7 ms·

It won't stop anyone who has the skill to author cheats themselves (i.e. someone with basic reversing and programming experience) but it does do a good job of d

It won't stop anyone who has the skill to author cheats themselves (i.e. someone with basic reversing and programming experience) but it does do a good job of detecting and banning players who are using widely distributed "commercial" cheats. I look at EAC as being very analogous to a virus scanner, very easy to bypass if you know what you're doing, but good at catching the common and soon-to-be common threats. It also puts up enough roadblocks to make some novice attempts at cheating inconvenient at least. Source: I deal with all the anti-cheat stuff (including EAC) on a semi-popular multi-player game. I can verify that it does make a very tangible difference to our player base in terms of the number of cheaters they are exposed to on a per match or per session basis.

arsome 5y ago
EAC is actually pretty terrible against commercial cheats, it's only use is against free cheats pretty much. If you're willing to pay, you'll find many for EAC games.
- ziml77 5y ago
  That still reduces the number of cheaters. Having to get out a credit card even to pay a penny is a barrier to people cheating.
- zorked 5y ago
  Interesting. I am not a gamer at all: so there is a market for cheating tools? How "legit" is it? Where do players go to buy cheats?
  - arsome 5y ago
    Many major titles are using EAC currently, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. There's a pretty large market for cheats in any of those titles. Just dropping "<game> aimbot" or "<game> cheats" into google is likely to turn up a multitude of commercial cheat developers, many of which are legitimate and will bypass the current anti-cheat. Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      > bypass the current anti-cheat Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
      - sushid 5y ago
        AFAIK, some of the top cheats are SaaS products and require a lot of money (e.g. > $50/month for a game like Escape from Tarkov). So yes, that's a deterrent but not for those willing to pay a price equal to the game for monthly access.
      - episteme 5y ago
        If you are willing to pay for a cheat then rebuying the game every few months when there is a ban wave is not that much effort. Especially if you buy it from some shady CD-Key reseller.
      - xnyan 5y ago
        If you are into cheating, new licenses are just a cost of business. Even a new, full price AAA game is about the cost of a round of golf. Furthermore, with free to play and microtransactions/ongoing ways to get revenue from players, there's a growing incentive to either give the game away (Fortnite et all) or offer the game at a fairly low price (eg rainbow 6 siege, can be had for as little as $5).
  - dafelst 5y ago
    I've found that the biggest marketplaces are on the Chinese web, places like taobao have a HUGE number. Also Russian social networks as well.
novok 5y ago
Do these anti cheat systems detect popular products of popular dev tools to create cheats typically? Or is the cheat world way beyond that phase and everyone just codes to the native OS APIs directly, making that hard to detect? Is there still cheating in console players? Maybe with jail broken devices? Do these companies really have to think about cheating with consoles? Do you think the eventual future of these kind of games is some sort of locked down console-like system, which is what apple seems to slowly be going to with their hardware?
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  My warframe account was banned a while ago for having cheat engine running in the background. I was using cheat engine with total war, a single player series and never hooked it into warframe. So some systems at least just looks for running processes to create cheat tools.
- pstrateman 5y ago
  The list of games protected by EAC is basically a list of games with terrible cheating problems. Fortnite, Rust, and Fallguys being the most obvious. There's people selling subscription cheats with money back guarantees against detection.
qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
You need more than basic reversing and programming experience to beat EAC now. It gets more comprehensive everyweek.
machiaweliczny 5y ago
In EU phone verification should basicaly prevent cheating as phone:person has almost 1:1 correspondence, so once you ban (or shadowban) there's not easy way to bypass.
- dagw 5y ago
  A new sim card with a new phone number is on the order of $5

arsome 5y ago

EAC is actually pretty terrible against commercial cheats, it's only use is against free cheats pretty much. If you're willing to pay, you'll find many for EAC games.

ziml77 5y ago
That still reduces the number of cheaters. Having to get out a credit card even to pay a penny is a barrier to people cheating.
zorked 5y ago
Interesting. I am not a gamer at all: so there is a market for cheating tools? How "legit" is it? Where do players go to buy cheats?
- arsome 5y ago
  Many major titles are using EAC currently, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. There's a pretty large market for cheats in any of those titles. Just dropping "<game> aimbot" or "<game> cheats" into google is likely to turn up a multitude of commercial cheat developers, many of which are legitimate and will bypass the current anti-cheat. Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
  - bscphil 5y ago
    > bypass the current anti-cheat Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
    - sushid 5y ago
      AFAIK, some of the top cheats are SaaS products and require a lot of money (e.g. > $50/month for a game like Escape from Tarkov). So yes, that's a deterrent but not for those willing to pay a price equal to the game for monthly access.
    - episteme 5y ago
      If you are willing to pay for a cheat then rebuying the game every few months when there is a ban wave is not that much effort. Especially if you buy it from some shady CD-Key reseller.
    - xnyan 5y ago
      If you are into cheating, new licenses are just a cost of business. Even a new, full price AAA game is about the cost of a round of golf. Furthermore, with free to play and microtransactions/ongoing ways to get revenue from players, there's a growing incentive to either give the game away (Fortnite et all) or offer the game at a fairly low price (eg rainbow 6 siege, can be had for as little as $5).
- dafelst 5y ago
  I've found that the biggest marketplaces are on the Chinese web, places like taobao have a HUGE number. Also Russian social networks as well.

novok 5y ago

Do these anti cheat systems detect popular products of popular dev tools to create cheats typically? Or is the cheat world way beyond that phase and everyone just codes to the native OS APIs directly, making that hard to detect? Is there still cheating in console players? Maybe with jail broken devices? Do these companies really have to think about cheating with consoles? Do you think the eventual future of these kind of games is some sort of locked down console-like system, which is what apple seems to slowly be going to with their hardware?

thatguy0900 5y ago
My warframe account was banned a while ago for having cheat engine running in the background. I was using cheat engine with total war, a single player series and never hooked it into warframe. So some systems at least just looks for running processes to create cheat tools.
pstrateman 5y ago
The list of games protected by EAC is basically a list of games with terrible cheating problems. Fortnite, Rust, and Fallguys being the most obvious. There's people selling subscription cheats with money back guarantees against detection.

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago

You need more than basic reversing and programming experience to beat EAC now. It gets more comprehensive everyweek.

machiaweliczny 5y ago

In EU phone verification should basicaly prevent cheating as phone:person has almost 1:1 correspondence, so once you ban (or shadowban) there's not easy way to bypass.

dagw 5y ago
A new sim card with a new phone number is on the order of $5