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Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

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Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#131

Post by chainingsolid »

bakugo wrote: post #109
bruce343434 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode".

> How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture I don't follow. How does the game being server-authoritative stop clients from running software that automatically aims at people's heads?

It doesn't. But it does allow preventing stuff like like seeing through walls. Although it would have to fail around corners for a short distance so players don't pop into view. Server authoritative solves less and less cheating problems the more sensitive to latency the game is. Non twichy RTS games could not send everything in the fog of war for example, and after checking for super human input, you'd have solved a good chunk of cheats.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#132

Post by bravetraveler »

whatevaa wrote: post #129
peremptor wrote: post #106

Im not sure if this is somthing we will ever be able to solve to a satisfactory degree with these top down/automated approaches. I have been gaming my whole life and I miss the "old" days of having community run server as being the default. You would go online one day pick a server and play on it in the mode you want (For context: I am talking about Counter Strike:Source). Over time you would get into talking with th…

Somehow I doubt ban revocations were common, too much of a hasle. But yeah, inability to have communities is not great.

(not the thread starter)

The lack of communities is why it seems unlikely. I remember several times successfully making my case and being unbanned!

Usually some friend of the admins was given power, they abused it, then you could go on a forum they hosted/make your case. People would chime in and so on

Children managed to "work from home" decades before the industry did

It wasn't a hassle, it was the point. Curate a community worth spending time in/with

Being denied served a function too. You learned about a community you don't want to be part of!

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#133

Post by npteljes »

orbital-decay wrote: post #125
dissent wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, I lived through it, and it was great at the time. Note that I was responding to OP who said he he'd set aside a Windows PC just for gaming. That would qualify as a gaming appliance in this context.

This might be true for competitive games with an intrusive anti-cheat, but not for gaming in general. I also keep an isolated PC specifically for these games, for my kids and myself - only because of the anticheat. But games like KSP always go to the main PC full of tools and possibilities to mod and tinker.

Yes, in reality I do both as well. I dual-boot my PC, I have two 1 terabyte SSDs in it, one for Linux, and one for Windows. The online multiplayer stuff I do on the Windows partition, it has the launchers, discord, and a bunch of things like that - and none of my personal data, just what's very strictly necessary for gaming, and even then, I'm often 100 years old, and live at "Screwyou Avenue 1" and things like that. And on my Linux partition I live my real life, but even that has the Steam launcher with some games, which I play not particularly isolated from anything else.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#134

Post by npteljes »

dissent wrote: post #122
npteljes wrote: post #114

In this day and age, I think that compartmentalization is the way to go. Gaming, and especially online gaming is basically public by default, so I decided that I don't fight the zeitgeist, rather I search for a place for it. I personally solved this for myself by having a dedicated gaming OS, and by not connecting that OS to my private network. So, there they have it - some control over my machine, but not much of my…

I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.

I see the point in this. While PC can do everything, we can specialize it ways, and if we separate the concerns, it enables further specialization. In fact I think (and experienced) that such separation enables a healthier lifestyle as well. I can do things like the gaming notifications not entering when I'm focused on administration, and similarly, I don't get the life planner updates while I'm gaming. If one has the resources to compartmentalize, I think it's a worthwhile effort.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#135

Post by bruce343434 »

mentalfist wrote: post #93
bruce343434 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode".

Sounds like in your experience, the time is ripe for you to revolutionise the incompetent game industry and solve all their simple problems!

I can't fix skill issues in others on a massive scale. I can not remove "crunch time" in the industry. I can not remove lack of care in others. Frankly, I was venting. Because sometimes all you can do is yell the wish for a better world into the void.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#136

Post by oefrha »

nkrisc wrote: post #128
oefrha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obvious cheats like spinbots spinning like crazy aren’t the only form of cheating, many cheats are more subtle and you may not realize as a player in the game, or an admin. Just look at the occasional streamer caught cheating — it’s not even obvious with tons of people watching their first person POV streams.

If we couldn’t tell they were cheating, than they weren’t ruining the experience. They didn’t gain anything from cheating on our server. There was no ranking or prize for being good.

Except lots of people like rankings and matchmaking with similarly skilled players, and people like winning too, so completely removing the incentive to cheat is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#137

Post by rincebrain »

self_awareness wrote: post #81
snvzz wrote: post #68

>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on. Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.

I wonder, how would you design an anti-cheat protection? Would you fight for the privacy of cheaters?

Fundamentally, like with any defense in depth/security system, you need to accept you can't build a solution that stops all cheating, it's all about making the cost sufficiently high that it's so rare people have an acceptable online gameplay experience most of the time.

So at each step, you weigh how much the cost is for the mitigation (in terms of upfront and ongoing dev costs, and player problems), and the benefit (in terms of how much higher you make the barrier).

For example, conceptually, you could sell a dedicated machine that requires gov't ID and credit card linked to your account to purchase and melts down if you ever are detected tampering with it, requires a mic and camera on 24/7 to make sure you're not tampering with it once purchased, dies if it loses internet ever once turned on, etc etc, but then nobody is going to buy it because you have made the cost in terms of disruption to players too high for anyone to bother.

I'm not sure you can usefully solve it other than trying to keep the barrier for entry higher than a lot of people will bother, and possibly making the barrier much higher for something like ranked play, b/c otherwise, if you do things like if you ever close their DRM after boot, you need to reboot to play the game, you're going to cannibalize your player base, because it's too much of a pain in the ass, and they will (correctly) blame you for this.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#138

Post by Nullabillity »

oefrha wrote: post #75
nkrisc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember playing online games in the 90s and early 2000s without lots of cheaters. It was easy: if we thought they were cheating we banned them from our server.

Obvious cheats like spinbots spinning like crazy aren’t the only form of cheating, many cheats are more subtle and you may not realize as a player in the game, or an admin. Just look at the occasional streamer caught cheating — it’s not even obvious with tons of people watching their first person POV streams.

So, in a matchmaking system, the cheaters filter themselves into a cohort of other cheaters and players who are on even ground without cheating.

On the other hand, you have issues like smurfers who cause the same disruption without actually running any cheat software.

Ultimately your problem is uneven matchmaking and the perception of cheating, not cheating itself.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#139

Post by Levitating »

squigz wrote: post #119

Is there any data on the prevalence of cheating in online games and/or the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems?

I am not sure if there's any public data regarding that.

But it has been estimated that the illegal market of cheats is worth about 100 million.

Many cheaters don't even intend on playing against legitimate players, looking for so called "hack vs hack" games.

At some point CS2 didn't really act on cheaters for a while and it got really ugly.

Anti-Cheats do work, there will always be ways around it but as long as these alternative paths are inconvenient enough to prevent a consumer from buying the cheat then it works.

Without Anti-Cheat modern competitive games are unplayable.

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