Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.
Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative.
However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run.
Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson?
I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
Sure, because they were also doping. Seriously though, I wouldn't say steroids make you _more skilled_, but they absolutely give a physical advantage over natural athletes. Which is why there aren't any top level natural athletes anymore except in very dedicated natural-only circles.
You're agreeing with me, I think, but in the form of an argument.
It's not really cheating anymore, since everyone does it now, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's not nothing either.
If you follow your logic and some how eliminate all outside advantage, then you may come to the conclusion that athletic competition is meaningless.
Following your logic of that’slife and genetics are part of natural life while steroids are so wrong, we should heavily focus on making sure advantages from consumption are curbed. No supplements, no high protein low calorie food. Limit medications and so on.
As genetics are a part of life, something I never disagreed with, and we all agree they are not equal in fairness, why are steroids of almost any kind frowned upon so strongly? But other life advantages or disadvantages are hand waved away?
Absolutely. One thing that I may not have made clear enough to people who have never played competitive online games is that it takes so much practice to master these games that your progression can't possibly go unnoticed, even in a large community. If you're good enough to take games off well-known good players, people will know you.
AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.)
Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected.
And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware.
I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately.
In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.
Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me.
The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear.
What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all).
There's some good information on how this system works here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is...
Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries.
A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]).
Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it.
(Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times)
My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).
I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't.
Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating.
Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc.
Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
This must’ve been early on in q3’s life, ‘keel/fb’ (bright green Keel) has been the preferred enemymodel for quite some time since it’s highly visible, has loud movement sounds, and fills out the hit box pretty well. I always assume my opponent forces fullbright Keel for my model too.
The entirely black skin was 3rd-party content, not an artifact from the official game. But yeah, no big deal either way.
Just picture this: a world of machines battling it out for supremacy, and somewhere off to the side there is an almost forgotten human brain. It seems to serve no discernible purpose, and yet it is actually the reason all the machines exist. What they are actually fighting to optimize, unbeknownst to them, is the dopamine release into a primate brain. Bonus points if the brain itself is a simulation :)
It should go without saying that this kind of activity destroys the interest in games affected by it. People don't like playing against superhuman enemies and having their progress impeded by it.
It doesn't make sense that it would be enjoyable to play except that you can enjoy making money or making other people feel bad.
Or accomplishment. Some people cheat just to accomplish something.
They cheat to gain the prestige of having accomplished it.
The sense of accomplishment comes from beating someone for many people. Cheats dont change that.
- You can cheat to finish a game and still enjoy the fact that you finished the parts that you didn't need to cheat by.
- You can figure out how to cheat the game (ie, hex editing) yourself, and get a sense of accomplishment from that.
It is entirely possible to both cheat at a game and have a sense of accomplishment related to that game. Just because it isn't something _you_ would do, doesn't mean it isn't true for others.
Personally, I spent days mapping out the save file for Bard's Tale back in the day and manipulating it to my heart's content. It was fun, and I enjoyed it.
Imagine the same scenario, but in a higher-stakes environment than playing a game. Let's imagine there is a "leetcode aug" that lets one instantly pattern-match a problem and pumps a perfect solution into one's brain. That doesn't have to be very sophisticated AI. But once this kind of augmentation is available, the pressure is on for everyone to get it, or for the tech to be banned, or for the evaluation criteria to change.
In some of the highest tier bodybuilding competitions, some people will be using steroids, and because that went unchecked and unspoken, now everyone has to or else they have no chance of competing. If you want to compete and you aren't using steroids, you will lose, so you have to start using them too.
In the game Warzone right now, at least some of the high-tier players are using hacks in competition or at least to get their "High kill game" viral videos on YouTube. So if you want to compete in that space, say make an even more impressive "high kill" game and take that crown, you have to start using hacks too.
The money on the line is bonkers too, as well as the ad-revenue from popular YouTube videos, you've got real competitions dropping 300k on online comps where it's incredibly easy to get away with cheating, so of course people will do it. Because some people do it, others will have to as well, and it goes unspoken because of all the money and prestige involved.
