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Especially since Valve already has anti-cheat malware. The reality is that the only way to combat cheating is to stream it to the client but as we've seen with

Especially since Valve already has anti-cheat malware. The reality is that the only way to combat cheating is to stream it to the client but as we've seen with Stadia, it's just not quite there yet. Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it. To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior. You don't need to lock down a PC. You need to lock down your logs server-side. It's also pretty scary that it's open sourced so more developers can use it. I cringe at having to fight root kits with every game uninstall. I'm a huge fan of games that detect cheaters in subtle ways and direct them to unintended outcomes. Like being stuck in the elevator unable to escape. Or what COD is doing with cheaters, taking away their senses and ability to see people or objectives. Kids will complain it's a bug or what not on the support forums only to expose themselves and get banned.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it. Exactly. It disgusts me to my core, the audacity of these corporations. > To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior. Partially agree. This is especially relevant in skill-based games but I assume such statistics can be poisoned by cheaters over time, increasing false negatives. There are also game designs where bots are literally indistinguishable from sufficiently addicted players. Think anything with a reward schedule in the game design: MMORPGs with timed spawns, mobile games with timed rate limited gameplay. Especially the latter. In the end, Linus Torvalds is right about security: if the word "trust" isn't involved, it's not security, it's masturbation. We should be playing games with friends who we trust instead of randoms from the internet.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  At an individual level, if a player goes from 1.3K/D avg over a sample and then it jumps to 8K/D over the same sample duration later, it’s pretty obvious. Wall hacking and aim bot can be caught with behavior and statistics. Not in real-time but damn near.
  - luluthefirst 4y ago
    People who play video games high or drunk shouldn't be punished when they're finally sober. :)
    - gabereiser 4y ago
      Which is why you sample an average. If you play high or drunk, it’s probably a pattern.
  - johnyzee 4y ago
    If only there was a way to teach computers to identify patterns based on a large dataset...
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    Not quite. I understand that's a piece but if you've ever tried to solve this problem it's not even close to being as easy as you make it out to be. 1. The stats you cited (k/d) is well within normal variance 2. It's not super common for cheaters to run around spinbotting/blatant wallhacking. I would actually say that's the minority. 3. Depending on the game, that would never happen because MMR just matches you up with people based on your new "skill" i.e. 2 games with 8K/d puts me in harder games and I go back down to something reasonable. Again, most cheaters don't continue to just dominate, those are the minority and get caught easily.
    - gabereiser 4y ago
      So it’s not as trivial as I make it sound, yes, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. People are working on just that. These things wouldn’t get you banned, but these are “early warnings” that you’re cheating and warrants further review of game footage (which most games store in the cloud now). It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science. AI behavior patterns combined with game footage review combined with a judiciary would cause one to be banned. The future of esports though is in closed edge networks with dedicated hosts. Provide them with the Internet cafe appliance. I just want to play some Counter-Strike. If I were to average my K/D over 1000 games I would get a pretty good statistical spread of how I play on certain maps. Granted theres a degree of variability depending on my mental state, but still a good enough sample to get an idea of how I play Dust II. Sudden and consistent outliers above norms would flag me for review. 2,3 kill cams and footage review would tell you that I’m cheating. Someone in Burma or Thailand could do that job until the AI is trained to spot aimbots, cough I’m sorry, “flick shots”.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  Funny, you know what disgusts me to my core? Cheaters. Ruin their PC for all I care. Send em to prison.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    Everybody's PC is getting ruined, except the cheaters'
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Funny, that's exactly the kind of profound lack of empathy and awareness my ex-wife had. "Do anything you want to prisoners; there's absolutely NO WAY I can possibly imagine being in that position myself" (I find this particularly amusing since she did far more actually illegal stuff like drugs etc in college than I ever dreamed of; but these emotions are always outwardly oriented:). The whole point of this thread is that these systems are not installed on cheaters in a targeted way. They are installed on everybody's computer. They make far far far more innocent gamers suffer than they punish cheaters. And we've seen time and again that these systems misidentify cheaters badly. Think of all the times your Norton of McAfee misidentified your bit torrent client or your open source utility or your own crypto mining software for malware, and multiply it by a thousand.
    - reactordev 4y ago
