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Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

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Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#121

Post by throwaway81523 »

self_awareness wrote: post #81
snvzz wrote: post #68

>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on. Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.

I wonder, how would you design an anti-cheat protection? Would you fight for the privacy of cheaters?

You sort of can't. No idea about video games but it's a big issue for chess. Really top games (world championship) are played person to person in a sealed environment with moves relayed out of the room after a 15 or 30 minute time delay. Online games of any importance require you to set up TV cameras in your playing room, etc.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#122

Post by dissent »

npteljes wrote: post #114

In this day and age, I think that compartmentalization is the way to go. Gaming, and especially online gaming is basically public by default, so I decided that I don't fight the zeitgeist, rather I search for a place for it. I personally solved this for myself by having a dedicated gaming OS, and by not connecting that OS to my private network. So, there they have it - some control over my machine, but not much of my…

I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#123

Post by orbital-decay »

dissent wrote: post #122
npteljes wrote: post #114

In this day and age, I think that compartmentalization is the way to go. Gaming, and especially online gaming is basically public by default, so I decided that I don't fight the zeitgeist, rather I search for a place for it. I personally solved this for myself by having a dedicated gaming OS, and by not connecting that OS to my private network. So, there they have it - some control over my machine, but not much of my…

I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.

> Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing.

I think this is terribly myopic. Gaming and game modding/development resulted from it hugely contributed to general purpose computing in general, possibly more than any other activity. And it was only possible with games running on a general-purpose platform, not a gaming appliance.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#124

Post by dissent »

orbital-decay wrote: post #123
dissent wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.

> Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. I think this is terribly myopic. Gaming and game modding/development resulted from it hugely contributed to general purpose computing in general, possibly more than any other activity. And it was only possible with games running on a general-purpose platform, not a gaming appliance.

I know, I lived through it, and it was great at the time. Note that I was responding to OP who said he he'd set aside a Windows PC just for gaming. That would qualify as a gaming appliance in this context.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#125

Post by orbital-decay »

dissent wrote: post #124
orbital-decay wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. I think this is terribly myopic. Gaming and game modding/development resulted from it hugely contributed to general purpose computing in general, possibly more than any other activity. And it was only possible with games running on a general-purpose platform, not a gaming appliance.

I know, I lived through it, and it was great at the time. Note that I was responding to OP who said he he'd set aside a Windows PC just for gaming. That would qualify as a gaming appliance in this context.

This might be true for competitive games with an intrusive anti-cheat, but not for gaming in general. I also keep an isolated PC specifically for these games, for my kids and myself - only because of the anticheat. But games like KSP always go to the main PC full of tools and possibilities to mod and tinker.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#126

Post by uyzstvqs »

skrebbel wrote: post #91

I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.

SteamDB has a "technologies used" field taken from the Steam API. Not all are bad, EAC and Battleye are the most common, and are both reputable. Those run with the game and close with the game, and they minimize data collection.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#127

Post by Levitating »

j-bos wrote: post #63

Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test? Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

So instead of developing anticheat measures, you argue game developers should fix the human race instead?

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#128

Post by nkrisc »

oefrha wrote: post #75
nkrisc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember playing online games in the 90s and early 2000s without lots of cheaters. It was easy: if we thought they were cheating we banned them from our server.

Obvious cheats like spinbots spinning like crazy aren’t the only form of cheating, many cheats are more subtle and you may not realize as a player in the game, or an admin. Just look at the occasional streamer caught cheating — it’s not even obvious with tons of people watching their first person POV streams.

If we couldn’t tell they were cheating, than they weren’t ruining the experience. They didn’t gain anything from cheating on our server. There was no ranking or prize for being good.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#129

Post by whatevaa »

peremptor wrote: post #106

Im not sure if this is somthing we will ever be able to solve to a satisfactory degree with these top down/automated approaches. I have been gaming my whole life and I miss the "old" days of having community run server as being the default. You would go online one day pick a server and play on it in the mode you want (For context: I am talking about Counter Strike:Source). Over time you would get into talking with th…

Somehow I doubt ban revocations were common, too much of a hasle. But yeah, inability to have communities is not great.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#130

Post by ThatPlayer »

andrewflnr wrote: post #80
hipadev23 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common cheat in FPS games watches the rendered frame and sends mouse input to aim+fire. The server being authoritative doesn’t help in this situation. These sort of cheats are often entirely out of band, running on a mirror of the video stream on a second machine, and transmitting user input back via USB. Clientside snooping won’t catch it either.

That seems like it ought to be detectable statistically, unless the cheater adds jitter to the inputs to mimic human hands on a controller. And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up. (As an aside, hearing about this kind of setup really makes me wonder what the point is of cheating. Prestige? Among what set of peers?)

> And if not, it seems literally impossible to prevent so you may as well give up.

But if you give up, and your game's competitors don't, players will switch games. The way I see it, a game developer anti-cheat goals isn't necessarily to have no cheaters, but definitely to have less cheaters than your competitor.

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