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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#61

Post by sjburt »

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…

These things seem obvious but are often not feasible for certain types of games (eg FPS) due to either latency or just the rate of events the server would have to resolve. This is why you're often stuck having to trust the client and implement complex checks for tampering.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#62

Post by mikec3010 »

fredophile wrote: post #44
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…

I'm not suggesting they tolerate it completely. Just that they make the game slightly "cheatable" then counteract it enough for there to be a known controversy.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#63

Post by def_true_false »

wild_preference wrote: post #40
B-Con wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m pretty sure their comment only really existed to dismiss LoL as a “copy of a popular mod”.

I'm merely saying that they could have avoided some of the issues if they designed a new game from scratch.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#64

Post by rubicon33 »

Assossa wrote: post #37
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…

Check out http://www.pwnadventure.com/ "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 Shm…

Recently (last week or so), there has been a hacker in PUBG who is using a flying car. I had never seen this cheat before, EXCEPT in "LiveOverflow" 's YouTube videos of pwnadventure!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzM4o6qxssk

In this series he managed to get his player to be able to fly.

I can't help but wonder if whoever that hacker is that developed the recent PUBG cheat, got his inspiration from pwnadventure and this series :)

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#66

Post by mopierotti »

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…

The first point is actually something that game developers have failed to do in many cases. For example if they want client syncing to require transferring very little data, they may only send player inputs across the wire, meaning that each client needs to know everything, even if the final decision about game state is made by a server.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#67

Post by mikec3010 »

chc wrote: post #50
mikec3010 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 parti…

So you're not disputing that dark patterns are useful and effective, just that you don't like hearing them pointed out?

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#68

Post by [deleted] »

fredophile wrote: post #36
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…

Most anti-cheat methods stop working once the details are known. As someone else mentioned, there was a talk at GDC this year about one of their anti-cheat systems. The talk got into a lot of detail about how this particular system worked.

[deleted]

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#69

Post by sthomas1618 »

monocasa wrote: post #8
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.

You obviously shouldn't rely entirely on security through obscurity, but obfuscation can absolutely be an important component of defense in depth. Especially when your attackers own the hardware.

Agreed. Definitely not trying to say encryption is a poor strategy. But it does seem obfuscation is most of their anti-cheat techniques.

But the larger point I was trying to make is that all these studios are very secret about anti-cheat but they all seem to be fighting the same battle. Makes me wonder if the industry would be better off with cross-studio collaboration and open-sourcing anti-cheat libraries (that won't be defeated by knowing the details).

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#70

Post by NeedMoreTea »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #11
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…

Cheating is incredibly toxic in the community, even a whiff of it and people start labeling each other scripters etc. Riot does a lot of work to make their community suck less, lots of player leave or drop engagement because the community is toxic. With that in mind I'd imagine the optimal amount of cheating is less than what they can achieve.

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 anything multiplayer.

Few seemed to actually care if the srever's elite guilds were using no wall hacks to get loot or someone was running with 6 chars receiving identical input, or botting their dailies overnight.

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