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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#141

Post by oneplane »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #96
oneplane wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the base example would make that specific scenario trivial: an account that is new has no business "being better" than everyone else. The only group you'd punish with that is skilled players that lose their account (and create a new one), but if you use a moving skill window they can grow back into their plausibility pretty quickly, and it's a small cost compared to everything else. And you could even mitigate t…

What about new players who are competitive in other, similar titles, and thus start off with a strong advantage? And - what about experienced players who cheat? In some scenes, it's actually more often that cheaters are some of the best, most experienced players who have a strong competitive lean and feel they 'deserve' to win, so use cheats to get an edge. It's far more common than you'd think. That's the problem wi…

Those players would be initially quarantined either way and a sliding experience window would put a limit on what is plausible. Same goes for transferrable skills.

Experienced players who cheat will still be subject to plausibility. Say there is a normal amount of variance in humans but suddenly some player no longer has variance in their action. That's not plausible at all. Or a player looking at things they cannot see, that might sometimes be a coincidence, but that level of coincidence is not plausible to suddenly change a drastic amount.

Again, this sort of thing doesn't catch all subtle cheaters, but those are also not the biggest issue. It's the generic "runs into a room, beats everyone within 10ms", and "cannot see, but hits anyway all the time" type of cheat you'd want to capture automatically.

A what-if in a tournament or the top 1% of players is such a small set of players, you'd be able to do human observation. Even then someone could cheat, but you're so far outside of the realm of general cheating, I wonder if that's worth including in a system that's mostly beneficial inside the mass market gaming players.

Either way, this sort of detection is usually done in the financial and retail world, and results in highly acceptable rates and results. It's not perfect with a 100% success rate or something like that, but it's pretty successful. Just not something studios or publishers seem to want to invest in. It's much simpler to just buy or licence something (like Easy Anti-Cheat). Broad internal expertise isn't something the markets are rewarding at this point.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#142

Post by ultimafan »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
Night_Thastus wrote: post #13

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.

My idea: 1. Determine minimum human reaction times and limit movement to within those parameters on the client side. (For example a human can't swing their view around [in a fps] in a microsecond so make that impossible on the client) this will require a lot of user testing to get right, get pro players and push their limits. 2. Build a 'unified field theory' for your game world that is aware of the client side const…

Playing against subtle cheaters is imo more rage inducing once you realize it's actually happening. New or poor players won't notice and won't call them out on it or participate in a votekick because they genuinely can't tell the player is cheating. Average to good players get tilted because they might have enough game knowledge to know something is off but not notice it every time or be able to call out exactly what's happening. They end up second guessing too much. And you can't improve and get better playing against subtle cheaters because they're going to be doing things you just can't. Great players can probably tell more often than not but they're going to quit in droves when they realize the playing field isn't fair. Subtle cheating is much more destructive to a games longevity because trust in public matches is heavily eroded over time. Rage hackers you can just kick/ban/leave the match yourself because it's obvious.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#143

Post by jdietrich »

johnisgood wrote: post #135
jorvi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now cheating has to at look like high level play instead of someone flying around spinbotting everyone from across the map. Players hopefully don't get as frustrated when playing against cheaters as they assume they are just great players. Great players should be competitive against cheaters as well. No, those are still just as vehemently hated as “closet cheaters”, for example the whole XIM / Cronus infestation on…

What are you referring to by "gamesense"? FWIW you can implement all sorts of movement hacks, from dodging bullet particles to appearing laggy enough to seem to be teleporting.

Gamesense: a mental model of the game by which players can anticipate and pre-empt the actions of other players.

A CS:GO player with good gamesense will habitually keep their crosshairs at head height and aim at corners where an enemy is likely to emerge. They'll have an intuitive sense of how long it takes to run from one point on the map to another. They'll listen through walls for footsteps to try and decode where the enemy are, where they're headed to and what strategy they might be about to attempt.

To the uninitiated, it looks a lot like cheating - you peek through a window and instantly get headshotted before you've had any chance to react. To the guy who hit you, it's just basic gamesense - you did a predictable thing and he punished you for it.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#144

Post by dangsux »

mobeigi wrote: post #10
voytec wrote: post #7

Kudos to the author for using RFC5737[0] TEST-NET-2 address for: > An example of an IPv4 IP address is 198.51.100.1. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737

I'm a big fan of using identifiers reserved for examples. I use TEST-NET-2 IP's and example.com all the time in my documentation!

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#145

Post by dangsux »

o11c wrote: post #117
voytec wrote: post #7

Kudos to the author for using RFC5737[0] TEST-NET-2 address for: > An example of an IPv4 IP address is 198.51.100.1. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5737

Where it gets interesting is when documentation uses a typoed reserved address (e.g. 189.51.100.1 or 198.15.100.1). There are actually several RFCs that do this.

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#146

Post by BlueTemplar »

burnte wrote: post #107
berbec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a slippery slope which we can view in real-time looking at the speedrunning community. Many current real person runs are using strategies once thought to be computer-only. A Mario run from 2024 would be viewed as totally impossible in 2004.

No one does multiplpayer speedruns.

Of course a lot of people do them. They even do them with multiple teams in parallel, starting at the same time !

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#147

Post by IPTN »

derefr wrote: post #121
project2501a wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry for the not-so-smart question. the cheats are software, software has certain quirks, like the way it aims or the way it tracks. And I'm willing to bet it has enough distinctiveness from human aiming to be classified. Couldn't a classifier work on the behavior of the cheating software itself, rather than use IP bans?

In order to actually catch a cheater mid-match rather than long after the match is already over, you'd need the servers that players are interacting through to have enough CPU grunt-force to do that kind of analysis "faster than realtime" — i.e. for the server's CPU to be able to run the game's physics faster than any client can, so it can run the physics with extra math in the same time it takes the clients to just…

You should be able to limit analysis for this type of detection to only the input leading up to a kill/hit and ignoring everything else. The majority of the time players are not shooting could be used to do the analysis with plenty of time to boot midway in a round let alone a full game.

Also simple analysis of only the input streams as you stated really doesn't have to do with the phys rate of the game server and should be alot cheaper computationally. It can be offloaded to another process even if it was found to be too impactful to run alongside the game server directly. Something all those extra cores might be good for.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#148

Post by johnisgood »

jdietrich wrote: post #143
johnisgood wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to by "gamesense"? FWIW you can implement all sorts of movement hacks, from dodging bullet particles to appearing laggy enough to seem to be teleporting.

Gamesense: a mental model of the game by which players can anticipate and pre-empt the actions of other players. A CS:GO player with good gamesense will habitually keep their crosshairs at head height and aim at corners where an enemy is likely to emerge. They'll have an intuitive sense of how long it takes to run from one point on the map to another. They'll listen through walls for footsteps to try and decode where…

Thank you, that makes sense.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#149

Post by BlueTemplar »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #30
anamexis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more sophisticated cheat developers though?

Cheat development these days is incredibly sophisticated. There are swathes of tutorials, old and recent examples to research, advanced inspection tools, etc. 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 developi…

It's funny, with "sophisticated", I would have expected "so much harder".

But I guess the documentation and standardization are even more advanced ?

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#150

Post by ghffjgff »

Syntonicles wrote: post #119
snarfy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have a whitelist ability also, but it is definitely a last resort. The game is mostly dead and difficult to discover for new players. We don't want that roadblock if we can avoid it.

TIL people still play UT2004. I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...

Ut99 with the matrix mod was where it was at for LAN parties...
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