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AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating
- MaxikCZ 2y ago[flagged]
- asddubs 2y agoit read to me like the introduction to the main post, except minus the actual main post part
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kreco 2y agoThe title of the article is "why you didn’t notice your teammate was cheating" Then you have the answer here: > Cheats have escaped the host PC > [...] > Colorbots are quite hard to detect. You can essentially just plug in a capture card to your PC and pass the images to another PC that the cheat runs on. If the article is low effort I would say that your comment is not great either because you seems frustrated to not have more information and just blame the author for not writing more about the subject.
- tomhow 2y agoPlease edit swipes out of comments. It's fine to state why you disagree with or dislike a post, but please keep within the HN guidelines, particularly to be kind and to avoid snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fracus 2y agoThere must be some statistical method or honeypot method to reliably detect cheaters. Like present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating. I don't know, there has to be a way. Cheaters are disease in online gaming. I know that sensible people won't want to sacrifice their anonymity to provide ID to play a video game but if it is in the competitive scene and they are playing for money, surely it isn't a stretch to ask for ID and thus ultimate accountability.
- MaxikCZ 2y agoTheres plenty of what you suggest going on all the time, loot spawning in unlootable places etc. Problem is, theres always some difference between valid and invalid target, and if the game knows it, cheat extracts that information and acts "dumb" around those honeypots. It wont shoot targets that the game doesnt render because the bot checks that attribute. It wont loot that honeypot because its in manualy upkept white/blacklist. Its just another level of cat and mouse game.
- pixl97 2y agoYep, the cheat engine designers get thousands and thousands of test cases. If the designer screws up your account gets banned, but quite often they can detect what did it. Now, good cheat detection won't ban you immediately, it will allow you to build up a novel of sins and then ban so it's difficult to determine what action provoked it. Unfortunately that does mean those people are on the servers for some amount of time.
- bob1029 2y ago> theres always some difference between valid and invalid target This information does not necessarily need to be made available to the client. Latency compensation can treat the phantom just like the real deal and the server can silently no-op any related commands (while recording your naughty behavior).
- amalcon 2y agoThis is a thing, yes. Statistical cheat-detection methods are more or less required for online chess, for example, because anyone can run Stockfish. A lot of that came out of academia, so you can just find papers like this: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway: - Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat - Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be - Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.
- ultimafan 2y agoSadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're not the ones who paid for / installed them.
- pixl97 2y agoI mean this is bog standard human behavior. "Jon is a drug dealer, but his money still spends" "Tom is insider trading, but I'm not since I don't actually 'know' that" etc, etc
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ramchip 2y agoMy personal experience (mostly TF2) is that a lot of players just don't pay attention to chat and votes.
- Jotalea 2y agoIn my defense, I was playing Bedwars (competitive Minecraft mini-game with floating islands, ability to make bridges across them, purpose being to break other team's beds), and once I found out there was a cheater in my team, I left my team's bed with no protection, to make the game easier for the "clean" players. It didn't work, the cheater in my team eliminated all the other players.
- nathants 2y agothis is why solos are better, you can’t blame your teammates. handcam anticheat when? kernel anticheat is necessary but not sufficient.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoCheating in solo games is more fun than you realize. I only cheat in offline games for the most part, its fun to see how badly I can break a game.
- nathants 2y agosolos doesn't solve cheating, but it removes the team dynamics and social meta games that team modes bring. like wondering whether your teammates are cheating, or failing to compete because you can't find a good team. obviously cheating is cool. we all love to code, to build, and to hack. there should be a place to cheat, even in pvp games. there should be a league with open cheating. cheaters need a place to game too! there should be a league with moderate anticheat, like what you see in games today. it kind of works, and stops all but the most motivated cheaters. there should be a league where cheating is impossible. where one doesn't have to doubt, ever, whether they died to a cheater or a god. this is where kernel level anticheat is not enough, and solos only should be required. cheating is about validating inputs and outputs. valid screen displaying into human eyes. valid output out of human hands to mouse and keyboard. if we take a step back, this is very achievable. it's not like doping in the olympics, we don't need bloodwork. we just need a little more information than we get from anticheats today.
- twic 2y agoI have a pretty foolproof system for evading cheaters. Just be so bad that any cheater will be far above me in the rankings. gg ez.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- izzydata 2y agoI have an even more foolproof system. Never play online competitive games.
- runarberg 2y agoThat is where I am in online chess. But every so often I get a message from chess.com that I was refunded some rating points because my opponent from a couple of weeks ago violated the fair play standards. I honestly don’t think about it much. Some of those games I played poorly enough that I deserved to loose either way, but at the end of the day I played much more fair games that this one particular game doesn’t really bother me.
