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Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

127 points by skilled 2y ago

eddiewithzato 2y ago
Not uncommon, punkbuster did this as well.
google234123 2y ago
> banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files Seems like a smart way to catch inexperienced/up and coming cheat devs. How many non-cheat devs really have IDA on their gaming PC? I did and it was for developing cheats
- G4E 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but that's a really narrow minded take. There are a lot of good reasons to have IDA or Ghidra installed on your computer, if only for fun and learning reverse-engineering. This should NOT prevent you to play others games. ( To everybody reading this : if you like computer and puzzles, you should absolutly try to reverse-engineer a simple binary at least once. It's fun !)
  - lmz 2y ago
    If you installed it to learn RE and the game refuses to run because of it, now you have a project to try your skills on.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      I assume this is a joke, but still... I have had Ghidra open in the background for a while (weeks), as I worked on some IoT projects for my cats. While I'm biased and I hold some unpopular opinions... I think not just me, but most people definitely would get offended if suddenly some game would refuse to start and/or ban online account. Honestly, banning players because they have RE tools feels like a generally counter-productive idea. Best-case scenario is that it'll require an engineer who was actually going to RE game files to get another account, stalling them very briefly. Worst-case scenario is getting someone with technical skills and free time pissed off enough to actually start messing with the game (potentially, in a less respectful way than your average cheat developer might - looking for game-breaking exploits than just automating things or providing extra information to the player), even if they didn't mean to.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  I have an old copy of IDA floating around somewhere and play games on my primary machine. This is a really bad and awful way to do anticheat.
- eddiewithzato 2y ago
  I used x64dbg to crack some accounting software that went EOL and forced us to buy a new software based on a new subscription model. You can basically patch the executable to skip the function that locks you out
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I recently saw that Roblox kids are trolling each other by putting "x64dbg" in their display names, because the game checks the window title of every running app and refuses to run if it sees that string anywhere :^)
    - ganoushoreilly 2y ago
      gotta love it. ALT+F4 to show your respects. ;D
    - robotnikman 2y ago
      That's actually pretty clever, and gave me a good laugh
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  Not literally IDA, but I once had OllyDbg on my "gaming PC" (really my "everything PC") because I was trying to help a game developer debug a problem that apparently only happened on my PC.
- ganoushoreilly 2y ago
  It's not so uncommon for homelab / cyber security researchers. I have an older licensed copy of Ida and Ghidra on my main gaming pc. Mostly to keep dumb research of workstations I use for legit work.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  As someone who has lost a fair bit of my hand eye coordination as I've aged, I wanted to say thank you to you and your community for developing some cheats. Specifically those for single player games, I've used them to finish games so I can view the story/endings.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Using a stupid/unreliable signal for lazy banning--like "is a developer tool installed"--is deeply unjust to a minority of users. A less permanently-severe but real example: A Windows game which terminates (with no message) if the user opens "git bash" (cygwin).
BearOso 2y ago
The screenshot function pointed in the article out will only be able to take screenshots on older versions of Windows with no compositor, i.e. the ones that draw directly to the scan-out framebuffer. That's why he found it's not used anywhere--it's obsolete.
- bjc 2y ago
  not true, BitBlt is still able to access screen content on Win10 & 11
  - mook 2y ago
    Specifically, it can access screen content, but not window content. As in, passing in the desktop hwnd gets you a picture, passing in a different hwnd gets you a bunch of black. At least as of when I tried it a few months ago on Windows 10.
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      Does the screen content contain all the windows that are visible, or is it the desktop image?
      - mook 2y ago
        All of the windows visible on screen. For my use case, I was taking a screenshot of my app (for automated testing), so I ended up taking a full desktop screenshot and cropping it to the window.
    - bjc 2y ago
      I was curious about this so I just tested it... some windows are able to be captured and some are black
- nvy 2y ago
  Looking at the MSDN docs I don't believe this is true. Can you point to something showing it doesn't work on modern windows? My only windows box is in an actual physical box right now and I cannot verify.
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.
- jakebasile 2y ago
  The really invasive kernel level ones don't and probably will never work, but there's a chunk of them that do. One of the big ones, Easy Anti Cheat, mostly works[1]. I, too, consider it a benefit of gaming on Linux. [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown
- senectus1 2y ago
  totally agree, but there are some things we just cant do. I bought Marauders to play with my son, and had maybe 4 months of excellent fun play with him. Then the dev's enabled EAC... now I cant play it anymore :-( I cant blame the mods, they never wrote the game to work on linux it was just a happy happenstance that i could use proton to play it before the EAC transition. Every game i have in my steam catalogue is at risk of this (except for the native ones obviously)
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Why wouldn't you blame them? They should at least provide an option to turn it off like games used to. It looks like it's a co-op game; if you're playing with your friends/family why do you need anti-cheat?
    - senectus1 2y ago
      no self hosted servers otherwise yeah, like 7 days to die I'd just turn it off.
      - ndriscoll 2y ago
        Why do you need self hosted servers? Most looter shooters are p2p in game, right? Either way, you just need a filter to allow matching with other people that have anti cheat off. Or at least allow private groups in that mode.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
