4 ms·

They’ve never actually rolled this out for League. I’ve played hundreds if not thousands of hours of competitive matches over a decade and never seen a blatant

by wswope 4y ago

They’ve never actually rolled this out for League. I’ve played hundreds if not thousands of hours of competitive matches over a decade and never seen a blatant cheater (maybe 1-2 cass botters, but couldn’t be sure). Given that it’s one of the biggest online PvP games around, I don’t think you or Riot are really making a strong case here.

stryan 4y ago
I believe this is referring to Vanguard, the anti-cheat Valorant uses that at some point is supposed to come to League.
phendrenad2 4y ago
To understand why it's a strong argument, you have to understand the difference between 2D games like League and 3D games like Valorant. In a 2D game, the game is slow enough that you can keep most of the state server-side. The potential to cheat in League is very low. Things you might want to do include (1) macros to do combos (2) automatically run away when low health (3) bigger alerts when an enemy is charging your lane (4) skillshot aiming. None of those are going to really push you up in rank. You'd be better off just getting good at them yourself, as you'll have more flexibility than relying on a tool to do them for you (and then having to fight the tool when you don't want them). A 3D game like Valorant or Call of Duty is much more fast-paced and also introduces a third dimension. This means that transferring the visible game state to the player every frame is much more difficult, both for the server to keep track of, and for the network bandwidth available to the players. This means that in 3D games, there is often client-side data that the user is not supposed to see (such as the exact position of an enemy who has ducked behind a wall, but the server hasn't stopped sending you position data for yet). This poses a huge advantage to whoever can get access to that data and display it somehow. These are called cheats... And they can run in kernel space. This is why they need their own kernel rootkit to detect them. This article seems to be a bit unclear, but it seems like their point is to justify kernel-mode anti-cheat in broad strokes. I don't think they're just talking about League here. Adding anti-cheat to League is probably not a priority, for reasons I've outlined above.
- wswope 4y ago
  Having started my technical career long ago as an angsty teen looking to develop cheats, I'm aware of the architectural issues. This is probably a hot take, but for FPS and the like, I view wallhack-type cheats as fully inevitable, and more of a game design challenge than a technical one. Compared to old school FPS like COD and CSGO, I'll throw out Overwatch as a good example of a game that de-emphasizes the relative importance of knowing an enemy's position by dramatically raising TTK and placing importance on team coordination, mechanics, and character selection. A cheating sniper in OW can easily get shut down by the coordinated actions of two enemy tank players. Designing the game in a way that limits the ability of a single wall-hacking sniper to ruin the experience is IMO much more effective than getting into a kernel-level AC arms race. Valorant still has cheats available for it, after all.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Okay but all of that is irrelevant to the point I'm arguing, which is that you need user-side kernel-mode anti-cheat or the cheaters are much more numerous and pass some point where the game is not fun to play for most non-cheaters. And redesigning the game to be cheater-unfriendly by adding vehicles and stuff is just limiting the game experiences you can have, because someone doesn't like rootkits (luckily, most players don't care).

by wswope 4y ago

stryan 4y ago

I believe this is referring to Vanguard, the anti-cheat Valorant uses that at some point is supposed to come to League.

phendrenad2 4y ago

To understand why it's a strong argument, you have to understand the difference between 2D games like League and 3D games like Valorant. In a 2D game, the game is slow enough that you can keep most of the state server-side. The potential to cheat in League is very low. Things you might want to do include (1) macros to do combos (2) automatically run away when low health (3) bigger alerts when an enemy is charging your lane (4) skillshot aiming. None of those are going to really push you up in rank. You'd be better off just getting good at them yourself, as you'll have more flexibility than relying on a tool to do them for you (and then having to fight the tool when you don't want them). A 3D game like Valorant or Call of Duty is much more fast-paced and also introduces a third dimension. This means that transferring the visible game state to the player every frame is much more difficult, both for the server to keep track of, and for the network bandwidth available to the players. This means that in 3D games, there is often client-side data that the user is not supposed to see (such as the exact position of an enemy who has ducked behind a wall, but the server hasn't stopped sending you position data for yet). This poses a huge advantage to whoever can get access to that data and display it somehow. These are called cheats... And they can run in kernel space. This is why they need their own kernel rootkit to detect them. This article seems to be a bit unclear, but it seems like their point is to justify kernel-mode anti-cheat in broad strokes. I don't think they're just talking about League here. Adding anti-cheat to League is probably not a priority, for reasons I've outlined above.

wswope 4y ago
Having started my technical career long ago as an angsty teen looking to develop cheats, I'm aware of the architectural issues. This is probably a hot take, but for FPS and the like, I view wallhack-type cheats as fully inevitable, and more of a game design challenge than a technical one. Compared to old school FPS like COD and CSGO, I'll throw out Overwatch as a good example of a game that de-emphasizes the relative importance of knowing an enemy's position by dramatically raising TTK and placing importance on team coordination, mechanics, and character selection. A cheating sniper in OW can easily get shut down by the coordinated actions of two enemy tank players. Designing the game in a way that limits the ability of a single wall-hacking sniper to ruin the experience is IMO much more effective than getting into a kernel-level AC arms race. Valorant still has cheats available for it, after all.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Okay but all of that is irrelevant to the point I'm arguing, which is that you need user-side kernel-mode anti-cheat or the cheaters are much more numerous and pass some point where the game is not fun to play for most non-cheaters. And redesigning the game to be cheater-unfriendly by adding vehicles and stuff is just limiting the game experiences you can have, because someone doesn't like rootkits (luckily, most players don't care).