Because it's advantageous for the competitions holders themselves to be hosting the highest level of competition for the sport, if Warzone comps or these bodybuilding competitions had to admit that all their most popular and highest performing participants were frauds, it would be incredibly embarrassing (and unprofitable) for everyone, and so it stays unspoken.
However, cheating in single-player games is perfectly okay in my book.
When I'm cheating in a solo FPS or other game, I still enjoy the game. The cheating is a way to tackle some aspect of the game that I don't enjoy, while still enjoying the rest. I can actually put on god-mode and unlimited everything and still enjoy moving through the game and doing things. Even the battles can still be somewhat fun under those conditions, even knowing that I can't possibly fail.
So it doesn't surprise me that the rush of beating real people still exists even when you're having the computer do most or all of the work.
I don’t know if that is better than the alternative ending, but it’s something to think about.
I want to go to the sea and my car brings me there faster than I could if I walked. Actually, I'd never been at the sea if there were no machines (trains first).
But the train, the car, the AI are only tools. Not much different than a knife or its first ancestors, the flint shards.
The next problem is that cheaters may decide to cheat 100% in one match and 0% in the other until they hit human ranks again. You'd have to write the scoring algorithm in a way that weights performance within individual games higher than average performance over multiple games. If cheaters insist on fighting human players they must lower the performance of their cheats to a human level. This allows people to cheat up to any rank they want but from the perspective of other players the game is still fair.
EDIT: for example by pretending they are just crappy machines and they need a human to be really good at doing things
EDIT2: oh too much snow, I can't drive, please human help me out!
Of course, for now, cheats like the one featured in the article should be fairly easy to detect (at least from what I've seen in the linked video). The motion of the bot is extremely jerky; a simple rule-based system, or, if you want to be fancy, a neural network based anomaly detection system should be able to detect this.
On the side of the cheat authors, this could be easily circumvented if they include a "calibration phase", where user input trains a simple neural network to stochastically emulate the dynamics of the user's sensor-action loop. The cheat could then act slightly faster than the user, giving them an edge while still using their unique dynamics profile.
I wonder where this will lead eventually, and I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who pour their heart and soul into competitive gaming; I don't think that this kind of cheating is something that can and should (see above) be prevented in the long-run. The best possible outcome I can imagine is that online gaming becomes more cooperative or once more converges back to small groups of people who know and trust each other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
Edit: Spelling, grammar, and clarity
Valve has already been doing that for a few years: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
I never got 'detected' how would they? And some of my bots easily got more skills than I ever had
For regular online gaming, you can train a neural net to detect cheats like this, biased by the players score. If the cheat is introducing enough error for the player to be killable, its not ruining the experience for the rest of the players.
That only delays things since in the end you still need a human being to be able to play. So you can have a camera looking at the screen and a mouse/keyboard with some wires soldered to the key points.
The game makers probably enjoy a large advantage in size-of-dataset vs cheat makers.
People keep saying this but it happened 20 years ago. This reminds me of shit like the postal service requiring photo ID to receive a package and people complaining about NSA hundreds of years later. Now you need a phone to play a game and some of the most popular need literal photo ID checks. Imagine, sending your photo ID which if stolen people can steal your money, to a bunch of newgrads running a game studio. This is what people (kids and manchildren) accept to address the overstated problem of game cheating. I played thousands of hours of games for 20 years and the number of cheaters I ran into is around 10 or 20. Most players of games (including the ones who complain about "cheaters") do not even have a clue what a game cheat is. They think some guy has some cheat that only works in this weird scenario that happens 1/100 games. Yeah, can you guys stop making me need photo ID for to play some stupid game? This is no different than every obnoxious statist concern that gets addressed by some charlatan who purports to be saving the world by ruining everyone's day (almost any time I install or configure a game my day is ruined, imagine a typical dependency hell but 10x worse). And no, I haven't ran into little cheaters because of "sophisticated anticheat" (stuff like punkbuster is extremely incompetent), it's because public hacks simply get blacklisted once they become big enough to matter.