[flagged]
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  Please don't post nationalistic flamebait. Even a decade ago, screenshots were long outdated as an anti-cheat measure. The code posted in the article is extremely tame, it's amateur hour compared to what modern anticheats like EAC/BattlEye/Vanguard do, especially in competitive leagues.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
Nothing ruins the fun faster than lag-switching lamers. Accordingly, one can never trust client side security enforcement, or you just create a tit-for-tat economy with cheat-code authors. The better solution is often live admins with a cheat-report button, server-side physics reconciliation trip-wires/audits (no time-travelers), and using clipped areas for character buffering (x-ray vision attempts floods buffers and crashes the client.) The only information an online game-engine should be pulling is the hashed GPU chip serial-number for account ban enforcement. The worst part about cheats is they ruin the fun for themselves too, as a game becomes pointless and boring. Installing a RAT has no justification on hardware people didn't pay for...
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Some chunk of the problem comes from companies trying to avoid spending money on dedicated+good servers, and choosing business models that are hostile to the idea of players banding together to subsidize their own little institutions.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    I think it is more of a fools errand to cost-optimize into a "cloud", as by its very design the lag gets worse with high concurrency loads. There are better solutions, but as you stated they are not cheap or easy to monetize. =)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > The only information an online game-engine should be pulling is the hashed GPU chip serial-number for account ban enforcement. Isn't that literally client-side security enforcement?
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    1. Submitting an already active card signature is an instant ban 2. Spoofing a signature will still force you to re-register, lose your current rankings, and zero your nontransferable e-store account balance. 3. Most people don't account for the other system signatures that will also get randomly audited over several months 4. Remember part of offline audits is comparing each clients game-log to look for suspicious glitches like inhuman aim behind occluded objects, and "weird" physics. Hope they find it is a QA issue on replay... =) Have a nice day, =)
hypeatei 2y ago
I know there's nothing that can or will happen about it (for various reasons) but the whole model around multiplayer games is flawed. You're giving someone code to run on their PC and hoping your anti-cheat code can catch their code doing bad things. I believe there are AI anti-cheats being developed and used in China so maybe we'll end up with a Recall-esque anti-cheat everywhere in the future :)
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    It would definitely stop most cheating but at a huge cost: performance. You're not running on bare metal anymore and that would be a non-starter for competitive games.
    - maximus-decimus 2y ago
      Is it really a problem is all competitors have the same performance hit?
      - tiagod 2y ago
        Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?
        fragmede 2y ago
        Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about. For people watching esports, they need to believe that the game isn't rigged and people aren't cheating. A couple more scandals and the sponsors are going to require cloud-gaming just to keep viewers.
j-bos 2y ago
Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test? Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.
- neandrake 2y ago
  I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. The anti-cheat keeps honest people honest as they say.
  - j-bos 2y ago
    > I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. Yes, and technical solutions are usually a bad sign. How nice is the neighborhood that locks pharmacy razors vs the one that doesn't?
- baby 2y ago
  I too wish we didn’t have to encrypt every communication over the Internet
  - j-bos 2y ago
    That's a good point. Though I feel there's a significant difference between defenfing comms from external and intermediary parties as opposed to forcing the behavior of the parties one chooses to interact with.
- npteljes 2y ago
  I think this underestimates the problem. Yes it's a people problem, but a game doesn't have the people-means to solve it, it only has technology. >Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Same could be said about laws. Goes to show that we don't have it solved it, at all. Every single system that we have has active bad actors in it, with no chance for us to catch them, by any means that we have, technological or not. To add to this even more, it's not even a people problem, it's an animal problem - some of them also give out fake signals, in order to gain something.
snvzz 2y ago
>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on. Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.
- self_awareness 2y ago
  I wonder, how would you design an anti-cheat protection? Would you fight for the privacy of cheaters?
  - ronsor 2y ago
    Cheaters are bad, but it's not worth unreasonably harming everyone else to stop them. I wouldn't advocate for surveillance cameras in everyone's homes to reduce crime.
    - jdietrich 2y ago
      Valorant took a massive amount of market share from CS:GO, in large part because of a very intrusive but highly effective anti-cheat system. Cheating in online games is a hard problem to solve and can make games completely unplayable. Gamers are generally much more bothered about cheating than about the privacy risks of anti-cheat, whether you agree with them or not. For the paranoid, dual-booting to a games-only OS image would be a reasonable choice.
      - bruce343434 2y ago
        In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode".
        mentalfist 2y ago
        Sounds like in your experience, the time is ripe for you to revolutionise the incompetent game industry and solve all their simple problems!
Barbara230 2y ago
[flagged]
skrebbel 2y ago
I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.
- hlfshell 2y ago
