I'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.
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.