5 ms·

imo anti-cheat should mostly be server-side behavior based

by pvillano 2y ago

gruez 2y ago
How are you going to catch wallhackers that aren't blatantly obvious?
- JasonSage 2y ago
  You may not, and that's ok.
  - chowells 2y ago
    It's not ok for people playing those games. They'll quit playing that game and go to one with invasive client-side anti-cheat instead. The incentives and priorities are very different for people who want to play fair games than they are for people who want to maximize their own freedom.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      This is a solved issue already. Vote kicks or server admin intervention. Aimbotting was never an issue for the old primitive fps games I would play because admins could spectate and see you are aimbotting. A modern game need only telemetry that captures what a spectating admin picks up, rather than active surveillance. Hackers are only a problem when servers are left unmoderated and players can’t vote kick.
      - nemothekid 2y ago
        You can't have vote kicks/server admins/hosted servers with competitive ranked ladders. If your solution is "don't have competitive ranked ladders" then you are just telling the majority of people who even care about anti-cheat to just not play their preferred game mode.
        kjkjadksj 2y ago
        Why can’t you have that with competitive ladders? Presumably theres still mechanisms to kick people in game if they start for example spewing racist messages in the game. What difference is it to kick someone one way or another? Not to mention plenty of games with vote kick mechanisms did have strong competitive scenes.
        nemothekid 2y ago
        If you only allow users to kick their teammates for suspected cheating, they will have little incentive to do so. If you allow users to kick opponents for cheating, they will have an incentive to kick legitimate players who are playing well. You cannot have a global competitive ladder if the ladder is split into a ton of different admin-run servers. overwatch had a version of this problem where people would queue into the Australia region during low traffic times to boost their rank.
      - chowells 2y ago
        That stopped being a solution when winning online started mattering. There are real money prizes for online game tournaments. Weekly events can have hundreds of dollars in their prize pools. Big events can have thousands. Suddenly vote kicking had to go, because it was abused. Not in the tournaments themselves, but in open ranked play which serves as qualifiers. An active game can rack up thousands of hours of gameplay per day, far beyond the ability of competent admins to validate. Especially because cheating is often subtle. An expert can spend more than real time looking for subtle patterns that automated tools haven't been built to detect. Games aren't between you and your 25 buddies for bragging rights anymore. They're between you and 50k other active players for cash prizes. The world has changed. Anti-cheat technology followed that change.
    - JasonSage 2y ago
      I play one of those games that doesn’t strongly enforce anti-cheating, and I agree with you that it’s a huge detraction compared to games with strong anti-cheat. But I strongly disagree about the use of invasive client-side anti-cheat. Server-side anti-cheat can reduce the number of cheaters to an acceptably low level. See for example how lichess detects and aids in detection of cheaters: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin And chess is a game where I feel like it would be relatively hard to detect cheating. An algorithm looking at games with actors moving in 3D space and responding to relative positions and actions of multiple other actors should have a great many more ways to detect cheating over the course of many games.
      - JasonSage 2y ago
        And frankly, I think the incentive structure has nothing to do with whether tournaments are happening with money on the line, and a great deal more whether the company has the cash and nothing better to do. Anti-cheat beyond a very basic level is nothing to these companies except a funnel optimization to extract the maximum lifetime value out of the player base. Only the most successful games will ever have the money or reach the technical capability to support this. Nobody making these decisions is doing it for player welfare.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  The only reason wallhacking is possible in the first place is a server sending a client information on a competitor that the client should not know about. IE the server sends locations and details about all players to your client, even if you are in the spawn room and can't see anyone else and your client has to hide those details from you. It is then trivial to just pull those details out of memory. The solution forever has been to just not send clients information they shouldn't have. My copy of CS:GO should not know about a terrorist on the other side of the map. The code to evaluate that literally already exists, since the client will answer that question when it goes to render visuals and sound. They just choose to not do that testing server side. Aimbotting however is probably impossible to stop. Your client has to know where the model for an enemy is to render it, so you know where the hitbox roughly should be, and most games send your client the hitbox info directly so it can do predict whether you hit them. I don't think you can do it behaviorally either.
