Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#221

Post by hnick » Thu, Jan 23, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #152

hnick wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat. An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down ex…

> An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That seems like it could go the other way. There are five cheat programs that each have a dozen versions and now you know that everybody using program A and D got banned, the people using program C and E didn't, and the people using program B got banned b…

Yeah that makes sense, if they collaborate and share information. But more-so it avoids the case where a patch drops then people suddenly get banned - it's easier to match the exact version and what changed or is different compared to others on the market that avoided it, which I think they want to avoid most.

I think ultimately it's to avoid devoting too many resources to the arms race by breaking it up into sprints. Mass ban waves also make community impact and news, and in some cases for the regular players it refreshes the scene just for a bit by clearing the muck. They can time it to coincide with in-game events or updates too then (which often break cheats), giving a window for non-cheaters to enjoy.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#222

Post by WhyNotHugo » Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 5:06 PM UTC

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.

You probably don’t need that many mods. They can jump around between multiple matches. Looking at one match every ten minutes might yield good enough results. That scales the amount down by 10x, so now you only need 1% of plays volunteering to help their own community.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#223

Post by alkonaut » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 10:26 PM UTC

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…

In CS you can probably get away with fewer and async. But even so, admin powers doesn't weigh anyone down. It's not a chore. You have N admins and then N/10 or so sub-admins who can't ban or unban people but can e.g. silence chat abusers, maybe kick or give a 12h ban etc. It's self moderation and it costs almost nothing.