Call of Duty Adds Kernel Level Driver for Anti-Cheat

> The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops.

My point is not contraindicated by Activision releasing new anti-cheat software a year and a half after a game came out.

Activision likely saw falling player signups/playtime/cosmetics spending, did some surveys, and decided improving their anti-cheat was the way to go.

> If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying.

In another comment I pointed out that the games are full of cheaters so blatant their K/D ratios are better than the top pros in the game, sometimes by a factor of ten. It would be trivial for Activision to automatically ban them simply on that alone, or at least auto-flag them for a manual review. A K/D ratio of 1.0 is considered "good" for an average player. 2-3 would be world-class. The top player on one of the CoD:WZ trackers has a K/D ratio of twenty six.

Everybody agrees it's a cat-and-mouse game. What's the endgame? Requiring signed peripherals to play? With mouse and keyboard detecting a heartbeat from the player, and gaze tracking?

Short of requiring implants with DRM and a proof of identity, I don't think cheating issues can be solved that way.

Some suggest streaming is the solution. It doesn't protect against ML-based bots, though restricting client info to the bare minimum is probably a good idea: if latency is good enough to allow streaming video, why not stream player position just in time, to prevent against the wallhacks-class of exploits?

ML-powered cheat detection on server side also sounds good, with the usual sanity checks (don't allow large speed, etc).

How to distinguish a good player from a cheater? Maybe have them pass a test on a trusted machine at a cyber café or so, and give them a "good player" badge to crank the anti-cheat detection threshold higher for them. There can't be that many good players, and identifying them sounds promising for future tournaments. Maybe a web-of-trust ring would help as well, with players vouching for each other, and staking their accounts too: when someone gets banned 10 years (permanent bans are just not nice), ban those who referred them 3 years, then 6 months, then 2, etc.

Also, I've been thinking lately at how this could be handled in open-source games, and if there's a way forward, I think it's that one.

At a high-level, game theory kind of approach, I don't think cheating can be prevented in incomplete information games. Two players could collude and exchange information, giving them an edge. This could be made part of gameplay (including vocal chats is probably part of this). Moves can still be checked against a given set of rules retrospectively: use a CRDT-like, directed graph structure to store player actions, check their validity, and when multiple players come in contact with new info, have them exchange that info and cross-validate it. Picture a card game for instance, but it's the same for a FPS.

The alternative is complete-information, where there is nothing to hide, and only the legality of a move has to be checked. For reflex-based games, it's hard to evaluate what level of proficiency to expect from a player. For strategy games, likewise (a player could use some AI tools to help them with their next move).

In the end, I think we have to go back to what makes playing a game fun. I have fun playing against bots, when they're my level. The only issue is being pitted against bots when I have no chance of winning. In that case, ML-based approaches can work to identify skill levels, and pitch opponents of similar skill against each other. Hopefully aimbots will play against aimbots this way. Also, legalize it, and have people declare what kind of assist they use. Heck, integrate it in the game. There's some people I like playing with, even though they are way less skilled: this could make it better for everyone. It would make games even more accessible to everyone, and make cheat providers redundant.