6 ms·

Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed. Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected b

Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed. Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.

AustinDev 5y ago
And those aren't even cheaters using a full DMA module and separate PC which is nearly impossible to detect if done properly.
- temporarrry0923 5y ago
  Or worse machine-learning-to-bounding-box that takes the video stream through HDMI, identifies character heads, intercepts the USB HID mouse, and injects movement commands to move the center of the screen towards the nearest "head". Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands. I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
  - cooljacob204 5y ago
    To be honest I have completely given up on competitive fps games. The cheating situation has only gotten worse and I really don't see anti-cheat makers winning.
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      I wish I could reply to this with a rallying cry for you to keep trying. But it's true, every 14 year old kid with a keyboard can cheat in competitive now.
    - deepsun 5y ago
      Play with friends only, like in good-o-days.
    - nawgz 5y ago
      As a former CSGO player who would've said this previously... Valorant is impressively legit
      - horsawlarway 5y ago
        As someone who was really into CSGO, I can tell you the cheating just gets more subtle. Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B) It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all. Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now. It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.
      - AustinDev 5y ago
        What about all the DMA radars? My buddy in Malta is making a ton of money selling them. It's not aim bot but full map knowledge can be very powerful.
    - BitAstronaut 5y ago
      How does Stadia play a role in this? I don't play video games outside of Football Manager so not knowledgeable in the area but I recall reading about the competitive scene of one of these games moving over to the service due to the cheating.
  - subw00f 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, how does it fare with smokes?
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      Pretty well. It doesn't shoot through them, because it can't see through them. Sometimes it aims/shoots through them somewhat early before it dissipates completely, because rxn time is way faster than a human. But it's close enough to not be suspicious.
  - eertami 5y ago
    >I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. Draw enough attention and I think it's not unlikely someone would find evidence (not evidence of how your system works, but video proof that shows cheating). And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected... then better players with more knowledge and game sense will consistently still win. You'd need to be a good player in the first place - which is actually where the danger lies. A pro player with an undetectable cheat they can toggle on momentarily, even just once a series at a crucial moment, could make all the difference. I've given up relying on technical anti-cheat solutions for online games. If it is apparent someone is cheating by watching them play then that's enough for me (and I've seen some _very_ subtle cheaters get banned from leagues for the most minor of slip-ups.) The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      >climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious Hard agree here. There's always been people accusing semipros of cheating (see r/VacSucks for more) though, so unless it was pretty concrete, it wouldn't mean anything. >And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected It's not that the humanization is good, it's that the cheat is poorly designed enough to be only as good as a really good consistent human. Though you're right that it's not going to be the holy grail. >The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled. Hard agree as well. I've been hoping for online majors to be called off, but alas.
    - emsy 5y ago
      >Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    Once you start requiring external hardware setups like that, I think the barrier to entry for cheaters becomes high enough that they become far less prevalent. The goal of good anti-cheat should never be to eradicate it entirely, since that is obviously impossible. You just need to make it so the vast majority of players rarely encounter it.
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      Very true. I wasted hundreds of hours doing this, if it takes an extra hour to do, cheating would drop overnight
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      People already pay hundred of dollars for cheats. I don't think it would make that much of a difference.
      - temporarrry0923 5y ago
