That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.
Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human."
It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement.
Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
Or a GAN
They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
Only in the "do these movement patterns appear human-like or not" sense. These aim bots can use assistive devices to input mouse movements and there's no way to tell whether or not there's a human hand moving the mouse.
As far as performance improvements, oh it's going to make the cheat programmers even more money as they implement a skill ramp up period and get to charge more.
The only way in which I'm "gleeful" is that it might finally put an end to the spyware when we realize that controlling someone else's computer is a losing proposition. Otherwise yeah it does suck.
The YOLO stuff combined with softaim is going to be pretty hard to detect. The game can't tell if your video is going into the cheating device. Even if it can tell if there's a secondary input coming in for the trigger... people could just mod their mouse to take external input for the button. Someone pathetic enough to cheat absolutely would do this.
I honestly don't know how multiplayer will even work in a year's time or maybe even less!
It's easy, IMO: remove the incentives for cheating. If this is the only way forward, I might be more likely to actually participate in the industry, because it'll put the focus back on intrinsically-fun games, instead of treating games as merely a vehicle for chasing status/rankings/items/etc.
I stopped playing most modern games because they stopped being intrinsically fun. I'd like to enjoy them again.
The way to defeat cheating is giving users exaustive options to watch and monitor other players and report them effectively. Half the damn games dont even have this sorted out.
You have a report system that weights users honesty based on usefulness of previous reports - so people.who just report good players get downweighted and their reports count for less, then its just a statistics exercise. Combine this with easily identifiable data for things like headshot % to help highlight players for closer review.
You know, the Steam Deck might be good for that.
I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will all have much more important concerns than anything related to gaming.
For me this has always been the case. I've felt the same since the days of Kali. There's enough jagoffs running around in games to spoil playing with the normal people. To the jagoffs, they're playing the metagame of cheats/trolling and the game itself is incidental.
Random drivers are just too stupid/reckless.
Already long since passed that point for me quite a couple few years back.
Thankfully, it's not that hard to build up a little circle of gamer friends who are fun to play with these days. The messaging options alone currently available are many and featureful, making it dead easy to gather a little group and keep in contact with them to organize a game session any ol' time.
You're thinking of wallhacks or wallhacks+aimbot
Aimbots only aim at things you can see, it's one of their main features. That way you won't snap into someone's head through a wall which would make everyone know you're hacking and get you banned.
Also yes these were invented a long time ago because people got caught snapping through the wall when CS servers started recording demos.
Thanks to latency & the realities of the internet, the server has to bias towards sending data the client can't strictly see/hear at that exact moment, but potentially _could_ see if they move. Which is enough to give a wallhacker a meaningful advantage still.
But what you can't do anymore is see where all the enemies are going at the start of the round and run to the weaker part of the map or whatever. So reduced effectiveness, but still a thing.
BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)
I dunno … Mebbe you should run do that right now, before someone else does … Get that price down by around half and most every gamer everywhere can afford your shiny new "modern game genie"; Once everyone can cheat, the original cheaters have nowhere left to hide. They're on even footing with everyone else.
Cheater problem solved! ;)
The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars.
Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house.
In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices.
In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
I don't know about TF2, but for CSGO weapon skins & knives (and all drops) never come from gameplay wins. So there's no motivation at all to cheat for any monetary-related reason. Botting was a thing to farm for drops, but those literally just joined a server and spun in place to avoid being AFK kicked - that's it.
So CSGO cheating is purely about the human interaction components (eg, feeling good about winning, taking pleasure in making people angry, the thrill of getting away with it, etc...)
On the other hand, PUBG does have Battle Point rewards linked to performance. And there it is very common. Almost guaranteed to see a cheater every 10 matches or so. And there was an easy means to sell those rewards. Contrast that against Sea of Thieves. A game specifically about PvP and stealing loot from other players. I don't know that I have ever encountered a cheater there. But there is very little incentive to do so. There just isn't many vectors to turn virtual work into real world profit.
