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Comment by withinrafael | Hacker News Reader

So I'm not seeing anything particularly novel here. In fact, I think most AAA titles do most if not all of these things today. It really just boils down to understanding your title's threat model and mitigating the threats.

I think the article missed an opportunity to talk about false positive rates, the workflow for users to get unbanned due to false positives (usually a very nasty process), performance, platform support (Windows, for example, has encrypted app packaging [1], anti-cheat monitoring [2], and protected processes [3] built in), and the privacy implications of uploading non-game-related Windows driver and process data.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/packaging/creat...

[2,3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/packaging/app-c...

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> It really just boils down to understanding your title's threat model and mitigating the threats.

Well that can be said for every product ever...

I do agree though, I did expect a little more real content. Not the "how anti-cheat works" because then we can find ways around it more easily, but like you said: reliability, performance, etc.

If you wanna something more novel, look at this talk from Valve [0] on how they are integrating Deep Learning into their CS:GO cheater detection system (confusingly called Overwatch). It's not used to ban users, but rather to bring suspicious plays into their existing user-reviewed moderation system.

In general, this type of human/AI side-by-side feedback loop seems to be very successful, all the way from games to moderating content on the web.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

> usually a very nasty process

especially with how opaque the whole flagging is.

I understand why they do it and a game environment is not a democracy or a court of law, but it's hard to defend yourself when you do not have access to the evidences.

Videogame cheat developer here (although, not for the game mentioned in the article) -- The mentality of game companies is if the 'evidence' of the anti-cheat flag is made accessible to users, cheat devs will use the same evidence to overcome the existing detections in place.

The oft-used 'arms race' analogy for this would be like sending blueprints of your newly-fabricated weapons to the adversary.

I've always been curious about this, do you get paid, and if so how?

People love cheating so much they pay for the tools to do so.

The fact is 99 out of 100 banned users were actually banned for good reason and are lying about not cheating. Half of those will also dmit to cheating but beg for forgiveness as if they aren't quite literally destroying the game and everyone's enjoyment of it. That less than 1 percent that is truly innocent is nearly impossible to service because of all the noise.

Cheating definitely sours a gaming community, as does falsely accusing people of cheating. I left the original (circa early 2000s) Counter Strike community after being routinely accused of cheating. I have never once cheated in a online multiplayer game. But, some people just couldn't grasp that I was really that (comparatively) good & quick of a shot. Also, I don't think they realized that certain materials could be shot through with a powerful enough weapon. I probably had a bit of a leg up on most people, too, as I had state of the art hardware for the time (I had dual P4 Xeons, 3GB RDRAM & the best at the time GeForce AGP card in 2002) and a single to low double digit ping for most servers being on a university OC-3 line.

Your comment reminded me of a frustrating evening on bzflag.

Long ago I was using a custom Linux box with a slow GPU, and on one map no matter how hard I tried (and no matter how many fellow players watched trying to help me get the timing right) I simply couldn’t jump to the first level of a building.

I’d never experienced a hardware limitation quite like that.

Haha neat. That was probably caused by the physics engine running slower than needed. If you do a rough friction calculation based on the frame rate you will end up with more friction at 20 fps vs 40 or 60.

Really trivial question, just look at any big cheats and most work based on subscriptions. AimWare, Project-7, ...

Yeah, I remember seeing the anti-scanning measure in another game circa 2009. IAT hooks were hot then too. I wonder if they run a CRC on sections of the game code as well (also pretty trivial to defeat).

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