  Rule of thumb - if it runs well on steam deck / steamos it probably doesn't have anything too extreme... most multiplayer games won't run on the windows compatibility layer as it allows the client a possible level of control that would look similar to a low level cheat. Nearly every competitive game game is going to be utilizing some form of anticheat like this, so single player games tend to not have this issue (drm is a separate conversation)
- PrivateButts 2y ago
  Steam sometimes lets you know with a banner in the store page about a required 3rd party software, but there's also https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ maintained by Linux gamers. What's frustrating to me is that games will run the hyper invasive kernel level version of an anti cheat on Windows but will allow Linux plays, which has no such level of access. If we're trusting Linux players with no kernel level monitoring, why not windows players? Have cheater really not caught on that there's a lower bar on that platform? I hope they don't because I like being able to play competitive games with friends without having to reboot first.
  - pynappo 2y ago
    I think it really is just that some cheaters don't wanna install a different OS, and my understanding is that there are still plenty of hacks on Windows so not much reason to change. Overwatch 2 for example has had a free undetected source-released cheat on Windows for months now (according to what I've heard on Reddit). I believe Valorant and Roblox have had devs/employees state that supporting Linux isn't worth it for the small proportion of the player base vs the increased cheat risk as well, although feel free to take that with a grain of salt
langsoul-com 2y ago
Anti cheat engines are effectively spyware, except accepted spyware. How can you reliably ensure someone's machine is not running a cheat without having access to what it's running? Anti cheat is not easy and just the perception of cheaters will nuke pvp games. But personally I want better anti cheat, the only question is at what cost?
peremptor 2y ago
Im not sure if this is somthing we will ever be able to solve to a satisfactory degree with these top down/automated approaches. I have been gaming my whole life and I miss the "old" days of having community run server as being the default. You would go online one day pick a server and play on it in the mode you want (For context: I am talking about Counter Strike:Source). Over time you would get into talking with the regulars on the server and you form some bonds. And if someone does something the majority does not like the can be vote kicked/banned. We took care of cheaters/flamers/grievers that way. An admin on the server can still revoke the ban if the banned person explains why it was unjustified. No it wasnt streamlined, and it was sometimes unfair, and establishing global leaderboards were difficult (see ESL company). But you had community involvment and soooooo much content (game mods and skins; all for free btw.) and it felt good to be part of it.
- whatevaa 2y ago
  Somehow I doubt ban revocations were common, too much of a hasle. But yeah, inability to have communities is not great.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    (not the thread starter) The lack of communities is why it seems unlikely. I remember several times successfully making my case and being unbanned! Usually some friend of the admins was given power, they abused it, then you could go on a forum they hosted/make your case. People would chime in and so on Children managed to "work from home" decades before the industry did It wasn't a hassle, it was the point. Curate a community worth spending time in/with Being denied served a function too. You learned about a community you don't want to be part of!
- DoItToMe81 2y ago
  Modern AAA games are meant to be disposable, with a killswitch for when the next consumable is released. This isn't possible with community servers. They don't want longevity. Cheating is an entirely self-inflicted problem caused by this. Self-policing communities with moderation tools are far more effective. These companies are so greed driven, that they lobby to make cheating a federal offence and for private police raids and private house searches, instead of making a healthy community based on previous experience. As has, disturbingly, already happened in Australia (https://torrentfreak.com/images/gtaorders-1.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/gtaorders-1.pdf)
npteljes 2y ago
In this day and age, I think that compartmentalization is the way to go. Gaming, and especially online gaming is basically public by default, so I decided that I don't fight the zeitgeist, rather I search for a place for it. I personally solved this for myself by having a dedicated gaming OS, and by not connecting that OS to my private network. So, there they have it - some control over my machine, but not much of my personal life.
- dissent 2y ago
  I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.
  - orbital-decay 2y ago
    > Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. I think this is terribly myopic. Gaming and game modding/development resulted from it hugely contributed to general purpose computing in general, possibly more than any other activity. And it was only possible with games running on a general-purpose platform, not a gaming appliance.
    - dissent 2y ago
      I know, I lived through it, and it was great at the time. Note that I was responding to OP who said he he'd set aside a Windows PC just for gaming. That would qualify as a gaming appliance in this context.
      - orbital-decay 2y ago
        This might be true for competitive games with an intrusive anti-cheat, but not for gaming in general. I also keep an isolated PC specifically for these games, for my kids and myself - only because of the anticheat. But games like KSP always go to the main PC full of tools and possibilities to mod and tinker.
squigz 2y ago
Is there any data on the prevalence of cheating in online games and/or the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems?
- Levitating 2y ago
  I am not sure if there's any public data regarding that. But it has been estimated that the illegal market of cheats is worth about 100 million. Many cheaters don't even intend on playing against legitimate players, looking for so called "hack vs hack" games. At some point CS2 didn't really act on cheaters for a while and it got really ugly. Anti-Cheats do work, there will always be ways around it but as long as these alternative paths are inconvenient enough to prevent a consumer from buying the cheat then it works. Without Anti-Cheat modern competitive games are unplayable.
JohnFen 2y ago
The extreme invasiveness of anti-cheat software is why I stopped buying and playing most modern video games years ago. It's a much higher price than I'm willing to pay.

