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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#41

Post by xenophonf »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #17

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…

You might enjoy old school TradeWars 2002, which you play over TELNET nowadays. There are all kinds of helpers (e.g., TWXProxy, SWATH), and there are some pretty sophisticated scripts you can run (e.g., MomBot for TWXProxy). Ice9 is probably my favorite server (http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/), and there are others out there.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#42

Post by hhh »

chc wrote: post #13
mikec3010 wrote: post #9

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…

I am skeptical that anyone has ever played a game because they were just curious to see who is cheating today.

In CS:GO, if you play a lot of the non-rotation maps (hostage etc,) and are high MMR you will quickly learn who is cheating. Many of them are the same people on many accounts, and you will learn who they are quickly. Personal experience.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#44

Post by fredophile »

mikec3010 wrote: post #9

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…

You won't find any companies with competitive online games that turn a blind eye to cheating. If you consider a game with a cheater as being ruined for the other players, a very small number of cheaters can ruin games for a large portion of the players.

For a rough example of how the math works, let's say we have a game that is 5v5. If we have 100 players, 1 player cheating, and everyone plays once you end up with 9 players having their game ruined. That's 9% of players impacted by having 1% of the players cheating.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#45

Post by ckocagil »

paulie_a wrote: post #18

I got into developing by modding doom with a hex editor. Giving my SimCity virtually unlimited money. Cheating in a video game is fun and standard practice in my opinion.

It definitely is. I had tons of fun cheating on RuneScape. There were (and maybe still are) more than 3 botting platforms with friendly APIs for writing scripts. Being a computer savvy kid I wrote my own scripts, tested them, ran them overnight... It took Jagex nearly a decade to ban me.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#46

Post by Arnavion »

tylerhou wrote: post #14
swanson wrote: post #2

I wonder if Riot would consider building the scripting UI they show into some kind of training mode. It's a bit like the argument that no one would pirate if they content was easy to get for a reasonable price. If players could train with the spell range circles, skill shot path projection, last hit helpers, etc in a sanctioned way, I wonder how much this would remove the desire to seek out the cheating programs. Edi…

> I wonder if Riot would consider building the scripting UI they show into some kind of training mode. The game would probably be more vulnerable then, because now you have "cheat" scripts designed to work with the game. > If players could train with the spell range circles, skill shot path projection, last hit helpers, etc in a sanctioned way, I wonder how much this would remove the desire to seek out the cheating p…

>The game would probably be more vulnerable then, because now you have "cheat" scripts designed to work with the game.

That's possible. For example, World of Warships is a game where you fire big ship-mounted guns and must learn to take shell travel time and target relative velocity into account to hit moving targets. There used to be a cheat which did those calculations for you and showed you a reticle you could aim at instead. IIRC this cheat relied on code that existed within the game already and was just not used.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#47

Post by sthomas1618 »

tjohns wrote: post #15
sthomas1618 wrote: post #7

I feel like the industry would be better off being transparent about anti-cheat strategies and maybe even embracing open-source. Protecting "secret sauce" is basically admitting their anti-cheat are largely through obfuscation and can be defeated by knowing any details.

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…

That's good point and their random debuggers are definitely a clever obfuscation technique. And also not trying to say encryption is a poor strategy. The larger point I'm trying to make is that its possible being so secret about anti-cheat is to the industry's disadvantage. Feels like there is an opportunity for many studios to collaborate on anti-cheat tools and techniques (perhaps with open-source). For example, is Riot Game's packer/unpacker a specific solution to their codebase or could it be abstracted and open-sourced? This is a industry-wide problem and studios should be competing for the most creative and fun games, not the best anti-cheat.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#48

Post by foepys »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #17

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…

Screeps is a game where you need to program each move: https://screeps.com/

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#49

Post by nodja »

rjvbk wrote: post #35

>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” (revealing all players on the map). >We let the server’s game simulation make the authoritative game decisions and generally don’t trust the information received from the client, which helps prevent common cheats like “god mode” and “disconnect hacks,” barring any overlooked exploits. >Our networ…

You'd be surprised by the amount of AAA games that do not do what was listed in the blog post.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#50

Post by chc »

mikec3010 wrote: post #30
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a good "wonder", definitely not deserving of downvotes. I'm pretty sure I want to play games in which there is no cheating though. You could do handicapping, so in an FPS rather than allowing wallhack lower players get a call from control "someone is closing on your position [from the North"]". Or new players are 'fresh' and can move faster. You need to weight it very carefully though.

Yeah the downvote has become the "disagree" button sadly. I remember playing GTA-V on PS3 and early on people figured out some sort of (seemingly) underflow attack where they got billions of in-game cash, traded and gave it away, and were eventually wrangled in by the mods. I wasn't harmed by this, I thought it was ingenious of whoever found it, and got a good chuckle at the moral judgements the pregame messages disp…

I'll go on the record that I downvoted because I'm so tired of the constant drone of comments suggesting self-sabotage as a would-be dark pattern. If someone actually put a lot of effort into developing the idea, that might be interesting, but I just don't feel like "What if you shoot yourself in the foot for the publicity?" by itself is a substantial comment. It's a fill-in-the-blanks theory so unlinked to any particular phenomenon that it gets applied to everything.

For another example, somebody yesterday suggested that Amazon intentionally broke their website on Prime Day for the publicity. I downvoted that too. I do disagree, but more than that, I just don't think they add anything.

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