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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

301–310 of 412 posts

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50ms player to streaming server + 10ms streaming server to streaming server + 50ms player to server = 110ms is less than 150ms player to player.

and how do you propose a server in Australia is going to achieve 10ms to a server in the US? Why is the server to server latency going to be less than the ISP's natural routes?

Streaming services have more money than consumers. Replace 10ms with whatever is possible. At some point, the latency will be lower overall.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#302

Here's my project's approach to Anti-Cheat. 1, 2, 3) Everything on the server. Server's version always wins. Server is the authoritative source. Granted, I have a mathematical advantage in the game's particular movement mechanics which makes this easy to get away with. The other game mechanics are also designed with facilitating this in mind. Corollary: The client is almost nothing and trusted with nothing. It's pret…

#5 is a bit of a double-edged sword, isn't it? All RNGs that I know of would require a shared seed value, and with procedural generation, you can effectively path any/everywhere in parallel.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#303
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough mechanical aides, the game balance breaks. For example, SC2 has a very cheap unit called the roach. When burrowed, it can't attack, but regenerates health incredibly quickly. It's trivial to write a cheat that will, whenever one of your roaches starts taking damage, causes it to burrow, and whenever it stops taking damage, unburrow. The unit is balanced around human control - no human can, with perfect ac…

I do not deny that the game mechanics would vastly change. The strategy would shift away from "How can I micro these roaches" vs "How can i effectively attack burrowing/unburrowing roaches" to "How can i ensure I get roaches" vs "How can I frustrate/prevent my opponent from getting them in the first place"... As an aside, ANY change to a game is going to disrupt the equilibrium in some manner and I assume would requi…

> I do not deny that the game mechanics would vastly change. The strategy would shift away from "How can I micro these roaches"...

It's kind of off-topic, but you will lose horribly if you actually try to win games on micro alone. People talk a lot about micro because it's flashy, but it's really just the icing on the cake. The pros can spend all their time showing off their icing skills because they all have solid macro underneath.

When I played in WoL, you could make it into master league (top ~2% of players) by: ensuring you were never supply blocked, spending all your money, scouting your opponent, and building counters. If you were efficient, you could do everything you really needed to with an APM of ~50.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#304

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters. You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better. The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you tra…

I always thought it would be better if the player got to choose who they played with. Let me tag other players, and feed that into a ratings engine. Match me up with players who tag like me, and not with players that people who tag like me tag as arseholes, and untagged players. Lets put the social media perception filter to good use. Could be even better on MMORPGs, where you can populate worlds with players who will have fun with each other and speak the same language and do the RPG part in similar ways.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#305
post #257
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair context: I make cheats/utilities this exact game being talked about in this article, so perhaps my opinion on the subject is biased or even invalid. I partially disagree about the transparency of this article, while they do explain most of their approach to anti-cheat (and that is pretty cool for them to do), they seem to leave out any mention of anything that could be controversial. It suppose that it does make…

How do they know you're not doing something shady if they don't actively scan...

Why do you think they have the right to know whether I'm doing something shady? Are they some kind of police? Did they get a warrant?

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheating definitely sours a gaming community, as does falsely accusing people of cheating. I left the original (circa early 2000s) Counter Strike community after being routinely accused of cheating. I have never once cheated in a online multiplayer game. But, some people just couldn't grasp that I was really that (comparatively) good & quick of a shot. Also, I don't think they realized that certain materials could be…

Your comment reminded me of a frustrating evening on bzflag. Long ago I was using a custom Linux box with a slow GPU, and on one map no matter how hard I tried (and no matter how many fellow players watched trying to help me get the timing right) I simply couldn’t jump to the first level of a building. I’d never experienced a hardware limitation quite like that.

Haha neat. That was probably caused by the physics engine running slower than needed. If you do a rough friction calculation based on the frame rate you will end up with more friction at 20 fps vs 40 or 60.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#307

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters. You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better. The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you tra…

This approach sounds incredibly smart. Hope you can share more details about it, or even a fun story or two.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#308

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters. You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better. The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you tra…

I don't have much time for playing games anymore, but I can think of a few games where I would gladly start paying for subscriptions again if I was able to use bots. Even if it meant using special bot-only accounts. For some reason this is much more fun to me than just games specifically designed around programming bots.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#309
post #117
post #3

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…

Fair context: I make cheats/utilities this exact game being talked about in this article, so perhaps my opinion on the subject is biased or even invalid. I partially disagree about the transparency of this article, while they do explain most of their approach to anti-cheat (and that is pretty cool for them to do), they seem to leave out any mention of anything that could be controversial. It suppose that it does make…

I don't expect software I use to scan my hard drives and exfiltrate data ("send samples") to their developers. That's exactly what malware does.

Companies just say it's for "security reasons" as if that somehow justified everything. When I read an anti-cheat software's privacy policy, I discovered it could scan my RAM, my files, take screenshots... They're basically trojans. It's not just game companies either. Banks here trick users into installing "security modules" that are actually kernel mode network monitors. I refuse to accept that.

These shady anti-cheating practices makes cheaters look good in comparison; similar to how copy protection measures make a genuine product inferior to the cracked version. If a hacker figures out the game's network protocol and writes his own client, he won't have to install a bunch of malware on his machine just to play the game. In my opinion, these developers are the real heroes.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#310
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair context: I make cheats/utilities this exact game being talked about in this article, so perhaps my opinion on the subject is biased or even invalid. I partially disagree about the transparency of this article, while they do explain most of their approach to anti-cheat (and that is pretty cool for them to do), they seem to leave out any mention of anything that could be controversial. It suppose that it does make…

> The current Mac game client for League Of Legends contains full debug symbols and it doesn't have Packman Probably because the person writing these anti-cheating facilities isn't as aware of how to implement these on macOS.

Unlikely. More likely there's simply not a very large Mac player base for the game, as compared to Windows
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