9 ms·

I'll simplify for everyone: They don't. Although I do appreciate the author delving into this beyond surface level analysis. Modern cheats use hypervisors or j

I'll simplify for everyone: They don't. Although I do appreciate the author delving into this beyond surface level analysis. Modern cheats use hypervisors or just compromise hyper-v and because hyper-v protects itself so it automatically protects your cheat. Another option that is becoming super popular is bios patching, most motherboards will never support boot guard and direct bios flashing will always be an option since the chipset fuse only protects against flashing from the chipset. DMA is probably the most popular by far with fusers. However, the cost of good ones has been increasing due to vanguard fighting the common methods which is bleeding into other anticheats (some EAC versions and ricochet). These are not assumptions, every time anticheats go up a level so do the cheats. In the end the weakest link will be exploited and it doesn't matter how sophisticated your anticheat is. What does make cheat developers afraid is AI, primarily in overwatch. It's quite literally impossible to cheat anymore (in a way that disturbs normal players for more than a few games) and they only have a usermode anticheat! They heavily rely on spoofing detection and gameplay analysis including community reports. Instead of detecting cheats, they detect cheaters themselves and then clamp down on them by capturing as much information about their system as possible (all from usermode!!!). Of course you could argue that you could just take advantage that they have to go through usermode to capture all this information and just sit in the kernel, but hardware attestation is making this increasily more difficult. The future is usermode anticheats and gameplay analysis, drop kernel mode anticheats. No secure boot doesn't work if you patch SMM in bios, you run before TPM attestation happens.

