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I looked into what was going on with CS:Go after trying to get back into it a few years ago, and noticing just how horrifically bad the amount of cheating was.

by ep103 6y ago

I looked into what was going on with CS:Go after trying to get back into it a few years ago, and noticing just how horrifically bad the amount of cheating was. The most damning thing for me wasn't just the subreddits dedicated to just indexing valve's lack of attention, or the way they appear to genuinely make money off of the cheating ecosystem. The worst was when I learned that VAC (their anti-cheating platform, IIRC) was so bad (at the time) that it appeared to only ban exact binary matches for detected cheats. So if you wrote a cheat, that eventually, ages later did end up getting banned by VAC, all you would have to do would be to go back to your source, rename a few functions and files, recompile to a new binary, and you'd be good to go again. As a sidenote, I just attempted to find the article that documented what I said above, and I found github repositories like this instead: https://github.com/danielkrupinski/VAC-Bypass https://github.com/danielkrupinski/VAC-Bypass The fact that things like this are front page google responses to phrases like "VAC Ban" (what I typed in google), really demonstrates just how abysmal Valve's performance is here.

MayeulC 6y ago
On the other hand, I cheated once (I was bored with TF2's new gameplay, and a teenager) 11 years ago , and got a lifetime VAC ban, while most die-hard cheaters would probably laugh it off and create a new account (especially now that it is f2p). Lifetime bans hardly seem proportional if you are on the receiving side. The solution to cheating problems isn't necessarily technical, it's also social, and I think it reflects a bigger issue in our society, also present on social platforms. When anyone can interact with strangers and behave however they want, there's going to be trolls and others, motivated by the feeling that they can't be held accountable for ruining someone else's fun (or, just not realizing they are not having healthy interactions). Lots of online platforms have developed lots of ways to cope with this, from karma systems to moderators, to social credits, to ID verification. Couldn't games take a page from that book?
- xahrepap 6y ago
  I had a brand new computer that i built at the start of the year. 100% new hardware. Brand new install of windows. Installed Steam, installed CS:GO. And I was unable to play because Steam flagged my system for cheating. The fix was to run some random steam exe found in the steam install directory. I guess it caused Steam to re-scan my system? Not the same level of frustration as a permaban. But I was pretty annoyed that I had to jump through hoops on a brand-new system. Really weird.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Steam is terrible software. It's been losing track of my games lately, so every time I want to play something I have to wait around for 5 minutes or so for steam to rediscover the local game files it had already installed. Download management is terrible too, frequently coming to a crawl or stopping entirely. It's not my ISP throttling me, either, because this only happens with steam and not when I am downloading other massive things from other places.
    - charcircuit 6y ago
      I've not experienced those issues. In fact Steam is the best at stealing internet bandwith from everything else.
- asdff 6y ago
  It sucks that developers only crack down on cheating when it hurts a revenue stream. I'm sure if people figured out how to clone hats, valve would hire an entire independent team to come in and work overtime for a blank check until its fixed. Rockstar only cared about cheating in GTA5 because people were duplicating in game money that Rockstar was trying to sell you for real money. They didn't care about cheating in GTA4 because it didn't affect any potential revenue since it only affected people who had already bought the game.
ArchOversight 6y ago
That VAC Bypass is rather crude... but I guess it works. When my friends and I wrote some cheats in the past we used to hook VAC so that when it wanted to run we'd unload our hooks/cheats and let it complete scanning as normal, then once VAC was completed we'd re-hook and re-load our library/hooks. This also allowed us to iterate on development by having live-reload of the .dll on disk by unhooking, reloading dll, and rehooking. This was back in the days of Counter Strike: Source, when it first came out. The day it was first released on macOS was fun too... Valve forgot to strip debug symbols on their macOS, so we were able to dump all of the debug symbols and get a much better idea on what to hook/look for and what the various structures were used for!
- Insanity 6y ago
  That was a pretty smart approach! At least in the past, admins on servers had the option to intervene and ban people (although they could be bypassed as well). Nowadays games opt for having entirely managing servers, sadly.
83457 6y ago
I've played CSGO and ran amateur LANs for years. People online talk about how bad cheating is but I've barely run into it. Admittedly most of my time has been right in the middle of ranks so maybe cheaters are mainly at the lower and higher ends and I'm using on Prime matchmaking. Usually when someone accuses another player of cheating they are just tilted and reacting to getting out aimed or seeing something suspicious due to how netcode handles lag/ping differential with interpolation, which is adjustable.
- ep103 6y ago
  Try making a new account, that isn't eligible for Prime matchmaking (because you haven't played the prerequisite number of games or whatever yet), and see if you can even get into Prime before quitting entirely out of frustration with cheaters. Or at least that was my experience. 12-13 games in a row of being headshotted across the map through walls or by spinning guys in the sky was enough to get me to swear off the game.

