3 ms·

> consoles shouldn't be treating users as the adversary I would 100% agree with this when talking about a normal computer, but I kind of feel differently about

> consoles shouldn't be treating users as the adversary I would 100% agree with this when talking about a normal computer, but I kind of feel differently about consoles. How do you prevent cheating in online games if you don't restrict what users can do?

JoshTriplett 2y ago
1) Play with people you know, or 2) Group players by apparent capability and observed behavior, such that cheaters end up only playing with other cheaters.
- searealist 2y ago
  1. makes matchmaking impossible, which is how 99% of people want to play. 2. is a research project that will probably never pan out.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    Multiple games have done 2 in production with great success.
    - searealist 2y ago
      No they haven't. Maybe they have caught cheaters with _intrusive_ software. But that's not "observed behavior and apparent capability".
      - JoshTriplett 2y ago
        Rootkits and other mechanisms are not the only way to catch cheating players. You can also rely on player reports of other players, as well as anomaly detection, and based on those reports, observe player actions to detect obvious cheating. You don't have to be perfect, just catch enough people to make it not worth the risk. Use the results to either pair suspected cheaters with other suspected cheaters, or just ban people if you don't mind risking that they'll hide themselves better and come back. This is not a hypothetical or a research project; some games do exactly this.
        searealist 2y ago
        This is just ideological gobbledygook. No concrete examples of this working in practice.
        JoshTriplett 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Anomaly_detection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Anoma... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Player_supervision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Playe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Banning_players https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Banni... > Certain games are known to identify cheaters and "shadow ban" them by placing them in matchmaking with other cheaters only, so as not to let the cheaters know that they have been identified.
        searealist 2y ago
        The text for the anomaly link basically just says it's infeasible for a number of reasons, but it would sure be nice from a privacy standpoint. The banning section mentions companies that employ very invasive software to find and ban cheaters. Read up on how the following softwares actually work: > There are many facets of cheating in online games which make the creation of a system to stop cheating very difficult; however, game developers and third-party software developers have created or are developing[22][23] technologies that attempt to prevent cheating. Such countermeasures are commonly used in video games, with notable anti-cheat software being BattlEye, GameGuard, PunkBuster, Valve Anti-Cheat (specifically used on games on the Steam platform),[citation needed] and EasyAntiCheat.
        alt227 2y ago
        The problem with what you are saying, is that the industry involved is shrouded in secrecy and full of smoke and mirrors. Because the only sources you have provided are anecdotal, its entirely possible you are falling for the illusion. To use your phrases, 'certain games companies' are known to totally lie about their anti cheat techniques and methods to throw people off the scent of the real methods. Therefore without actually decompiling something to prove whats going on, you have no real idea what techniques are being used at all.
- aseipp 2y ago
  By that point the player base can already be devastated, and it can kill the game. Cycle: Frontiers was an extraction shooter, and the immediate cheating was rampant; the game's design meant dying to hackers was devastating -- imagine a hacker forcing you to lose not just this game, but retroactively making you lose the prior 5 games too. This absolutely destroys player morale, near instantly. Even if you ban that hacker instantly, there's an extremely high chance those players will never return. Because the rampant cheating went on for so long, the game's reputation never recovered. Within a year of release the servers were shut down. A single cheater can often ruin games for hundreds or even thousands of players very easily. For experienced players, seeing a single flying aimbot shithead in your lobby just means there are 10 other cheaters in the lobby too -- ones using subtle ESP/wallhacks that can be extremely difficult to detect, by design. Shady websites like G2A or GMG that sell keys (which are almost 100% hot keys, to really make it all come full circle) mean that even if you get banned, buying new keys for a new copy of the game is extremely cheap, especially when many of these games have items that can be sold for IRL cash in various ways, games like Rust. For many parts of the world, selling/trading rare items to players can net you plenty of actual income -- and getting banned means nothing as a result. Instant banning cheaters the second they are confirmed leaks information to the cheater and cheat creator, today most games like Warzone or Destiny have to play psyops and shroud their exact detection techniques in part by doing "ban waves" only when they accumulate a mass amount of confirmed cheaters. The cheater that ruined your top score may, necessarily and by design, be allowed to run free for a while. The net result of all this is that designers and -- importantly, even though people on Hacker News don't want to hear it -- PLAYERS tend to overwhelmingly prefer prevention instead of reaction. They are both needed. Players are not morons who love installing rootkits. But on the whole, preventative measures tend to be more valuable to players and creators than reactionary ones, even if they are all ultimately imperfect. In a funny twist, games like Tarkov and Rust do have a gameplay mechanic that reduces the long-term psychological devastation of cheaters and is not invasive at all: they reset all content in the game to "neutral" every once in a while, so basically all your stuff gets deleted, and everyone starts over again. (This non-permanence is probably one of the reasons players stick with the game, despite cheaters, which are incredibly infuriating.) Can I ask if you seriously play any online competitive games, at a high level or otherwise? Because I do, and I'll be honest: I've been hearing it all for 20 years. These types of approaches have had success (CS's player review system, certain shadowban systems, "trip wires" that trigger on impossible game behavior), but there is no single approach that has proven itself to be the ultimate universal solution. There is no universal, wibbly wobbly bullshit stats algorithm you run on your servers to "solve" this. These problems are not solved. I don't like it. I don't run certain games with certain forms of anticheat. But it is what it is.
kevincox 2y ago
I think public matchmaking and local play are different. I can mostly get behind anti-cheat for public play. But for local and optionally for friend games it should be possible to extract, edit and play with your saves.