  - snailmailman 2y ago
    To some extent though- the games do need information about players that are behind walls. In CSGO/CS2, even if you can’t see the player you can hear their footsteps or them reloading, etc. the sound is very positional. Plus, you can shoot through some thin walls at these players. Even if they can’t be seen. I don’t believe server side anti cheat can truly be effective against some cheats. But also Vanguard is trash and makes my computer bluescreen. I’ve stopped playing league entirely because of it.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Nit, but surely hit detection happens on the server? Shooting wildly should always register a hit, regardless of what the client knows.
    - pohuing 2y ago
      You don't happen to have used some means to install win 11 on an unsupported device have you? People bypassing the windows install requirements and then vanguard making false assumptions have been a source of issues.
- Ukv 2y ago
  Minimize the possible advantage by not sending the client other players' positions until absolutely necessary (either the client can see the other player, or there's a movement the client could make that would reveal the other player before receiving the next packet), and eliminate the cheaters you can with server-side behavior analysis and regular less-invasive client-side anticheat. Ultimately even games with kernel anticheat have cheating issues; at some point you have to accept that you cannot stop 100.0% of cheaters. The solution to someone making an aimbot using a physically separate device (reading monitor output, giving mouse input) cannot be to require keys to the player's house.
  - lutoma 2y ago
    > not sending the client other players' positions until absolutely necessary (either the client can see the other player, or there's a movement the client could make that would reveal the other player before receiving the next packet) I think the problem with this is sounds like footsteps or weapons being fired that need to be positional. Which makes me wonder if you could get away with mixing these sounds server-side and then streaming them to the client to avoid sending positions. Probably infeasible in practice due to latency and game server performance, but fun to think about.
    - Ukv 2y ago
      To whatever extent the sound is intended to only give a general direction, I'd say quantize the angle and volume of the sound before it's sent such that cheaters also only get that same vague direction. Obviously don't send inaudible/essentially-inaudible sounds to the client at all.
      - Workaccount2 2y ago
        They need to just make CPU's, GPU's, and memory modules with hardware level anti-cheat. Totally optional purchase, but grants you access to very-difficult-to-cheat-in servers.
        2y ago
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  Standalone servers. Run your own then you can ban anyone you like, or better still only allow anyone you like.
  - cobalt60 2y ago
    Nothing like sourcemodded server! Good old days!
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Did their hitbox clip through the wall? Yes? Banned. You could do it with telemetry.
  - Arnavion 2y ago
    You're confusing wallhacking with noclipping. Wallhacking is being able to see through walls, like drawing an outline around all characters that renders with highest z-order, or making wall textures transparent. It does not result in any server-side-detectable difference in behavior other than the hacker seemingly being more aware of their surroundings than they should, which can be hard to determine for sure. Depending on how the hack is done, it may not be detectable by the client either, eg by intercepting the GPU driver calls to render the outlines or switch the wall textures.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      if wall between client and another client == true; do dont render other client; fi
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Stop thinking about trying to catch wallhackers. Instead, make wallhacking impossible. Do that by fixing the server to, instead of sending all player positions to everyone, only send player positions to clients that they have an unobstructed view of.
- bdzr 2y ago
  Reading this thread it's impressive how little people know about competitive gaming while simultaneously knowing how to fix the cheating issues.