127 points by skilled 2y ago

Not uncommon, punkbuster did this as well.

> banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files Seems like a smart way to catch inexperienced/up and coming cheat devs. How many non-cheat devs really have IDA on their gaming PC? I did and it was for developing cheats

G4E 2y ago
I'm sorry, but that's a really narrow minded take. There are a lot of good reasons to have IDA or Ghidra installed on your computer, if only for fun and learning reverse-engineering. This should NOT prevent you to play others games. ( To everybody reading this : if you like computer and puzzles, you should absolutly try to reverse-engineer a simple binary at least once. It's fun !)
- lmz 2y ago
  If you installed it to learn RE and the game refuses to run because of it, now you have a project to try your skills on.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    I assume this is a joke, but still... I have had Ghidra open in the background for a while (weeks), as I worked on some IoT projects for my cats. While I'm biased and I hold some unpopular opinions... I think not just me, but most people definitely would get offended if suddenly some game would refuse to start and/or ban online account. Honestly, banning players because they have RE tools feels like a generally counter-productive idea. Best-case scenario is that it'll require an engineer who was actually going to RE game files to get another account, stalling them very briefly. Worst-case scenario is getting someone with technical skills and free time pissed off enough to actually start messing with the game (potentially, in a less respectful way than your average cheat developer might - looking for game-breaking exploits than just automating things or providing extra information to the player), even if they didn't mean to.
kmeisthax 2y ago
I have an old copy of IDA floating around somewhere and play games on my primary machine. This is a really bad and awful way to do anticheat.
eddiewithzato 2y ago
I used x64dbg to crack some accounting software that went EOL and forced us to buy a new software based on a new subscription model. You can basically patch the executable to skip the function that locks you out
- jsheard 2y ago
  I recently saw that Roblox kids are trolling each other by putting "x64dbg" in their display names, because the game checks the window title of every running app and refuses to run if it sees that string anywhere :^)
  - ganoushoreilly 2y ago
    gotta love it. ALT+F4 to show your respects. ;D
  - robotnikman 2y ago
    That's actually pretty clever, and gave me a good laugh
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
Not literally IDA, but I once had OllyDbg on my "gaming PC" (really my "everything PC") because I was trying to help a game developer debug a problem that apparently only happened on my PC.
ganoushoreilly 2y ago
It's not so uncommon for homelab / cyber security researchers. I have an older licensed copy of Ida and Ghidra on my main gaming pc. Mostly to keep dumb research of workstations I use for legit work.
bloopernova 2y ago
As someone who has lost a fair bit of my hand eye coordination as I've aged, I wanted to say thank you to you and your community for developing some cheats. Specifically those for single player games, I've used them to finish games so I can view the story/endings.
Terr_ 2y ago
Using a stupid/unreliable signal for lazy banning--like "is a developer tool installed"--is deeply unjust to a minority of users. A less permanently-severe but real example: A Windows game which terminates (with no message) if the user opens "git bash" (cygwin).