There is no sport and few other pre-computer competitive games that even approach this level of depth and complexity.
But speaking of playing the meta-game more than the game, I had a ton of fun making a "hero picker".
At the beginning of each match there's a mini-game where each of the ten players gets to choose their hero out of the available pool of 119. Some heroes combo well others on their own team, and others counter the enemy choices well. This leads to an explosion of possibilities, with something like 4e20 possible distinct combinations, so choosing well is... difficult.
I downloaded the outcome of 30 million games (just a few days' worth!) and tried a bunch of ML/AI algorithms to come up with an optimal hero picker: Given 'n' current picks, choose the best hero for the nest pick.
That produced high win rates but boring games: it just picked the overall strongest characters with very little variance.
I then tried to make it pick the hero with the highest differential win rate. That is, it would sometimes recommend a hero that would decrease your chance of winning, but increase your chance for that hero relative to other games. This would give the opportunity to play weak heroes in games that suited them best.
That was okay, but still not optimal, because it used the win rates from very bad players.
I then took my 30M games, and produced an automatic chess-style ranking for all players. I threw away all "weird" games and players only seen a few times, giving me a clean learning set of regular players with a known skill set. I then filtered it to my personal ID number +/- a 10% skill range (still millions of games!) and trained the ML on that, hoping to give optimal recommendations for my own skill set.
That was a good try, but it turned out that people in my skill range are terrible at the meta-game of picking heroes.
I then threw up my hands and simply had the ML train on the top 10% of players. That was amazing! It was like having the knowledge of the best players distilled into an AI. It recommended some amazing combos, and generally stopped recommending heroes that are strong in the mid-tier "pub" games but weak against skilled opponents. My skill went up, and I slowly climbed the ranks to about the top 20% or so.
Fun times, fun times...
On a more serious note, I'm sure something like this exists already. I wasn't even the first one to write a Dota picker, I got the idea from someone else's tool. I even saw one that could analyse the display and recognise the hero images to enter the existing picks automatically!
Even my little utility merely scratched the surface. It didn't handle the first few picks well, because the choices are not independent. Depending on the game mode chosen, each team can take turns picking. In the fully competitive variant of the game, players can even exclude ("ban") heroes from that individual match.
I only optimised mine for picking the last one or two heroes out of the ten players, because I either played solo or with one other friend. We'd pick last based on my tool's recommendations.
That alone was hard enough to program! Theoretically, it's a trivial probability problem. Just build a 10-d matrix of win rates, and then picking is trivial. Unfortunately, this is a huge amount of data, and impossible to train well. Reducing it to, say, the 3-d case of ally+ally+oppose and computing that over every combination in the current picks doesn't cover things like the support/lead roles well, so it over-recommends some heroes. Some heroes do well with short games, some with long. Some can reduce the game length, others can drag it out. Some are "greedy", consuming shared team resources, others are frugal. I ended up with a complex heuristic model that included all of these high-level traits in its combined recommendation plan.
Fundamentally, there's nowhere near enough data available for a full model, and the labels are super noisy, because even a good combo may only shift the win rate by 10 or 20 percent at best. You might see thousands of samples for some popular combination of strong heroes, but then you'd get a long tail of individually unique games.
I found a theoretical mathematical paper that covered this exact training scenario, and it basically concluded that this is an entirely new branch of probability theory that has been essentially unexplored. In other words: "Good luck with that, we couldn't solve it either!"
It's certainly a fun problem space to play with. There's tons of data, and you can immediately test the output yourself, personally. There's no end to the depth of it either! You can go to the n-th degree and even start recommending ideal hero builds (i.e.: which items to buy in-game), where each hero should be positioned, etc...
And I think even a human would struggle winning the character select mini game just with tabular data related to the players' win rates with those characters in previous matches. Learning about actual play styles of each playerand customising their play style with a given character would be a huge factor in them gaining an edge.