Seems to me that the lower the barrier of entry together with the higher the real world value of the rewards\drops gives you a clear scale of the cheat potential\incentive\effort. I think there will always be a small percentage of those doing it for the LULZ. You can combat that by raising the barrier to entry. F2P games seem to have a higher rate of these types.
When the reward system cultivates an environment ripe for abuse, it moves from occasionally annoying to game killing epidemic.
Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared:
> We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.
https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#har...
Modern cheats essentially can give a player inhuman reflexes. "See, aim, shoot" all mechanized, or even "see, dodge, aim, shoot". Some of them even use sound to locate other players, so it's "hear, dodge, turn, see, aim, shoot".
The cost of of infrastructure to reliably detect that on the server across thousands of players is a lot more than running some cheap process on the user's machine to look for other strange things going on (why does the user have two mice and only uses one to shoot?).
Valve is already using machine learning to analyze player mouse movements across all games to look for "inhuman" patterns and send those directly to the community-staffed manual review process called overwatch.
> I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality.
Let's say 1% of the population cheats. Maybe that's high (or low, but I could easily see 1% of the real world population having less than stellar morals w.r.t. cheating). So you play an online game with 20 people in it. That means on average one out of every 5 games there is a cheater in it.
That ruins the experience for you (and everyone in it). Not to mention now because there are so many legit cheaters, people start mistaking really talented players of cheating. Accusing them, starting back and forth arguments online which worsens the experience even if they're not cheating. This adds to the frequency of assumed cheating. Then one of those 20 people decides the way they'll fix it is they'll download a cheat a next time someone on the other team cheats then they'll start cheating too. And so they do, but sometimes they do it when someone is actually just good an not cheating and so they worsen the game.
Overall if you're a company, trying to run an online game you need a positive environment where people will want to return to play. Cheaters very quickly ruin the trust in a game, and that leads to real financial impact.
Specfiically, at about 7:50 into this, he talks about the propensity of encountering cheaters in CS:GO. The tl;dr is that in a 5v5 multiplayer game the percentage of cheaters required to ruin 9 other players' games at once is not high. It only takes 7% of people to cheater to encounter 1 every 2nd game, and a 2% cheating rate gets you a 20% cheater-encounter rate.
I'd also touch on the point that cheating ruins an online-only game. Like, it is the #1 way a game falls apart.
Take a look at a game like Escape from Tarkov, where a cheater will ruin a good block of time for a lot of people just by existing in one game. It's especially bad in that game because the distinction between 'being caught by someone in a position you didn't check' and 'being killed by a cheater' is so unclear, and the consequences of losing are so high (and thus losing to a cheater is so much worse). It creates an environment where the players have to be absolutely 100% confident cheating doesn't exist, or it will very quickly sour people to the game.
If this wasn't the case, and the server wouldn't send player positions until they were actually visible, players would pop out of thin air when turning corners or crossing doorways.
This leads to a different kind of disadvantage called "peeker's advantage", where the peeking player shows up later at the peeked player's screen... but this is generally accepted as a tradeoff. Players like their object persistence apparently :)
Latency isn't getting any better soon, and there will always be an impassable limit on link latency due to distance.
>Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.
>At the beginning of development, when we were talking about security goals for the project, the two things that came up over and over again were wallhacks and aimbots.
>League’s Fog of War system works because the game server withholds information about the positions of enemies until a client needs to display it. I knew if I could implement something like this for VALORANT we could solve the problem of wallhacks because there would be nothing for the wallhack to see. If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle. If we could pull it off, this seemed like the ideal solution - but we had no idea whether this would be feasible in Unreal Engine.
E.g. rocket league or online chess. No need to hide anything. Can't have wallhacks if there are no walls.
Also some types of cheats such as wall hacks can only be detected client side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU
They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.
You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world.
Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends.
There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago.
This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.
They're doing that too.
