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Comment by exgamedev | Hacker News Reader

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.

You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.

The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It's actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.

There's no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine

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Sure. Until you're playing Dark Souls for the first time, you get summoned to help someone with a boss, and then get invaded by someone with a 360 degree one-shot kill spell that breaks all your weapons and armor, gives you an egghead that you can't remove unless you know where to go, and gives you an item that marks you as a cheater so you now get constantly invaded by exclusively cheaters.

The item that marks you as a cheater might have been a drop in another invasion, I don't remember. The point remains, once the cheaters realize you have a separate cheaters' matchmaking system, they will weaponize that too.

> The item that marks you as a cheater might have been a drop in another invasion, I don't remember.

I believe they can do it completely passively, so you’re kinda screwed if it happens to you :( This is sadly the nature of trusting what clients send you: a hacked client can send whatever it wants and the “anti cheat” in Dark Souls sadly seems to simply just check if an item should be possible, meaning a cheater can trick the game into punishing non-cheaters. Luckily this hasn’t been a problem for me on console, but it certainly does suck on PC :(

And of course, if it didn't punish non-cheaters, then cheaters could simply cheat the items in on one account, invade/summon another of their own accounts, (or passworded summon in the remaster) and then give the new account the items.

There's no winning against cheaters as long as you trust the client. (And it's possible to do it on consoles too, just more rare as the tools are readily available on PC.)

> There's no winning against cheaters as long as you trust the client.

Indeed.

> And it’s possible to do it on consoles too

Sure, but the barrier to entry is higher, so its not done as often. I’ve never noticed someone who was obviously cheating (which doesn’t mean I’ve never encountered any, but if I have, they’ve never been so severe as to do the things mentioned here or for me to notice it)

That seems to be a completely different type of cheat than described in the article. The article is just about cheats that automate certain moves that players would already be able to do, just would be very hard. It's not possible to stop this type of automation in the general case.

If a cheater can make items appear out of nowhere, that's not an automation cheat, that's a security vulnerability in the server that should be fixed.

My understanding is that the server is not for realtime. Realtime gameplay is peer to peer.

That sounds like a completely different system than League of Legends has. So hellbanning should work fine as suggested (it was suggested for League of Legends).

Other games that use (IMHO) broken protocols by trusting the client can't reliably use hellbanning, and I don't think they can reliably do anything.

But the realtime gameplay is where the cheaters are giving other clients items in order to mark innocent players as cheaters.

So everyone's getting hellbanned, at which point no one is hellbanned...

I'm saying that a game where the server isn't in the middle is broken, and cannot implement hellbanning.

League of Legends has a server in the middle, thus isn't broken, players can't give each other fake items, and hellbanning will work.

This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game. The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they're cheating at is probably negligible.

I mean... sure but they're also only willing to interact with the game when they're making the experience bad for everyone else.

I don't think it is really the cheaters that degrade the experience, it is the knowledge (right or wrong) that cheaters exist that reduces trust that makes for not fun experiences.

I've played online games for many thousands of hours over the past two decades and I can count the number of times I encountered a blatant cheater on my hands. Every time it actually happened people had a good laugh about it and either hopped servers or banned the person cheating. Sure I have probably unknowingly encountered a bunch of map and wall hackers but I didn't know so it didn't degrade my experience. For all I knew those players were just better than me, plenty of those around. Having played with some extremely high level players in various games, it actually feels like the good players are using map/wallhacks more than the actual hackers because they have such good gamesense.

On the other hand, I have been accused of cheating more times than I have actually for sure encountered real cheaters. It isn't fun when a server turns sour because everyone is accusing each other of cheating and getting salty over nothing.

Of course, if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn't the case. But any game with a modicum of community power to enforce rules won't have that problem. The major places you reliably encounter cheaters are non-private servers and matchmaking services that have essentially been abandoned by the developers.

Borderlands was fun until the cheaters showed up, and this even as a cooperative game.

People with hacked 999999999-damage guns warp in, splat everything and even if they dont steal all the loot, they make the entire game pointless.

You couldnt do anything about it but leave. There was no ban system users could appeal to.

Though some fun memories were had with cheaters in other competitive games, like coordinating to try to take down or hide from literally invincible opponents.

Counterpoint: Pokemon Go is incredibly infuriating to play as a new player because of cheaters. People spoofing their location fill up gyms, making it extremely difficult to earn in-game currency. They can also prevent you from effectively raiding with members of your own team, if spoofers from another team vastly outnumber you (reducing the reward from the raid).

Not only is it not fun, it's discouraging. And it's one of the big things that led to me quitting the game.

What games do you play? Because it's at least once a play session for me. Perhaps we are playing different games or different regions have more cheaters than others.

I have also often wondered if cheaters choose other regions than their own to exploit in, hence why little ol' Australia gets so many of them.

Wait, what? Why would allowing cheaters to run rampant mean people accused others of cheating LESS?

Sorry, in "if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn't the case." I meant "the case" as something like "the perception of cheating is more damaging than the actual cheating". Poorly written on my part.

Certainly not all cheaters have the same interests.

Some are simply curious experimenters, others are trolling, others want to make videos doing the impossible etc.

I wish there was another path out of this mess than the current arms race. It would be interesting what effect would result in providing a sandbox mode where cheating were allowed to see if it would reduce cheating in general population.

I've thought a little about building cheating detection into the mechanics and lore of maybe an MMORPG by treating it like a forbidden dark art.

