5 ms·

This isn't a high-level gameplay problem. I'm not sure what you play but in (CoD) Warzone, for example, just based on Twitch streams at least, almost every lobb

• cortesoft 5y ago
  Why don't they just have a special lobby for people who don't want to use anti-cheat? Protect the people who want to play fair games, and let the people who want to play with their friends and aren't worried about cheating (or hell, want to play with cheaters) play without anti-cheat? Seems like a win win?
  • xerxes901 5y ago
    Because the only people in this lobby will be cheaters lol. Most people don't care about running garbage-tier CoD kernel code on their machines... so I wind up having to because they do, because it's the default. Although I concede that basically what I'm asking for here is for the default to be _my_ usecase...
    • cortesoft 5y ago
      Well this guy only wants to play with friends, so he doesn’t care if everyone else in the lobby are cheaters. He isn’t playing with anyone besides his friends. And why do you care if a lobby exists that you are never going to go to? Why does it bother you if cheaters want to use cheats against each other? As long as you don’t interact with them, I don’t understand why you would care.
      • foota 5y ago
        You may not have played in a lobby with cheaters, but they ruin the game for anyone else there. Warzone matchmakes you with ~a hundred people, so you can't play with just your friends, so if you have an anti-cheat off lobby your game will be ruined.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • smiths1999 5y ago
        In my experience, people that cheat in games like this typically do it to get an edge over everyone else in the lobby. It's not the cheating itself they enjoy but the winning. If everyone in the lobby has the same advantage I doubt they would be content just enjoying the game like the rest of us.
        • krageon 5y ago
          There exist plenty of cheater servers where the point is competitive aimbot writing. The fun can come from many places.
  • ThatPlayer 5y ago
    CS:GO can already do this. You can start a server with VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) disabled.
• xerxes901 5y ago
  I think my suggestion handles this situation though. If the cheaters are playing well enough that you can identify them as cheaters, then they would be getting flagged by my hypothetical server-side anticheat as "good" and so need to run the client-side software too. Also I don't think "twitch streams" are a great sample of "normal level gameplay", most people there would be ranked comparatively highly in MMR I would have thought? That or I'm leaving tons of money on the table by not streaming my wood-tier CS:GO :D
  • xkfm 5y ago
    For warzone, I don't believe that game has any sort of MMR, so the situation is a little different there compared to most other games people stream on twitch. Warzone seems to be especially bad, even when compared with other games in it's genre. There's also another issue where some people play with devices like Cronus which are borderline cheats and essentially hardware scripts (better/no recoil control, scripted bunny hopping, that sort of thing).
    • KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Damn near all online games have some form of matchmaking algorithm, but the point of them is to maximize the time you spend in-game by learning your patterns. There's also matchmaking that intentionally puts you on a team with someone better tan you who has cosmetics you don't, so you hopefully associate being kickass with having that skin. I wish I were making up that last one.
  • Natsu 5y ago
    I feel like showing things like replays of the kill cam can help with this sort of thing. That should make things like wallhacks more obvious as they get flagged by other players.
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    I agree that matchmaking would be a factor if it were purely designed to create fair matches with an infinite number of available players would match cheaters against very good players, and the # of players vs skill level was fairly linear. But limitations in available players in the queue (especially as skill goes up), "experience optimized" matchmaking (which psychologically manipulates you into playing more by feeding you wins and losses at the right time)...I'm not so sure. I used to spend a significant amount of time playing a tactical shooter type game, and what I figured out was that the game would purposefully throw you soft games and hard games, especially when first partying up with people on your friend list. One of the developers of the game publicly disclosed that their matchmaking algorithm took several dozen games to figure out how good you were. I tried creating a new account, and it took a very long time before I stopped being given opponents who could barely move, whereas I'm dodge-rolling, using my character's ult, using grenades, etc. It was so bad, I felt terrible and stopped using the secondary account. So cheaters (who keep creating new accounts) probably enjoy plenty of playtime. There were multiple cases of obvious cheaters running around achieving relatively high account levels, showing that anti-cheat measures took a long time to kick in. Lastly: the anti-cheat software available for this relatively small game was incredibly sophisticated. Sure, you could set the hitbox detection and zero fuzz and go for all headshots, but that would make you jump off the page stats-wise, you're right. As long as you weren't super greedy, you could probably "on paper" look like just a fairly skilled player. The other problem? The game had verystrong controller assist. So much so that many pro players abandoned the game fairly early on. It was very difficult to tell the difference between someone cheating and someone who was just good at controller play, because controller aim assist is intended to help casual players compete against MNK players. It's not intended to help very skilled controller users, who will absolutely decimate MNK players in a lot of types of gunfights (particularly close range stuff.)
