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.
It’s all tuned to keep you playing and want that dopamine hit of a win that’s always just around the corner.
Then once the game puts you with people closer to your skill level, the best of them feel like they're cheating (and to be clear, some definitely are, but to the people you were stomping you also probably seemed similarly clairvoyant with impossible aim and movement)
Skill based matchmaking is controversial, but the truth is more games have been killed by an infinite loop of skilled players stomping new players so badly that the new players never become skilled players, than the opposite.
Oh boy, this absolutely does not work for chess at high levels. Endless debates and arguments.
Like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ctj85n/viih_sou_upd...
A very good player invented a stupid opening and then somehow won a lot of games against top players with it, and chess.com decided he was cheating (without presenting evidence) and banned him. It really seems like he wasn't.
Magnus himself said this. If he were to cheat, he'd only get 1-2 moves per game, and sometimes not even the moves explicitly, but merely the notion that "there is a very good / critical move in this position". That would be statistically impossible to accurately detect.
But it's pretty impossible to point to a single move and say "that's definitely a cheat move".
> It sounds like if you want the answers you desire then you'll need to contact a lawyer and figure out if you have any right to them.
What legal recourse would there even be here? Some sort of civil action?
As a private entity, chess.com is within its rights to admit or reject people for any reason it wants, except on the basis of certain protected classes (which cheating is not one of them). Furthermore, the terms of use for an account probably says something to the effect of "we have the right to ban you for whatever reason we feel like, and you have no real recourse." One could still attempt to sue, but the almost certain result is to flush tens of thousands of dollars in the toilet just to get thrown out on the motion to dismiss for lack of a case.
About the only cheat you can really identify is glass-walling, because usually people who do it eventually slip up and aim/shoot perfectly at someone they plainly cannot see.
Cheating still happens.
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.
I would hope that we all know that the person who wrote the A* pathfinder code probably isn’t making choices at the product level.
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.
<Bitterly laugh-cries in Rocket League>
Games "feed" less skilled players to higher skilled players - just enough that the less skilled players don't ragequit. Higher skilled players don't actually want to play in a lobby full of people their skill. They want a few people their skill, and then a lot of people they can stomp.
This tends to stand out like a sore thumb once you start looking at things from the perspective of the frequency domain. Even if you use an RNG to delay activity, the properties of the RNG itself can be leveraged against it. You may think taping a pencil to a desk fan and having that click the mouse button is being clever wrt undetectable RNG, but you must realize that the power grid runs at 50/60hz and induction motors are ~fixed to this frequency.
There is also the entire space of correlation. A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored. You could check for what are effectively [near] causality violations to determine the probability that the player is actually human.
> A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored
So would a human who is tunneled-vision at the center of the screen.
I’ve thought that trying to make a bot for personal fishing use would be a delightfully fun project, and this is how I pondered evading such anti-cheat heuristics.
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)
Now what I do not get is why people just fork over a few hundred bucks for someone else's cheating solution. You aren't winning anything, you aren't breaking anything, you're just copy-pasting someone else's work. Not doing it yourself sort of removes that appeal. The game you're playing is supposed to be against the anticheat guys and by buying someone else's solution you're not actually playing that game at all. Regular players aren't really a fun target.
This is exclusively what it is for me. I don't care about the games I cheat on at all. The game is finding ways to cheat that the host can't combat. If I can't beat them, I find a new private server. To be fair though, those guys generally don't have the resources or know-how to battle cheating to the degree major companies can and I'm a noob so it's a learning environment for me as well.
For what it's worth, to me and I assume a lot of other people, this ruins the game. There's nothing I dislike more than getting invited to a survival minecraft server (or whatever) and having someone dump diamond everything on me as a gift. What even is the point of playing the game anymore at that point?
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.
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.
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-...
"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
I'm still having hard time believing in this, but I haven't found better explanation for cheaters.
This is not a new concept, in fact many games and apps use this research which includes sophisticated operant conditioning to induce associations, which then later trigger dopamine spikes through those associations.
Its why people who spend most of their time gaming or using their phones start acting like junkies. Its completely destroyed the dating scene because they do this in dating apps. Nothing is a bigger turn off then dating a junky, and they often don't even realize it.
Much of this type of game design material has been rebranded from its original contextual use. It originates in PoW torture camps during the Korean Conflict, and narcosynthesis/narco-analysis was known all the way back to WW2.
