Even if they move a memory value when it's changed they still need to have a pointer somewhere to it's new location. If you can find that pointer you can still read/write at will. This is actually one of the things covered by Cheat Engine's tutorial.
Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
21–30 of 412 posts
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#22I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. By default the game would present a very simple UI but players would be encouraged to write and share scripts enabling varying levels and types of functionality. As a game developer your job then would be to write interesting enough systems for players to exploit to come up with interesting gameplay. I can imagine a scenario where d…
Although a single player game and a game that must be hacked instead of extended with new functionality, maybe you like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%27n%27_Slash
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#23I got into developing by modding doom with a hex editor. Giving my SimCity virtually unlimited money. Cheating in a video game is fun and standard practice in my opinion.
Sure, but in a single-player, local context: do what you want and experiment.
League of Legends is a multi-player game, and a competitive one at that: you having fun by cheating is likely leading to another player not having fun, which is bad for the game (and Riot as a revenue-generating company!).
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#24I got into developing by modding doom with a hex editor. Giving my SimCity virtually unlimited money. Cheating in a video game is fun and standard practice in my opinion.
Cheating in single-player games is absolutely fun and a good way to introduce oneself to reverse-engineering. The key difference, though, is that cheating in multiplayer games can directly (usually negatively) impact the experience of other people playing the game.
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#25I feel like the industry would be better off being transparent about anti-cheat strategies and maybe even embracing open-source. Protecting "secret sauce" is basically admitting their anti-cheat are largely through obfuscation and can be defeated by knowing any details.
But anti-cheat is largely obfuscation. Unless the host system is locked down (i.e. game consoles, systems with TPM-based verified boot), any state the game has access to is also going to be accessible to attackers. You can limit what state the game itself has access to, but that's just one class of attack. It won't prevent aimbots, for instance. It's the same reason why secure DRM is so hard. If the user has root, it…
Given the state of toolkits like OpenCV one might even imagine an aimbot which scans the HDMI output or a webcam picture taken from your screen and does aiming or grinding!
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#26I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. By default the game would present a very simple UI but players would be encouraged to write and share scripts enabling varying levels and types of functionality. As a game developer your job then would be to write interesting enough systems for players to exploit to come up with interesting gameplay. I can imagine a scenario where d…
Not sure if this will scratch your itch, and I haven't really looked into it, but checkout https://screeps.com/ "The world's first MMO sandbox game for programmers"
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously shouldn't rely entirely on security through obscurity, but obfuscation can absolutely be an important component of defense in depth. Especially when your attackers own the hardware.
Or you could design the game mechanics so that client-side cheating offers little advantage... but that would probably require doing more than ripping off a popular mod of another game.
> Or you could design the game mechanics so that client-side cheating offers little advantage
Not possible in any sort of real-time game that involves reacting quickly to what your opponent does, or a game where user input precision is paramount.
I mean, that idea basically eliminates all first-person shooters, where aimbots run rampant.
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#28This is a great technical breakdown of some modern high level approaches to common cheats. I think this the most transparent approach (even though the author admits leaving some detail out) to modern anti-cheat for massive multiplayer games. Good on riot for having an open dialogue about this. I don't think you'd ever see someone like Valve going a transparent route with something like this. (Not making a judgement o…
Is this really open dialogue? Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically all of the methods that they mentioned are pretty standard stuff. They had a few interesting twists on these ideas, but in general, things like source code encryption and shuffling memory locations seem pretty basic.
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#29I'd love to see a game where cheating and scripting is the primary means of gameplay. By default the game would present a very simple UI but players would be encouraged to write and share scripts enabling varying levels and types of functionality. As a game developer your job then would be to write interesting enough systems for players to exploit to come up with interesting gameplay. I can imagine a scenario where d…
Seems like this would devolve into a market for add-ons for your game. Let's assume that this game becomes popular. I'd claim that then most players would passively consume the leading open source solution(s), which are likely to outperform whatever any one person can do working in secret (or just tweaking the leading open source solutions). Software is copyable -- I don't think you can give a mechanical advantage to being the author of the software instead of a script kiddie.
Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
#30I wonder if there's an optimization to be made about tolerating a minimum amount of cheating while being vociferous about the countermeasures? Along the same lines as "no such thing as bad publicity", having just enough cheating to piss off a few people and getting them to talk about it and the countermeasures seems like a great way to get free advertising and game engagement of players just curious to see who is che…
That seems like a good "wonder", definitely not deserving of downvotes. I'm pretty sure I want to play games in which there is no cheating though. You could do handicapping, so in an FPS rather than allowing wallhack lower players get a call from control "someone is closing on your position [from the North"]". Or new players are 'fresh' and can move faster. You need to weight it very carefully though.
Yeah the downvote has become the "disagree" button sadly. I remember playing GTA-V on PS3 and early on people figured out some sort of (seemingly) underflow attack where they got billions of in-game cash, traded and gave it away, and were eventually wrangled in by the mods. I wasn't harmed by this, I thought it was ingenious of whoever found it, and got a good chuckle at the moral judgements the pregame messages displayed, for a game whose theme is utter debauchery. Other "cheats" where people found holes in solid objects and glitched to hiding places were pretty clever too.
I think cheating is kind of funny as long as it's not widespread or required to play the game enjoyably. I think anyone who gets offended about it is taking their video games way too seriously