BearOso 2y ago

The screenshot function pointed in the article out will only be able to take screenshots on older versions of Windows with no compositor, i.e. the ones that draw directly to the scan-out framebuffer. That's why he found it's not used anywhere--it's obsolete.

bjc 2y ago
not true, BitBlt is still able to access screen content on Win10 & 11
- mook 2y ago
  Specifically, it can access screen content, but not window content. As in, passing in the desktop hwnd gets you a picture, passing in a different hwnd gets you a bunch of black. At least as of when I tried it a few months ago on Windows 10.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    Does the screen content contain all the windows that are visible, or is it the desktop image?
    - mook 2y ago
      All of the windows visible on screen. For my use case, I was taking a screenshot of my app (for automated testing), so I ended up taking a full desktop screenshot and cropping it to the window.
  - bjc 2y ago
    I was curious about this so I just tested it... some windows are able to be captured and some are black
nvy 2y ago
Looking at the MSDN docs I don't believe this is true. Can you point to something showing it doesn't work on modern windows? My only windows box is in an actual physical box right now and I cannot verify.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.

jakebasile 2y ago
The really invasive kernel level ones don't and probably will never work, but there's a chunk of them that do. One of the big ones, Easy Anti Cheat, mostly works[1]. I, too, consider it a benefit of gaming on Linux. [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown
senectus1 2y ago
totally agree, but there are some things we just cant do. I bought Marauders to play with my son, and had maybe 4 months of excellent fun play with him. Then the dev's enabled EAC... now I cant play it anymore :-( I cant blame the mods, they never wrote the game to work on linux it was just a happy happenstance that i could use proton to play it before the EAC transition. Every game i have in my steam catalogue is at risk of this (except for the native ones obviously)
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Why wouldn't you blame them? They should at least provide an option to turn it off like games used to. It looks like it's a co-op game; if you're playing with your friends/family why do you need anti-cheat?
  - senectus1 2y ago
    no self hosted servers otherwise yeah, like 7 days to die I'd just turn it off.
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      Why do you need self hosted servers? Most looter shooters are p2p in game, right? Either way, you just need a filter to allow matching with other people that have anti cheat off. Or at least allow private groups in that mode.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

[flagged]

orbital-decay 2y ago
Please don't post nationalistic flamebait. Even a decade ago, screenshots were long outdated as an anti-cheat measure. The code posted in the article is extremely tame, it's amateur hour compared to what modern anticheats like EAC/BattlEye/Vanguard do, especially in competitive leagues.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

Nothing ruins the fun faster than lag-switching lamers. Accordingly, one can never trust client side security enforcement, or you just create a tit-for-tat economy with cheat-code authors. The better solution is often live admins with a cheat-report button, server-side physics reconciliation trip-wires/audits (no time-travelers), and using clipped areas for character buffering (x-ray vision attempts floods buffers and crashes the client.) The only information an online game-engine should be pulling is the hashed GPU chip serial-number for account ban enforcement. The worst part about cheats is they ruin the fun for themselves too, as a game becomes pointless and boring. Installing a RAT has no justification on hardware people didn't pay for...

