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Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

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

#151

Post by frollogaston »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #126
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…

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.

PC game market is also smaller than mobile games

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

#152

Post by frollogaston »

rimunroe wrote: post #21

Back in 2000-2005 I was very active in a community centered around 20 or so modded Counter-Strike servers which I volunteered as an admin on. We were generally good about having at least one admin on each server at any given time to deal with cheaters. Occasionally someone wouldn’t be around though. There was a period of time lasting about a month or two where a player with a name like BELT SANDER or ANGLE GRINDER or…

Another way in some games is to cheat even harder against the cheaters, like repeatedly insta-headshot-spawnkill them until they leave.

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

#153

Post by phoronixrly »

whoisyc wrote: post #87
phoronixrly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I mentioned that it's not OK for games to be proprietary software and/or use unethical software like DRM (which tbh anti-cheats are as well). I got accused that I wanted game developers to starve to death.

There are countries that believed farming should not be profit oriented and curiously they happen to be the ones to have breadlines. It is no coincidence that America and Japan, the two countries with the most draconian copyright protections, continue to be the dominant player in the game industry. Profit motive and the ability to reinvest previous profits into future products is the greatest force multiplier in our…

Oh, I've heard this one before! Steve Ballmer, is that you? I thought we were past the 'open-source is communism' and 'cancer on intellectual property' times...

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

#154

Post by jowea »

Frotag wrote: post #81
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've botted in a few MMORPG games and the appeal is that it's basically a new perspective on the game. Also makes it more of a technical challenge than a test of mechanical skill or free time / patience. It still feels like a game in the sense that there's progression and rewards for progression. For example, learning how to read cooldowns means you can make smarter macros and double your income / cut kill time by ha…

It's a technical challenge for the script kiddie making their own hacks, but from what I gather most PvP cheaters nowadays are paying (!!!) a subscription for their cheats.

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

#155

Post by djm2k »

techjamie wrote: post #150
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 once tried an early GTA V multiplayer mod, pre-FiveM, that used .NET as a basis. They didn't apply any protection to their mod DLL though, and it was trivial to modify it in any way one liked with DnSpy. I used it to completely automate a grindy task on a server complete with chat hooks, and automatic teleportation to sell the items and back. And also implemented a trainer of sorts with all sorts of functions. The…

these days you can open the devtools for the web-based inventory systems and start sending malicious events straight from the console. filed as not-a-bug...

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

#156

Post by chedca21 »

IsTom wrote: post #128
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…

> 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.

[dead]

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

#157

Post by chedca21 »

npteljes wrote: post #136
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.

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…

[dead]

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

#158

Post by nickzelei »

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.

Back in the cs1.6 days there were servers that advertised as hacker servers. Obviously anti cheat was turned off, but the draw was that everyone was hacking and you could test your hacking skills. The goal was to see who had written the best hacking software. It was actually really fun and an entirely new way of playing the game.

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

#159

Post by nickzelei »

malwrar wrote: post #26
rimunroe wrote: post #21

Back in 2000-2005 I was very active in a community centered around 20 or so modded Counter-Strike servers which I volunteered as an admin on. We were generally good about having at least one admin on each server at any given time to deal with cheaters. Occasionally someone wouldn’t be around though. There was a period of time lasting about a month or two where a player with a name like BELT SANDER or ANGLE GRINDER or…

I used to write cheats for CSS & other Source games. Not sure if the original CS would have the same vuln, but iirc you used to be able to use an INetChannel::ReceiveFile function with path traversal to grab the server config. There were a few cool hacks around the file path filtering logic they added in my era that (combined with ::SendFile) enabled a fun period of arbitrary RCE on Source servers. I knew one person…

Maybe you would be the person to answer this. Back in 1.6 it was common to install amxmodx for use as admin software in game. There was a function in one of the menus that would open up a players disc drive on their PC! I was an admin on a wc3 fun server back in the day and would do it to people for fun. Too young at the time to ever think more about how that was actually done or what security vulnerability that must have been exploiting! I always wondered how it was done.

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

#160

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

altruios wrote: post #59
AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say for DRM, but there's much bigger demand to play a multiplayer action game without experiencing cheating than demand for a similar game that's not a rootkit. Cheaters are nasty. Devs make rootkit anti-cheats simply because there's no better alternative, not because they're evil.

We need to define nebulous terms like 'better'... to a company that's synonymous with what is 'cheapest' to their bottom line. To a player, that's a more effective anti-cheat. To my understanding, the latter is much more effectively solved server-side, but is more costly for the company to run. I'd rather play a game with server-side anti-cheat than player-side-anti-cheat.

All games are different, and for some game, this may be true, but what I, personally, have in my mind in a discussion about intrusive anti-cheats is a fast shooter with lag compensation like CS or CoD, and for them, this problem is not solvable only server-side.

CS:GO actually have heuristics and ML to flag cheaters server-side, but that's only another line of defense - the majority of defense is on the client-side anti-cheat. It's called VACnet, and its bans are temporary - most likely because of false positives.

It's unfortunate, but it is how it is.

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