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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#331

Post by dividuum »

stcredzero wrote: post #275
username3 wrote: post #192

The best way to prevent cheating is by streaming games. Game streaming services are the future of multiplayer games. Edit: I mean cloud gaming like OnLive, not Twitch.

Essentially, my game system is the low tech version of this. The game is just a dumb terminal for displaying moving objects, which are syncing to info streaming from the server. It's so simplistic and dumb, we can even enforce Fog of War. When an entity disappears, its tag and move information are simply not sent. The client then diffs it out of the set of visible things.

Any reasonable multiplayer game works like this. They mention it in the linked article: "We don’t share the state of other players if it doesn’t need to be shared, so we can avoid common cheats like “map hacks”. Essentially the client only has the information it needs to show the current state of the game.

The problem is then that the state available to the client (like position of entities) is easily accessible in memory unless you implement some of the countermeasures they describe.

Streaming (as video) makes this harder as you'd then have to rely on visual information only. While this of course is also solvable using CV, it's a lot harder than looking at memory directly.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#332

Post by NeedMoreTea »

zucan wrote: post #256
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must have encountered very different online games and communities. Plenty of MMO's seem to have survived well known and endemic cheating without any additional toxicity in the community. No more toxic than the fake outrage when someone loses a loot roll in a dungeon or a pvp round. The "communities" and games usually seem brimming over with toxin with or without cheating. It's a good part of why I now avoid anythi…

The toxicity comes from the focus on competition and the lack of repercussion when misbehaving. A guild kicks you out if your negativity annoys too many or the wrong members, whereas matchmaking has an infinite supply of teammates to abuse. I agree with you that adding cheating to the cocktail of toxicity would probably not be significant enough to lose a large group of players. However cheating may yield a competiti…

Quite.

Personally I used to get more annoyed by queuing for a matchup and someone dropping so we're in a team one short, or by poor matching than cheating which was usually more of an eye-roll moment for me.

Resolution would have required GMs using a (temporary) ban hammer to bring some repercussion to all the toxic reports in the chat logs, not just headline anti-cheat sweeps and very rarely during tournaments. The resulting toxic anarchy seemed the obvious and inevitable result of games ignoring just about every behaviour. Which is why I voted by removing my wallet. :)

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#333

Post by de_watcher »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #289
ABCLAW wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it, though? Sirlin's scrub is a strawperson player that will not adapt to any changes in the game, instead asking that the game itself is changed to suit them. Running cheats is the ultimate scrub move - you change your play experience asymmetrically to benefit yourself rather than practicing at the game as offered to get better. There are a ton of interactions in games that are degenerate if performed at TAS leve…

>Is it, though? Sirlin's scrub is a strawperson player that will not adapt to any changes in the game, instead asking that the game itself is changed to suit them. Running cheats is the ultimate scrub move - you change your play experience asymmetrically to benefit yourself rather than practicing at the game as offered to get better. That's a fair point; I agree. But the ancestors are debating a scenario with sanctio…

> but can a team of AIs beat Navi in a full game of DotA?

Yes it can, especially Na`Vi (Dota-reddit jokes that AI won't play with Na`Vi because developers want to test AI with a pro team). There were matches with pro players last month. Players say that mechanics in 5v5 fight are perfect and the global strategy is there.

I won't say that the strategy has many states in Dota: it's the items and position on the map (by choosing one of the objectives).

It's not ready for the real Dota 2 tournaments though: AI was trained for the specific 5 heroes.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#334

Post by hycaria »

johnmg wrote: post #117
crsv wrote: 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…

So are you living out of that?

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#335

Post by SXX »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #302
stcredzero wrote: post #243

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.

You can always leave some crucial part or procedural generation on server-side too and impose some limits on how client can use API to it. E.g client might do any kind of heavy lifting (generation of terrain, etc), but code that handle important stuff (e.g PvE enemies, rewards) could be stay on server-side.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#336

Post by mynameisss »

civilitty wrote: post #240
mikekchar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit more complicated than that. You have to do a few things. First you have to tell the customer that you are collecting their data. Then you have to tell them under what lawful basis you are collecting their data. The user then has various rights (depending on the lawful basis you choose) to object, etc. If you must collect and use the data in order to fulfil the contract (i.e., there is no other way to do it…

> I think you could make a pretty strong argument that it doesn't apply, as long as you take pains to ensure that you can't identify the person from the information. That would entirely defeat the purpose of an anti-cheat system. You have to have some sort of personally identifiable information attached to the data being sent in to the server, otherwise how are you going to ban the cheaters? Even IP addresses are per…

Instead of using an IP address to identify cheaters the game could assign a unique random generated ID to players. Then they could ban that id without using IP. I think this scheme complies with the GDPR if you take care of not binding that ID with other user personal information.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#337

Post by SXX »

stcredzero wrote: post #259
bsder wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4) Scripting -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! Yeah, I was kind of annoyed that he flags this: > draws the ranges of various abilities, indicates which minions are ready to be last-hit, and shows the path of skillshot projectiles. as a cheat. It seems like this would be a godsend to new players. However, I prefer Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation-like games over the twitchfests like Starcraft.

However, I prefer Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation-like games over the twitchfests like Starcraft. We've made our client so dumb, even Fog of War is cheatproof. How do we enforce not seeing something? The data for those entities isn't sent. In fact, this is exactly the same thing as making an entity disappear. The entity's tag and movement info aren't sent, and so it's diffed out of the set of visible entities.

Same thing already done in spiritual successor for Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation called Planetary Annihilation. Basically there is authoritative server that work exactly that way.

Only downside of this is that when you have few thousand units on screen game will use abysmal about of bandwidth like 8Mbps for each client. So when there is 10 players in-game server-side must have these 80Mbps.

Oh and it's also used as replay / save system. Amazing tech:

https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/the-tech-of-planetary-annih...

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#338

Post by tinus_hn »

VectorLock wrote: post #224
exgamedev wrote: post #212

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 is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game. The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they're cheating at is probably negligible.

I see you’ve never had to deal with trolls and griefers.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#339

Post by SXX »

stcredzero wrote: post #243

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…

Very unfortunately what you explain here only work for very specific type of gameplay. For instance almost nothing works when you need to secure first-person shooter simply because it's skill-based gameplay where it's also very easy to cheat for the bot.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#340

Post by earenndil »

stcredzero wrote: post #276
SteveNuts wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there massive video latency issues with this? People spend tons of money to get the absolute best frame rates and monitor response times, I can't imagine hardcore gamers wanting to have tens of ms additional latency in their gaming.

You can have real-time games whose mechanics are designed around latency. My game is one example. In fact, I would assert that for now, you have to design around latency in real-time multiplayer games. Until round-trip latency for your entire userbase is below 40ms, it will be an issue.

I'd say 30ms, not not 40. Because a single frame is 16.6ms, so 30ms round-trip would bring one-way down to below one frame of latency (potentially with a small amount of jitter).
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