Terr_ 2y ago
Some chunk of the problem comes from companies trying to avoid spending money on dedicated+good servers, and choosing business models that are hostile to the idea of players banding together to subsidize their own little institutions.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  I think it is more of a fools errand to cost-optimize into a "cloud", as by its very design the lag gets worse with high concurrency loads. There are better solutions, but as you stated they are not cheap or easy to monetize. =)
wizzwizz4 2y ago
> The only information an online game-engine should be pulling is the hashed GPU chip serial-number for account ban enforcement. Isn't that literally client-side security enforcement?
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  1. Submitting an already active card signature is an instant ban 2. Spoofing a signature will still force you to re-register, lose your current rankings, and zero your nontransferable e-store account balance. 3. Most people don't account for the other system signatures that will also get randomly audited over several months 4. Remember part of offline audits is comparing each clients game-log to look for suspicious glitches like inhuman aim behind occluded objects, and "weird" physics. Hope they find it is a QA issue on replay... =) Have a nice day, =)

hypeatei 2y ago

I know there's nothing that can or will happen about it (for various reasons) but the whole model around multiplayer games is flawed. You're giving someone code to run on their PC and hoping your anti-cheat code can catch their code doing bad things. I believe there are AI anti-cheats being developed and used in China so maybe we'll end up with a Recall-esque anti-cheat everywhere in the future :)

Dalewyn 2y ago
I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  It would definitely stop most cheating but at a huge cost: performance. You're not running on bare metal anymore and that would be a non-starter for competitive games.
  - maximus-decimus 2y ago
    Is it really a problem is all competitors have the same performance hit?
    - tiagod 2y ago
      Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about. For people watching esports, they need to believe that the game isn't rigged and people aren't cheating. A couple more scandals and the sponsors are going to require cloud-gaming just to keep viewers.

j-bos 2y ago

Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test? Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

neandrake 2y ago
I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. The anti-cheat keeps honest people honest as they say.
- j-bos 2y ago
  > I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. Yes, and technical solutions are usually a bad sign. How nice is the neighborhood that locks pharmacy razors vs the one that doesn't?
baby 2y ago
I too wish we didn’t have to encrypt every communication over the Internet
- j-bos 2y ago
  That's a good point. Though I feel there's a significant difference between defenfing comms from external and intermediary parties as opposed to forcing the behavior of the parties one chooses to interact with.
npteljes 2y ago
I think this underestimates the problem. Yes it's a people problem, but a game doesn't have the people-means to solve it, it only has technology. >Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Same could be said about laws. Goes to show that we don't have it solved it, at all. Every single system that we have has active bad actors in it, with no chance for us to catch them, by any means that we have, technological or not. To add to this even more, it's not even a people problem, it's an animal problem - some of them also give out fake signals, in order to gain something.

snvzz 2y ago

>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on. Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.

self_awareness 2y ago
I wonder, how would you design an anti-cheat protection? Would you fight for the privacy of cheaters?
- ronsor 2y ago
  Cheaters are bad, but it's not worth unreasonably harming everyone else to stop them. I wouldn't advocate for surveillance cameras in everyone's homes to reduce crime.
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Valorant took a massive amount of market share from CS:GO, in large part because of a very intrusive but highly effective anti-cheat system. Cheating in online games is a hard problem to solve and can make games completely unplayable. Gamers are generally much more bothered about cheating than about the privacy risks of anti-cheat, whether you agree with them or not. For the paranoid, dual-booting to a games-only OS image would be a reasonable choice.
    - bruce343434 2y ago
      In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode".
      - mentalfist 2y ago
        Sounds like in your experience, the time is ripe for you to revolutionise the incompetent game industry and solve all their simple problems!

Barbara230 2y ago

[flagged]

skrebbel 2y ago

I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.

hlfshell 2y ago
Rule of thumb - if it runs well on steam deck / steamos it probably doesn't have anything too extreme... most multiplayer games won't run on the windows compatibility layer as it allows the client a possible level of control that would look similar to a low level cheat. Nearly every competitive game game is going to be utilizing some form of anticheat like this, so single player games tend to not have this issue (drm is a separate conversation)
PrivateButts 2y ago
Steam sometimes lets you know with a banner in the store page about a required 3rd party software, but there's also https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ maintained by Linux gamers. What's frustrating to me is that games will run the hyper invasive kernel level version of an anti cheat on Windows but will allow Linux plays, which has no such level of access. If we're trusting Linux players with no kernel level monitoring, why not windows players? Have cheater really not caught on that there's a lower bar on that platform? I hope they don't because I like being able to play competitive games with friends without having to reboot first.
- pynappo 2y ago
  I think it really is just that some cheaters don't wanna install a different OS, and my understanding is that there are still plenty of hacks on Windows so not much reason to change. Overwatch 2 for example has had a free undetected source-released cheat on Windows for months now (according to what I've heard on Reddit). I believe Valorant and Roblox have had devs/employees state that supporting Linux isn't worth it for the small proportion of the player base vs the increased cheat risk as well, although feel free to take that with a grain of salt

langsoul-com 2y ago

Anti cheat engines are effectively spyware, except accepted spyware. How can you reliably ensure someone's machine is not running a cheat without having access to what it's running? Anti cheat is not easy and just the perception of cheaters will nuke pvp games. But personally I want better anti cheat, the only question is at what cost?