by ep103 6y ago

MayeulC 6y ago

On the other hand, I cheated once (I was bored with TF2's new gameplay, and a teenager) 11 years ago , and got a lifetime VAC ban, while most die-hard cheaters would probably laugh it off and create a new account (especially now that it is f2p). Lifetime bans hardly seem proportional if you are on the receiving side. The solution to cheating problems isn't necessarily technical, it's also social, and I think it reflects a bigger issue in our society, also present on social platforms. When anyone can interact with strangers and behave however they want, there's going to be trolls and others, motivated by the feeling that they can't be held accountable for ruining someone else's fun (or, just not realizing they are not having healthy interactions). Lots of online platforms have developed lots of ways to cope with this, from karma systems to moderators, to social credits, to ID verification. Couldn't games take a page from that book?

xahrepap 6y ago
I had a brand new computer that i built at the start of the year. 100% new hardware. Brand new install of windows. Installed Steam, installed CS:GO. And I was unable to play because Steam flagged my system for cheating. The fix was to run some random steam exe found in the steam install directory. I guess it caused Steam to re-scan my system? Not the same level of frustration as a permaban. But I was pretty annoyed that I had to jump through hoops on a brand-new system. Really weird.
- asdff 6y ago
  Steam is terrible software. It's been losing track of my games lately, so every time I want to play something I have to wait around for 5 minutes or so for steam to rediscover the local game files it had already installed. Download management is terrible too, frequently coming to a crawl or stopping entirely. It's not my ISP throttling me, either, because this only happens with steam and not when I am downloading other massive things from other places.
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    I've not experienced those issues. In fact Steam is the best at stealing internet bandwith from everything else.
asdff 6y ago
It sucks that developers only crack down on cheating when it hurts a revenue stream. I'm sure if people figured out how to clone hats, valve would hire an entire independent team to come in and work overtime for a blank check until its fixed. Rockstar only cared about cheating in GTA5 because people were duplicating in game money that Rockstar was trying to sell you for real money. They didn't care about cheating in GTA4 because it didn't affect any potential revenue since it only affected people who had already bought the game.

ArchOversight 6y ago

That VAC Bypass is rather crude... but I guess it works. When my friends and I wrote some cheats in the past we used to hook VAC so that when it wanted to run we'd unload our hooks/cheats and let it complete scanning as normal, then once VAC was completed we'd re-hook and re-load our library/hooks. This also allowed us to iterate on development by having live-reload of the .dll on disk by unhooking, reloading dll, and rehooking. This was back in the days of Counter Strike: Source, when it first came out. The day it was first released on macOS was fun too... Valve forgot to strip debug symbols on their macOS, so we were able to dump all of the debug symbols and get a much better idea on what to hook/look for and what the various structures were used for!

Insanity 6y ago
That was a pretty smart approach! At least in the past, admins on servers had the option to intervene and ban people (although they could be bypassed as well). Nowadays games opt for having entirely managing servers, sadly.

83457 6y ago

I've played CSGO and ran amateur LANs for years. People online talk about how bad cheating is but I've barely run into it. Admittedly most of my time has been right in the middle of ranks so maybe cheaters are mainly at the lower and higher ends and I'm using on Prime matchmaking. Usually when someone accuses another player of cheating they are just tilted and reacting to getting out aimed or seeing something suspicious due to how netcode handles lag/ping differential with interpolation, which is adjustable.

ep103 6y ago
Try making a new account, that isn't eligible for Prime matchmaking (because you haven't played the prerequisite number of games or whatever yet), and see if you can even get into Prime before quitting entirely out of frustration with cheaters. Or at least that was my experience. 12-13 games in a row of being headshotted across the map through walls or by spinning guys in the sky was enough to get me to swear off the game.