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With all my heart, I'm rooting for the authors of this approach. Anti-cheat and DRM hide behind the defense of practicality and cost efficiency, but these produ
by rcoveson 5y ago
With all my heart, I'm rooting for the authors of this approach. Anti-cheat and DRM hide behind the defense of practicality and cost efficiency, but these products are absolutely evil. As personal computers are becoming more and more an extension of our bodies and minds, it is essential that they act in our interests and nobody else's. Imagine a prosthetic leg that phoned the insurance company if it detected illegal drugs in your blood. That's how I feel about these rootkit anti-cheats.
So please, let the cheaters turn to human-interface cheating methods. Force companies to deal with these problems in the proper way, like any other security problem: Don't trust the client at all. Infecting the client with your own agents is not an option. Can't make it work? Then use a different business model. Have your users put time and money into the game, and require more time and money the higher up the ranked ladder they climb. If they're buying as many in-game cosmetics as the average user, and playing for as much time as the average user must to reach a given level, then they never notice. If not, don't let them climb the ladder until they do. If they get reported by other players as cheaters, and manual validation confirms it, then they lose their investment. With that approach, you could have the most obviously hacked account in the world and it wouldn't be able to impact anybody for long without covering the costs of its own detection and banning.
- thirtyseven 5y agoNot a game dev but I don't think that's really feasible in a world where network latency is a thing, and it's necessary to send game state to a client that may not currently be visible on screen, unless you'd like us to move to a Stadia-like model of game streaming and dumb terminals.
- devwastaken 5y agoYou don't need game state. Good cheaters don't need to look behind walls, and it's obvious when they do so. You can theoretically build your own bot simply from visual recognition that plays pretty well.
- smegger001 5y agoI wonder if you could train an ai using screen grab and the mouse/keyboard input of players as a training set. so that it would look like a natural player rather than a aimbot
- inykt 5y agoWell, Open AI's Dota 2 bot beats top players. It does not use any extra info thats not available to any dota player + lower reaction time than humans. https://www.techspot.com/news/70552-openai-bot-beats-world-best-dota-2-players.html https://www.techspot.com/news/70552-openai-bot-beats-world-b...
- anonymousab 5y agoAnd if a cheater makes it non obvious by being a bit worse sometimes, and has become indistinguishable from a regular or just really good player, then... Mission Accomplished? At that point, it's no worse for the other players than playing with someone who is organically good, unless the sanctity of some matchmaking algorithm is more important to them than the gameplay. Which is fine too, but the solutions for that problem may ultimately need to extend our be situated beyond the game software itself.
- kbenson 5y ago> Imagine a prosthetic leg that phoned the insurance company if it detected illegal drugs in your blood. Pure hogwash! There's no way a major company would decide to throw their users under the bus like this and subvert their best interests and there definitely haven't been recent events about one of the largest companies in the world doing exactly this thing! /s
- novok 5y agoThis will eventually lead to online multiplayer games to only be playable of a game console of sorts for ranked matches, where you are not the root user is implicit from the start.
- horsawlarway 5y agoMy take is that it will lead to a lack of interest in these games. Why bother trying to be the "best" (or even good) at a thing, if a robot can outperform you by leaps and bounds?
- novok 5y agoBecause in the tournaments that pay money, you're in person and there are no bots and all of your bot assisted skill falls away.
- horsawlarway 5y agohttps://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/cs-go-5-pro-players-caught-hacking https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/cs-go-5-pro-players-caug...
- novok 5y agoWere they banned at a live tournament or an online only one? Article isn't clear. Also getting caught got them banned from the sport, much like sports doping today. It makes it a high risk action.