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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I hope they are also keeping separate rankings for cheaters, that would be pretty cool.

"I'm currently the #5 player in the cheater zone of Apex."

Heck, embrace it: don't call it the cheater rankings, call it the tool-assisted rankings, by analogy with "tool-assisted speedruns". Tag people at the end of the game with which particular cheats you detected. Pop up a polite notice that "We have noticed that you seem to be using external tools to help you play better; we will now be matching you up with other cyborg players to keep things fair. Good luck, and may the best man-machine win!"

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Many moons ago I made a "chatroulette" application for the reddit community. It was surprisingly popular, but was plagued by your typical penis flasher.

I added a simple "report" button. After a user had been reported a few times they were silently sandboxed with other penis flashers so they could flash their penii at each other.

I love this way of dealing with bad actors - but I think that its a bad idea to let them know whats happening, as then they can try to circumvent. Keep them in the dark, just let them cheat against other cheaters and wonder why they suddenly suck - dont glamorize entering the cheater zone.

Not telling the user is also problematic. If your false positive rate isnt 0% you are seriously messing with some people. The same issue exist with shadowbanning, you can make an argument to shadowban trolls who dont follow the rules of a given environment on purpose, but shadowbanning a random user is just really ugly. Wasting someones lifetime like that for no reason is just wrong.

In my case, it matched them with me for verification. Not the most pleasant job in the world :D But yeah, you shouldn't just do it at random - it must be justified.

That would be really interesting! Although it'd be like offering a gym for cheaters, heh. A place for them to hone cheating tools and techniques that would end up back in the regular game.

But could avoid that if a game embraced it holistically, where the default is tool-assisted and anything goes.

There's an interesting argument to be made that by embracing the cheating market wholesale, it divides the cheating community into separate units. Those that are happy to exploit games publicly and share code, versus those that would prefer to hide and benefit from it financially or otherwise.

In that sense, encouraging people to come forward with hacking tools means that you'll have a stronger awareness of how they're used. Then if you were to leave the less destructive methods of hacking alone, you could design your detection methods to explicitly examine those avenues of exploitation and maintain a clean separation of people who use outside tools and those who do not.

It's an attempt to combat the constant arms race of hacking by deflating it a bit.

Isn't one of the hardest parts of making these tools evading detection? An aimbot isn't that tremendously difficult to create, the hard part is creating an aimbot that is hard to differentiate from a skilled player.

If the competition is all using assists, then the sneaky aimbot that simulates slower human reflexes will lose to the bot that positions the sights directly on the opponent in <0.1ms. I like this idea, I don't see why it would make it any easier to develop the types of cheating systems that affect human players, and it might be fun for the types of players that enjoy things like tool-assisted speed running; where the ultimate aim is more about studying the underlying game mechanics to determine the algorithmically-optimal way to play. If the default is tool-assisted, then all the human players will be excluded by default.

Even in the very old days it was more of a balancing act: It's not super difficult to make it undetectable, but it will be slower. Slower means that you will always lose to the more detectable variants that somehow still manage to evade the technical filter (but not the people filter). The second segment will of course eventually get banned, but in the meantime you will keep losing to them.

The downside to making this visible in-game is people will then iterate their cheating tools until the game doesn't detect them.

I haven't kept up with it, but back in the day of Counter Strike there were VAC-disabled servers specifically configured for cheaters and it was very interesting to see all of the various aimbots, wallhacks, etc going at it. Some of the cheats were specifically designed for these servers.

As someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this was called HvH. Great stuff.

It still exists apparently.

Unfortunately that would be really hard to do without creating a "did we detect cheats" oracle. If they did that, the only thing a person creating a cheating tool needs to do is play a few games to make sure the tool is not detected anymore.

the idea is that cheaters would find it more fun to play in the tool-assisted mode. obviously there will still be some black-hats who try to hack the main mode.

But is that not exactly what cheaters are doing right now? I reckon it would make less sense to implement this kind of system in games which aren't free. The price of the game disincentivizes cheating and makes consecutive iterations of the cheat harder. However, Apex Legends is free. Every time a cheat is detected nothing withholds its developer of creating a new account for the next iteration.

Sometimes... VAC can kick you mid-game for very obvious things. But in other cases you may be able to play for hours until a report goes through and gets verified. That delay (as a side-effect) guarantees that you can't quickly iterate and get immediate feedback on whether you're detected or not.

Often in console land, bans come in "waves" at pre-scheduled times, so you have a hard time matching the cause with the ban

The problem is that it this ends up boiling down to your tools, so it's...programming. Competitive programming can be fun! But cheaters are looking to cheat, not compete, which is why they aren't playing something like Screeps.

Actually in CS:GO there's a pretty big Hack vs Hack scene where both teams cheat. It's interesting because on one hand there are some novel cheats, on the other you still have to obey the game's mechanics, just in a different way.

Note: Please do not cheat in video games unless everyone involved is okay with it (such as dedicated HvH servers)

A cyber hamsterdam of sorts

I think RuneScape (or old school runescape) used to do this as well, if your account was flagged for botting you'd be silently placed in a hidden world (and unable to join other worlds) with other botters so they could better keep an eye on you.

Yes. It also navigates around the problem of "I payed this much money for this game and now I can't play it ever because I possibly broke some rule. Maybe not, maybe autobanning tool was just overzealous with me. Now what?"

I'm not sure being accidentally placed in a Colosseum of cyborgs as an average player would be any fun

You can expect to be able to play. Whether it'll be fun for you or not depends on many factors and you can't expect to be ensured that you'll have fun just because you paid for it.

Basically suddenly you'll feel like people that murder you are cheaters and for the first time you'll most likely be right.

That sounds sort of like the Olympics but for steroid-users.

There's a SNL sketch about that: https://youtu.be/jAdG-iTilWU

Also - a separate MLB where you can 'roid your testicles to kingdom come. Let everyone have a 1.1 slugging average and the pitchers all throw 110

They have this for significant weight lifting competitions. Where known steroid users are allowed to participate.

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