      This is the real meat. Anti-cheat malware is installed on everyone’s machine. Guilty until proven uninstalled.
    - seattle_spring 4y ago
      Fine, then propose and implement a viable alternative that effectively cuts out 99% of cheating in online games.
      - yunwal 4y ago
        Or just don’t? If the game isn’t fun with cheating and the developers can’t do anything about it without malware just don’t play it
tapoxi 4y ago
If you compare the Valorant and CS:GO communities, the Valorant community has a much easier time onboarding people and a much smaller cheating problem. That's all because of Vanguard, their much more intrusive anti-cheat that uses an early mode kernel driver. VAC (user-mode) is easily broken for the most part so players willingly navigate to external platforms for CSGO like ESEA and FaceIt which use their own hand-rolled intrusive kernel mode anti-cheat. Maybe it's best if Microsoft just baked this into Windows. It's intrusive, but clearly players demand it for competitive games. Streaming isn't a solution to that, the latency is unacceptable in shooters.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Notably, these kernel drivers work because the cheat makers are not able to create their own kernel drivers. Microsoft requires drivers to be code signed, and Microsoft will not code sign cheating software. Unfortunately, that also means you and I can't run our own driver code, on our own purchased machines! I find this really crappy for reasons which have nothing to do with anti-cheat. For example, I can't install modified nVidia drivers.
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    The people who want to tinker with unsigned drivers is many orders of magnitude smaller than the people who would accidentally install a malicious driver and ruin their PC. They had to make a choice for UX sake, they chose the bigger group of people and are happy to let the tinkers go to Linux
  - ChoGGi 4y ago
    I thought you could boot into test mode to run unsigned drivers (or did they get rid of that?).
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      You can but it's annoying and complex, and anticheats can detect it.
    - 4y ago
capitainenemo 4y ago
Streaming to the client will not prevent cheating. There are apparently fairly cheap cheat devices that work entirely on video capture.
- filmor 4y ago
  It at least rules out wall hacks and certain classes of aimbots.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
  Find cvcheat with a quick Google. Looks like the site is not in English though. Curious to learn more, it’s fascinating problem and rat race. Wonder how this tech would fair against csgo over watch.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  Sure, you'd still have video capture and hardware controlled cheats but those can be mitigated as well. No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse. Want to look behind you and then back in front in 2ms? Crank your mouse sensitivity all the way up. I've seen some hardware mouse controller cheats in the wild. They aren't that good. There was one that used a video feed and AI to "software control" the mouse but that can be detected as well by reading from the hardware directly. Mouse input is pretty standard USBHID shit.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse. Descent did, famously different max rates for vertical and horizontal, so if you want to master fast turning, you've also got to master rolling so you can turn in the direction you want at the faster rate.
    - reactordev 4y ago
      I don’t categorize Descent as an FPS. It’s more a space-shooter. It was one of my favorite games growing up, that, and TIE-Fighter. Descent was very much in the realm of Wing Commander and TIE-Fighter but inside Doom Levels. Space-sims have always had weird physics as part of the charm (much to the hatred of the developers). Wall Running (strafe running), Rocket Jumps, Roll-Turns, things that are side-effects of non-uniform physics or physics effects that added to the gameplay so it was left in.
broast 4y ago
> but as we've seen with Stadia, it's just not quite there yet. .... if you are using Stadia as an example of the capabilities of this technology, it is a mistake. Stadia was always the least capable of all the game streaming services. As someone who games exclusively on the cloud, including competitive online multi-player games, using services like ShadowPC, GeForce Now, and XCloud - I contend it is quite closer than you think
LorenPechtel 4y ago
The problem with such things is false positives. I recall many years ago one of the Command and Conquer games decided I had a pirate installation and blew up all my units in an on-line game. No, I had a perfectly legitimate copy that thought it was pirate because I had done an over-the-top installation of Windows because it was corrupted. Most everything worked fine and didn't need reinstallation.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it. Exactly. It disgusts me to my core, the audacity of these corporations. > To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior. Partially agree. This is especially relevant in skill-based games but I assume such statistics can be poisoned by cheaters over time, increasing false negatives. There are also game designs where bots are literally indistinguishable from sufficiently addicted players. Think anything with a reward schedule in the game design: MMORPGs with timed spawns, mobile games with timed rate limited gameplay. Especially the latter. In the end, Linus Torvalds is right about security: if the word "trust" isn't involved, it's not security, it's masturbation. We should be playing games with friends who we trust instead of randoms from the internet.

