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You can't tell people to play something else other than what they enjoy just because it'll "make cheating harder". Many of the very popular games now require g

by m11a 7y ago

You can't tell people to play something else other than what they enjoy just because it'll "make cheating harder". Many of the very popular games now require good aim. Some people spend countless hundreds/thousands of hours just practicing their aim and muscle memory. It's part of the fun for them. CS:GO is a notable example. The problem isn't really that it's impossible to ban such cheating. ESEA do it pretty well in CS:GO - their anti-cheat is practically a RAT. It's that banning cheaters and making a bulletproof anticheat has two issues: 1) To do it properly you need to basically code a RAT, which has some privacy issues. If Valve do it, it could hurt activity, platform support, and be controversial. ESEA have done it since day one, but their player base is much smaller and more competitive. ESEA is also limited to Windows. 2) It's not profitable. That's the honest truth. They ban obvious public cheats and the cheaters will buy another account and come back, probably use another cheat again, get banned again, repeat. Some games don't have awful cheat protection because the company can't make a good one, they have awful cheat protection because it's not profitable to alienate all the cheaters in the game away from the platform (and their many purchases per person; legitimate players only buy once).

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
It's somewhat worse than that, because anti-cheat and anti-anti-cheat are basically two things in ring-0 fighting each other. So it's a resource war, whoever spends more development time trying to win does. But the economies of scale favor the cheaters. If only one game has working anti-cheat, it may not be worth the cheater's time to break it because it's only one game, and they can go cheat in a different game. If all the games had it then more people would try to break it and more would succeed. And once they have a working method, it can be employed against any other game that uses the same kind of anti-cheating, even if it's not the same vendor's, as long as the mechanism is similar. But having all the vendors get together to pool resources and design one good anti-cheating software makes it even worse, because then it might be a little harder to defeat, but the prize for defeating it is being able to cheat in every game without even having to translate the cheating method to each new game. So you get small victories or nothing. There is no winning at scale because increasing scale only increases the number of adversaries and the gains from finding an effective way to cheat. It's basically the same problem as keeping the latest Hollywood releases off of pirate sites. They count success as occasionally having a week before a new release is on the pirate sites instead of being there the same day, and even that doesn't happen very often. It turns out it's more effective to make it so it doesn't matter. In their case by making it so easy and cheap to watch Netflix on your TV that it's not worth most peoples' time to figure out how to use BitTorrent even if it has 100% of their content. In this case by making more games that humans are better at than computers, so you can't use a computer to cheat.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > But the economies of scale favor the cheaters. I feel like the concept of "ban waves" ought to help a lot here. Wait a couple weeks between banning people, and then randomly don't ban some people during the wave. Should make it pretty hard to test your anti-anti-cheat.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    That's assuming the way they test is based on whether they get banned or not, instead of analyzing the anti-cheat code to see how it works so they don't get banned to begin with.
    - meheleventyone 7y ago
      Is that actually a thing that happens routinely?
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Whether things happen routinely depends a lot on whether other effective alternatives exist. It's a thing that enables cheaters to not get caught. They may not need it if they have some other way to not get caught, but you can expect to see it if it is or becomes the easiest thing that works.
        meheleventyone 7y ago
        So no then.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Shouldn't most of the cheat detection be happening server side for exactly this reason? Is that not feasible?
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  The economies of scale actually favour the game makers. People build cheats for profit, every person that buys a cheat is also buying the game (and rebuying) the cheat makers are in competition, and further the number of people that cheat is generally a lot smaller than the game playing population. Because they are sold for profit the most popular cheats are easy to find and detect. As long as companies can keep cheating at a tolerable level for their audience they win as do a small number of cheat makers able to make a living in the space.

by m11a 7y ago

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

It's somewhat worse than that, because anti-cheat and anti-anti-cheat are basically two things in ring-0 fighting each other. So it's a resource war, whoever spends more development time trying to win does. But the economies of scale favor the cheaters. If only one game has working anti-cheat, it may not be worth the cheater's time to break it because it's only one game, and they can go cheat in a different game. If all the games had it then more people would try to break it and more would succeed. And once they have a working method, it can be employed against any other game that uses the same kind of anti-cheating, even if it's not the same vendor's, as long as the mechanism is similar. But having all the vendors get together to pool resources and design one good anti-cheating software makes it even worse, because then it might be a little harder to defeat, but the prize for defeating it is being able to cheat in every game without even having to translate the cheating method to each new game. So you get small victories or nothing. There is no winning at scale because increasing scale only increases the number of adversaries and the gains from finding an effective way to cheat. It's basically the same problem as keeping the latest Hollywood releases off of pirate sites. They count success as occasionally having a week before a new release is on the pirate sites instead of being there the same day, and even that doesn't happen very often. It turns out it's more effective to make it so it doesn't matter. In their case by making it so easy and cheap to watch Netflix on your TV that it's not worth most peoples' time to figure out how to use BitTorrent even if it has 100% of their content. In this case by making more games that humans are better at than computers, so you can't use a computer to cheat.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> But the economies of scale favor the cheaters. I feel like the concept of "ban waves" ought to help a lot here. Wait a couple weeks between banning people, and then randomly don't ban some people during the wave. Should make it pretty hard to test your anti-anti-cheat.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  That's assuming the way they test is based on whether they get banned or not, instead of analyzing the anti-cheat code to see how it works so they don't get banned to begin with.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    Is that actually a thing that happens routinely?
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      Whether things happen routinely depends a lot on whether other effective alternatives exist. It's a thing that enables cheaters to not get caught. They may not need it if they have some other way to not get caught, but you can expect to see it if it is or becomes the easiest thing that works.
      - meheleventyone 7y ago
        So no then.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Shouldn't most of the cheat detection be happening server side for exactly this reason? Is that not feasible?
meheleventyone 7y ago
The economies of scale actually favour the game makers. People build cheats for profit, every person that buys a cheat is also buying the game (and rebuying) the cheat makers are in competition, and further the number of people that cheat is generally a lot smaller than the game playing population. Because they are sold for profit the most popular cheats are easy to find and detect. As long as companies can keep cheating at a tolerable level for their audience they win as do a small number of cheat makers able to make a living in the space.