How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
vmcall.blog
vmcall.blog
Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? Is there a monetary incentive? Otherwise, it seems like a lot of effort just to increase one's standing on a leader board.
Why make this a gender thing?
People should be able to make such observations.
My sense of the multiplayer cheating scene (which I never looked at closely) is that most of the cheaters use tools developed by others. So, it seems possible that the people doing the bulk of the work are motivated in part by the technical challenge (including the cat and mouse aspect of it), and the social proof that comes along with sharing their cheats.
Once the cheats are out there, using them has a much lower barrier to entry.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker...
Is making an overlay a derivative work?
Leaderboards are dopamine clickbait for trying to improve.
Why do billionaires want to richer?
This assumes a subject is required for coercion. It might be that multiplayer games are the only way for someone to escape.
I don't think this is really as difficult as you imagine. People in poverty have the decision to work or die. Poverty is a form of objective violence. Therefore, people are coerced by objective violence that doesn't depend on any sort of task master whipping them into action.
I don't think that video games need to be the only form of escapism for my argument to hold true. It's a form of escapism that people are taking a part in to avoid the whatever boogeymen exist in the day-to-day. So, while individuals could find themselves in different forms of escapism--drugs, cults, &c.--they may still be finding themselves there after not having been coerced by any other person.
I'm responding to specifically you saying "No >one< forces," someone to play video games, but the "video games" isn't the important part. The important part, to me, is you saying that there needs to be some subject coercing another subject.
Why is this an important distinction? The same or similar forces are likely causing the individual to cheat, so there has to be some serious consideration into how culpable the cheater actually is.
To further argue the point: if all players were cheating then there would be no competitive advantage to cheating, which eliminates the only reason a subset of players cheat in the first place. Even by skewed standards it violates the golden rule.
Uh, what?
It seems very selfish in retrospective and I'm sorry for all the gamer experiences I ruined.
Or maybe .. neither really contributes or detracts from “gamer addiction”.
1. Technical challenge
2. Trolling "try hards"
3. Dopamine from winning
I'm sure there's a bunch of other reasons, but cheating is still like a game, just expanding the rules.
It is indeed a bit immoral when one tries to cheat in a way that unfairly puts themselves ahead of other humans.
I don't think money enters into it. People just do weird things, like painting miniatures or climbing Mt. Everest, and hacking is another of those hobbies.
Some like the rush of doing something "naughty".
Some want quick results.
Some want prestige.
Some want to explore and exploit the system itself rather than the game.
Some want to gold farm.
Some want to be like gods.
Some want to automate the tedious parts.
Some want to take down big mobs that can't be taken down any other way.
I once wrote about 400k of Blech code for Macroquest to automate the most tedious parts of EQ grinding, and to automate support party members (running on separate accounts) when I couldn't find a group (before the mercenary system), powerlevel new accounts, or needed more precision to one-group multibox raid targets (for example, Overlord Mata Muram). In many ways it brought the game to a whole new level of challenges due to the difficulty of my targets, and the strategies I needed to employ.
It was actually quite cool, consisting of modules for healing, buffing, offtanking, main tanking, positioning, dd, dots, aggro management, clickies, AA abilities, timers... the works. I had a configuration language that assembled the necessary modules to produce the behavior I needed for a particular task.
All of the dev work involved, at my professional rate, would have come out to 5 or 6 figures, so there's that :P
If it was up to me, entering the Konami code would unlock everything in every single player game. Everyone has the right to access content they've purchased in the way and order they see fit.
But when you're playing with other people there's really no excuse.
Consider games like WoW. Ask anyone what the game is like, and you'll find that the game "doesn't really begin" until you are already max level. That is, the "real" content of the game is all of the Guild-related activities. Everything up to that point is more or less an extended tutorial that lasts for dozens of hours.
Cheating because you want to skip the "tutorial" and quickly get to the point where you can play at the same level as your friends seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. In fact, now a days I believe WoW provides a free (high) level character for all new players, but for a long time, you needed to run through that grind yourself, or pay a microtransaction to skip up.
