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Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

arstechnica.com

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Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> money or prestige Or accomplishment. Some people cheat just to accomplish something.

Not really, because if they cheated, they didn't actually accomplish it. They cheat to gain the prestige of having accomplished it.

No. They still feel accomplished. It is self deception, but many people are good at double thing.

The sense of accomplishment comes from beating someone for many people. Cheats dont change that.

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#82
post #10
post #3

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 rea…

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 acti…

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.

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is demand for this sort of work in the League of Legends space. Could be of interest for you!

I don't fraternise with those filthy LoL players! /s

On a more serious note, I'm sure something like this exists already. I wasn't even the first one to write a Dota picker, I got the idea from someone else's tool. I even saw one that could analyse the display and recognise the hero images to enter the existing picks automatically!

Even my little utility merely scratched the surface. It didn't handle the first few picks well, because the choices are not independent. Depending on the game mode chosen, each team can take turns picking. In the fully competitive variant of the game, players can even exclude ("ban") heroes from that individual match.

I only optimised mine for picking the last one or two heroes out of the ten players, because I either played solo or with one other friend. We'd pick last based on my tool's recommendations.

That alone was hard enough to program! Theoretically, it's a trivial probability problem. Just build a 10-d matrix of win rates, and then picking is trivial. Unfortunately, this is a huge amount of data, and impossible to train well. Reducing it to, say, the 3-d case of ally+ally+oppose and computing that over every combination in the current picks doesn't cover things like the support/lead roles well, so it over-recommends some heroes. Some heroes do well with short games, some with long. Some can reduce the game length, others can drag it out. Some are "greedy", consuming shared team resources, others are frugal. I ended up with a complex heuristic model that included all of these high-level traits in its combined recommendation plan.

Fundamentally, there's nowhere near enough data available for a full model, and the labels are super noisy, because even a good combo may only shift the win rate by 10 or 20 percent at best. You might see thousands of samples for some popular combination of strong heroes, but then you'd get a long tail of individually unique games.

I found a theoretical mathematical paper that covered this exact training scenario, and it basically concluded that this is an entirely new branch of probability theory that has been essentially unexplored. In other words: "Good luck with that, we couldn't solve it either!"

It's certainly a fun problem space to play with. There's tons of data, and you can immediately test the output yourself, personally. There's no end to the depth of it either! You can go to the n-th degree and even start recommending ideal hero builds (i.e.: which items to buy in-game), where each hero should be positioned, etc...

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#84
post #3

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 rea…

Actually, it might be a good idea to instead of banning cheaters just put them on the same server to play each other without telling them.

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#85
Does anyone know why Intel FOGS did not get popular? https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.techno... Hardware signing input device inputs would advance the cat and mouse game by a lot. Then you'd need something physically moving the input device for you to aimbot. Or pay someone to properly crack open the secure enclave on your input device.

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#86

Does anyone know why Intel FOGS did not get popular? https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.techno... Hardware signing input device inputs would advance the cat and mouse game by a lot. Then you'd need something physically moving the input device for you to aimbot. Or pay someone to properly crack open the secure enclave on your input device.

Just make a "usb mouse" which is actually a programmable arduino? What makes an aimbot possible is that something can read the game's state and turn it into a mousemove signal. It can then feed it into the arduino instead of directly moving the mouse.

The problem is preventing game state from being read. Part of this can be done by detecting DLL injections.

Sadly you will always be able to write a monitor that runs as root. After all, the kernel literally administrates the computer's memory. Of course it has read, and write, access. So in the worst case, cheaters will use custom "memory drivers".

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I side with you. 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 differenc…

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.

Not really on topic, but it has been "interesting" to watch the cheating progression unfold in fitness games (Zwift, etc.) where it essentially IS digital steroids. Although often done in a very analog way, like attaching drill motors to $10k carbon bike frames to get that pro-level rush of achieving 5w/Kg for hours at a time. A Movistar contract, no doubt, arriving shortly...

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#88
In my experience as a game developer that has had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with cheaters I've seen that the most effective way to deal with them is to make a more interesting game.

What I find depressing about this article is not the length people will go to cheat but that people are still interested in the same competitive FPS formula.

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#89
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key difference is that steroids are a sacrifice. You mess with your actual body. Cheating in a game? Yeah you injected a DLL into dynamic memory…

Yeah and you're still going to have to do all the work and be a talented athlete to be at the top, unlike with hacks or cheats.

Yeah I guess it's just to turn on the spin hack and rage your way to the 300k prize.. Cheating without getting caught is arguably one of the most valuable talent people can have today, sad as that may be..

Re: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

#90
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acti…

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 movi…

It's not unethical to cheat at solitaire. Hot take.
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