31–40 of 412 posts
I'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…
This 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…
I 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…
It's bad enough that cheaters, after getting banned, will come to the game forums or reddit and make a ton of noise about getting banned "for no reason". All too often, you'll have a few people (though most of them probably on puppet accounts) that jump on the post and spread lies about Riot banning people for insignificant infractions, when the real cause was cheating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I hope they are proud of doing the obvious. That's like having a webpage and bragging about escaping strings that you insert into a SQL table...
This 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…
I'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…
"Pwn Adventure 3: Pwnie Island is a limited-release, first-person, true open-world MMORPG set on a beautiful island where anything could happen. That's because this game is intentionally vulnerable to all kinds of silly hacks! Flying, endless cash, and more are all one client change or network proxy away. Are you ready for the mayhem?!"
"Pwn Adventure 3 was originally during Shmoocon 2015, from January 16-18, 2015. While the CTF is now over, we are still running the servers in a limited capacity so others can try it."
Great writeup, and nice that they mention telemetry only once and work more with obfuscation than the usual process scanning, document scanning, blacklisting and reporting all back to shady servers, etc. It's scary that one can easily get nasty anticheat software installed, even when playing only single player(!) games.
Buy Linux games on gog.com?
We tend to see similar exploits across all our games (memory hacking, fake IAPs, etc) which lets us build an armoury of anti-cheat tools.
What I find most interesting is where hackers don't focus their attention. It took almost 4 years for them realise the encryption key for our assets was easily accessible using the 'strings' tool in Linux - once they found it we had a busy few days stopping modders from impacting legitimate players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's literally impossible. The entire point of the game is to have client-side input and for that input to be generated by a human and not a computer. There's no way to move that to a server.