What I do in fact fundamentally not understand is why games are designed this way†. Good on WoW for apparently letting players skip it nowadays. I admit, I'd have trouble faulting someone who wanted to cheat their way through.
† Outside of games that explicitly want to sell micro-transactions. I understand that all to well.
Looking back there was a lot of tedium in Everquest. Tradeskills. Attunement. AA points. Traveling was a pain in the first few expansions. I don't deny that I was cheating, but certain types of cheating can reveal flaws in the fundamentals of the game.
The original game designer Brad McQuaid (RIP) defended that tedium, particularly around things like travel, as necessary to give you a feeling of achievement. He was also worried about inflation in the economy. Although I have some warm memories of playing EQ I vehemently disagree with his views on game mechanics. In retrospect I realize I enjoyed his art style more than anything. I plan to give the follow on Pantheon a miss because it too plays to the poopsockers of the world.
Blatant cheating to troll is one (myg0t "clan" is the first notorious case I remember from back in the day).
Another is "cheating" to fix problems in the game. Some games are really good except for a couple of issues. An example from back in the day is Final Fantasy XI. They programmed it so ALT-TAB would crash the game. They thought this would stop cheaters (Japanese devs don't seem to really get the PC landscape sometimes) but it was just really inconvenient for the rest of us. I hit it by mistake/habit more than once in a tense moment. So a third party hack called Windower was invented to stop this.
Predictably, it was very popular but there were also players saying those who used it were dirty cheats who deserved a ban. Alsod predictably, because it already operated in a grey area, it received a number of QoL updates and features including add-on support and scripting where anyone could easily develop things that clearly crosses the line.
The first are cheats like an overt aimbot, which are blatant and where basically everyone gets shot in the head from a mile away whenever the cheater has line-of-sight. These I imagine are only fun for trolling.
The second are cheats that are more subtle, showing you the location of hidden enemies etc. Since these aren't just a "win button", the cheater still gets some satisfaction from winning. After all, they still had to shoot and kill the other players, and they're not guaranteed to win. In their mind they still won, they just had a little help. This kind of cheating is akin to cheating in sports by using steroids. You still have to do a lot of the same work, but it's easier to win.
Probably because adversarial coding is fun, and cheating at videogames is one of the best free ways to really get going doing that against a party that is really invested in stopping you. There's other options, but those are much more likely to lead to arrests.
esports? not sure how common it is these days to have someone cheating in a competition but I can tell you it happened quite a lot of times in the past, especially with FPS games.
People use cheats because it makes the game more enjoyable. In FPS, someone can shoot you before you have time to react. In RTS, someone can step out of the darkness with an army that traps yours at just the right moment. Cheats replace those unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones where you ambush the enemy and fight them with an advantage
Unfortunately cheating is a negative sum game. When both players cheat, it doesn't just even the odds once again, it makes the game you're playing significantly less enjoyable
In all seriousness, I think there's a non-trivial aspect to it where human psychology is misfiring in the modern era. Certain people, mostly younger, have a drive to show off to potential mates, some more so than others, and superficially, spending lots of time creating cheats like this looks like it's leading to social approval and standing. You get lots of "thanks" and "kudos". But in reality, you're getting nothing. It doesn't work. People are willing to use the output, but whether rational on some level or not, I don't think you are really getting social credit for it, and even to the extent you are, it's far too widely dispersed to be any good. (That is, it may not exactly be useless to convince a million people to think slightly good of you, but harvesting that for any benefit is really tricky, whereas conclusively convincing someone you are a good person can be beneficial in all sorts of ways and is the basis of any number of relationships.)
In grad school, I worked on an open source LCMS that spent a lot of time fighting people helping other students cheat on their homework. Instead of just solving their homework problem, the cheaters would solve the whole meta-problem (all the variants we might serve) and hand out the meta-solution. This requires a great deal more effort than just solving the individual problem alone. What was funny to me is... I don't think it actually got them anything. Nobody cares. They'll use your solution, but for all that work you get very little real social currency. The majority of your "customer base" is getting it from their friend, who got it from their friend, and the origin of the cheat isn't even known by probably the majority using it. Same sort of thing.
