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Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

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

#131

Post by Drunkfoowl »

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.

[dead]

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

#132

Post by antarctician »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #89
tines wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. Last I looked, VAC only looks at a few gross elements, like the names of the DLLs loaded into the game's process. If you don't match a blacklisted name, you're probably not detected.

And user account names. At least at one point you could catch a ban for having an account named "catbot" when running on a linux box. Admittedly that was probably quite a reasonable litmus test in practice even if not in principle.

I have a suspicion that that was FUD spread by the cheat creators. Back then I decided to test that by creating a user named like that and running Steam from there. My account did not receive a ban.

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

#133

Post by jajko »

eszed wrote: post #36
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.

My perception of the psychology is a malformed competitive drive. Competition is fun! But when it gets someone to the place of "Must win at all costs " it can be life-destroying. For the video game cheats, I think it starts out as "Must beat the other players", but then that gets (mostly) boring once they are actually are beating the other players, and it shifts to "Must beat the anti-cheat system."

> Competition is fun!

A bit, sometimes, maybe, for some. The only person you really need to compete with is your past you. The rest... it certainly leads to less happy life, unless you keep winning way more often than the rest.

And uncontrolled, it can very easily spiral into rather destructive personality patterns over time. Parents often fuck up their kids having them compete as much as possible, laying seeds for later issues. Competitive people always compare themselves to others, never happy with what they have, regardless of how much they achieved. Literal opposite of searching for happiness in life.

I don't know about your peers but I see this behavior often in high performance environment, high achievers with sad inner lives.

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

#134

Post by beAbU »

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.

At this point games like call of duty, especially warzone, is completely unplayable to me due to the massive skill gap. I spend more time in the game lobby than actually playing the game. Warzone is especially bad as you are kicked out when you die, no respawn. It makes for very frustrating gameplay.

I seriously considered cheating at some point just so that I can actually have some fun and get to the end-game without constantly fucking dying. But then I remembered there are other games that I also enjoyed playing, and then I stopped playing CoD.

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

#135

Post by izzydata »

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…

Same problem here. I doubt I'll ever touch an online competitive game ever again . Back in the 90s and even early 2000s cheating was different as people would be extremely blatant and it would sometimes even be funny watching people fly around in Halo. These days there is actually profit to be made through cheating by winning tournaments and streaming. Thus they now hide it as best as possible and even pay large sums of money for individualized cheat software. The game is now to cheat as best as possible without getting caught.

There is no way to guarantee all participants are legitimate so I am not interested. It feels like a complete waste of time putting in the effort.

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

#136

Post by npteljes »

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.

The result, and the taboo method gives a thrill. It's a power trip essentially. It is also used to close the perceived skill gap, or get revenge. Some people enjoy a very uneven power balance - in games, this means that they like to get an overwhelming win, or "stomp". Sometimes skilled people achieve this by playing in a league that is much less skilled than their own, "smurfing". Technically not cheating, but it's usually against the EULA, and creates essentially the same situation.

All in all, it's just power dynamics, and lack of compassion.

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

#137

Post by npteljes »

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 think you a misunderstand why people cheat. There is nothing "nowadays" about playing unfair. Minecraft is also a bad example, as it's also cheated, and botted to hell. If there is anything to gain in any context, and you get enough people interested, the people will try to maximize that gain, and some will not care about the rules, or the intent of the context.

I do agree about the conclusion though. The solution for the disappointment in online matchmaking is singleplayer, and multiplayer with friends. Both completely eliminate the bad actors.

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

#138

Post by b3lvedere »

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 never cheat in multiplayer (also because i don't like multiplayer with strangers), but i do cheat sometimes in single player games to speed up progress. I lack the time and hate the grind. If a game has a very easy or story mode i will happily select that one.

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

#139

Post by cat1750309572 »

antarctician wrote: post #132
fc417fc802 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And user account names. At least at one point you could catch a ban for having an account named "catbot" when running on a linux box. Admittedly that was probably quite a reasonable litmus test in practice even if not in principle.

I have a suspicion that that was FUD spread by the cheat creators. Back then I decided to test that by creating a user named like that and running Steam from there. My account did not receive a ban.

It was real, but maybe the username wasn't the only data point they used. Considering that:

1. Brand new Steam accounts were banned after logging in to Steam client, before even launching any game

2. Replacing "catbot" in user accounts with a random string stopped the bans completely

3. A linux VAC module, dumped similarly to the method described in the article, had access to usernames - I think it was via a getpwent() call. It also collected some other info about the environment (I don't have that binary anymore).

You can probably agree that user account names played at least some role in the bans, even if they weren't the only factor.

* I can't provide concrete evidence for either of those three points as the events took place 8 years ago, feel free to not take my word for it. Maybe you can find someone else from that circle who still has dumped VAC binaries, links to the empty banned accounts or a clone of bot orchestration software repository with a commit that renamed the user accounts and stopped the bans. Maybe even chat logs from that era.

Anyway, at this point it's just a funny piece of tf2 cheating history that has zero impact on anything anymore. So you might as well think it was all fake and I'm just making stuff up, it doesn't matter.

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

#140

Post by heraldgeezer »

henrebotha wrote: post #11
eGQjxkKF6fif wrote: post #7

When VAC was originally introduced, CPUs only had 32bit architecture, not that 64bit hindered anything; but you could inject cheats in a near infinite amount of way, or have cheats read from memory directly, or have cheats do things especially through video drivers. Hell, glitching your nvidia drivers and setting things like Negative LOD Bias would allow you to see through textures in some cases (wall hacks) It's bee…

Yet another reason why fighting games are the superior competitive scene. The only "cheat" you could realistically see at an offline event is macros, and the chances of a macro increasing your win rate are slim to none. And there are so, so many good offline events. Online there are more potential ways to cheat, but nobody really cares. Just blacklist the player and move on.

Yea but boring or too complex, just not fun to watch. There is a reason CS and DoTA/LoL is waaaaay bigger :)
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