• nmfisher 5y ago
  > As for your particular case (running a Windows VM with PCI-e GPU passthrough), that's... such a niche corner case that you're you just don't factor in. I'm not saying it's not niche (it definitely is), but I just wanted to chime in and say I'm another one who does this.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwing_away 5y ago
    I don't see any practical way they can detect qemu that can't be patched. Here's one patch that supposedly works with battleeye: https://github.com/WCharacter/RDTSC-KVM-Handler https://github.com/WCharacter/RDTSC-KVM-Handler The current situation is that they could probably use server-side heuristics to detect players behaving oddly, review the case, and ban according. But also I wouldn't be surprised if there were already bots using machine learning to autoaim based on video signal out of the PC with aiming done as a "real" HID mouse. If we can train a car to drive, we can certainly train a computer to find and click faces in cod.
    • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      > If we can train a car to drive, we can certainly train a computer to find and click faces in cod. But we can't really train a car to drive yet, and it seems unlikely that the full problem (i.e. Level 5) will be solved in the next decade or so.
    • kingcharles 5y ago
      15 years or more ago when I was writing Star Wars Galaxies bots I spent most of the time making them do all sorts of dumb shit, making silly errors, clicking on the wrong buttons etc so they seemed human. The fact the bots were grinding 24x7 365 days a year without a pee break didn't seem to throw up any red flags luckily.
• vpilcx 5y ago
  For me, it's already ruined the game. There's a type of player that every time they take a bad beat, they'll be like, "Oh, we've got a cheater!" I am not like that. At all. It requires an enormous amount of evidence to accuse someone of cheating. But with Warzone, it was happening so often, I no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I used to run into more than one blatant cheater per day. And now all my bad beats, I assume half of them are cheating, even if it's not exactly clear. It's ruined the game for me. I genuinely don't even bother to play anymore unless I'm playing with one of my friends.
  • stikypad 5y ago
    There are definitely cheaters in (nearly) every match of every game. I should know, because I decided years ago to take the path of "if you can't beat 'em..." Once I did, it became painfully obvious how many people cheat. With x-ray, "wallhacks," or 3D "radar," with bounding boxes around all players, it became readily apparent who's aiming at and/or chasing players who shouldn't be visible, always choosing the route the opposing team is taking, without fail. And who on the other team always takes the route you take, chasing you through any maze with no problem, even turning around when (and only when) you try to flank them. Also anyone who out-scores you while cheating (particularly if you're "rampaging") is definitely cheating as well, because you're already doing better than is humanly possible. And believe me, you'll get out-scored plenty. I would be glad to have functional anti-cheats, but it's just not possible in my experience. Cheats are available on day one of any game launch, or day 2 at worst. It's big business (clearly). Even kernel drivers like this have patched kernels to get around them. For now, cheating makes games fun to play again. Aimbots aren't perfect anyway, and even if they were, nobody can look or shoot everywhere at once. You still have to manage ammo, you still have to reload, and you can still get the drop on people (cheaters) when their attention is focused elsewhere, and you still get killed while cheating. Sure, it sucks for the people who don't have cheats, but I'm not going to be one of those people as long as a large percent of other people are cheating too. Unless and until anti-cheating actually works, it's just evening the playing field as far as I'm concerned.
    • banana_maker 5y ago
• asdff 5y ago
  Games like Call of Duty are a captured market at this point. They will be preordering next years release no matter what.
  • BillinghamJ 5y ago
    Worth noting, Warzone is free
    • k12sosse 5y ago
      3.5 million in revenue a day in skins, kind of free