Unfortunately, this is effectively unsolvable. By the time you hypothetically educate one group that this isn't useful, next year's group is already here.
(Also, to be clear, I'm not saying this is all the reason, merely a less-explored one, and a sufficient one on its own to be a source of significant cheating.)
Some people do it just to challenge themselves or to learn
Free software wouldnt exist if everybody used your approach.
You sounds as if you tried to say that putting effort into something without $$ as result is bad?
Dollars didn't even come up in my post. I think you read what you were expecting to read rather than what I wrote.
I feel like sitting inside at your computer working on cheats isn't the best way to "show off to potential mates".
That aside, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by social credit, but in some communities the creators of hacks and cheats(at least the people making fun, constructive cheats - not aimbots and the like) are highly esteemed. They are regarded somewhere alongside competitive players/speedrunners but in a more shadowy background roll(which many people may find cooler/more valuable). They also tend to have universal support among the community rather than being on one team or the other like, for example, tournament players.
This is all true in the communities I've witnessed at least, I don't play many esport type games though.
High profile Fortnite/Apex Legends/CS:GO etc gamer could make significant money on streaming, and there were quite a high profile gamers caught using aimbots/wallhacks etc.
1. Hacking the game can be more interesting than playing the game.
2. There's absolutely nothing wrong with hacking games with immoral game design.
also skills, resume?
Also game streaming is big now and being "good" attracts more viewers so there is also a lot of money to be made by cheating.
I have completely stopped taking video games seriously in any capacity as I am pretty confident the entire culture of competitive gaming is completely infested with cheating.
Second, what kinds of cheats would you expect using peripherals? Any visual cheats would likely be detected, since player's screens are often viewed by referees and/or televised. I suppose an audio based cheat is conceivable. The screen and the audio are the only output from most computer games.
Aimbots these days look almost indistinguishable from good playing. The point isn't to be perfect. It's to give some kind of competitive edge. If you can take even 15% of the effort away then you can focus on other things.
I've been accused of cheating many many times, despite never cheating. I was blacklisted from a community counterstrike server back in 2002 or so for "cheating" after a lucky couple games where I got a LOT of headshots with guns that aren't very good accuracy wise. I was playing with very good players, and even some of them thought I was running cheats.
My experience says people vastly underestimate how far a good lucky streak and adequate reaction time + aim can take someone. Plenty of friends have similar experiences of being accused of cheating when they play well.
It probably doesn't help that the asynchronous client-server model of fast paced FPS games introduces weird effects with respect to latency. (I.e. rewriting history to show some high-latency player killed you after you've already observed visual/audio effects for their own death.)
Though I've heard now it's possible to load your USB peripherals with cheating software.
https://hackaday.com/2017/07/29/injecting-code-into-mouse-fi...
From a high level view, you learn:
* Fundamentals of computer security
* Fundamentals of computers, operating systems, and number systems.
* Debugging skills!!! (Can't stress enough)
* Perseverance
* Note taking
From a technical view, you learn:
* Memory Forensics
* Reverse Engineering
* Patching executables (in memory and on disk)
* Anti-Debugging and Anti-Anti debugging tricks
* Packet sniffing and modifying
* Crypto
* 3D Modeling
* Simple algorithms for writing bots
* Memory corruption vulnerabilities
* Programming
That said, I'm HIGHLY against the use of cheats. If you want to show your friends and get a laugh out of it, that's fine! Just don't ruin the gaming experience for others. And don't do anything illegal of course.
I don't know how it got so bad, MMOs used to be focused on group content, socialization, meaningful progression. Nowadays it's solo grinding bs with constant reminders to "buy this shit, it helps you/makes you look fab". Just sad money squeezing activities that waste your time.
