4 ms·

There 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 u

by fracus 2y ago

There 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 ago
Theres 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 ago
  Yep, 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 ago
This 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.
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  Haha, I cheat at Worlde all the time, losers!
- TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
  In the WarCraft 3 community they have a custom client and third-party ladder called W3Champions. It adds a few quality of life improvements like allowing you to not get matched against the same player again for 8 hours. But where it really shines is in the ability to moderate the community by banning bad actors. Some popular Twitch streamers tried out WC3 recently and in the official battle.net ladder they got players trolling them by making swastikas with towers or deliberately deboosting in order to snipe them. Once they switched to W3Champions the trolls all went away, but if any showed up they would get banned pretty quickly. One of the biggest benefits of building smaller communities is that it's actually possible to moderate them and elevate the gaming experience of everyone involved.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Another example is Apex Legends. Watching creators on Twitch and it's a massive quality of play (and stream) change going from random matchmaking and playing matches with a small selection of people.
ultimafan 2y ago
With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment. I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
  Game devs take on the problem by themselves by not releasing a server component. Older games used to release the server component, so people could self host or make their own ladder system. That allowed each community to come up with their own set of rules and restrictions for how much moderation was desired. But in the modern era where the game developer controls the server everyone is subject to a single set of rules.
  - kibibu 2y ago
    It used to be standard practice for ISPs to host a bunch of game servers too, to minimize latency and cost.
  - ultimafan 2y ago
    That helps but there's still a huge burden on the community who end up having to self moderate. I think one of the biggest issues today is that cheating is not so easy to uncover anymore. It could just be rose tinted glasses or just lack of knowledge among the public about what cheat developers were up to but 20 years ago I don't really remember it being such a prevalent issue. I'd see rage hackers, spin botters, people blatantly using god mode or flying out of bounds or wall hacking but never heard much in the way of the kind of culture that seems to be prevalent now. It feels like there's plenty of extremely subtle cheats out there today and even "microcheats" that don't do much other than tweaking certain values by 10%~ in a way that gives a significant advantage to players with enough skill to leverage their play style around that without it being obvious that they are in fact cheating. And you'd go paranoid trying to catch them out because people are much more clever about how they use them.
nitwit005 2y ago
The problem with a statistical method is you can't ban the best players. For most cheats, you can dial the cheat down until it's at a human level.
- reaperman 2y ago
  The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to performance KPI’s. Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably discriminating those signals is a hard problem.
  - bob1029 2y ago
    > Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do This tends to stand out like a sore thumb once you start looking at things from the perspective of the frequency domain. Even if you use an RNG to delay activity, the properties of the RNG itself can be leveraged against it. You may think taping a pencil to a desk fan and having that click the mouse button is being clever wrt undetectable RNG, but you must realize that the power grid runs at 50/60hz and induction motors are ~fixed to this frequency. There is also the entire space of correlation. A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored. You could check for what are effectively [near] causality violations to determine the probability that the player is actually human.
    - kisper 2y ago
      What if one were to train a neural network of sorts based on your response times and mouse paths toward on screen stimuli? I’ve thought that trying to make a bot for personal fishing use would be a delightfully fun project, and this is how I pondered evading such anti-cheat heuristics.
    - Joker_vD 2y ago
      But... humans kinda behave the same? Your FPS is 50/60 Hz and your reactions are pretty much tied to it; and human behaviour is a pretty lousy RNG, that's been known for ages. > A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored So would a human who is tunneled-vision at the center of the screen.
efilife 2y ago
Whose purpose. Who's means who is
- fracus 2y ago
  Thanks. I wish I could correct it but it won't let me.
bob1029 2y ago
I think statistical methods are the best primary option. There are a lot of other tools you can use but this is the most impenetrable from the outside. The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured. There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.
s09dfhks 2y ago
> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see
stevage 2y ago
Reminds me many years ago I was playing online poker. The site I was on did this special anniversary giveaway thing. Every million hands or so, there would be a massive (in relative terms) jackpot. If you win the hand, you get the jackpot. It was so large, that you should never fold any hand, at all. (At these microstakes, normally a big hand was $5. These were like $300, so risking your whole stack of $2 was totally worth it). At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on. I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded. That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.
- fn-mote 2y ago
  Once they get you hooked, they can match you with the other whales. Until then it's just training your reponses even when it costs them 300 fluffmarks.
_bin_ 2y ago
Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.