fleroviumna 8mo ago
[dead]
uhx 8mo ago
Everything you described increases the cost of attack (creating a cheat), and as a result, not everyone can afford it, which means anti-cheats work. They don't have to be a panacea. Gameplay analysis will only help against blatant cheaters, but will miss players with simple ESP. It's almost the same as saying "you don't need a password on your phone" or something like that.
- himata4113 8mo ago
  Economics work out, harder to make means that it's more profitable to do so. DMA crackdown has actually lead into innovation which has drove the prices down for "normal" DMA hardware what used to be thousands is now $120, excessive spoofing detection has driven down the cost of bios level spoofing and as a result the creation of bios level DMA backdoors - no additional hardware required. ESP is a lot more obvious to a machine than one might think, the subtle behavior differences are obvious to a human and even more so for a model. Of course none of that can be proven, but it can increase the scrutiny of such players from player reports.
  - maccard 8mo ago
    The number of people willing to spend $120 and hook up a hardware device compared to downloading and running an executable is significantly less. That’s kind of the point of it!
    - himata4113 8mo ago
      You can achieve the same with usermode anticheats, once you have bare minimum obfuscations the level of entry is roughly the same as kernel mode anticheats in terms of price. Cheats cost more than $100 a month (rest are scams or don't put any effort into being undetected).
      - maccard 8mo ago
        A DMA cheat requires a hardware change (and a second device). That is a much higher barrier than a download plus reboot. > you can achieve the same with user mode anticheats A user mode anti cheat is immediately defeated by a kernel mode cheat, and cheaters have already moved past this in practice. A user mode anti cheat (on windows) with admin privileges has pretty much full system access anyway, so presumably if you have a problem with kernel AC you also have a problem with user mode. Lastly, cheating is an arms race. While in theory, the cheaters will always win, the only thing that actually matters is what the cheaters are doing in practice. Kernel mode is default even for free cheats you download, so the defaults have to cover that.
orbital-decay 8mo ago
>It's quite literally impossible to cheat anymore (in a way that disturbs normal players for more than a few games) AKA the way that is easiest to detect, and the easiest way to claim that the game doesn't have cheaters. Behavioral analysis doesn't work with closet cheaters, and they corrupt the community and damage the game in much subtler ways. There's nothing worse than to know that the player you've competed with all this time had a slight advantage from the start.
- himata4113 8mo ago
  Overwatch has made the decision that closest cheaters are not a problem and have actually protected a cheater in contenders, although they were forced to leave the competitive scene. None of it ever became public.
  - maccard 8mo ago
    How do you know if none of it went public?
    - JasonADrury 8mo ago
      Every other competitive game regularly has public cases of cheaters being caught in pro games, overwatch doesn't.
      - Xunjin 8mo ago
        Wait... Your proof that something has happened is that there is no proof?
        JasonADrury 8mo ago
        Do you really think that's not sufficient for the purposes of this conversation?
        8mo ago
lachiflippi 8mo ago
Don't forget that ActiBlizz are also pretty much the only ones regularly taking legal action against pay2cheat developers, see Bossland/EngineOwning.
- himata4113 8mo ago
  I saw engine owning lawsuit verdict as the biggest loss for the companies. They proved that you can continue running a cheat provider service out in the open. They won way more than they lost, people who left got given a free pass for ratting the remaining people out.
Thaxll 8mo ago
Kernel AC is currently the best way to protect against cheats by far, the game with the strongest protection is Valorant and it works very well. OW2 is lightyears behind Valorant. Not sure what your point is. Most of your post is inaccurate, DMA cheats represent the minority of cheats because they're very expensive and you need a second computer.
- himata4113 8mo ago
  elitepvpers - it's public. DMA cheats have grown and are the primary way people cheat in games these days it makes around 5m/month [retail] just from one of the providers that I know in the scene this includes selling the hardware, the bypass and the cheats (not under the same umbrella for obvious reasons). The scene has shifted immensely in the last few years, everyone and their grandmother has DMA now, I mean you can buy these off amazon now. Korean's are a bit stuck since most of them use gaming cafes so they've been slow adopters, but cafe shops have the benefit of using an old version of hyper-v which allows you to just use the method described above. Hyper-V cheats are the most popular for valorant. I would argue that valorant and overwatch are pretty much on the same level based on what it feels to play. I've seen just as many visible cheaters in valorant as in overwatch. Although I will admit that I am pretty outdated myself since around mid 2025. Valorant allows you to ** around so that might be related, overwatch bans rage hackers way faster than valorant does as well. So no, my post is pretty accurate.
  - Thaxll 8mo ago
    OW2 is very different from CS and Valorant, OW does not suffer from cheat the same way because it's not a pure aim based game game with hitscan as the main thing. The vast majority of classes don't benefits from cheat like other fps do. I did main support and tank at master level in OW and beside esp there is 0 benefit of cheating.
    - himata4113 8mo ago
      Asked a guy I know since 2021 said that ability helpers are the most important features for an overwatch cheat and that ESP is basically unusable in gm since you get almost immediately called out for it, they are quite just sus you out and report. Trust score of high rated players eventually gets you banned (assumption).
vbezhenar 8mo ago
I'm playing WoW and I've heard lots of compains about Blizzard banning innocent players. Just recently there was a wave of complains that they banned players who spent a lot of time farming one dungeon (like 10+ hours per day). I, myself, got two accounts banned and I was innocent. I managed to make it through support and got them unbanned but I'm fairly certain that many players didn't, because they seem to employ AI in their support. So I'm a bit skeptical about that kind of behavioural bans. You risk banning a lot of dedicated players who happened to play differently from the majority and that tend to bring bad reputation. For example I no longer purchase yearly subscription, because I'm afraid of sudden ban and losing lots of unspent subscription time.
- xorgun 8mo ago
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- Levitz 8mo ago
  I think you are right on every point, but I think it's worth noting that WoW is kind of a different beast. You don't play a "match", you don't play "against" other players most of the time, in this context "botting" and "cheating" overlap because having your character do stuff 24/7 unattended is an evident advantage over the rest of the population, but it's not like you are hindering anyone's progress directly the vast majority of the time doing so. How often does actual cheating happen in WoW, anywhere it matters? M+? Raiding? PvP?
  - vbezhenar 8mo ago
    Most of cheating is botting. When bots farm dungeons or other activities, earn gold and then that gold is being sold at black markets for dollars to other players. That's indirectly hindering other players progression, because it causes deflation (so you can't earn as much gold selling your ores); because it causes inflation (more circulating gold, yes, these are contradictory); because it denies other player farm (if bot gathered ore, other player have to search for another vein) and so on; also illegal gold selling increases expectations (other players bought super good gear, why don't you do that) and causes burn-out (because farming gold fairly is much more hard, than just buying it). But mainly it just makes players angry, because they can see these bots moving in a predetermined route and stealing resources from their noses. I'm not really sure if bots are that bad in the grand scheme of things, but living players certainly don't like to compete with automatons. There were also cheaters who used instant cast interruptions at arenas, but it seems that competitive PvP is not that popular nowadays so I'm not sure how it's wide spread.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Another option that is becoming super popular is bios patching I wouldn’t call BIOS patching “super popular”. That sounds like an admission that anti-cheat is working because running cheats now requires a lot of effort. Now that cheats are becoming more involved to run, it’s becoming less common to cheat. When cheats were as simple as downloading a program and you were off to cheating, the barrier to entry was a lot lower. It didn’t require reboots or jumping through hoops. Anyone could do it and didn’t even have to invest much time into it. Now that cheats are no longer an easy thing to do, a lot of would-be cheaters are getting turned off of the idea before they get far enough to cheat in a real game. > Of course you could argue that you could just take advantage that they have to go through usermode to capture all this information and just sit in the kernel, but hardware attestation is making this increasily more difficult. Didn’t the first half of your post just argue that these measures can be defeated and therefore you can’t rely on them?
- himata4113 8mo ago
  Cheating is so addictive that it doesn't matter if it's more difficult to cheat. I have peronsally interacted with people that just want to spin-bot. Anticheats, especially kernel-mode ones does not make the problem smaller. All they do is make it more rewarding for capable people.
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    Having gamed on and off over the years, I don’t think the average cheater is actually a highly motivated super genius who derives reward from patching their BIOS or installing PCIe DMA cards to an entire second computer built for the purpose of cheating. The average cheater is (or was) basically a troll. They delighted in the act of ruining other people’s games, not installing the cheat. The harder you make it for them to get to that point, the less enjoyment they get. The people you describe who are in it for the thrill of breaking through are not the ones playing 6 hours every night because the game itself is not the thrill. It’s the exploration of the hardware and software. They might get cheats set up, but once it’s working they get bored with the game and move on to another technical challenge.
LtWorf 8mo ago
Taking a probabilistic approach to ban people… so if enough people start cheating it's fine?
rldjbpin 7mo ago
> What does make cheat developers afraid is AI there are already systems that just use the video feed of the game and provide external inputs for popular games (see [1] for a goofy demo). this goes beyond the pc where the game is being run. kernel-level anti-cheats came at the wrong standpoint imho, and since there are still cheats in games that support it (e.g. EA FC 25, some CoD Warzone stories, etc.), not quite worth the compromise. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rrcw_oRVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rrcw_oRVs