First, these are not great lengths when all you need to do is download and install an application.
Second, some people don't get as much kick from playing a game as from dominating other players. They want to win the game in any way possible, but don't consider winning fairly to be any more satisfying than winning with cheating. They might be in denial over their abilities and use cheating to feel better. They don't feel any need to be courteous or fair. These are people who, when they loose a game against you, will say "fuck you" instead of congratulating you.
Don't try to find logic where there isn't any.
In monster hunter, the speedrunning community is migrating to PC because the ability to use cheats to negate the huge amount of RNG present in the game. Cheating is usually looked down on by speedrunners for obvious reasons but because of the difficulty of speedrunning a game with so much RNG(not rng that effects your gameplay, but that effects your ability to play at all), modders are basically making a new game with the rng removed and people are speedrunning that, and it's widely accepted as necessary by the community.
So cheating is often just a means of either getting something new out of a game or 'fixing' aspects of a game that the community takes issue with.
I agree that players like you describe, who's main goal is griefing other players, also make up a large portion of cheaters, just wanted to further elaborate on your response that not all cheaters are doing it to 'move up the leaderboard'
I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that offer valuable prizes have a real incentive to cheat.
I would call this a mod, not a cheat.
I didn't look into aiming bots, but I did figure out how to edit the resource files to make the walls transparent so I could camp the flag and see players coming for it long before I was supposed to.
That’s game over for anti-cheat IMO.
Client v1 sends packet A for command Attack
So does China Client v1
Developer updates client to v2 and now packet A is non-existent, so no legit user is going to send it
so after patch everyone who sends packet A can be banned
This means immediately after an update many cheats stop working until they’re updated (or their creator flags the new game version as compatiable)
For many games packet inspection and injection work just fine to automate actions and provide access to hidden information.
And the server knows the user is cheating.
Apparently it sends 2 packets over the pipe and disables the anti-cheat completely. That's been patched but presumably it wouldn't be too hard to expand the emulator to handle the patch.
Back in 2005/2006 Sony where installing rootkits on PCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... - this is why to this day I try make sure very little with "Sony" printed upon it touches my network. IIRC the best we got by way of an apology was "we are sorry Sony BMG embarrassed the group by getting caught" and "we promise not to do exactly the same thing again in the near future" (weasel words that meant they could do other equally crappy things immediately and as now is not the near future from then that could do the same thing now without breaking their word).
That was to try to protect content in audio CD tracks by breaking things that might allow copying, I'm sure similar methods can be (and probably have been) used to try block game cheats too.
with regards to cheating, I understand the need to present a fair playing experience to all customers but as with anything else, people are the one variable we have the least control over and with the numbers games as with any service have to deal with you are guaranteed to get bad actors.
the simple avoidance to those who see this is spyware/etc is not you play. I do not see this choice as a bad one. for some it is abhorrent but for others playing where cheaters have free reign is just as abhorrent. so unless you can fix people you choose what you are willing to accept
Problem is, it's all-or-nothing. I'd be better if games could be sandboxed, so that its cheat-prevention spyware doesn't leak to the rest of the system. But I suppose the practical answer to that would be, "buy a console".
Who is "we" in this context? Is there a community of anti-cheat reverse engineers out there?
No, thanks.
This allows the server to execute arbitrary, ephemeral code fragments on any client at any time, with no trace. If the server is ever compromised, so are all clients, instantly.
This is absolutely insane from a security POV. Just because I gave you a program once that you're using doesn't mean that you want to give me an SSH login to your machine.
I think you overestimate the ability for this to be detected. These aren't open source.
That is happening with or without this anti-cheat stuff, so what is the difference?
Hell, if you're using any browser extensions in firefox/chrome, you're effectively open to the same vulnerabilities. (which did in fact happen, somebody's Chrome dev account was hacked and malicious code was injected into the extension which affected all end users).
It doesn't prevent outside code (i.e. your cheat software) getting in.
As long as you control the computer running the sandbox, you can have it do whatever you want.