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Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

arstechnica.com

111–120 of 153 posts

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

#111
> Those display frames are then run through a computer vision-based object detection algorithm like You Only Look Once (YOLO) that has been trained to find human-shaped enemies in the image (or at least in a small central portion of the image near the targeting reticle).

I wonder how well would these pre-trained networks work in a real-life automated turret.

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

#112
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many movies. This tech isn’t close to deployment for an infantryman.

Who needs infantrymen when you have suicide drone swarms, bunker busters, MIRV's, thermobaric weapons (vacuum bombs), instant retina frying laser disco drones... Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. Maybe frogmen will have their day or something. The future of human violence at scale is fucking terrifying. Edit: Oh, and how could I forget. Our lovely fucking sword deploying…

> Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars.

I disagree. The reason we still have millions of factory workers doing jobs a robot can do, is that the human is easily trained, and easily replaced, and very cheap to run. If the human breaks, you just replace it from the endless supply of other humans.

Infantry[1] is the same. Take a gun, learn how to shoot it, run at the enemy. If the solider dies, just replace it with another one from the endless supply of humans.

Robots on the other hand are very expensive to replace. Until we can auto-build Terminators[2] for less than the 'cost' of a human, robots will never replace people in low skill, high churn roles.

---

[1] I'm not talking about proper specialist soldiers here, just the barely-trained cannon fodder.

[2] ..and we all know how that turns out.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pi…

When it comes to solving complex AI problems I always like to think, if I had given a human this task, what would they want to know.

And I think even a human would struggle winning the character select mini game just with tabular data related to the players' win rates with those characters in previous matches. Learning about actual play styles of each playerand customising their play style with a given character would be a huge factor in them gaining an edge.

For example, let's say there is a player picking a slow but tanky character, but I happen to know the player who picked it often attempts a certain cheeky move to gain an advantage (like jungling early in the case of LoL, I really don't know much about Dota or LoL so you'll have to work with the metaphor here) and THAT cheeky technique is what increases their win rate. But then I know of a move that can be done by a certain character only in that specific cheeky scenario that will tip the scales and let me get a kill on them early, tipping the entire balance of the game early. As a pro player, that could be why I win with my selection, but the cheeky strategy also why the other guy often wins with his, even against other players who pick mine.

There's essentially a list of known play styles between different characters and optimal strategies to use with them against certain other characters. I think when you filtered to the top 10% of players, you essentiallly made sure a larger percent of those optimal play styles were the ones that generated the outcome data.

But still, if the player doesn't know what those in game strategies are, or their opponent doesnt know the ones they're "supposed" to be using, it'll throw off the value of making it the best selection.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Sure, because they were also doping. Seriously though, I wouldn't say steroids make you _more skilled_, but they absolutely give a physical advantage over natural athletes. Which is why there aren't any top level natural athletes anymore except in very dedicated natural-only circles.

If my genetics aren’t as good as another athlete. I’m at a disadvantage. Why is this considered not just acceptable but even good? The genetically gifted person didn’t do anything to receive praise society gives out for said genetics.

That’s just life. There are many genetic advantages and disadvantages people have beyond just athletic ability, not to mention non genetic advantages like opportunities due to wealth, gender, race, birth place, influential peers, etc.

If you follow your logic and some how eliminate all outside advantage, then you may come to the conclusion that athletic competition is meaningless.

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

#115
post #27

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…

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 fro…

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.

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

#116
post #105
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…

There's also trolling. myg0t cheated brazenly simply to piss people off and get a reaction. I never saw the point but clearly some people enjoy this.

Yeah, that kind of sadistic motivation doesn't quite fit my "prestige" label, although seeking notoriety kind of relates to both.

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

#117
post #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.

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.

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

#118
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an underrated idea. It is possible that at the logical conclusion of the current trend of machines getting better at previously human-only things, it might turn out that all we can really do that a machine cannot, is to want things. I don’t know if that is better than the alternative ending, but it’s something to think about.

It started a long ago. I want to go to the sea and my car brings me there faster than I could if I walked. Actually, I'd never been at the sea if there were no machines (trains first). But the train, the car, the AI are only tools. Not much different than a knife or its first ancestors, the flint shards.

Interesting, machines (and technically all human creation) not only fulfill desires, they also create them.

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

#119
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

QC doesn't have /votekick though

Might have been Live after all. I'm getting that old :)
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