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

Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

ssno.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 223 posts

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#191

Post by Asmod4n »

gambiting wrote: post #92
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics. Is this supposed to do any good? The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned. Then they figure out how, make a new account and go back to cheating. Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenience…

>>The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned. So....yes. But there are mitigating tactics around this, I really recommend looking into it because it's a fascinating topic. As the simplest thing - you don't ban cheaters the moment they are detected to not give off how you detected them. That's why Activision bans people in waves and all at once, even though they kn…

there is no money back from the cheat makers, its paypal, visa et al which does that.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#192

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

dpig_ wrote: post #186
alkonaut wrote: post #102

Cheating is ultimately a human problem. You can have some safeguards and heuristics like the ones the article describe, to weed out 90% the most blatant cheaters, so I think anticheats like these are fundamentally a good thing. But the anti-cheat can and should err on the safe side because ultimately it should be the players and admins themselves that sort this out. Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take plac…

> Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take place on servers with human admins. The sheer scale of this arbitrary requirement is hilarious.

When you go back this was the norm. You go to irc, search in #5on5: high server on (counter-strike 1.6)

You either have a server and they come to you or you don't and message people. If they/you feel like are hacking go next. There were tons of servers where you had admins all the time.

Human admins still can only see the obvious spin/aimbots.

Companies took this from us as hosting your own servers is rarely an option these days and you rely on the company never shutting them down.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#193

Post by alkonaut »

dsjoerg wrote: post #134
alkonaut wrote: post #102

Cheating is ultimately a human problem. You can have some safeguards and heuristics like the ones the article describe, to weed out 90% the most blatant cheaters, so I think anticheats like these are fundamentally a good thing. But the anti-cheat can and should err on the safe side because ultimately it should be the players and admins themselves that sort this out. Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take plac…

Why do you think human admins are the only viable solution? Plenty of games thrive without them—e.g., Apex Legends uses robust reporting and anti-cheat systems, and Rocket League's moderation is largely automated yet effective.

Depends on how the game works a suppose. Mostly it depends on whether a cheater would ruin one short game, or many hours of games. I usually find async reporting useless because it already ruined my evening (this is under the assumption I’m playing a server and have no interest playing anywhere else, but a single cheater can ruin the game for everyone for a whole day). Whether that cheater gets disciplined later doesn’t help anyone in that scenario unless they were kicked from the game right away.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#194

Post by alstonite »

alkonaut wrote: post #190
dpig_ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take place on servers with human admins. The sheer scale of this arbitrary requirement is hilarious.

This was the norm. It just changed in the last few years (say, 10). And it could be the norm again. I still play games with zero cheaters because I return to the same server every night, playing against 63 other players where I usually have seen most of them before. And there is usually an admin there, or someone who can ping one if needed. I have no idea why this changed in more recent games. While every other onlin…

So I just checked the player count of Counter-Strike 2. It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

Trying to also account for total players in every other competitive game seems like an impossible ask.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#195

Post by eertami »

ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #192
dpig_ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take place on servers with human admins. The sheer scale of this arbitrary requirement is hilarious.

When you go back this was the norm. You go to irc, search in #5on5: high server on (counter-strike 1.6) You either have a server and they come to you or you don't and message people. If they/you feel like are hacking go next. There were tons of servers where you had admins all the time. Human admins still can only see the obvious spin/aimbots. Companies took this from us as hosting your own servers is rarely an optio…

> If they/you feel like are hacking go next.

This here is why I find matchmaking is such a frustrating experience at high ELO compared to the old times. With an IRC scrim you aren't held hostage by blatant cheaters, you just leave - but on matchmaking, you cannot choose to forfeit and have to waste 30 minutes or be penalised.

I only play with a 5 stack so us choosing to leave doesn't ruin anyone's experience. I kept two CS accounts (same rank) purely so that we could skip the cooldown and requeue if the opponent had blatant cheaters/spinbots.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#196

Post by radlad »

alstonite wrote: post #194
alkonaut wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the norm. It just changed in the last few years (say, 10). And it could be the norm again. I still play games with zero cheaters because I return to the same server every night, playing against 63 other players where I usually have seen most of them before. And there is usually an admin there, or someone who can ping one if needed. I have no idea why this changed in more recent games. While every other onlin…

So I just checked the player count of Counter-Strike 2. It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators... Trying to also account for total players in every other competitive game seems like an impossible ask.