imo anti-cheat should mostly be server-side behavior based

gruez 2y ago

How are you going to catch wallhackers that aren't blatantly obvious?

JasonSage 2y ago
You may not, and that's ok.
- chowells 2y ago
  It's not ok for people playing those games. They'll quit playing that game and go to one with invasive client-side anti-cheat instead. The incentives and priorities are very different for people who want to play fair games than they are for people who want to maximize their own freedom.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    This is a solved issue already. Vote kicks or server admin intervention. Aimbotting was never an issue for the old primitive fps games I would play because admins could spectate and see you are aimbotting. A modern game need only telemetry that captures what a spectating admin picks up, rather than active surveillance. Hackers are only a problem when servers are left unmoderated and players can’t vote kick.
    - nemothekid 2y ago
      You can't have vote kicks/server admins/hosted servers with competitive ranked ladders. If your solution is "don't have competitive ranked ladders" then you are just telling the majority of people who even care about anti-cheat to just not play their preferred game mode.
      - kjkjadksj 2y ago
        Why can’t you have that with competitive ladders? Presumably theres still mechanisms to kick people in game if they start for example spewing racist messages in the game. What difference is it to kick someone one way or another? Not to mention plenty of games with vote kick mechanisms did have strong competitive scenes.
        nemothekid 2y ago
        If you only allow users to kick their teammates for suspected cheating, they will have little incentive to do so. If you allow users to kick opponents for cheating, they will have an incentive to kick legitimate players who are playing well. You cannot have a global competitive ladder if the ladder is split into a ton of different admin-run servers. overwatch had a version of this problem where people would queue into the Australia region during low traffic times to boost their rank.
    - chowells 2y ago
      That stopped being a solution when winning online started mattering. There are real money prizes for online game tournaments. Weekly events can have hundreds of dollars in their prize pools. Big events can have thousands. Suddenly vote kicking had to go, because it was abused. Not in the tournaments themselves, but in open ranked play which serves as qualifiers. An active game can rack up thousands of hours of gameplay per day, far beyond the ability of competent admins to validate. Especially because cheating is often subtle. An expert can spend more than real time looking for subtle patterns that automated tools haven't been built to detect. Games aren't between you and your 25 buddies for bragging rights anymore. They're between you and 50k other active players for cash prizes. The world has changed. Anti-cheat technology followed that change.
  - JasonSage 2y ago
    I play one of those games that doesn’t strongly enforce anti-cheating, and I agree with you that it’s a huge detraction compared to games with strong anti-cheat. But I strongly disagree about the use of invasive client-side anti-cheat. Server-side anti-cheat can reduce the number of cheaters to an acceptably low level. See for example how lichess detects and aids in detection of cheaters: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin And chess is a game where I feel like it would be relatively hard to detect cheating. An algorithm looking at games with actors moving in 3D space and responding to relative positions and actions of multiple other actors should have a great many more ways to detect cheating over the course of many games.
    - JasonSage 2y ago
      And frankly, I think the incentive structure has nothing to do with whether tournaments are happening with money on the line, and a great deal more whether the company has the cash and nothing better to do. Anti-cheat beyond a very basic level is nothing to these companies except a funnel optimization to extract the maximum lifetime value out of the player base. Only the most successful games will ever have the money or reach the technical capability to support this. Nobody making these decisions is doing it for player welfare.
mrguyorama 2y ago
The only reason wallhacking is possible in the first place is a server sending a client information on a competitor that the client should not know about. IE the server sends locations and details about all players to your client, even if you are in the spawn room and can't see anyone else and your client has to hide those details from you. It is then trivial to just pull those details out of memory. The solution forever has been to just not send clients information they shouldn't have. My copy of CS:GO should not know about a terrorist on the other side of the map. The code to evaluate that literally already exists, since the client will answer that question when it goes to render visuals and sound. They just choose to not do that testing server side. Aimbotting however is probably impossible to stop. Your client has to know where the model for an enemy is to render it, so you know where the hitbox roughly should be, and most games send your client the hitbox info directly so it can do predict whether you hit them. I don't think you can do it behaviorally either.
- snailmailman 2y ago
  To some extent though- the games do need information about players that are behind walls. In CSGO/CS2, even if you can’t see the player you can hear their footsteps or them reloading, etc. the sound is very positional. Plus, you can shoot through some thin walls at these players. Even if they can’t be seen. I don’t believe server side anti cheat can truly be effective against some cheats. But also Vanguard is trash and makes my computer bluescreen. I’ve stopped playing league entirely because of it.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Nit, but surely hit detection happens on the server? Shooting wildly should always register a hit, regardless of what the client knows.
  - pohuing 2y ago
    You don't happen to have used some means to install win 11 on an unsupported device have you? People bypassing the windows install requirements and then vanguard making false assumptions have been a source of issues.
Ukv 2y ago
Minimize the possible advantage by not sending the client other players' positions until absolutely necessary (either the client can see the other player, or there's a movement the client could make that would reveal the other player before receiving the next packet), and eliminate the cheaters you can with server-side behavior analysis and regular less-invasive client-side anticheat. Ultimately even games with kernel anticheat have cheating issues; at some point you have to accept that you cannot stop 100.0% of cheaters. The solution to someone making an aimbot using a physically separate device (reading monitor output, giving mouse input) cannot be to require keys to the player's house.
- lutoma 2y ago
  > not sending the client other players' positions until absolutely necessary (either the client can see the other player, or there's a movement the client could make that would reveal the other player before receiving the next packet) I think the problem with this is sounds like footsteps or weapons being fired that need to be positional. Which makes me wonder if you could get away with mixing these sounds server-side and then streaming them to the client to avoid sending positions. Probably infeasible in practice due to latency and game server performance, but fun to think about.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    To whatever extent the sound is intended to only give a general direction, I'd say quantize the angle and volume of the sound before it's sent such that cheaters also only get that same vague direction. Obviously don't send inaudible/essentially-inaudible sounds to the client at all.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      They need to just make CPU's, GPU's, and memory modules with hardware level anti-cheat. Totally optional purchase, but grants you access to very-difficult-to-cheat-in servers.
      - 2y ago
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
Standalone servers. Run your own then you can ban anyone you like, or better still only allow anyone you like.
- cobalt60 2y ago
  Nothing like sourcemodded server! Good old days!
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Did their hitbox clip through the wall? Yes? Banned. You could do it with telemetry.
- Arnavion 2y ago
  You're confusing wallhacking with noclipping. Wallhacking is being able to see through walls, like drawing an outline around all characters that renders with highest z-order, or making wall textures transparent. It does not result in any server-side-detectable difference in behavior other than the hacker seemingly being more aware of their surroundings than they should, which can be hard to determine for sure. Depending on how the hack is done, it may not be detectable by the client either, eg by intercepting the GPU driver calls to render the outlines or switch the wall textures.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    if wall between client and another client == true; do dont render other client; fi
josephcsible 2y ago
Stop thinking about trying to catch wallhackers. Instead, make wallhacking impossible. Do that by fixing the server to, instead of sending all player positions to everyone, only send player positions to clients that they have an unobstructed view of.
bdzr 2y ago
Reading this thread it's impressive how little people know about competitive gaming while simultaneously knowing how to fix the cheating issues.