fleroviumna 8mo ago

[dead]

uhx 8mo ago

Everything you described increases the cost of attack (creating a cheat), and as a result, not everyone can afford it, which means anti-cheats work. They don't have to be a panacea. Gameplay analysis will only help against blatant cheaters, but will miss players with simple ESP. It's almost the same as saying "you don't need a password on your phone" or something like that.

himata4113 8mo ago
Economics work out, harder to make means that it's more profitable to do so. DMA crackdown has actually lead into innovation which has drove the prices down for "normal" DMA hardware what used to be thousands is now $120, excessive spoofing detection has driven down the cost of bios level spoofing and as a result the creation of bios level DMA backdoors - no additional hardware required. ESP is a lot more obvious to a machine than one might think, the subtle behavior differences are obvious to a human and even more so for a model. Of course none of that can be proven, but it can increase the scrutiny of such players from player reports.
- maccard 8mo ago
  The number of people willing to spend $120 and hook up a hardware device compared to downloading and running an executable is significantly less. That’s kind of the point of it!
  - himata4113 8mo ago
    You can achieve the same with usermode anticheats, once you have bare minimum obfuscations the level of entry is roughly the same as kernel mode anticheats in terms of price. Cheats cost more than $100 a month (rest are scams or don't put any effort into being undetected).
    - maccard 8mo ago
      A DMA cheat requires a hardware change (and a second device). That is a much higher barrier than a download plus reboot. > you can achieve the same with user mode anticheats A user mode anti cheat is immediately defeated by a kernel mode cheat, and cheaters have already moved past this in practice. A user mode anti cheat (on windows) with admin privileges has pretty much full system access anyway, so presumably if you have a problem with kernel AC you also have a problem with user mode. Lastly, cheating is an arms race. While in theory, the cheaters will always win, the only thing that actually matters is what the cheaters are doing in practice. Kernel mode is default even for free cheats you download, so the defaults have to cover that.

