I hope they put some effort into anticheat on Linux for their own games. Team Fortress 2 has been barely playable for the past year because of cheaters running bots using widely available software which Valve seemingly can’t detect on Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or a GAN
They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
Random drivers are just too stupid/reckless.
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.
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.
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.