- kibwen 2y agoWe can only cross our fingers and hope that the rise of unblockable cheats annihilates the market for the subgenre of competitive online games that team you up with randos and/or pit you against randos. What a cesspit.
- Vilian 2y agoIt's going to become cloud only
- grepfru_it 2y agoI have created an AI bot that plays by itself on Xbox cloud gaming using a custom browser and a virtual joystick emulating an Xbox controller. Cloud gaming isn’t safe either :)
- grepfru_it 2y agoWell, down voters, I use it to create a virtual NPC in an open world game I play. Not for cheating, however the cheating implications are obviously visible. Carry on with your disagreements!
- gcommer 2y agoAgreed. To be more precise: I think the solution is small, community-run servers. This allows large, consistent groups of players to play together regularly with a much higher percentage of admins who can handle cheaters manually. I also maintain that human judgement, can still catch things anti-cheat software is yet incapable of. Example: it doesn't matter how well hidden your aimbot is, I still notice cheaters when their accuracy is wildly out of proportion with their strategic understanding of the game.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> To be more precise: I think the solution is small, community-run servers. That was the normal way to do things. Essentially all modern games go out of their way to prevent you from doing this.
- thesuitonym 2y agoI just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point?
- ramesh31 2y ago>I just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point? Vindication. The average cheat buyer is someone who gets beat down in the game, and feels personally slighted. This is also why avoiding detection is more important than just worrying about bans. The whole point of modern cheating is to be subtle enough to pass yourself off as a top player, with all the social/financial perks that entails, not to run around in god mode griefing people.
- kreco 2y agoI forget where I read this, but somehow, some people have the "brain stimuli award" associated with the "winning" aspect even when they are using cheats. So winning is winning. I'm still having hard time believing in this, but I haven't found better explanation for cheaters.
- notfed 2y agoFor a single player game, that might be a good explanation. For a multiplayer game, though, it's not hard at all to see what's happening. If a cheater cheats and gets away with it, then they rationally should expect to receive social reputational credit, which I want to believe is something that instinctively makes most of us feel good, us being social creatures.
- kreco 2y agoMakes sense! Thanks for the necessary addition. I should have mentioned the social aspect of the winning. Interestingly, I didn't even think about the single player game...
- aryan14 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 2y ago$5-500 monthly payments just to bypass a decent anti-cheat...Cheaters must reflash their BIOS, wipe their PCs, reinstall Windows, and create a new account to play again...every few weeks This is fun? If it's eSports for $$ I understand the incentive, otherwise pretending to be good, all the while likely having not a twinge of irony hit you as you 'git gud the opposition... It's a mindset I don't understand.
- recursivecaveat 2y agoI think a lot of people are simply delusional. "My teams are holding me back, I only turn it on when they're throwing the game" or "I have the game sense of a masters player, I just don't have time to practice execution / grind rank". Boosting account ranks is the same deal, and it's a big industry.
- denkmoon 2y agoEveryone's the good guy in their own mind.
- burnished 2y agoOh absolutely, used to see it in LoL, people would complain about their teammates holding them back and really deserving to be two leagues higher.. all I could say was that if you watched better players you'd see that the game they are playing and the game we are playing are only superficially similar, and that if you were playing on that level it'd be obvious (cause you'd be winning). Don't think it ever penetrated though.
- aruametello 2y ago> It's a mindset I don't understand. one of the scenarios is the person that is not looking on the enjoyment of "winning", but instead diving on the "trolling" realms of ruining the fun of others. its irrelevant if he gets a ban because when he hears someone getting mad at him or sad, he gets a boner. the mentality of "trying to punch people that cant defend themselves" is the description that i give of these to people that dont play video games. (because most wouldn't cheat without the anonymity)
- _2d30 2y agoMy meta-comment is that it's a really sad state of affairs that we don't as a society have an immune system that makes it so that an individual who posts openly about creating software whose sole (and even if not "sole" then certainly intended) purpose is to enable others to deceive and cheat their way to "success" is made a pariah.
- pixl97 2y agoBecause that would be a simple solution to all societies ills, and it's obvious the world does not work this way. And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.
- _2d30 2y ago> Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills No it wouldn't and I don't lament its absence as such. > and it's obvious the world does not work this way. Agreed which is my lamentation. > And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work. I'm very clearly not, but even given the case that all communication around this moves to anonymous is itself fine. The impact of people understanding that they would be pariahs for developing such tools is itself a good deterrent. That social deterrents do not work with perfect 100% efficacy is not an argument against their usage.