gabereiser 4y ago
At an individual level, if a player goes from 1.3K/D avg over a sample and then it jumps to 8K/D over the same sample duration later, it’s pretty obvious. Wall hacking and aim bot can be caught with behavior and statistics. Not in real-time but damn near.
- luluthefirst 4y ago
  People who play video games high or drunk shouldn't be punished when they're finally sober. :)
  - gabereiser 4y ago
    Which is why you sample an average. If you play high or drunk, it’s probably a pattern.
- johnyzee 4y ago
  If only there was a way to teach computers to identify patterns based on a large dataset...
- motoxpro 4y ago
  Not quite. I understand that's a piece but if you've ever tried to solve this problem it's not even close to being as easy as you make it out to be. 1. The stats you cited (k/d) is well within normal variance 2. It's not super common for cheaters to run around spinbotting/blatant wallhacking. I would actually say that's the minority. 3. Depending on the game, that would never happen because MMR just matches you up with people based on your new "skill" i.e. 2 games with 8K/d puts me in harder games and I go back down to something reasonable. Again, most cheaters don't continue to just dominate, those are the minority and get caught easily.
  - gabereiser 4y ago
    So it’s not as trivial as I make it sound, yes, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. People are working on just that. These things wouldn’t get you banned, but these are “early warnings” that you’re cheating and warrants further review of game footage (which most games store in the cloud now). It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science. AI behavior patterns combined with game footage review combined with a judiciary would cause one to be banned. The future of esports though is in closed edge networks with dedicated hosts. Provide them with the Internet cafe appliance. I just want to play some Counter-Strike. If I were to average my K/D over 1000 games I would get a pretty good statistical spread of how I play on certain maps. Granted theres a degree of variability depending on my mental state, but still a good enough sample to get an idea of how I play Dust II. Sudden and consistent outliers above norms would flag me for review. 2,3 kill cams and footage review would tell you that I’m cheating. Someone in Burma or Thailand could do that job until the AI is trained to spot aimbots, cough I’m sorry, “flick shots”.
seattle_spring 4y ago
Funny, you know what disgusts me to my core? Cheaters. Ruin their PC for all I care. Send em to prison.
- bombolo 4y ago
  Everybody's PC is getting ruined, except the cheaters'
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Funny, that's exactly the kind of profound lack of empathy and awareness my ex-wife had. "Do anything you want to prisoners; there's absolutely NO WAY I can possibly imagine being in that position myself" (I find this particularly amusing since she did far more actually illegal stuff like drugs etc in college than I ever dreamed of; but these emotions are always outwardly oriented:). The whole point of this thread is that these systems are not installed on cheaters in a targeted way. They are installed on everybody's computer. They make far far far more innocent gamers suffer than they punish cheaters. And we've seen time and again that these systems misidentify cheaters badly. Think of all the times your Norton of McAfee misidentified your bit torrent client or your open source utility or your own crypto mining software for malware, and multiply it by a thousand.
  - reactordev 4y ago
    This is the real meat. Anti-cheat malware is installed on everyone’s machine. Guilty until proven uninstalled.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    Fine, then propose and implement a viable alternative that effectively cuts out 99% of cheating in online games.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      Or just don’t? If the game isn’t fun with cheating and the developers can’t do anything about it without malware just don’t play it

