6 ms·

I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-cheats. Right now CounterStrike playe

I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-cheats. Right now CounterStrike players are mostly begging Valve for kernel-level anti-cheat since their current solution isn't working at all. If anything, this warning will actually make many player's more impressed with the game. That said, more consumer information is almost always better in any case, especially in this case considering that this is not a requirement of law but of a private company.

logical_person 2y ago
Prop 65 went great! Let's get a warning out for every game with peer to peer networking while we're at it.
- byteknight 2y ago
  I get the argument, but if that is more than a strawman argument to you, I am bewildered. Making a network connection is infinitely less problematic than having root level access to a kernel (translate to windows language for NT)
- akira2501 2y ago
  > Prop 65 went great! The secondary effect is that business will stop using processes and chemicals which require them to carry this warning. You've effectively created a new market segment. Are the labels annoying to the point of comedy? Sure, but it's not /your/ behavior we were trying to modify.
  - Matheus28 2y ago
    Seeing the warning everywhere has mostly desensitized people to it, which makes it ineffective.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Doesn’t matter in a world of AI powered hacks. Kernel level anti cheat isn’t detecting the yolov8 model fine tuned on the head of my enemies.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  This video suggests you can catch this type of cheater without even a kernel level anti cheat: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA There’s a lot of other stuff in the video but if you skip the robot building parts at the beginning he talks about an anti cheat system he developed with another person.
  - orbital-decay 2y ago
    Behavioral analysis (the thing he's talking about) doesn't work that well and has a hard precision limit due to the nature of online gaming. What the player sees, what the server sees, and what other players see are entirely different things. I'm not even talking about plausibly deniable things like visual sound location. Nobody's using complicated stuff like this in practice though, as there are easier methods. But of course this path can be taken, and it's not possible to block easily.
    - mmis1000 2y ago
      it's not always easy to tell if it's just a player playing weirdly or a mistuned AI though. Maybe the player just have too low mouse sensitivity so it is always a little lagged, maybe it's actualy AI. There is no easy way to tell, and require manual judgement in a lot of cases.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Aimmy is still undetected everywhere except overwatch last I checked: https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy And it's likely that most detection systems can be trivially fooled by me ChatGPTing the code around the way mouse movements are implemented to act slightly different / use a different compiler or something to get different file hashes on the core tool.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  >nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters. Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may work, but many companies don't seem interested in it due to the cost, at least IIUC.
  - flessner 2y ago
    As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly... Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience, but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's Vanguard. With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have pushed beyond 15k and briefly above 20k Elo and the amount of cheaters have steadily declined (although less obvious cheats, eg. wallhack, are probably more common at that level) - for Valorant it has pretty much stayed at a constant amount of "cheatiness" across the ranks. CS actually has a rich history of features, functions, services?... that aren't strictly anti-cheat... Overwatch gave players the option to "police" others players replays - this wasn't only against cheating, but also griefing. Prime? Is it still even a thing? It was great when CSGO went F2P... all the cheaters just annoyed the non-prime players (F2P). The ominous Trust factor which is probably the single most effective piece in making my personal experience great. But there's no real way to tell? Also, VacNet - which is running? is AI based? banning players? lowering their trust factor?... with Valve there's no real way to tell most of the time, but it's probably existent in some shape, way or form. Not to say that CS2 has solved cheating, it's far from it - but neither has Valorant.
    - 2y ago
skizm 2y ago
As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play. Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.
  - janderland 2y ago
    Reports only work so well. Overwatch has MANY cheater in spite of vigorous reporting.
  - freeAgent 2y ago
    Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not important enough to me to give them kernel access to my system. I’m sure many gamers disagree with me though.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    > a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans. No. No no no. Automated bans via the report system is very well-known to be abused. Even if you implement a "trust" system where initially, all your reports are manually verified by game staff until its determined your reports are correct until your reports are acted on automatically, all it takes is a player to just be "good" until their trust is high enough, then start reporting people who don't actually deserve it. And I'm not convinced that server-side anti-cheat can be effective. You have to rely entirely on heuristics. Sure, a simple aim-bot that instantly snaps someone's aim right on someone's head might be detectable, but one that simply lets you see through walls certainly won't be if the player doesn't make it stupidly obvious by pre-aiming around every corner.
mock-possum 2y ago
Do you think a large percentage cares about cheats in general?
ehnto 2y ago
Yep. I would call myself a privacy focused person, but given that Windows is the primary platform for PC gaming, and I trust Microsoft about as far as I can throw a their corporate headquarters, the platform is already compromised. Treat it accordingly, play your games. Maybe watch your adult films and write your memoirs on a different system than your gaming rig.
veunes 2y ago
Ideally, players would be given both a choice and a clear breakdown of what’s actually being collected or monitored.
rldjbpin 2y ago
valve has their own ethos in this topic, which i wholeheartedly accept. you can guess which end of the spectrum they lie from the original news article. faceit for the longest time has had their own way around this. so did esea, before they ruined the trust forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233). some highly-motivated players still found ways around it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331).

