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Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
81–90 of 197 posts
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#82the best anti cheat that i have experience is vangaurd by riot games. I was running a python script in background for web crawling, left it on and guess what? my account got banned. the support says the vangaurd found a script running. i explained them patiently that it was a web crawling script , still no use.
How is that "best"? Seems pretty bad, if they dont reverse ban even after being informed of possible false positive.
Having anticheat ban everyone doesnt make it good. What makes anticheat good is it banning cheaters while leaving honest players not.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#83I don't know enough about 'real time' netcode for games. However I have read several HN articles over the years so I've got at least a basic understanding. Why can't the servers distrust the clients? What should a 'client side anti cheat' actually prevent? The way I think I'd tackle such things is to have multiple copies of each character model moving in different locations and different ways. Such that trying to spy…
The reason multiplayer servers implicitly trust clients is because it's a cheaper and proven (less risk) solution.
The traditional anti-cheat can be just slapped after the game is developed in most games. If the game is very successful then you can just update the game with extra paid protections provided by the anti-cheat tool.
The alternative is local game engine that works with a partial game state which is a challenge on it self. If you still can make it work, you will still have to deal with people "modding" the client to gain an advantage. E.g.: enemies are painted red instead of camouflage.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the user controls their own machine, so they can open a hex editor and turn your option off.
Well I assume there are ways to prevent that (or make it extremely difficult at least)? E.g. look at denuvo, nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo.
Denuvo isn't just a flag on a process. It's no more relevant to your suggestion than encryption would be to a suggestion that audio files have an option to prevent them being copied.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#85Anti-Cheat will not help, if the games not Update it for more than 8 month. And one thing the devs could do without Anti-Cheat, is to automate analysis of e. g. head shot rate, movement speed, etc. but most games not do that. If average player make 25 Kills per hour in a game and some 150 over longer periods i did not need an anti cheat to do something.
This is a common misconception. Some players are extremely good at video games, and they look like statistic anomalies / outlier when mapped across the full distribution of players.
Consider, for example, professional gamers. They spend countless hours practicing, and they can easily outcompete casual gamers who don't have the time to refine their skills daily.
Statistical anti cheat is extremely weak in any game where legitimate human players can end up as outliers.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not talking about developer tools - cheats that come with the game, available in single player (and multiplayer if the host allows it). But a lot of games do also have accessible to everyone replays that show every order given by every player, so catching a cheater that acted on information not available to them (because for instance they had buddies in other team(s)) isn't particularly hard, especially in tourna…
> isn't particularly hard At scale it’s incredibly hard. Impossibly hard even. So hard no one has successfully solved it! Ever! But what you’re describing is Valve’s Overwatch system for Counter-Strike. It’s a key component of the anti-cheat ecosystem. But cheating is still rampant in CS and one of the biggest complaints.
"at scale" assumes a popular game - and you end up by giving as an example one of the most popular FPSes ever ! Please give an example of a game with, say, less than a million of copies sold / given away ? (And ideally, not an FPS, we all know these have specific extra challenges involved.)
And "at scale" pretty much means that matches are not competitive, because the sums required for entering a tournament game and given for winning it are going to be too small, won't they ?
P.S.: And for non-competitive games, I would expect that this cheating issue (among others) would be aggravated if you insist on playing with total strangers you will never see again (also part of the scale issue) - maybe just avoid that ?
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#87One thing I don't understand and I would really appreciate if someone could explain this to me. Why do we need separate anti-cheat programs? Can't the operating systems simply have an option when creating a process that prevents all operations looking at the memory of the process (and maybe if such a process is about to be launched the user has to explicitly accept that by clicking a button)? Wouldn't that stop almos…
It could if the hardware allowed such separation, but the x86 platform doesn't do anything close to that and allows reading memory of other processes in so many different ways in both userspace and kernel. Not to forget hardware being able to read memory via DMA that many use now.
- Have a thin hypervisor kernel
- Have the user-facing OS be a VM managed by that hypervisor
- Have the game process run under a second sibling VM
The hypervisor can then mediate hardware access and guarantee nothing from VM A can access VM B nor the other way around.
IIRC WSL2 enables such a mode, both the Windows OS the user sees and the Linux VM run under Hyper-V as siblings VMs.
And Xbox One and up do EXACTLY the above: each game runs in its dedicated VM (I presume that's what "trivially" enables Quick Switch/Resume via pausing/shapshotting the VM) and apps run in another.
Tangent: I somewhat wish MS would allow WSL2 on Xbox.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#88One thing I don't understand and I would really appreciate if someone could explain this to me. Why do we need separate anti-cheat programs? Can't the operating systems simply have an option when creating a process that prevents all operations looking at the memory of the process (and maybe if such a process is about to be launched the user has to explicitly accept that by clicking a button)? Wouldn't that stop almos…
In addition to the technical details mentioned there is also the "social" part:
Having Anticheat lets the company show they are doing "something" against cheating and keeps law abiding players from installing cheats.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#89leaving aside that most anticheats are useless and constantly teetering on the thin line between legitimate software and malware, not enabling anti-cheat solutions that support Linux on Linux is really an asshole move that almost definitely stems from an unmotivated or ideological hostility to Linux in general (I'm specifically referring to Tim Sweeney here).
I agree that they teeter the line, but hard disagree that they’re ineffective. They’re ineffective if you run your own servers and vet your own community because you don’t need them, but that’s not how most popular games are being played these days whether you like it or not. Fall guys was fundamentally broken, they added easy anti cheat and the problem disappeared pretty much.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#90leaving aside that most anticheats are useless and constantly teetering on the thin line between legitimate software and malware, not enabling anti-cheat solutions that support Linux on Linux is really an asshole move that almost definitely stems from an unmotivated or ideological hostility to Linux in general (I'm specifically referring to Tim Sweeney here).
Another offender is Ubisoft, or more specifically the R6 Siege team. Battleye works perfectly fine on Linux - in fact, other Ubisoft teams have enabled Battleye-Linux support for their games (ex: For Honor) - but for whatever reason, the Siege team refuses to do so, even though it's one of the most upvoted issues on the bug tracker [1]. [1] https://r6fix.ubi.com/projects/RAINBOW6-SIEGE-LIVE/issues/LI...
Doesn't the Battleye build in Linux makes it easier for cheaters to cheat on Linux vs. the windows one ? Just trying to understand their reasoning