4 ms·

I used to do server development for a very popular free FPS game. At that time the cheat for the game would increase the firing rate of the guns, which I could

by calebh 8y ago

I used to do server development for a very popular free FPS game. At that time the cheat for the game would increase the firing rate of the guns, which I could easily detect. We started slapping on the detection script after some testing, and it started banning tons of people. My conclusion was that the number of cheaters in online games is ridiculously high. We never received any complaints of false positives from players, so I believe that all the bans were legitimate. Detection is made more difficult by the fact that some players are actually really good. I've been playing Fortnite for only a couple weeks now on the Switch, and I can easily kill ~60% of players. I'm sure that with more practice I could get within the top three pretty consistently.

annywhey 8y ago
Do I know you from my pyspades days? I worked on that(Triplefox) and play Fortnite on the daily now. We did experiment with aimbot detection with pyspades but had false positives. Most of the featureset focused instead on assisting with manual server moderation, which empowered the operators to make "the game they want to play". That ultimately developed into a federated banlist and a coalition government of operators and developers, sufficient to deal with the population at that time. Reports of euphemistic "misbehaving little brothers" were rife. Then the game went commercial, motivations shifted and it all blew up. The cheating issue in any successful game really is a case of only being able to tame the blatant cheats down to the point of every player you encounter being "plausibly just that good" while monitoring for the cheating software so that a ban sweep can be done later. Pretty much every time Fortnite does a major patch now, a wave of bans goes through and the player population suddenly becomes much weaker. Likewise I've gone through periods where I'll play Counter-Strike casuals and it's even more dramatic in some respects. Players will show up in the server and the atmosphere changes suddenly - I'll make the same kinds of plays as before, performing apparently similarly, and yet my K/D will bottom out, without even directly interacting with that player at all. It's like they sucked the air out of the room, and they'll get on the voice chat and spew garbage about how high or drunk they are right now. Then they leave and my K/D pops right back up again. So I've concluded that online gaming always tends towards being an illusion world - a rough approximation of ability at best, but mostly a venue for untrammeled predatory behavior. I still put up with it because it really engages my masochistic tendencies to try to "beat the cheater", and most games have techniques that let you do this to some degree.

by calebh 8y ago

annywhey 8y ago

Do I know you from my pyspades days? I worked on that(Triplefox) and play Fortnite on the daily now. We did experiment with aimbot detection with pyspades but had false positives. Most of the featureset focused instead on assisting with manual server moderation, which empowered the operators to make "the game they want to play". That ultimately developed into a federated banlist and a coalition government of operators and developers, sufficient to deal with the population at that time. Reports of euphemistic "misbehaving little brothers" were rife. Then the game went commercial, motivations shifted and it all blew up. The cheating issue in any successful game really is a case of only being able to tame the blatant cheats down to the point of every player you encounter being "plausibly just that good" while monitoring for the cheating software so that a ban sweep can be done later. Pretty much every time Fortnite does a major patch now, a wave of bans goes through and the player population suddenly becomes much weaker. Likewise I've gone through periods where I'll play Counter-Strike casuals and it's even more dramatic in some respects. Players will show up in the server and the atmosphere changes suddenly - I'll make the same kinds of plays as before, performing apparently similarly, and yet my K/D will bottom out, without even directly interacting with that player at all. It's like they sucked the air out of the room, and they'll get on the voice chat and spew garbage about how high or drunk they are right now. Then they leave and my K/D pops right back up again. So I've concluded that online gaming always tends towards being an illusion world - a rough approximation of ability at best, but mostly a venue for untrammeled predatory behavior. I still put up with it because it really engages my masochistic tendencies to try to "beat the cheater", and most games have techniques that let you do this to some degree.