Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers. It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% s…
Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input.
Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters.
You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones:
- time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error)
- % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes
and so on (depending on the game).
These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money.
For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to:
- flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation
- Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours).
Even if cheats were used on the server, their