orbital-decay 8mo ago

>It's quite literally impossible to cheat anymore (in a way that disturbs normal players for more than a few games) AKA the way that is easiest to detect, and the easiest way to claim that the game doesn't have cheaters. Behavioral analysis doesn't work with closet cheaters, and they corrupt the community and damage the game in much subtler ways. There's nothing worse than to know that the player you've competed with all this time had a slight advantage from the start.

himata4113 8mo ago
Overwatch has made the decision that closest cheaters are not a problem and have actually protected a cheater in contenders, although they were forced to leave the competitive scene. None of it ever became public.
- maccard 8mo ago
  How do you know if none of it went public?
  - JasonADrury 8mo ago
    Every other competitive game regularly has public cases of cheaters being caught in pro games, overwatch doesn't.
    - Xunjin 8mo ago
      Wait... Your proof that something has happened is that there is no proof?
      - JasonADrury 8mo ago
        Do you really think that's not sufficient for the purposes of this conversation?
        8mo ago

lachiflippi 8mo ago

Don't forget that ActiBlizz are also pretty much the only ones regularly taking legal action against pay2cheat developers, see Bossland/EngineOwning.

himata4113 8mo ago
I saw engine owning lawsuit verdict as the biggest loss for the companies. They proved that you can continue running a cheat provider service out in the open. They won way more than they lost, people who left got given a free pass for ratting the remaining people out.

Thaxll 8mo ago

Kernel AC is currently the best way to protect against cheats by far, the game with the strongest protection is Valorant and it works very well. OW2 is lightyears behind Valorant. Not sure what your point is. Most of your post is inaccurate, DMA cheats represent the minority of cheats because they're very expensive and you need a second computer.

himata4113 8mo ago
elitepvpers - it's public. DMA cheats have grown and are the primary way people cheat in games these days it makes around 5m/month [retail] just from one of the providers that I know in the scene this includes selling the hardware, the bypass and the cheats (not under the same umbrella for obvious reasons). The scene has shifted immensely in the last few years, everyone and their grandmother has DMA now, I mean you can buy these off amazon now. Korean's are a bit stuck since most of them use gaming cafes so they've been slow adopters, but cafe shops have the benefit of using an old version of hyper-v which allows you to just use the method described above. Hyper-V cheats are the most popular for valorant. I would argue that valorant and overwatch are pretty much on the same level based on what it feels to play. I've seen just as many visible cheaters in valorant as in overwatch. Although I will admit that I am pretty outdated myself since around mid 2025. Valorant allows you to ** around so that might be related, overwatch bans rage hackers way faster than valorant does as well. So no, my post is pretty accurate.
- Thaxll 8mo ago
  OW2 is very different from CS and Valorant, OW does not suffer from cheat the same way because it's not a pure aim based game game with hitscan as the main thing. The vast majority of classes don't benefits from cheat like other fps do. I did main support and tank at master level in OW and beside esp there is 0 benefit of cheating.
  - himata4113 8mo ago
    Asked a guy I know since 2021 said that ability helpers are the most important features for an overwatch cheat and that ESP is basically unusable in gm since you get almost immediately called out for it, they are quite just sus you out and report. Trust score of high rated players eventually gets you banned (assumption).