If a player is flagged for cheating, they could take on an "aura" in the game. Maybe different types of auras for different types of cheating or for the types of events that took place around the cheating. It could grow stronger with more flags or fade with time. Fine-grained detection of auras could be a sought-after perception skill.

The in-game community could decide how they want to treat different types of cheaters. You could see interesting things like self-segregation or vigilante organizations.

You still have to intervene a lot to block gold farming bots or whatever, but I think you can keep the vanilla players and most cheaters happy.

Some game developers are making AI teams for their games which seems to be the logical conclusion for botting.

Console speed-runs have different leagues where different levels of glitches are allowed - from 0% to any%. Maybe that could work here, possibly as a "competitive aimbot league".

I was under the impression that 0%, 100%, and any% were completion ranges, not different levels of glitches allowed.

0% means you make as little progress as possible, level up as few times as possible, pick up as few items as possible, and otherwise avoid progress other than completing the objective.

100% means you pick up every item, finish every quest, etc...

any% means you do whatever you have to in order to get through as quickly as possible.

That said, there are different levels of glitches, exploits, and external tools allowed in different speedruns. TAS (Tool Assisted) speedruns would probably appeal to this crowd.

For instance this run[0] of the NES Super Mario Brothers games where all four games use the same controller inputs and finish in the same second. (Host says 3 games, but it's really 4.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3358&v=EHfw-BEuR...

I’ve always heard n% refer to the completion ranges, as you say, however, the level of glitches allowed has often been a factor too (although in my limited experience its usually been simply no glitches allowed or glitches allowed). Mostly I’ve watched dark souls speedruns where the general consensus is that any in-game glitches are allowed, external tools, hacks etc are not and the % refers to how many of the bosses are defeated.

Doubt it. The one time I cheated on a game( borderlands 2) was because the game was too hard without the p2w dlcs that I had no intention to buy. I didn't mind playing along with other people that played in whatever way they wanted( cheating or not) but I was too afraid of getting banned that I disabled online play while cheating.

A friend of mine that was cheating hard for a period on CoD 4 only did so for the fun of it and had no intention to ruin the game for the rest players.

In the case of Riot / League of Legends, these are still potentially customers willing to pay for skins etc, which is their income stream.

I wonder if cheaters are as likely to pay for that stuff as non-cheaters?

A game with prevalent hacking/cheating is going to go downhill quick and lose it's established player base. Catering to these people in any way does not seem like a wise strategy.

The options presented are 1) segregate them into a separate pool, as suggested. They can then still give you money, the arms race is short circuited, and they don't impact the enjoyment of other players.

2) You ban them.

And then they possibly create an account and tread more carefully next time so they don’t lose their skins. This is behavior you can even see in streamers that get banned.

Frankly I think a zero tolerance approach to cheating makes sense and sends a more serious message. It still looks bad if cheaters exist even to other cheaters, for example a shadowbanned streamer, and makes it harder to take your game seriously.

So you ban them and they get back up to the same, if not worse behavior. Maybe they behave a little better or try to avoid getting caught.

Trying to keep someone banned is much much harder problem than finding them to ban in the first place.

Sorry, I was meaning my comment from the context of the conversation, where they'd be in a separate pool competing against each other. If cheaters want to cheat each other, it's no skin of my nose. Might still be a good revenue stream for Riot.

I see you’ve never had to deal with trolls and griefers.

What game did you do this for?

> It's actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt.

This part reminds me of 'Open' Battle.net for Diablo 2. Everyone used hacked items in pvp and just tried to have better fake items than their opponents.

Did you consider the possibility of false positives? Even the most modern and well considered justice system runs into this issue. Or is this not possible when detecting video game cheaters?

False positives are certainly possible. My office has an hour allotted to gaming on Friday afternoons. There have been occasions when TF2 kicked all players connecting from Linux clients (approx 50% of us).

I don't have much time for playing games anymore, but I can think of a few games where I would gladly start paying for subscriptions again if I was able to use bots. Even if it meant using special bot-only accounts. For some reason this is much more fun to me than just games specifically designed around programming bots.

I always thought it would be better if the player got to choose who they played with. Let me tag other players, and feed that into a ratings engine. Match me up with players who tag like me, and not with players that people who tag like me tag as arseholes, and untagged players. Lets put the social media perception filter to good use. Could be even better on MMORPGs, where you can populate worlds with players who will have fun with each other and speak the same language and do the RPG part in similar ways.

Quarantine only delays the length of time the cheater/spammer knows they've been caught, usually on the order of days. So, the tradeoff is building the real experience (along with adding new features) for those users to save days. It's usually not worth it.

>Quarantine only delays the length of time the cheater/spammer knows they've been caught, usually on the order of days

Days are crucially important in a game's development cycle. This is because the modern review style is structured around "first impressions", since interest in a game is an L-curve: the first person to get a review out can sometimes claim a lion's share of ad-revenue from possible viewers.

This means preventing cheating "on the order of days" can protect your game's review scores during the most critical review period.

How would you do that and ensure they don't interfere? Would have you have a separate server just for cheaters?

This approach sounds incredibly smart. Hope you can share more details about it, or even a fun story or two.

There's a youtuber who focuses on CSGO that recently made a video where he interviews a cheater, they touch on the "cheater vs cheater community" in the video as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o

Matching cheaters to cheaters is brilliant and should be THE non-intrusive industry standard!

Like Ashley Madison.

Very productive approach. I felt like I learned something today.

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