by fracus 2y ago

MaxikCZ 2y ago

Theres 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 ago
Yep, 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 ago

This 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.

dullcrisp 2y ago
Haha, I cheat at Worlde all the time, losers!
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
In the WarCraft 3 community they have a custom client and third-party ladder called W3Champions. It adds a few quality of life improvements like allowing you to not get matched against the same player again for 8 hours. But where it really shines is in the ability to moderate the community by banning bad actors. Some popular Twitch streamers tried out WC3 recently and in the official battle.net ladder they got players trolling them by making swastikas with towers or deliberately deboosting in order to snipe them. Once they switched to W3Champions the trolls all went away, but if any showed up they would get banned pretty quickly. One of the biggest benefits of building smaller communities is that it's actually possible to moderate them and elevate the gaming experience of everyone involved.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Another example is Apex Legends. Watching creators on Twitch and it's a massive quality of play (and stream) change going from random matchmaking and playing matches with a small selection of people.

ultimafan 2y ago

With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment. I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
Game devs take on the problem by themselves by not releasing a server component. Older games used to release the server component, so people could self host or make their own ladder system. That allowed each community to come up with their own set of rules and restrictions for how much moderation was desired. But in the modern era where the game developer controls the server everyone is subject to a single set of rules.
- kibibu 2y ago
  It used to be standard practice for ISPs to host a bunch of game servers too, to minimize latency and cost.
- ultimafan 2y ago
  That helps but there's still a huge burden on the community who end up having to self moderate. I think one of the biggest issues today is that cheating is not so easy to uncover anymore. It could just be rose tinted glasses or just lack of knowledge among the public about what cheat developers were up to but 20 years ago I don't really remember it being such a prevalent issue. I'd see rage hackers, spin botters, people blatantly using god mode or flying out of bounds or wall hacking but never heard much in the way of the kind of culture that seems to be prevalent now. It feels like there's plenty of extremely subtle cheats out there today and even "microcheats" that don't do much other than tweaking certain values by 10%~ in a way that gives a significant advantage to players with enough skill to leverage their play style around that without it being obvious that they are in fact cheating. And you'd go paranoid trying to catch them out because people are much more clever about how they use them.

nitwit005 2y ago

The problem with a statistical method is you can't ban the best players. For most cheats, you can dial the cheat down until it's at a human level.

reaperman 2y ago
The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to performance KPI’s. Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably discriminating those signals is a hard problem.
- bob1029 2y ago
  > Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do This tends to stand out like a sore thumb once you start looking at things from the perspective of the frequency domain. Even if you use an RNG to delay activity, the properties of the RNG itself can be leveraged against it. You may think taping a pencil to a desk fan and having that click the mouse button is being clever wrt undetectable RNG, but you must realize that the power grid runs at 50/60hz and induction motors are ~fixed to this frequency. There is also the entire space of correlation. A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored. You could check for what are effectively [near] causality violations to determine the probability that the player is actually human.
  - kisper 2y ago
    What if one were to train a neural network of sorts based on your response times and mouse paths toward on screen stimuli? I’ve thought that trying to make a bot for personal fishing use would be a delightfully fun project, and this is how I pondered evading such anti-cheat heuristics.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    But... humans kinda behave the same? Your FPS is 50/60 Hz and your reactions are pretty much tied to it; and human behaviour is a pretty lousy RNG, that's been known for ages. > A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored So would a human who is tunneled-vision at the center of the screen.

efilife 2y ago

Whose purpose. Who's means who is

fracus 2y ago
Thanks. I wish I could correct it but it won't let me.

bob1029 2y ago

I think statistical methods are the best primary option. There are a lot of other tools you can use but this is the most impenetrable from the outside. The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured. There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.

s09dfhks 2y ago

> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see

stevage 2y ago

Reminds me many years ago I was playing online poker. The site I was on did this special anniversary giveaway thing. Every million hands or so, there would be a massive (in relative terms) jackpot. If you win the hand, you get the jackpot. It was so large, that you should never fold any hand, at all. (At these microstakes, normally a big hand was $5. These were like $300, so risking your whole stack of $2 was totally worth it). At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on. I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded. That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.

fn-mote 2y ago
Once they get you hooked, they can match you with the other whales. Until then it's just training your reponses even when it costs them 300 fluffmarks.

_bin_ 2y ago

Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.