vbezhenar 8mo ago

I'm playing WoW and I've heard lots of compains about Blizzard banning innocent players. Just recently there was a wave of complains that they banned players who spent a lot of time farming one dungeon (like 10+ hours per day). I, myself, got two accounts banned and I was innocent. I managed to make it through support and got them unbanned but I'm fairly certain that many players didn't, because they seem to employ AI in their support. So I'm a bit skeptical about that kind of behavioural bans. You risk banning a lot of dedicated players who happened to play differently from the majority and that tend to bring bad reputation. For example I no longer purchase yearly subscription, because I'm afraid of sudden ban and losing lots of unspent subscription time.

xorgun 8mo ago
[dead]
Levitz 8mo ago
I think you are right on every point, but I think it's worth noting that WoW is kind of a different beast. You don't play a "match", you don't play "against" other players most of the time, in this context "botting" and "cheating" overlap because having your character do stuff 24/7 unattended is an evident advantage over the rest of the population, but it's not like you are hindering anyone's progress directly the vast majority of the time doing so. How often does actual cheating happen in WoW, anywhere it matters? M+? Raiding? PvP?
- vbezhenar 8mo ago
  Most of cheating is botting. When bots farm dungeons or other activities, earn gold and then that gold is being sold at black markets for dollars to other players. That's indirectly hindering other players progression, because it causes deflation (so you can't earn as much gold selling your ores); because it causes inflation (more circulating gold, yes, these are contradictory); because it denies other player farm (if bot gathered ore, other player have to search for another vein) and so on; also illegal gold selling increases expectations (other players bought super good gear, why don't you do that) and causes burn-out (because farming gold fairly is much more hard, than just buying it). But mainly it just makes players angry, because they can see these bots moving in a predetermined route and stealing resources from their noses. I'm not really sure if bots are that bad in the grand scheme of things, but living players certainly don't like to compete with automatons. There were also cheaters who used instant cast interruptions at arenas, but it seems that competitive PvP is not that popular nowadays so I'm not sure how it's wide spread.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> Another option that is becoming super popular is bios patching I wouldn’t call BIOS patching “super popular”. That sounds like an admission that anti-cheat is working because running cheats now requires a lot of effort. Now that cheats are becoming more involved to run, it’s becoming less common to cheat. When cheats were as simple as downloading a program and you were off to cheating, the barrier to entry was a lot lower. It didn’t require reboots or jumping through hoops. Anyone could do it and didn’t even have to invest much time into it. Now that cheats are no longer an easy thing to do, a lot of would-be cheaters are getting turned off of the idea before they get far enough to cheat in a real game. > Of course you could argue that you could just take advantage that they have to go through usermode to capture all this information and just sit in the kernel, but hardware attestation is making this increasily more difficult. Didn’t the first half of your post just argue that these measures can be defeated and therefore you can’t rely on them?

himata4113 8mo ago
Cheating is so addictive that it doesn't matter if it's more difficult to cheat. I have peronsally interacted with people that just want to spin-bot. Anticheats, especially kernel-mode ones does not make the problem smaller. All they do is make it more rewarding for capable people.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  Having gamed on and off over the years, I don’t think the average cheater is actually a highly motivated super genius who derives reward from patching their BIOS or installing PCIe DMA cards to an entire second computer built for the purpose of cheating. The average cheater is (or was) basically a troll. They delighted in the act of ruining other people’s games, not installing the cheat. The harder you make it for them to get to that point, the less enjoyment they get. The people you describe who are in it for the thrill of breaking through are not the ones playing 6 hours every night because the game itself is not the thrill. It’s the exploration of the hardware and software. They might get cheats set up, but once it’s working they get bored with the game and move on to another technical challenge.

LtWorf 8mo ago

Taking a probabilistic approach to ban people… so if enough people start cheating it's fine?

rldjbpin 7mo ago

> What does make cheat developers afraid is AI there are already systems that just use the video feed of the game and provide external inputs for popular games (see [1] for a goofy demo). this goes beyond the pc where the game is being run. kernel-level anti-cheats came at the wrong standpoint imho, and since there are still cheats in games that support it (e.g. EA FC 25, some CoD Warzone stories, etc.), not quite worth the compromise. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rrcw_oRVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rrcw_oRVs