21–30 of 372 posts
I am surprised VGUI browser shares cookies across Steam accounts. When I log out of my Steam account, switch to another one, launch the same game, I would have expected an entirely different datastore to be used for the VGUI browser.
>Now, in order for a player to appear to us as a "fresh player" they would need to change their Steam ID, IP address and Steam installation folder. As you can imagine, no one is going to do the latter. Really? I would expect that a dedicated cheater would reinstall Windows (or reload from a snapshot) every time they are caught.
Server side only anti-cheat is one of the problem domains that I'd really love to work on at some point in my career. This is the type of adversarial arms race that just seems really fun to think long and hard about.
Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.
I hope they asked permissions for storing those cookies. Otherwise they're violating various EU laws.
https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/europa-web-g...
In this case, this one might fit:
> User centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses and linked to the functionality explicitly requested by the user, for a limited persistent duration
The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders.
IMHO, one of the most effective way to stop ban evaders is to actually charge money for the game.
>We Outsmarted CSGO Cheaters by Exploiting the Client Fixed
> If a player joins with a different Steam ID but with an IP address that is already banned, the system now re-bans them This works great until you realize you're punishing innocent players because of CGNAT and IP addresses getting rotated. Cheaters usually know how to get their router to request a new IP address. That IP address then gets assigned to someone else later.
They addressed this in the section entitled "Problematic cases of IP address fingerprinting"
By using IP as the ban id they created a system that constantly and regularly banned completely innocent steam IDs, thinking they are somehow linked when a new steam id uses a banned IP, which is nonsense. They just did not notice because the banned gamers did not complain.
Excellent write up and solution. Cheating in video games makes for a wretched experience for those who don't cheat. It's crazy how rampant cheating in multiplayer games, especially competitive ones has gotten. Ten years ago, I thought it was at an extreme, but it's only gone up since then. Part of the problem is that for some software developers, writing cheats brings in a massive amount of money. So instead of some…
A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess.
So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.
Are there more sophisticated cheat developers though?
It's so much easier to make cheats today than it was, say, 10 years ago.
It's also easier because more and more games are sharing common infrastructure like game engines, as compared to the past. What works in one Unreal game may save you a lot of time developing a cheat for another Unreal game.
These days, many online games encounter serious cheats within the first couple of days of release - if not the day OF release.