the client doesn't need to know the location of the firing player.
I know it's not the only way to cheat, but the fact that the client has all the information has to be a large factor.
Sadly, CS2, from what I've gathered, broke this.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/opt...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkhQgYB4lAA
[2]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
handcam anticheat when?
kernel anticheat is necessary but not sufficient.
obviously cheating is cool. we all love to code, to build, and to hack. there should be a place to cheat, even in pvp games.
there should be a league with open cheating. cheaters need a place to game too!
there should be a league with moderate anticheat, like what you see in games today. it kind of works, and stops all but the most motivated cheaters.
there should be a league where cheating is impossible. where one doesn't have to doubt, ever, whether they died to a cheater or a god. this is where kernel level anticheat is not enough, and solos only should be required.
cheating is about validating inputs and outputs. valid screen displaying into human eyes. valid output out of human hands to mouse and keyboard.
if we take a step back, this is very achievable. it's not like doping in the olympics, we don't need bloodwork. we just need a little more information than we get from anticheats today.