Fortunately, most cheaters don't know how or are not trying that hard to hide, and are identified by pattern recognition. It's not that big a problem in practice. It's still universally considered cheating.
Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible. It might not be feasible due to players on bad connections and hardware cost (in fact, the reason that games do so few checks serverside is hardware cost), but it's not something impossible anymore.
> I can't even think of a way that things like aimbots could be prevented server-side; it's hard enough just to detect them.
Pattern detection can, things like following enemy movements through walls or extreme precision. I agree that it's easier to check for running software on the client, but this is error prone as well and can also be defeated by a sophisticated enough hacker.
That's a fair point, and maybe we're closer than I think, but I don't think that fully-streamed games demonstrate that we're there yet. At the risk of sounding too elitist, those games aren't "hardcore". The things that streamed game players expect and will put up with are a far cry from the things that hardcore gamers expect.
A serious Counter-Strike player wants things to operate as close to the limits of human reaction time as possible. People can typically react (as in press a button) in response to visual stimuli in something like 150ms, and to audio stimuli in something like 50ms (I don't have good links for these, so don't hold me to the numbers; there are studies out there).
While this may seem like it's slow enough that processing and network delays don't matter too much, when you add those in, you're well into the territory of perceptable delays. Advanced/pro gamers (especially younger ones) are even faster. I don't know that it's possible for fully server-side systems to compensate for this. Anecdotally, I can't tell the difference between 20ms and 70ms latency while gaming (at least not now that I'm old), but I can tell the difference between 20ms and 120ms. If everything had to happen server side, I think it'd be noticeable.
I fully agree with you that game streaming platforms, as of now, are not usable for pro FPS players (or any players where tens of ms of latency are important). You're not elitist, that is the truth of it :-) But, if a developer would really want to, there would be options:
1. You could go for datacenters in all major cities. With this, you could probably get <10ms roundtrips for a lot of people. It would still be bad compared to local, but if you control the stack, you could easily get those ms back on other fronts. Bad keyboards and mice, for example, might add a lot of latency. Same for USB hubs and non-gaming monitors. If you supply your own optimized hardware you can easily save quite a few ms compared to a "normal" setup to counter out the network latency.
2. Stadia is the concept driven to its maximum - the client is just a video player, everything is done server-side. For cheat safety, this is actually not necessary - by just sending render instructions (i.e. which object is where), you can let the client do the actual rendering, with only culling being done server side. This would not only reduce the server hardware requirements, but also drastically reduce the required bandwidth (especially at 4K) and latency (since you can skip video en-/decoding and a bit of compression). If cheat safety is the only goal (instead of not requiring hardware, which game streaming optimizes for) this would probably be a superior solution.
Stadia (and NVidia Now and the other ones) prove that the technology is close enough that this would be doable, even though they themself optimize towards other things. However, the reality of it is that this would cost an insane amount of money and still not catch everyone [0]. Cheaters do cost games something, but as long as there are reasonably few (and they're kept out of tournaments), it's fine with developers. This is far cheaper to do with client side anti-cheat right now. So you are probably even right with the prediction that we won't see this for a long time - it's just not for a technological reason.
[0] You could do [Game Console of Choice] -> HDCP Stripper -> Cheat-PC w/ HDMI capture card -> Faked gaming mouse/keyboard via USB host -> [Game Console]. This setup works with everything available on the market right now and is virtually undetectable on the client and the server, at least without analyzing user behavior.
Aimhacking is still fully possible on Stadia. You have the problem here of even if the client only has visibility into what they strictly should, machine reaction time & precision is vastly superior to humans. So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
That's why I specifically quoted the part about the server being able to specify what is rendered client-side - this part is possible via game streaming.
> So aimhacks will always be viable, regardless of how little the client is trusted.
Fully agreed. In the end, the platform can only do pattern detection, but this is really, really hard to do. LAN tournaments where the hardware is fully controlled is really the only option where one can be reasonably sure that no cheating is going on, but it has happened even in these circumstances.