For example, let's say there is a player picking a slow but tanky character, but I happen to know the player who picked it often attempts a certain cheeky move to gain an advantage (like jungling early in the case of LoL, I really don't know much about Dota or LoL so you'll have to work with the metaphor here) and THAT cheeky technique is what increases their win rate. But then I know of a move that can be done by a certain character only in that specific cheeky scenario that will tip the scales and let me get a kill on them early, tipping the entire balance of the game early. As a pro player, that could be why I win with my selection, but the cheeky strategy also why the other guy often wins with his, even against other players who pick mine.
There's essentially a list of known play styles between different characters and optimal strategies to use with them against certain other characters. I think when you filtered to the top 10% of players, you essentiallly made sure a larger percent of those optimal play styles were the ones that generated the outcome data.
But still, if the player doesn't know what those in game strategies are, or their opponent doesnt know the ones they're "supposed" to be using, it'll throw off the value of making it the best selection.
In retrospect, a neural net would have likely been the best approach, but the (maximal!) noise in the training data would have made it difficult to train. I wanted a billion or more game outcome records to enable NN training, but the game stats API is very throttled and it would have taken months to get that much data. In that timeframe the game is often patched with new rules, which would invalidate the older data.
An interesting effect I noticed was that the pub games have all sorts of weird second-order effects.
E.g.: Some characters are unpopular because pub players play them ineffectively, and/or they're hard to play well because they're so niche, so few people get enough practice with them in the right kind of scenario.
Dota's Jakiro is a great example. It's a lumbering support hero with very slow spells and a glacial turn rate. It's like trying to do acrobatics with a jumbo jet. He's frustrating to play and when most people pick him, the effect on the overall win rate is about -15%, which is insanely bad for 1 out of 10 players in a game! My win rate with him was something like 25%, which is absolutely atrocious. That's "throwing the game" bad.
My picker app often recommended Jakiro when the enemy team had over-represented heroes that typically commit to a fight, such as Legion Commander or Axe. Those heroes are nailed to the ground in a fight and can't escape Jakiro's devastating-but-slow attacks.
I ended up playing Jakiro a lot, and eventually I got about a 55% overall win rate with him, which is an amazing swing if you think about it. It took practice though, figuring out how to best utilise him. If I had played him in random games, I never would have gotten anywhere. The picker app however made this possible, by providing these hints of when and how to use the hero.
In Warzone the map is huge, and 150 players are split up in to competing squads of 1-4 players. So it becomes very much an information heavy game. Knowing where people are, even when they're hundreds of meters away, is extremely valuable, and that's one of the hacks people have. They see nametags, hitboxes and information for players overlaid on their screen. They also change colour based on if they're in line-of-sight, so you can say "I see that squad, but they can't shoot at me, so I am safe" and that's extremely valuable.
Second to that, they can use aim-assist but the highest-end aimbots are really quite nuanced, and they allow you to smooth out the assisted movements and only auto-aim in specific scenarios, and that makes it really hard to tell they're using an aimbot. It just looks like a really good player. Gone are the "snap to head" aimbots of Counter Strike that were so obvious.
You can report someone all-day-long and they may never get banned because the hack software is competent, and it's hard to demark the difference between "Knowledge you shouldn't be able to have" and "Intuition of a good player".
It involved some weird Logitech mouse hacking for the control side of things and was overall really rough, especially with how much latency was involved.
With a normal USB capture device, the latency is around 50-100ms, so it’s hard to do lightning-fast reaction. Even more so if your view is moving at the same time. Everything that normal aimbots do by directly accessing the game’s memory suddenly becomes much harder when you don’t have memory access.
For anyone interested though, the computer vision models publicly available are both very good and also easy to fine-tune for a specific use case (e.g. a specific game).
[1] https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-l...
I remember over a decade ago doing something far less sophisticated to "cheat" in a turn-based projectile physics game --- I used a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram printed on transparency and just put it on the monitor to quickly calculate parameters between turns.
