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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Modern "anti-cheat" solutions are invasive rootkits. I have no interest in running that on my computer for that purpose. I wish they'd invest more in server side AI instead to handle this, but it's much easier for them to simply put more malware on the client side.

Some developers aren't even denying that it's nasty, but excuse it with "no one cares anyway" or "we already could snoop on you, so don't complain if we make it even worse" which is disgusting.

Example: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-...

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Cheats themselves are basically rootkits, and you can't beat a rootkit when you are running on top of it. Anti-cheat pretty much has to be like this.

Server side enforcement is not only heavy, but has much of the same problems as the client side. It's running on a layer even higher than the client side anti-cheat. How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim? Sure if they do something outright impossible you could ban them, but heuristic approaches are going to have problems with false positives as well as false negatives.

Server side doesn't violate user's system with rootkits. How to detect things with good level of correctness using server side AI is a good question. But it's a much better problem to solve than how to add even more privacy invasive malware on the user's system.

> How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim?

That's the point. I don't care. As long as the game is enjoyable. And I'm sure AI can be gradually trained to detect cheating in more sophisticated manner do differentiate non human from human patterns. Not a trivial issue, but something they should invest money in as above, instead of rootkits.

  14:22:01 *Shmerl has joined the game
  14:22:02 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:05 [AnotherTotallyHumanPlayer] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:07 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:07 DefinitelyNotAnAimbot is on a killing spree!
  14:22:10 *Shmerl has left the server

I already explained the idea above. Trade off of the server side AI detection is way better than client side rootkit idea. Neither is perfect, but the latter is outright disgusting and crooked.

This won't work very well for a free to play game.

not sure why you are downvoted. You speak the truth, and as usual get downvoted without a reply.

multiplayer game have the choices: a) ship game with malware/trojan to try to prevent cheats, or b) open up for cheats (even if client side only, like see trhu walls)

Most popular games chose option A (and still fail preventing both client side and remote hacks)

Another option is to develop server side AI that can detect some non human behavior or behavior patterns that are cheats. It's not full protection but for sure more appropriate than putting rootkits on the client side.

oh that can't backfire at all *sarcasm

here is another idea: proper ranking of player abilities! crazy right? something so simple should be a day-one feature right? that would put all the hackers together and they could even compete in their own hacking league... 100% of clients satisfied!

now think about game companies failing to put that single feature to work correctly, what changes do you think a AI that detect human behaviour have or working well in that space? :(

Or the server could hide the data from the client that the client shouldn't be able to act on until just before that data would be seen by the client. (obviously with a slight tolerance for sending a bit extra that clients might need if lag rubber-banding predicts it might be revealed)

That isn’t really enough... that wouldn’t stop aim bots, for example.

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