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Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

areweanticheatyet.com

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Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#111

Post by madflame991 »

Strom wrote: post #104
Reubend wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common misconception. Some players are extremely good at video games, and they look like statistic anomalies / outlier when mapped across the full distribution of players. Consider, for example, professional gamers. They spend countless hours practicing, and they can easily outcompete casual gamers who don't have the time to refine their skills daily. Statistical anti cheat is extremely weak in any game whe…

Extremely good players have old profiles that they have used for a long time, gradually getting better. Cheaters are either using a new profile, or an old profile with bad stats that then has a sharp uptick.

I've been playing the same 2 games for many years and I think I got pretty good at them and I've used multiple accounts - under your assumption I look like a cheater.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#112

Post by asddubs »

Starz0r wrote: post #101
Cortex5936 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play the devil's advocate here, do you think enabling EC on Linux systems makes it easier for players to cheat ?

Yes. But, in practice, it usually doesn't result in any new cheaters. There is a myriad of reasons for this, but I won't go over them here.

Could I persuade you to reconsider going over them? I'm not expecting an essay or anything but it would be interesting.

One thing that comes to mind for me is that most cheaters probably don't code the cheats themselves but buy them off telegram channels or whatever (just a guess), and probably wouldn't want to install a whole operating system for them

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#113

Post by shaokind »

bob1029 wrote: post #110

I think the real answer is to sidestep all of the direct, deterministic solutions in favor of statistical ones. I am not 100% certain of this, but I believe some there are some games, like EA's Battlefield series, that utilize a degree of statistical modeling to detect cheaters. We reliably use statistical process control to automatically calibrate incredibly precise, nanometric-scale machinery for purposes of semico…

> like EA's Battlefield series, that utilize a degree of statistical modeling to detect cheaters

Battlefield started out using PunkBuster, one of the earliest kernel-level anti-cheats. With Battlefield 4, they used FairFight, a statistical server-side solution, alongside PB.

With Battlefield 1, they dropped PB, and operated with just FairFight.

And now, EA have decided to create their own kernel-level AC, called EA AntiCheat, and are implementing it on BF5 and BF1, largely because FairFight was not enough.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#114

Post by Strom »

madflame991 wrote: post #111
Strom wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely good players have old profiles that they have used for a long time, gradually getting better. Cheaters are either using a new profile, or an old profile with bad stats that then has a sharp uptick.

I've been playing the same 2 games for many years and I think I got pretty good at them and I've used multiple accounts - under your assumption I look like a cheater.

> under your assumption I look like a cheater

In a proper statistical analysis there are far more variables than what I outlined in my preceding two sentence post. It would be naive to think that I would consider anyone a cheater only based on the account age.

Smurf accounts are also bannable in plenty of games and I certainly support that.

Beyond that, the level of "good" we're talking here goes way beyond dominating in a random match. Cheater stats are usually better than literally the top #1 player in the world.

Take something like Battlefield, where on the public leaderboards the "top players" have a kill-to-death ratio in the thousands. That is so far beyond human possibility, yet they are still not banned because of this aversion to statistics.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#115

Post by Starz0r »

asddubs wrote: post #112
Starz0r wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But, in practice, it usually doesn't result in any new cheaters. There is a myriad of reasons for this, but I won't go over them here.

Could I persuade you to reconsider going over them? I'm not expecting an essay or anything but it would be interesting. One thing that comes to mind for me is that most cheaters probably don't code the cheats themselves but buy them off telegram channels or whatever (just a guess), and probably wouldn't want to install a whole operating system for them

This is indeed one of the reasons!

Cheating is a market, and most cheaters are not programmers themselves. But it goes deeper than that. Most players, and players who intend to cheat are already using Windows. Any portion of a game's player base that intends to cheat is usually small, any the portion of a game's player base that is also running Linux at the same time, is even smaller. So programming cheats for Linux (however easy it may be), is a nil-some game. Though I'm not going to claim it's never happen, there are cheats for CS2 on Linux for example, but this is an outlier and exception to the rule.

> Could I persuade you to reconsider going over them? I'm not expecting an essay or anything but it would be interesting.

Sorry, I didn't say that because I was trying to withhold this information, I just didn't want to spoil my future blog post. If you don't want to wait for the post and just want to hear it, I'm down to just giving a overview of the reasonings.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#116

Post by ThatPlayer »

mook wrote: post #63
dijit wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you have rollbacks and rubberbanding, and UI elements that fired which aren't valid once the physics interactions have resolved serverside. Jt doesn't take much for people to feel like the UI is untrustworthy and “broken”. No game wants to be a jank piece of ass, but theres no good solution here, believe me, we’ve tried.

My understanding is that it's popular now to use rollbacks in fighting games (in combination with delays so the rollback doesn't get too far). Perhaps something like that would be useful, though of course that would depend on the game (and how much data it needs to send between players).

I think the difference is fighting games are easier to simulate. Part of rollback is to rewind 6 frames and resimulate those 6 frames again with the new input. This basically requires you to be able to run your game at 6x speed consistently. It's also increased memory requirement, because you need to have the game state from those 6 frames ago in memory. These are also reasons you cannot do too many rollback frames without adding delay. I believe the Nintendo Switch never got the rollback update for BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle because of performance reasons.

Fighting games have two (maybe 4 with assists) characters generally at 60fps. That's relatively easy to do. A worse case would be an RTS game: in a fight when each unit's attack needs to be calculated repeatedly. Valorant runs at 128 ticks/second. For the same latency compensation as 6 frames in a fighting game, you would need 13 frames, so you need to be able to simulate the game at 13x speed.

And rollback still has janky visuals when conflicts happen. The games I've played will let you choose between smoother visuals with more delay or rollback artifacts with less delay. Generally the default setting is the former.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#117

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

shaokind wrote: post #108
Starz0r wrote: post #73

What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don't blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It's come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with som…

[dead]

I think there are external kvm like cheat devices though. Scans the image and controls the mouse and keyboard i guess

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#118

Post by kuschku »

shaokind wrote: post #108
Starz0r wrote: post #73

What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don't blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It's come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with som…

[dead]

And how's that gonna help you when cheaters can use an HDMI grabber and USB HID emulation? Lol

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#119

Post by kuschku »

hexomancer wrote: post #75
strken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the user controls their own machine, so they can open a hex editor and turn your option off.

Well I assume there are ways to prevent that (or make it extremely difficult at least)? E.g. look at denuvo, nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo.

> nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo.

In fact, three people have been able to do so, that's why denuvo games do get cracked.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#120

Post by BoringTimesGang »

strken wrote: post #84
hexomancer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I assume there are ways to prevent that (or make it extremely difficult at least)? E.g. look at denuvo, nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo.

Denuvo isn't just a flag on a process. It's no more relevant to your suggestion than encryption would be to a suggestion that audio files have an option to prevent them being copied.

Picking an analogy that is actually how DRM worked is fitting.

>Denuvo isn't just a flag on a process

Nor would be PC's solution. That's why they added it, making it relevant.

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