peremptor 2y ago

Im not sure if this is somthing we will ever be able to solve to a satisfactory degree with these top down/automated approaches. I have been gaming my whole life and I miss the "old" days of having community run server as being the default. You would go online one day pick a server and play on it in the mode you want (For context: I am talking about Counter Strike:Source). Over time you would get into talking with the regulars on the server and you form some bonds. And if someone does something the majority does not like the can be vote kicked/banned. We took care of cheaters/flamers/grievers that way. An admin on the server can still revoke the ban if the banned person explains why it was unjustified. No it wasnt streamlined, and it was sometimes unfair, and establishing global leaderboards were difficult (see ESL company). But you had community involvment and soooooo much content (game mods and skins; all for free btw.) and it felt good to be part of it.

whatevaa 2y ago
Somehow I doubt ban revocations were common, too much of a hasle. But yeah, inability to have communities is not great.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  (not the thread starter) The lack of communities is why it seems unlikely. I remember several times successfully making my case and being unbanned! Usually some friend of the admins was given power, they abused it, then you could go on a forum they hosted/make your case. People would chime in and so on Children managed to "work from home" decades before the industry did It wasn't a hassle, it was the point. Curate a community worth spending time in/with Being denied served a function too. You learned about a community you don't want to be part of!
DoItToMe81 2y ago
Modern AAA games are meant to be disposable, with a killswitch for when the next consumable is released. This isn't possible with community servers. They don't want longevity. Cheating is an entirely self-inflicted problem caused by this. Self-policing communities with moderation tools are far more effective. These companies are so greed driven, that they lobby to make cheating a federal offence and for private police raids and private house searches, instead of making a healthy community based on previous experience. As has, disturbingly, already happened in Australia (https://torrentfreak.com/images/gtaorders-1.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/gtaorders-1.pdf)

npteljes 2y ago

In this day and age, I think that compartmentalization is the way to go. Gaming, and especially online gaming is basically public by default, so I decided that I don't fight the zeitgeist, rather I search for a place for it. I personally solved this for myself by having a dedicated gaming OS, and by not connecting that OS to my private network. So, there they have it - some control over my machine, but not much of my personal life.

dissent 2y ago
I think you nail it right here. Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. The only reason we ever used one machine for both was that home computers were expensive. Not having to support games in your daily driver means you can optimise it for real tasks, and also optimise your gaming platform for games. It's a win/win.
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  > Gaming is a specialist activity poorly suited to general purpose computing. I think this is terribly myopic. Gaming and game modding/development resulted from it hugely contributed to general purpose computing in general, possibly more than any other activity. And it was only possible with games running on a general-purpose platform, not a gaming appliance.
  - dissent 2y ago
    I know, I lived through it, and it was great at the time. Note that I was responding to OP who said he he'd set aside a Windows PC just for gaming. That would qualify as a gaming appliance in this context.
    - orbital-decay 2y ago
      This might be true for competitive games with an intrusive anti-cheat, but not for gaming in general. I also keep an isolated PC specifically for these games, for my kids and myself - only because of the anticheat. But games like KSP always go to the main PC full of tools and possibilities to mod and tinker.

squigz 2y ago

Is there any data on the prevalence of cheating in online games and/or the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems?

Levitating 2y ago
I am not sure if there's any public data regarding that. But it has been estimated that the illegal market of cheats is worth about 100 million. Many cheaters don't even intend on playing against legitimate players, looking for so called "hack vs hack" games. At some point CS2 didn't really act on cheaters for a while and it got really ugly. Anti-Cheats do work, there will always be ways around it but as long as these alternative paths are inconvenient enough to prevent a consumer from buying the cheat then it works. Without Anti-Cheat modern competitive games are unplayable.

JohnFen 2y ago

The extreme invasiveness of anti-cheat software is why I stopped buying and playing most modern video games years ago. It's a much higher price than I'm willing to pay.