Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anticheat Update Tracking

not-matthias.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#61

Post by whoisyc »

varun_ch wrote: post #13

Forgive my ignorance, but why don’t game developers put more effort into limiting the amount of data accessible to the client (restricting it only to what’s reasonably necessary)? For example, couldn’t more movement physics be validated or handled server side? Cheats might still be able to read some data from the game process, but ideally, they’d be limited to issuing inputs like any other player, based only on the s…

Validating input and physics is easy and is effective against some of the crazy cheats people ran on eg PUBG. But it’s much harder to “limit information”. For example in CS if someone is 95% hiding behind a smoke screen with just one foot sticking out, do you tell other players about this player or not? If you don’t, then you are depriving them of information they should have been able to see, if you do, then it still gives a cheater an edge because even if you do spot the foot you will probably have a hard time actually shooting at the player because his body is still hidden.

And even if you can 100% accurately decide when to hide or show information or if you are outright just streaming the game to the players there are still cheats that you cannot detect this way because they only enhance player capabilities within what is possible for an honest human player. For instance a simple cheat can detect if another player’s head is under your crosshair and fire automatically (with a randomized delay to game anticheat systems.) Realistically cheats these days are more complicated and do way more to emulate human input. It’s not easy to conclusively tell if a player is cheating thus way or not just looking at his inputs in one game. Maybe he is just fast, maybe he has lower latency, maybe he is just pre firing at spots he knows an enemy is likely to come from. You can’t know for sure unless you know what’s actually going on on his PC and his peripherals. And if you start banning people using just statistics you will likely end up with many false positives.

At the end of the day there is no silver bullet to cheating. Even if you fully control a player’s PC there are still ways to cheat in hardware [1]. You need to find the balance between annoying too many players with your anticheat and your game getting overrun by cheaters.

[1] https://www.counter-strike.net/newsentry/6500469346429600836

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#62

Post by pxc »

whoisyc wrote: post #60
pxc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway. If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you shou…

What makes you think the PC gamers who do the PC master race things are the same people as the ones playing games with invasive anticheat? Just because they both game on PCs? Your assumption tells more about yourself than those mythical “PC gamers”, whoever they are.

Maybe you skipped over the word "some" in your reading of my comment, or there's other ambiguity in the scope of a subordinate clause that you interpreted uncharitably, but I don't actually assert (or assume) that all or only PCMR types run games that require such rootkits.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#63

Post by Hikikomori »

unaindz wrote: post #24
fleebee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a number of good reasons not to make everyone run a kernel level anti-cheat. Linux (and therefore SteamOS) compatibility is a big one. I think the status quo where anyone on any platform can access the vanilla game -- where cheaters may not even be a huge problem depending on one's skill rating -- and the most competitively-minded players have the choice to play on FACEIT, works pretty fine. I do wonder what…

Valve's approach was to avoid the cat and mouse game knowing it doesn't lead anywhere. You can always cheat using DMA or reading the monitor with another computer that simulates a hardware mouse to get aimbot abilities. They wanted a machine learning to detect, flag and ban suspicious behaviour. This didn't work out and I'm not sure they are still trying but there's a few conferences talking about it.

They did try some stuff but got pushback from Reddit community for being too invasive. Not that it really matters for something already running on your pc.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#64

Post by endmin »

ragequittah wrote: post #59
pxc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway. If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you shou…

You just dual boot. Windows is a joke itself even without the anticheat shenanigans so I use it like a toy. Any real work gets done in Luks encrypted Linux inaccessible to the Chinese company with a rootkit in my windows. Hopefully.

Sony is Japanese

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#65

Post by hoseja »

pxc wrote: post #32
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy that people allow this stuff to effectively run as root. One of these companies is going to have a vulnerability that lets other players run code on your machine in kernel mode.

It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway. If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you shou…

> and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway.

Only when you want to play mainstream anticheat slop.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#66

Post by Cthulhu_ »

reginald78 wrote: post #57
maccard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have any inside info, but I’d comfortably bet $20 that it’s phone number verification.

F2P creates this problem. If you're eating $20-60 per account every time your anti-cheat is burned it isn't much fun anymore. But if you can roll new accounts for free, there's nothing to lose.

This wouldn't work with CSGO either, as it's a play-to-earn game where you can win / gamble for items that some people are willing to spend a lot of money on. See also Diablo 3 when it first came out, there was a good story about a guy that would run two dozen bots just scanning the auction house, buying stuff for in-game money and selling it for real money. Every once in a while they did a round of bans, but the author just bought new copies of the game and continued.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#67

Post by Hikikomori »

nichochar wrote: post #50

This was super interesting. Unsurprisingly, I see he didn't have much to say about faceit and esea. I think CSGO anti-cheats are a league above the rest (I'm not sure why, maybe because the scene is more competitive?)

Is this sarcasm? CS is one of the worst when it comes to cheating.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#68

Post by pxc »

hoseja wrote: post #65
pxc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway. If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you shou…

> and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway. Only when you want to play mainstream anticheat slop.

A lot of people do! That's what makes it mainstream.

Even though it's not been part of my life for a long time, I would still prefer a world where people can participate in trendy multiplayer games without subjecting themselves to such corporate malware.

But I agree, many games are better and lack this, and a lot of games that rely on nasty anti-cheat software succeed more based on network effects than on intrinsic excellence.

If you game for games' sakes, it's not too painful to avoid games so encumbered, or to cut these from your gaming diet. If you game as a ritual to stay in touch with distant friends, you will probably experience more pressure towards the rootkit-encumbered slop.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#69

Post by pxc »

endmin wrote: post #64
ragequittah wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just dual boot. Windows is a joke itself even without the anticheat shenanigans so I use it like a toy. Any real work gets done in Luks encrypted Linux inaccessible to the Chinese company with a rootkit in my windows. Hopefully.

Sony is Japanese

Maybe they're thinking of Riot Games' parent company, Tencent.
Post reply on HN