One of the people near me worked around that by taking a few shots down the sights and then sticking a blob of blue tack on his monitor where the shots hit, creating an instant targeting reticle available at all times.
Game developers should stop trying to police this and let the bots fight each other. The game becomes, who can tune their bots better. Train the bots for team work or more strategic level play.
In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy some co-op gaming against some easy bots, or play competitive matches against just friends and family.
If some random person on your server is no fun to play again, just kick them.
If you are really into the competitive gaming and want to take the games more seriously, I'd like to see players go meet other players face to face. Join a local league and play on hardware you don't own with other people watching. I used to love playing Quake down at the local internet cafe with a bunch of friends. We had a small 4v4 league going.
It's a bit of a chicken an egg problem.
I was amazed by this back then, there's probably better stuff by now: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-...
Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. Maybe frogmen will have their day or something.
The future of human violence at scale is fucking terrifying.
Edit:
Oh, and how could I forget. Our lovely fucking sword deploying hellfire missiles
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-story-of-americas-hellfire-...
This is where you insert the joke about studying the blade I think.
I disagree. The reason we still have millions of factory workers doing jobs a robot can do, is that the human is easily trained, and easily replaced, and very cheap to run. If the human breaks, you just replace it from the endless supply of other humans.
Infantry[1] is the same. Take a gun, learn how to shoot it, run at the enemy. If the solider dies, just replace it with another one from the endless supply of humans.
Robots on the other hand are very expensive to replace. Until we can auto-build Terminators[2] for less than the 'cost' of a human, robots will never replace people in low skill, high churn roles.
---
[1] I'm not talking about proper specialist soldiers here, just the barely-trained cannon fodder.
[2] ..and we all know how that turns out.
It will type it’s own source code (but better) into a hacked TPU/GPU/whatever cluster using a keyboard and vim, no problem.
I do wonder about the claim that it is undetectable though since a machine will be flawless where as even the best human players make mistakes.
There’s videos of a popular streamer called symphony or something where he’s shooting people through walls or sniping people when zoomed in that aren’t even visible. Then jokes “oh someone will call me a cheater”
In my vision every game creates a model of your behavior/capabilities (server-side). For example, in a fps game it could consider your reaction times, overshoot distance on quick movements, look-around frequency, movement patterns, etc..
When you reach certain level you must certify yourself. That is, you must go to an actual physical location and play in a controlled environment. If your behavior there matches your model you get certified for that level of play and can keep going. If you don't... you get banned. Of course the model would track your progress and ask/force you to re-certify as you keep improving/reach the limits of your current certification.
Would this eliminate all cheats? Probably not. However, since you can't play outside of the standard deviation of your controlled-environment capabilities, I would argue that it doesn't matter anymore. To a honest player a cheater would look like "a player having a good day" (which is something that happens and you need to deal with anyway) instead of looking like "a player with superhuman capabilities".
The problem with this approach is how to build such controlled-environment certification centers and procedures. This is a big task, but also a big opportunity. It is not that much different from examination centers that already exist in the learning/certification industry.
Furthermore, since gaming is such a huge market (and growing) and certification centers don't need to be tied to specific games (they can be a service that games hire and people pay for) the whole ordeal seems doable. So doable in fact that I could see myself investing in a startup having this goal.
To be in this business you need the companies making games to trust you. Otherwise your certifications are worth nothing.
Would you really risk your reputation (and hence your entire business) for peanuts? If you systematically certify people above their level or advertise in any way that you do you will get caught. If you don't you won't profit much from it, and will always be at risk.
I just don't see how this would be a significant issue.
The problem is preventing game state from being read. Part of this can be done by detecting DLL injections.
Sadly you will always be able to write a monitor that runs as root. After all, the kernel literally administrates the computer's memory. Of course it has read, and write, access. So in the worst case, cheaters will use custom "memory drivers".
I wonder how well would these pre-trained networks work in a real-life automated turret.
What I find depressing about this article is not the length people will go to cheat but that people are still interested in the same competitive FPS formula.
Someone had predicted this.