        That's a small fraction of all cheaters. I was a dev of a free open source cheat and our download rates were insane.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that video game cheats are a billion dollar market.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Congratulations on your fun project. Be careful about "literally impossible" though. If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you. If it isn't, there might be some statistical (in)consistency that's detectable with enough play.
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      >If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        What if some person or algorithm notices that you don't have those skills while walking or shooting at other body parts - only at heads? That's the kind of inconsistency I'm talking about. Or what if the nature of the mouse movements is consistently a little different between the AI and yourself?
  - tester756 5y ago
    >Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands. doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      Absolutely, it's a bezier curve with some random noise, I oversimplified.
      - tester756 5y ago
        > random noise I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected? e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen
        jay_kyburz 5y ago
        The hosts are so cheap they wont do a raycast from a player to an object to see if its in line of sight, they are not going to try and scan your input looking for randomness.
        woobilicious 5y ago
        You're downplaying how genuinely hard it is to do server side stuff on a game with 60+ players, a lot of this stuff is O(n^2), and the bottle necks is network packet sizes as well where players will start to complain about packet loss because they play on WiFi connection with someone else who watches YouTube or Netflix. Apex legends does in fact do fully simulated bullet dropoff server side with temporal rewinding, and it doesn't stop hackers from just shooting you with 99% accuracy.
        jay_kyburz 5y ago
        Its not _hard_ its $$$ expensive. You'll need bigger processors and more servers. I mean, I guess its _hard_ to choose what compromises to make, but not technically hard. Anyhow, I'm no expert. The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.
  - oliwarner 5y ago
    Physical aimbots are a much fairer cheat than picking apart the render pipeline to see through walls. A good player can still beat them. I'm not saying I'm for any sort of cheat, including the built-in aim-assist for people who choose to play with a controller, but if I absolutely had to play against an unknown number of cheaters, I would prefer they were at least playing with the same deck as me.
phendrenad2 5y ago
You know this? You've personally tried them? Or is this secondhand, thirdhand, hypothetical knowledge? It seems to me that anti-cheat works the same way DRM works: It poses a barrier to entry that keeps NN% of people who would hack from hacking, which is sufficient to keep the game from becoming a hacker cesspool.
- switz 5y ago
  As someone who runs an online Counterstrike platform, I can attest to this firsthand. There are literally dozens of open source cheats on Github that bypass the major anticheat services. And when one gets detected, they're usually updated in just a few days. For private paid cheats, they're very rarely detected. I've heard of people paying thousands of dollars for custom-built cheats that have gone years and years without being detected. The cheating in the game is out of control and has been for half a decade. People still play and can find little pockets to play in to avoid cheaters (namely playing with friends or on paid services, that cut down on cheating due to the barrier to entry of cost), but it's inevitably unavoidable to consistently run into cheaters My approach has been to run no client anti cheat outside of that built into the game (VAC), as I don't believe invading people's privacy (e.g. always-on kernel level detection) for the illusion of reducing cheating is worth it. There are better ways of hindering cheating than on-client detection, in my humble opinion.
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    Does popflash.site have an AC? I didn't have a problem last time I tested it. I think your server could check for several cvars that are only enabled for cheaters using some cheats, to auto-ban them. Though this precludes externals and some better internals.
    - switz 5y ago
      Sorry, I edited my comment after you asked. We don't have an "anti-cheat" in the traditional sense, though I've developed a few solutions to curb cheating in the past. Fortunately, it's not really a problem I've had to solve because I only offer scrimmages these days, meaning you choose who you play with. If I were to offer matchmaking, I'd be more liable to prevent cheaters from using the platform since I would be matching up people to play with. Since my users are mostly just playing friends I don't really have rampant cheater problems like other services.

Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed. Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.

AustinDev 5y ago

And those aren't even cheaters using a full DMA module and separate PC which is nearly impossible to detect if done properly.

temporarrry0923 5y ago
Or worse machine-learning-to-bounding-box that takes the video stream through HDMI, identifies character heads, intercepts the USB HID mouse, and injects movement commands to move the center of the screen towards the nearest "head". Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands. I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
- cooljacob204 5y ago
  To be honest I have completely given up on competitive fps games. The cheating situation has only gotten worse and I really don't see anti-cheat makers winning.
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    I wish I could reply to this with a rallying cry for you to keep trying. But it's true, every 14 year old kid with a keyboard can cheat in competitive now.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    Play with friends only, like in good-o-days.
  - nawgz 5y ago
    As a former CSGO player who would've said this previously... Valorant is impressively legit
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      As someone who was really into CSGO, I can tell you the cheating just gets more subtle. Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B) It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all. Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now. It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.
    - AustinDev 5y ago
      What about all the DMA radars? My buddy in Malta is making a ton of money selling them. It's not aim bot but full map knowledge can be very powerful.
  - BitAstronaut 5y ago
    How does Stadia play a role in this? I don't play video games outside of Football Manager so not knowledgeable in the area but I recall reading about the competitive scene of one of these games moving over to the service due to the cheating.
- subw00f 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how does it fare with smokes?
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    Pretty well. It doesn't shoot through them, because it can't see through them. Sometimes it aims/shoots through them somewhat early before it dissipates completely, because rxn time is way faster than a human. But it's close enough to not be suspicious.
- eertami 5y ago
  >I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. Draw enough attention and I think it's not unlikely someone would find evidence (not evidence of how your system works, but video proof that shows cheating). And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected... then better players with more knowledge and game sense will consistently still win. You'd need to be a good player in the first place - which is actually where the danger lies. A pro player with an undetectable cheat they can toggle on momentarily, even just once a series at a crucial moment, could make all the difference. I've given up relying on technical anti-cheat solutions for online games. If it is apparent someone is cheating by watching them play then that's enough for me (and I've seen some _very_ subtle cheaters get banned from leagues for the most minor of slip-ups.) The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    >climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious Hard agree here. There's always been people accusing semipros of cheating (see r/VacSucks for more) though, so unless it was pretty concrete, it wouldn't mean anything. >And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected It's not that the humanization is good, it's that the cheat is poorly designed enough to be only as good as a really good consistent human. Though you're right that it's not going to be the holy grail. >The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled. Hard agree as well. I've been hoping for online majors to be called off, but alas.
  - emsy 5y ago
    >Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  Once you start requiring external hardware setups like that, I think the barrier to entry for cheaters becomes high enough that they become far less prevalent. The goal of good anti-cheat should never be to eradicate it entirely, since that is obviously impossible. You just need to make it so the vast majority of players rarely encounter it.
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    Very true. I wasted hundreds of hours doing this, if it takes an extra hour to do, cheating would drop overnight
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    People already pay hundred of dollars for cheats. I don't think it would make that much of a difference.
    - temporarrry0923 5y ago
      That's a small fraction of all cheaters. I was a dev of a free open source cheat and our download rates were insane.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that video game cheats are a billion dollar market.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Congratulations on your fun project. Be careful about "literally impossible" though. If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you. If it isn't, there might be some statistical (in)consistency that's detectable with enough play.
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    >If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      What if some person or algorithm notices that you don't have those skills while walking or shooting at other body parts - only at heads? That's the kind of inconsistency I'm talking about. Or what if the nature of the mouse movements is consistently a little different between the AI and yourself?
- tester756 5y ago
  >Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands. doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?
  - temporarrry0923 5y ago
    Absolutely, it's a bezier curve with some random noise, I oversimplified.
    - tester756 5y ago
      > random noise I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected? e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen
      - jay_kyburz 5y ago
        The hosts are so cheap they wont do a raycast from a player to an object to see if its in line of sight, they are not going to try and scan your input looking for randomness.
        woobilicious 5y ago
        You're downplaying how genuinely hard it is to do server side stuff on a game with 60+ players, a lot of this stuff is O(n^2), and the bottle necks is network packet sizes as well where players will start to complain about packet loss because they play on WiFi connection with someone else who watches YouTube or Netflix. Apex legends does in fact do fully simulated bullet dropoff server side with temporal rewinding, and it doesn't stop hackers from just shooting you with 99% accuracy.
        jay_kyburz 5y ago
        Its not _hard_ its $$$ expensive. You'll need bigger processors and more servers. I mean, I guess its _hard_ to choose what compromises to make, but not technically hard. Anyhow, I'm no expert. The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  Physical aimbots are a much fairer cheat than picking apart the render pipeline to see through walls. A good player can still beat them. I'm not saying I'm for any sort of cheat, including the built-in aim-assist for people who choose to play with a controller, but if I absolutely had to play against an unknown number of cheaters, I would prefer they were at least playing with the same deck as me.

phendrenad2 5y ago

You know this? You've personally tried them? Or is this secondhand, thirdhand, hypothetical knowledge? It seems to me that anti-cheat works the same way DRM works: It poses a barrier to entry that keeps NN% of people who would hack from hacking, which is sufficient to keep the game from becoming a hacker cesspool.

switz 5y ago
As someone who runs an online Counterstrike platform, I can attest to this firsthand. There are literally dozens of open source cheats on Github that bypass the major anticheat services. And when one gets detected, they're usually updated in just a few days. For private paid cheats, they're very rarely detected. I've heard of people paying thousands of dollars for custom-built cheats that have gone years and years without being detected. The cheating in the game is out of control and has been for half a decade. People still play and can find little pockets to play in to avoid cheaters (namely playing with friends or on paid services, that cut down on cheating due to the barrier to entry of cost), but it's inevitably unavoidable to consistently run into cheaters My approach has been to run no client anti cheat outside of that built into the game (VAC), as I don't believe invading people's privacy (e.g. always-on kernel level detection) for the illusion of reducing cheating is worth it. There are better ways of hindering cheating than on-client detection, in my humble opinion.
- temporarrry0923 5y ago
  Does popflash.site have an AC? I didn't have a problem last time I tested it. I think your server could check for several cvars that are only enabled for cheaters using some cheats, to auto-ban them. Though this precludes externals and some better internals.
  - switz 5y ago
    Sorry, I edited my comment after you asked. We don't have an "anti-cheat" in the traditional sense, though I've developed a few solutions to curb cheating in the past. Fortunately, it's not really a problem I've had to solve because I only offer scrimmages these days, meaning you choose who you play with. If I were to offer matchmaking, I'd be more liable to prevent cheaters from using the platform since I would be matching up people to play with. Since my users are mostly just playing friends I don't really have rampant cheater problems like other services.