logical_person 2y ago

Prop 65 went great! Let's get a warning out for every game with peer to peer networking while we're at it.

byteknight 2y ago
I get the argument, but if that is more than a strawman argument to you, I am bewildered. Making a network connection is infinitely less problematic than having root level access to a kernel (translate to windows language for NT)
akira2501 2y ago
> Prop 65 went great! The secondary effect is that business will stop using processes and chemicals which require them to carry this warning. You've effectively created a new market segment. Are the labels annoying to the point of comedy? Sure, but it's not /your/ behavior we were trying to modify.
- Matheus28 2y ago
  Seeing the warning everywhere has mostly desensitized people to it, which makes it ineffective.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

Doesn’t matter in a world of AI powered hacks. Kernel level anti cheat isn’t detecting the yolov8 model fine tuned on the head of my enemies.

ok_dad 2y ago
This video suggests you can catch this type of cheater without even a kernel level anti cheat: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA There’s a lot of other stuff in the video but if you skip the robot building parts at the beginning he talks about an anti cheat system he developed with another person.
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  Behavioral analysis (the thing he's talking about) doesn't work that well and has a hard precision limit due to the nature of online gaming. What the player sees, what the server sees, and what other players see are entirely different things. I'm not even talking about plausibly deniable things like visual sound location. Nobody's using complicated stuff like this in practice though, as there are easier methods. But of course this path can be taken, and it's not possible to block easily.
  - mmis1000 2y ago
    it's not always easy to tell if it's just a player playing weirdly or a mistuned AI though. Maybe the player just have too low mouse sensitivity so it is always a little lagged, maybe it's actualy AI. There is no easy way to tell, and require manual judgement in a lot of cases.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Aimmy is still undetected everywhere except overwatch last I checked: https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy And it's likely that most detection systems can be trivially fooled by me ChatGPTing the code around the way mouse movements are implemented to act slightly different / use a different compiler or something to get different file hashes on the core tool.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
>nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters. Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may work, but many companies don't seem interested in it due to the cost, at least IIUC.
- flessner 2y ago
  As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly... Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience, but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's Vanguard. With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have pushed beyond 15k and briefly above 20k Elo and the amount of cheaters have steadily declined (although less obvious cheats, eg. wallhack, are probably more common at that level) - for Valorant it has pretty much stayed at a constant amount of "cheatiness" across the ranks. CS actually has a rich history of features, functions, services?... that aren't strictly anti-cheat... Overwatch gave players the option to "police" others players replays - this wasn't only against cheating, but also griefing. Prime? Is it still even a thing? It was great when CSGO went F2P... all the cheaters just annoyed the non-prime players (F2P). The ominous Trust factor which is probably the single most effective piece in making my personal experience great. But there's no real way to tell? Also, VacNet - which is running? is AI based? banning players? lowering their trust factor?... with Valve there's no real way to tell most of the time, but it's probably existent in some shape, way or form. Not to say that CS2 has solved cheating, it's far from it - but neither has Valorant.
  - 2y ago

skizm 2y ago

As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.

dietr1ch 2y ago
While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play. Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.
- janderland 2y ago
  Reports only work so well. Overwatch has MANY cheater in spite of vigorous reporting.
- freeAgent 2y ago
  Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not important enough to me to give them kernel access to my system. I’m sure many gamers disagree with me though.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans. No. No no no. Automated bans via the report system is very well-known to be abused. Even if you implement a "trust" system where initially, all your reports are manually verified by game staff until its determined your reports are correct until your reports are acted on automatically, all it takes is a player to just be "good" until their trust is high enough, then start reporting people who don't actually deserve it. And I'm not convinced that server-side anti-cheat can be effective. You have to rely entirely on heuristics. Sure, a simple aim-bot that instantly snaps someone's aim right on someone's head might be detectable, but one that simply lets you see through walls certainly won't be if the player doesn't make it stupidly obvious by pre-aiming around every corner.

mock-possum 2y ago

Do you think a large percentage cares about cheats in general?

ehnto 2y ago

Yep. I would call myself a privacy focused person, but given that Windows is the primary platform for PC gaming, and I trust Microsoft about as far as I can throw a their corporate headquarters, the platform is already compromised. Treat it accordingly, play your games. Maybe watch your adult films and write your memoirs on a different system than your gaming rig.

veunes 2y ago

Ideally, players would be given both a choice and a clear breakdown of what’s actually being collected or monitored.

rldjbpin 2y ago

valve has their own ethos in this topic, which i wholeheartedly accept. you can guess which end of the spectrum they lie from the original news article. faceit for the longest time has had their own way around this. so did esea, before they ruined the trust forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233). some highly-motivated players still found ways around it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331).