- EGreg 2y agoYou mean half of all AI products? The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used… It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duckling23 2y agoIt's a hobby project I decided to share. I won’t deny it’s problematic. I understand both sides of the argument, but if I was going to make it for fun anyway, why not publish it? Posting it publicly on GitHub is the main reason I got invited to job interviews this spring. I'm a third-year student with no prior IT experience, and now I have a great summer job lined up. And for the record—I enjoy playing legit. I don’t cheat.
- nkrisc 2y agoIt’s amazing the lengths people will go to just to ruin something fun for other people.
- tbojanin 2y ago[flagged]
- RALaBarge 2y agoThere is a solution, but no one wants to hear it. Anonymity is the problem and the only way to curb cheats like these are to have extreme meatspace penalties and some sort of central ID mechanism that requires some sort of real and personal identification
- viraptor 2y agoYou mean a system where when you get misidentified (this will almost always happen at scale) you get effectively banned forever, across multiple games? Yeah... I think I know why people aren't keen on that. (And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)
- eddd-ddde 2y agoThat doesn't mean he is wrong. That _is_ the only way.
- viraptor 2y agoIt's not a realistic solution that can be applied. It's the way in the same way as a bomb in your desktop that explodes if you're found cheating is the way.
- Joker_vD 2y agoBesides, there is another way, which is just as stupid: just ban everyone. No more video games, ever. And there you go: no more cheating in video games.
- teddyh 2y agoIt really is not. People will still do it.
- jjani 2y agoThose people will next use their mother's ID, their grandparents' IDs, and so on. Then move on to stolen IDs. Which is not preventable unless you do full-on hardware attestation tied to real ID, which means China-level surveillance. Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- jokoon 2y agoI recently played cs2 for 4 months until the paranoia of closet cheaters got me. There are pro players who get caught cheating, this game is rotten to the core. Valve doesn't seem to care because apparently, players don't care about cheaters since they are so addicted to gambling with skins.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI would love if Valve developed a multiplayer server system for CS2 (and maybe generalisable beyond that) that only sent other players' locations when they were very close to being visible to the player, and sent audio and damage events in a way that only gave soft information away as well. So if you snipe through a wall, instead of sending the location of the shot source and direction, the server has to do slightly more work - calculate who got hit and what noise everyone should hear, but then the client doesn't need to know the location of the firing player. I know it's not the only way to cheat, but the fact that the client has all the information has to be a large factor.
- shaokind 2y agoThis is a really old idea. It was implemented in CS:GO in ~2015 [0], although community anti-cheats like SMAC have implemented it for years before then [1]. Riot have an article about their implementation of the same idea in VALORANT's that a good read from a technical perspective [2]. Sadly, CS2, from what I've gathered, broke this. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/optional_counterstrike_global_offensive_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/opt... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkhQgYB4lAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkhQgYB4lAA [2]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-valorants-fog-war https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
- aiiizzz 2y agoDid you read the article? What would that even help
- trod1234 2y agoPeople that choose to abuse other people for fun, are a blight on humanity, there is no valid defense. Some people cheat, and think "its just a game", falsely justifying that abuse. The false justification, however; is an act of self-violation. It warps their perception willfully blinding themselves to their evil acts. That is not what is happening, it is not just a game. It was a competition where the two parties agreed to follow rules, and that one person broke the silent implicit agreement, they did so deceitfully to impose cost on others, delude themselves, and take like any drug-addled junky would. Worse, writing tools and publishing them to enable such destructive behavior induces others to committing similar acts. Corrupting others, inducing them towards such, are also evil acts and its consequences. They are fundamentally evil people because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their destructive actions, which are evil actions, and they have no resistance or thought against repeating those actions. Like evil people, they continue repeating these choices until someone else stops them. They do this despite there being a severely broken symmetry between the benefit they receive, which is diminishing and is ill-gotten and just fuels more junky-like behavior; and the loss their victim feels when its clear that contract was broken, or worse when they can't tell. The things you choose to do in the small things of life that don't really matter show to the world what you will do when everything is on the line. Showing deceitful behavior, or worse torturing people, shows a lack of credibility and character first and foremost, and that behavior is destructive in everything it touches. There is no place for people like this in any team, or cooperative, and since life in general is through a cooperative distribution of labor, that pretty much sums it up. When the rule of law fails, and current society can no longer defend and protect these people. The natural law will hold sway, and throughout history in such environments, evil people are often granted a final mercy of peace and stopped. If you cannot control yourself to engage in beneficial behavior for yourself and others, someone will do it for you; and you will not like it. The longer it takes for a correction, the worse it will be.