> It's at 936,330 players. At 10 players per match, that's a requirement of 93,633 game moderators...

I'm not sure why this seems impossible to you? As the number of players increases, one would expect the number of players willing to act as an admin/moderator to increase linearly.

Typically admins are players also - that's why they choose to host a server.

I am still playing Quake Live, and it's all user-run servers. Hacks and cheats can be a problem, but users get banned via their Steam account, and there's a real cost (to buy the game) if you want to come back.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#197

Post by radlad »

alkonaut wrote: post #190
dpig_ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take place on servers with human admins. The sheer scale of this arbitrary requirement is hilarious.

This was the norm. It just changed in the last few years (say, 10). And it could be the norm again. I still play games with zero cheaters because I return to the same server every night, playing against 63 other players where I usually have seen most of them before. And there is usually an admin there, or someone who can ping one if needed. I have no idea why this changed in more recent games. While every other onlin…

> I have no idea why this changed in more recent games.

I thought the reasons were basically:

(a) accessibility - running a game server requires some technical knowledge, and if you're doing it from home, possibly changes to your network (and home connections likely won't have as good of routing)

(b) cheat detection - since the server is run by the game developers, it's easier to find misbehaving clients and ban them across all servers.

(c) DRM - it's harder to crack a game that has to sign-in to cloud servers.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#198

Post by foooorsyth »

bob1029 wrote: post #105
alkonaut wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I'd prefer it if games could permaban based on just heuristics and the EULA simply stated "tough luck, buy the game again". I'd happily pay for that, knowing my money is at least not going to some 2 year legal fight. I get that I might be the one accused of cheating next time. But if that risk is tiny and the cost when it happens is $50 or $100 it sounds a lot more attractive than the alternative. Also (obvi…

I think stat based bans are the ultimate solution for all the client side bullshit. If you use statistics, you will sometimes get it wrong, but in the other cases the cheaters are completely out of luck. You could offer the source code to your game willingly and it wouldn't help them very much. If the cost of a false positive is $50 for the gamer and the chance of it happening is rare, I think many would quickly unde…

>I think many would quickly understand the value proposition

I think thousands of innocent teenagers without credit cards will be furious. Not to mention anyone that takes a game semi-seriously and cares about their reputation after getting banned. Also, with real-dollar values tied to skins, you’re not just nuking someone’s $50 account — accounts and their associated items can be worth a lot of money.

Anti-cheats should need to be certain. They should also, however, ban the hardware ID, which lots of games companies choose not to do (because they’d lose money).

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#199

Post by foooorsyth »

mavamaarten wrote: post #183
bob1029 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think stat based bans are the ultimate solution for all the client side bullshit. If you use statistics, you will sometimes get it wrong, but in the other cases the cheaters are completely out of luck. You could offer the source code to your game willingly and it wouldn't help them very much. If the cost of a false positive is $50 for the gamer and the chance of it happening is rare, I think many would quickly unde…

I feel like pretty much all cheaters can be detected by just looking at mouse movements vs enemy positions. If you can easily spot cheaters through a killcam or spectator view, they can be detected through a serverside watchdog, no?

Unfortunately the cheats are way ahead of this. Most modern aimbots in shooters like Counter-Strike are (intentionally) not-obvious. They give minor advantages and do tiny corrections for an already-immensely-skilled player to gain a small edge. In a game where the difference between a great player and an elite player is small, they can be the invisible difference maker.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#200

Post by arminiusreturns »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #175
amatecha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact same thing happened to me with League of Legends. I was inexplicably banned for cheating, despite never having done any such thing (and despite regularly playing on three accounts (this is fully permitted), the other two of which were not banned!) Their support people repeatedly said "we reviewed your case and the ban is correct", etc. all the while giving zero information about what I did so I could correc…

I feel that. I'm not against playing video games, but I'm uneasy about getting too attached to virtual property, considering it's controlled by a gaming company who has no obligation to you and no inclination to keep games alive beyond their shelf life. To be fair though, real life property is only slightly less ephemeral.

I'm working on something that allows you to mirror your online (my game world) virtual "possessions" locally, open-source, free, forever.
Post reply on HN