tapoxi 4y ago

If you compare the Valorant and CS:GO communities, the Valorant community has a much easier time onboarding people and a much smaller cheating problem. That's all because of Vanguard, their much more intrusive anti-cheat that uses an early mode kernel driver. VAC (user-mode) is easily broken for the most part so players willingly navigate to external platforms for CSGO like ESEA and FaceIt which use their own hand-rolled intrusive kernel mode anti-cheat. Maybe it's best if Microsoft just baked this into Windows. It's intrusive, but clearly players demand it for competitive games. Streaming isn't a solution to that, the latency is unacceptable in shooters.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Notably, these kernel drivers work because the cheat makers are not able to create their own kernel drivers. Microsoft requires drivers to be code signed, and Microsoft will not code sign cheating software. Unfortunately, that also means you and I can't run our own driver code, on our own purchased machines! I find this really crappy for reasons which have nothing to do with anti-cheat. For example, I can't install modified nVidia drivers.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  The people who want to tinker with unsigned drivers is many orders of magnitude smaller than the people who would accidentally install a malicious driver and ruin their PC. They had to make a choice for UX sake, they chose the bigger group of people and are happy to let the tinkers go to Linux
- ChoGGi 4y ago
  I thought you could boot into test mode to run unsigned drivers (or did they get rid of that?).
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    You can but it's annoying and complex, and anticheats can detect it.
  - 4y ago

capitainenemo 4y ago

Streaming to the client will not prevent cheating. There are apparently fairly cheap cheat devices that work entirely on video capture.

filmor 4y ago
It at least rules out wall hacks and certain classes of aimbots.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
Find cvcheat with a quick Google. Looks like the site is not in English though. Curious to learn more, it’s fascinating problem and rat race. Wonder how this tech would fair against csgo over watch.
gabereiser 4y ago
Sure, you'd still have video capture and hardware controlled cheats but those can be mitigated as well. No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse. Want to look behind you and then back in front in 2ms? Crank your mouse sensitivity all the way up. I've seen some hardware mouse controller cheats in the wild. They aren't that good. There was one that used a video feed and AI to "software control" the mouse but that can be detected as well by reading from the hardware directly. Mouse input is pretty standard USBHID shit.
- toast0 4y ago
  > No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse. Descent did, famously different max rates for vertical and horizontal, so if you want to master fast turning, you've also got to master rolling so you can turn in the direction you want at the faster rate.
  - reactordev 4y ago
    I don’t categorize Descent as an FPS. It’s more a space-shooter. It was one of my favorite games growing up, that, and TIE-Fighter. Descent was very much in the realm of Wing Commander and TIE-Fighter but inside Doom Levels. Space-sims have always had weird physics as part of the charm (much to the hatred of the developers). Wall Running (strafe running), Rocket Jumps, Roll-Turns, things that are side-effects of non-uniform physics or physics effects that added to the gameplay so it was left in.

broast 4y ago

> but as we've seen with Stadia, it's just not quite there yet. .... if you are using Stadia as an example of the capabilities of this technology, it is a mistake. Stadia was always the least capable of all the game streaming services. As someone who games exclusively on the cloud, including competitive online multi-player games, using services like ShadowPC, GeForce Now, and XCloud - I contend it is quite closer than you think

LorenPechtel 4y ago

The problem with such things is false positives. I recall many years ago one of the Command and Conquer games decided I had a pirate installation and blew up all my units in an on-line game. No, I had a perfectly legitimate copy that thought it was pirate because I had done an over-the-top installation of Windows because it was corrupted. Most everything worked fine and didn't need reinstallation.