We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
171–180 of 372 posts
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sh…
Cheats nowadays can and do
a) run on 2nd pc passively capturing the screen and commands to a fake mouse device plugged into both machines,
b) "humanise" the aim with ai models trained on professional players
c) add random variances within the limits of human reaction times
So it doesn't solve things, really it'd still be playing catchup.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The vast majority of cheaters are not "rage hacking", but instead using cheats as a skill assist. Take a moment and think about how you would design cheats that would be undetectable. Hot keys, real time adjustments, all the options and parameters you could provide cheater to dial in their choice experience while also keeping them looking legit. Then realize cheat developers thought of all that decades ago and it is…
You misidentify the core problem, or at least why it is a problem from a business perspective.
The problem isn't cheating itself, the problem is players feeling like they have been cheated (and thus not buying micro transactions in the future).
If you can limit player action to things that look plausibly human, less players will feel cheated and will be less likely to drop out.
This system would be put in place on top of existing systems and if implemented as I have described could be done so fairly cheaply from a operational perspective (getting it off the ground will require a good bit of dev time).
If you had ELO based matchmaking (that dropped matches where the player performed far below what they had previously done to prevent sandbagging) a cheater with "perfect play" would end up only playing against other cheaters after a time.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#174For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. 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 th…
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?
Some “aimbots” don't actually assist with the aiming, they just fire the trigger any time the user gets on target.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#175For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. 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 th…
Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#176Earlier 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.
> Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. Because they're 10 years behind the curve and don't understand that a game's lifespan is contingent on anti-cheat. Once it becomes clear to the casual player that a hacker is going to effect every gaming session, the game dies quickly. Many games have gone so far as to obfuscate the presence of hackers so that players are less likely to notice them (CoD…
> Many games have gone so far as to obfuscate the presence of hackers so that players are less likely to notice them (CoD)!
How does CoD accomplish this, or other games that use similar strategies. I can't wrap my mind around how you could do this effectively while also not identifying hackers for the purpose of banning. Banning = Cheater buying another license to the game, I thought they like banning people for that reason :/
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#177Earlier 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…
Cheaters who spin don't care if they get caught. Its the closet cheaters you can't catch like this who's aim bot only locks on the head of someone when the cross hair its a certain amount of pixels from the head, or they set it to never lock on the head.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#178For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. 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 th…
Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.
> Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN..
Cheaters, which is why they’re getting banned in the first place
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#179Excellent 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…
Some competitive multiplayer games. Which seem to be exclusively FPS games with ~10+M players ? I don't even remember the last time when I've heard of a game outside that very narrow (albeit decently popular) category to have complaints about cheaters. Meanwhile for these games, I hear about it like every month, and all this despite this genre being amongst the ones that I play the least !
Well, it's just a genre that's immensely popular and easy to cheat in.
If you have access to the game's memory etc, it's pretty easy to create an aimbot or thing that lets you see thru walls et cetera.
How you gonna cheat in a moba? It's a strategy game, you need, like, cutting edge AI to beat the best humans at it. In fact OpenAI specifically worked on an AI to play Dota 2, it was that hard.
Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger
#180For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. 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 th…
Who is gaming in a competitive game behind a VPN.. I suppose if its your only option, but I don't think this would be a great playing experience.
Using a VPN with WireGuard can actually reduce latency if your ISP has poor routing to the game server, as a VPN with better peering or routing paths can improve your connection. It’s not always the case, but with a decent provider, you might see lower ping in certain situations.