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Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

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Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#121

Post by codedokode »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I think those who use cheats are mostly school age kids who do it to troll people or to boost their self-esteem.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#122

Post by vintermann »

jokoon wrote: post #68

I stopped playing because I felt I could not trust other players, I was getting too paranoid. There were not that many blatant cheaters, but with closet cheaters, it's now very difficult to know if your opponent is better than you or cheating in subtle ways. It's a grey zone. I guess it's the combination of a frustration of losing matches and the constant suspicion. I was constantly trying to probe things and watchin…

In one specific area, I think this was actually the point, and that was Minecraft servers.

Minecraft minigame servers were very competitive, and very shady, using every dark pay-to-win, gacha psychology trick in the book and even some new ones (in particular, pay-to-unban). They also had very public, competitive popularity rankings among themselves, which players actually used to pick a server.

So I'm pretty sure they also actually paid account stealers to go to competing servers and cheat. The account stealers didn't have any better ways to monetize their huge lists of stolen account credentials.

What makes me think this is the huge number of accounts who would cheat in obvious ways and immediately get banned for it. There didn't seem to be much effort to avoid bans, but when you can join minigame after minigame, and all of them have one guy who ruins it by cheating and immediately gets banned, I think that's economics at play, not just psychology.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#123

Post by jajko »

codedokode wrote: post #121
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I think those who use cheats are mostly school age kids who do it to troll people or to boost their self-esteem.

Sad people full of insecurities and other complexes, compensating it on strangers (well, failing miserably but there is always those few seconds of dopamine kicks). Sounds about right.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#124

Post by gambiting »

codedokode wrote: post #121
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I think those who use cheats are mostly school age kids who do it to troll people or to boost their self-esteem.

Given that the paid cheats market is a huge business and the prices are not insignificant, I'm afraid a lot of adults with stable source of income are cheaters too.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#125

Post by on_the_train »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

Winning is fun. Cheating makes you win.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#126

Post by ascagnel_ »

miamibre wrote: post #93
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

It's pretty simple, nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means. Outside of a few games like minecraft, every other game is designed around winning. 6 of the most played games on steam right now are some combination of competitive FPS / pvp survival or Dota 2. All of these games give you way more rewards for winning over just casually playing so over time the community is incent…

I'd say the pendulum is swinging in the other direction -- Fortnite is bigger than most everything on Steam, and everything in that game feels like it's designed around you making progress through its battle pass in some incremental way. The world map has puzzles, there's a fishing mechanic, and it comes with a suite of non-combat alternate modes.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#127

Post by dminik »

tines wrote: post #108
compton93 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they just read the memory. The whole point of an external cheat is to only read memory. They can still use Win32 to send inputs.

How do you determine whether the mouse is over an enemy head? Is there some variable the engine maintains for that?

For Counter-Strike 1.6, source and GO your crosshair would change and indicate that you are aiming at a player. Not sure about CS2, but wouldn't rule it out either.

It's a bit slow, but you could grab the player ID, then check if the player is on your team or not and then fire. Either by sending a mouse input, or if I remember correctly by writing to a specific address.

However, with enough knowledge (which is mostly documented online) you could actually pull out the hitbox, skeleton and animation data and just run the line-box intersection step yourself. Easier to do internally by hooking in-game functions though.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#128

Post by IsTom »

miamibre wrote: post #93
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

It's pretty simple, nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means. Outside of a few games like minecraft, every other game is designed around winning. 6 of the most played games on steam right now are some combination of competitive FPS / pvp survival or Dota 2. All of these games give you way more rewards for winning over just casually playing so over time the community is incent…

> fun will always be dictated by how often you win

Matchmaking is designed so that you win roughly 50% of the time (except for the very top), no matter how well you play. If you focus on playing better it's going to be a treadmill by design. OTOH some people accept that you're going to lose 50% of matches anyway, chill and keep to lower ELO.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#129

Post by jpsouth »

Arnavion wrote: post #116
miamibre wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty simple, nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means. Outside of a few games like minecraft, every other game is designed around winning. 6 of the most played games on steam right now are some combination of competitive FPS / pvp survival or Dota 2. All of these games give you way more rewards for winning over just casually playing so over time the community is incent…

Cooperative games do still have the problem that you either need to have friends with the same interests and gaming schedule as you (the last one especially gets more and more difficult with age and real life responsibilities), or you play with randoms and then all the same annoyances with multiplayer games that you listed apply.

Helldivers 2 was exceptional for this in my experience - I met some great people from matchmaking, both when I was playing with IRL friends and solo. I know it’s only a video game but it truly felt like a proper bonding experience when you were trying to save the last of your team, or when you harmonised in such a way it just felt tactically perfect.

I need to hop back on that game.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#130

Post by andoando »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I did a lot of cheating back when I was younger. I mean, it was just fun being a dick and a god dominating the game
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