JoshTriplett 2y ago

1) Play with people you know, or 2) Group players by apparent capability and observed behavior, such that cheaters end up only playing with other cheaters.

searealist 2y ago
1. makes matchmaking impossible, which is how 99% of people want to play. 2. is a research project that will probably never pan out.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  Multiple games have done 2 in production with great success.
  - searealist 2y ago
    No they haven't. Maybe they have caught cheaters with _intrusive_ software. But that's not "observed behavior and apparent capability".
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago
      Rootkits and other mechanisms are not the only way to catch cheating players. You can also rely on player reports of other players, as well as anomaly detection, and based on those reports, observe player actions to detect obvious cheating. You don't have to be perfect, just catch enough people to make it not worth the risk. Use the results to either pair suspected cheaters with other suspected cheaters, or just ban people if you don't mind risking that they'll hide themselves better and come back. This is not a hypothetical or a research project; some games do exactly this.
      - searealist 2y ago
        This is just ideological gobbledygook. No concrete examples of this working in practice.
        JoshTriplett 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Anomaly_detection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Anoma... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Player_supervision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Playe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Banning_players https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Banni... > Certain games are known to identify cheaters and "shadow ban" them by placing them in matchmaking with other cheaters only, so as not to let the cheaters know that they have been identified.
        searealist 2y ago
        The text for the anomaly link basically just says it's infeasible for a number of reasons, but it would sure be nice from a privacy standpoint. The banning section mentions companies that employ very invasive software to find and ban cheaters. Read up on how the following softwares actually work: > There are many facets of cheating in online games which make the creation of a system to stop cheating very difficult; however, game developers and third-party software developers have created or are developing[22][23] technologies that attempt to prevent cheating. Such countermeasures are commonly used in video games, with notable anti-cheat software being BattlEye, GameGuard, PunkBuster, Valve Anti-Cheat (specifically used on games on the Steam platform),[citation needed] and EasyAntiCheat.
        alt227 2y ago
        The problem with what you are saying, is that the industry involved is shrouded in secrecy and full of smoke and mirrors. Because the only sources you have provided are anecdotal, its entirely possible you are falling for the illusion. To use your phrases, 'certain games companies' are known to totally lie about their anti cheat techniques and methods to throw people off the scent of the real methods. Therefore without actually decompiling something to prove whats going on, you have no real idea what techniques are being used at all.
aseipp 2y ago
By that point the player base can already be devastated, and it can kill the game. Cycle: Frontiers was an extraction shooter, and the immediate cheating was rampant; the game's design meant dying to hackers was devastating -- imagine a hacker forcing you to lose not just this game, but retroactively making you lose the prior 5 games too. This absolutely destroys player morale, near instantly. Even if you ban that hacker instantly, there's an extremely high chance those players will never return. Because the rampant cheating went on for so long, the game's reputation never recovered. Within a year of release the servers were shut down. A single cheater can often ruin games for hundreds or even thousands of players very easily. For experienced players, seeing a single flying aimbot shithead in your lobby just means there are 10 other cheaters in the lobby too -- ones using subtle ESP/wallhacks that can be extremely difficult to detect, by design. Shady websites like G2A or GMG that sell keys (which are almost 100% hot keys, to really make it all come full circle) mean that even if you get banned, buying new keys for a new copy of the game is extremely cheap, especially when many of these games have items that can be sold for IRL cash in various ways, games like Rust. For many parts of the world, selling/trading rare items to players can net you plenty of actual income -- and getting banned means nothing as a result. Instant banning cheaters the second they are confirmed leaks information to the cheater and cheat creator, today most games like Warzone or Destiny have to play psyops and shroud their exact detection techniques in part by doing "ban waves" only when they accumulate a mass amount of confirmed cheaters. The cheater that ruined your top score may, necessarily and by design, be allowed to run free for a while. The net result of all this is that designers and -- importantly, even though people on Hacker News don't want to hear it -- PLAYERS tend to overwhelmingly prefer prevention instead of reaction. They are both needed. Players are not morons who love installing rootkits. But on the whole, preventative measures tend to be more valuable to players and creators than reactionary ones, even if they are all ultimately imperfect. In a funny twist, games like Tarkov and Rust do have a gameplay mechanic that reduces the long-term psychological devastation of cheaters and is not invasive at all: they reset all content in the game to "neutral" every once in a while, so basically all your stuff gets deleted, and everyone starts over again. (This non-permanence is probably one of the reasons players stick with the game, despite cheaters, which are incredibly infuriating.) Can I ask if you seriously play any online competitive games, at a high level or otherwise? Because I do, and I'll be honest: I've been hearing it all for 20 years. These types of approaches have had success (CS's player review system, certain shadowban systems, "trip wires" that trigger on impossible game behavior), but there is no single approach that has proven itself to be the ultimate universal solution. There is no universal, wibbly wobbly bullshit stats algorithm you run on your servers to "solve" this. These problems are not solved. I don't like it. I don't run certain games with certain forms of anticheat. But it is what it is.

kevincox 2y ago

I think public matchmaking and local play are different. I can mostly get behind anti-cheat for public play. But for local and optionally for friend games it should be possible to extract, edit and play with your saves.