3 ms·

And still cheaters plague most public servers of the games I played. On the other hand: how can you spot a cheater who obviously has the cheat at kernel level

And still cheaters plague most public servers of the games I played. On the other hand: how can you spot a cheater who obviously has the cheat at kernel level - with a anticheat software running above that?

simfoo 6y ago
By realizing that a purely technical solution is not enough. - make it easy to report suspected cheaters - include footage from the cheater, not prerendered but as client state - create a way for experienced players to judge, from multiple angles, with proper randomization and incentives - require an id for creating an account. Ban persons not accounts
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "include footage from the cheater, not prerendered but as client state" Don't you need that deeper system integration to achieve that in a way it can't be negated by the cheat?
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    You can record (clientside and server side) the inputs from multiple players and play them back deterministically; if the suspected cheater's ones don't line up with how the game played out for the majority of the server then that's a pretty clear smoking gun. I think it is ok to be judicious with timeouts, kicks and even bans, so long as you provide a reasonable, accessible and well-scaled dispute mechanism.
    - simfoo 6y ago
      Forgot that last point, a good dispute mechanism is absolutely needed
    - maccard 6y ago
      > You can record (clientside and server side) the inputs from multiple players and play them back deterministically; That requires a deterministic simulation, and also trusting the clients inputs. Cheats that just send damage/kill messages are stopped by a server just checking "is it possible for X to do Y". Stuff like this is often explainable by unfortunate lag spikes on the "cheaters" side (and most instances of someone rotating 90 degrees and headshotting you in one shot are really just bad networking combined with an edge case in prediction code). Meanwhile modern cheats are emulating input devices and living as kernel extensions. A game that looks at client inputs is doomed to fail. > well-scaled dispute mechanism. The primary issue with dispute mechanisms is social engineering. If you have a cheat forum of 300 people banned, and one figures out what to say to be unbanned, they share the results with others and everyone gets unbanned. A stream of 300 tickets in a game like Fortnite, particularly if they're done in multiple languages and spread across a few days would be unnoticed. It's a tough problem. I'm not claiming kernel level anticheat is a _good_ thing but it seems to be better than any of the other options available right now.
maccard 6y ago
Cheaters are (for the most part) not a problem on games using the more "modern" kernel mode cheats. There are always going to be some cheaters on PC games, but for games using solutions like EAC, the majority are banned incredibly quickly. Its always a game of cat and mouse. The _only_ solution to cheating is hardware control (see consoles of game streaming), everything else is a sliding scale.

simfoo 6y ago

By realizing that a purely technical solution is not enough. - make it easy to report suspected cheaters - include footage from the cheater, not prerendered but as client state - create a way for experienced players to judge, from multiple angles, with proper randomization and incentives - require an id for creating an account. Ban persons not accounts

hutzlibu 6y ago
"include footage from the cheater, not prerendered but as client state" Don't you need that deeper system integration to achieve that in a way it can't be negated by the cheat?
- anonymousab 6y ago
  You can record (clientside and server side) the inputs from multiple players and play them back deterministically; if the suspected cheater's ones don't line up with how the game played out for the majority of the server then that's a pretty clear smoking gun. I think it is ok to be judicious with timeouts, kicks and even bans, so long as you provide a reasonable, accessible and well-scaled dispute mechanism.
  - simfoo 6y ago
    Forgot that last point, a good dispute mechanism is absolutely needed
  - maccard 6y ago
    > You can record (clientside and server side) the inputs from multiple players and play them back deterministically; That requires a deterministic simulation, and also trusting the clients inputs. Cheats that just send damage/kill messages are stopped by a server just checking "is it possible for X to do Y". Stuff like this is often explainable by unfortunate lag spikes on the "cheaters" side (and most instances of someone rotating 90 degrees and headshotting you in one shot are really just bad networking combined with an edge case in prediction code). Meanwhile modern cheats are emulating input devices and living as kernel extensions. A game that looks at client inputs is doomed to fail. > well-scaled dispute mechanism. The primary issue with dispute mechanisms is social engineering. If you have a cheat forum of 300 people banned, and one figures out what to say to be unbanned, they share the results with others and everyone gets unbanned. A stream of 300 tickets in a game like Fortnite, particularly if they're done in multiple languages and spread across a few days would be unnoticed. It's a tough problem. I'm not claiming kernel level anticheat is a _good_ thing but it seems to be better than any of the other options available right now.

maccard 6y ago

Cheaters are (for the most part) not a problem on games using the more "modern" kernel mode cheats. There are always going to be some cheaters on PC games, but for games using solutions like EAC, the majority are banned incredibly quickly. Its always a game of cat and mouse. The _only_ solution to cheating is hardware control (see consoles of game streaming), everything else is a sliding scale.