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Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

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Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#211

Post by PinkSheep »

Levitating wrote: post #157
solarkraft wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does respond to minor inquiries frequently, but do remember that his company supports a gigantic predatory underage gambling market.

> supports a gigantic predatory underage gambling market Last year Valve updated their code of conduct and effectively banned gambling. They've also been known to send cease-and-desist orders to various CS:GO gambling sites. So I wouldn't say that they support it, though for much time they weren't actively combating it either.

The above commenter was probably inspired by the recent investigative(!) video series by Coffeezilla (and decided not to mention it?). It was either in part 2 or 3, where C-z alleged/suspected Valve's legal actions to have been mostly about good PR and to send a signal to those ~websites~ businesses to keep them in check.

However it is indeed the case, that Valve has introduced greater and greater restrictions on inventory handling. The measures obviously go far beyond just counteracting possible scammers and phishing. Still, I am inclined to believe, they could've implemented all these features many years ago, if only they had wanted to. I highly recommend the videos. You can maybe skip the first one. It's mostly about casino owners' drama.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#212

Post by PinkSheep »

llucy3 wrote: post #146
skizm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dropping to yellow and then red How do you know what your trustfactor is? Or were you just speculating because the quality of games was lower? As far as I understand TF is hidden specifically so it can't be gamed.

In CS, the difference between high and low Trust is very noticeable; it's a big change when your games with silent / mostly-nice teammates and enemies start to become slur-fests. The value itself is not visible to the end-user, but its effects are certainly felt.

Now that you've written it out, it explains why my solo games are better than when we queue with a friend, who never plays outside our games together. And I end up promising "I just had nice team mates the last game!" :)

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#213

Post by dolmen »

15155 wrote: post #120
brettermeier wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind cheaters getting their asses kicked. Let them lose real money. If you accidentally get banned, that's a different story though. And it's just a game that's not playable anymore, not the whole Steam account, isn't it?

The entire Steam account is tainted: that's the issue. Some random commercial third party can make an accusation and damage the value of thousands of games on a lark. Meanwhile, any determined cheater just bought another copy of the game on an account dedicated solely to that task. This person suffers no extended consequence.

With Family accounts it's even worse: the tainting is attached to the account owning the licence of the game, not to the account playing the game. So if you share a game with a kid and (s)he's caught cheating, your account will be tainted, not just the kid's.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#214

Post by PinkSheep »

bunnybender wrote: post #145
HideousKojima wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban. This appears to be the case in Apex Legends: https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveApex/comments/1bhicc6/cl... Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money mac…

> Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money machine gun because Rockstar are greedy assholes. Eh? Rockstar doesn't force you to buy Shark Cards, and everyone has gotten 11 years worth of DLCs for free. Making in-game money IS an essential part of the game. You also don't have to purchase every single vehicle or other item the game offers…

The "eh?" should be directed back at your comment, how you casually omit that microtransactions and the incentives to purchase them have become a central part of modern game design. In the end, how much of an issue you rank this to be entirely depends on your weekly play hours. Maybe you just play so much as to have no issues to unlock best in class content from DLCs (most notably cars in GTAV).

Unfortunately, a quick search didn't yield anybody doing math like for the Star Wars: Battlefront (new) debacle.[1][2]

PS: The non-microtransactional design goal in multiplayer games will optimize for more play time.[3] How convenient to offer purchasable shortcuts.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7c6bjm...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7dmvdv...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gtaonline/comments/1i2qtay/comment/...

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#215

Post by itishappy »

radlad wrote: post #196
alstonite wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Expecting 10% of the player-base to volunteer as admins instead of (in addition to?) playing the game seems on the high side.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#216

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pc86 wrote: post #176
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…

I mean "then they figure out how" and "make a new account" are each doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting here. Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened? Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even…

> Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?

How are you going to figure out how it happened if it happens after one day? There are different methods of cheating and the cheaters start favoring the ones that didn't get banned over the ones that did. The cheat makers who got banned snoop the telemetry the game is sending to detect cheating to determine if there is any detectable difference between what the game sends when their cheat is installed and when it isn't etc.

> Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?

Tying it to a membership means they just create a new membership, which isn't a deterrent to anyone who is either only playing your game (so can cancel the old one) or likes cheating enough to pay for a separate membership in order to cheat. It might deter the people who can't afford to do that and are also using their subscription for other games, but banning them immediately instead of in waves would do the same thing.

Tying it to the physical hardware seems kind of pointless. They'd just buy a new device using the money they got from selling the old one to someone who probably won't realize it's banned from that game until after the return period expires. Also, then you've banned the innocent second hand purchaser of the device instead of the actual cheater.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#217

Post by dpig_ »

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 also miss the server browser. That said, there is no world in which it could ever become the norm again. It essentially died in the same wave as personal blogs and other casualties of Web 2.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#218

Post by dpig_ »

mvdtnz wrote: post #189
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.

It's not that long ago this was the norm.

Yep, I remember. It was nice to play regularly on a server with names you came to recognise. That will never be the norm again though unfortunately. It still exists in the indie space, however, like for example on VR games such as Pavlov where the playerbase is too small for formal matchmaking.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#220

Post by radlad »

itishappy wrote: post #215
radlad wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Expecting 10% of the player-base to volunteer as admins instead of (in addition to?) playing the game seems on the high side.

Honestly, this really isn't necessary as long as the game implements votekick/voteban. Kicking alone is usually enough to deal with a problem until an admin is available.

My point was really just that 10% is 10%, regardless of scale.

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