Victims are easily controllable, misled, and often gullible, since rational thought is greatly reduced as they fall into an involuntary state of hypnosis and become highly suggestible.
Brain development to combat addiction also doesn't fully develop until your early 20s for most.
You see this in almost any FPS that has an audio trigger associated with a headshot. I know for a fact BF1942 did this with a cha-ching sound. Games, and apps too.
For a multiplayer game, though, it's not hard at all to see what's happening. If a cheater cheats and gets away with it, then they rationally should expect to receive social reputational credit, which I want to believe is something that instinctively makes most of us feel good, us being social creatures.
I should have mentioned the social aspect of the winning.
Interestingly, I didn't even think about the single player game...
Vindication. The average cheat buyer is someone who gets beat down in the game, and feels personally slighted. This is also why avoiding detection is more important than just worrying about bans. The whole point of modern cheating is to be subtle enough to pass yourself off as a top player, with all the social/financial perks that entails, not to run around in god mode griefing people.
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.
Some people cheat, and think "its just a game", falsely justifying that abuse. The false justification, however; is an act of self-violation. It warps their perception willfully blinding themselves to their evil acts.
That is not what is happening, it is not just a game. It was a competition where the two parties agreed to follow rules, and that one person broke the silent implicit agreement, they did so deceitfully to impose cost on others, delude themselves, and take like any drug-addled junky would.
Worse, writing tools and publishing them to enable such destructive behavior induces others to committing similar acts. Corrupting others, inducing them towards such, are also evil acts and its consequences.
They are fundamentally evil people because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their destructive actions, which are evil actions, and they have no resistance or thought against repeating those actions.
Like evil people, they continue repeating these choices until someone else stops them.
They do this despite there being a severely broken symmetry between the benefit they receive, which is diminishing and is ill-gotten and just fuels more junky-like behavior; and the loss their victim feels when its clear that contract was broken, or worse when they can't tell.
The things you choose to do in the small things of life that don't really matter show to the world what you will do when everything is on the line.
Showing deceitful behavior, or worse torturing people, shows a lack of credibility and character first and foremost, and that behavior is destructive in everything it touches. There is no place for people like this in any team, or cooperative, and since life in general is through a cooperative distribution of labor, that pretty much sums it up.
When the rule of law fails, and current society can no longer defend and protect these people. The natural law will hold sway, and throughout history in such environments, evil people are often granted a final mercy of peace and stopped.
If you cannot control yourself to engage in beneficial behavior for yourself and others, someone will do it for you; and you will not like it. The longer it takes for a correction, the worse it will be.
I also maintain that human judgement, can still catch things anti-cheat software is yet incapable of. Example: it doesn't matter how well hidden your aimbot is, I still notice cheaters when their accuracy is wildly out of proportion with their strategic understanding of the game.
That was the normal way to do things. Essentially all modern games go out of their way to prevent you from doing this.
Disregarding that the most popular game genres today are exactly the things you are saying need to be annihilated is wild to even consider. Some (well most) people enjoy it, some (less) people don't.
Posting it publicly on GitHub is the main reason I got invited to job interviews this spring. I'm a third-year student with no prior IT experience, and now I have a great summer job lined up.
And for the record—I enjoy playing legit. I don’t cheat.
Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge. Many people are doing this for fun and I don't see any problem with this. Cheating is another question, though.
They're not ruining my entertainment, I don't play any such online game. Even still, poisoning any element of trust in society should default make you a pariah. This is no different from anyone else who purposefully breaks the social contract in any other context for their own gains.
> Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge.
Getting into street fights with strangers is a good way to obtain a ton of self-defense related knowledge. I still think that's no excuse for someone to get into street fights with strangers. There are plenty of other ways to gain similar knowledge that don't require poisoning the community well.
> Cheating is another question, though.
??? How do you think you figure out how to bypass the good anti-cheat???
No it wouldn't and I don't lament its absence as such.
> and it's obvious the world does not work this way.
Agreed which is my lamentation.
> And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.
I'm very clearly not, but even given the case that all communication around this moves to anonymous is itself fine. The impact of people understanding that they would be pariahs for developing such tools is itself a good deterrent. That social deterrents do not work with perfect 100% efficacy is not an argument against their usage.
The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used…
It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.