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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today.

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.

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There's a form of cheating I've heard about a while back called softaim. Basically the cheating software doesn't aim for you, but it can tell if you're aiming at the person and pull the trigger for you.

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!

> 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.

It's easy, just destroy the entire esports industry?

It's an easy concept. A lot of people might not like it. But I would like it.

Just play the games you like then and stop commenting how other types of games that you don't even play need to change

Multiplayer FPS (PvP) games are my favorite - could you explain how they can remove the incentives therein? Almost the entire incentive behind PvP games is beating the other person in any given battle/arena/skirmish. Even if ranks/bonuses/items were detached from "skill", most of the incentive still remains for PvP. Having encountered a number of cheaters over the years, I know they still get joy out of winning the objective of the game with no obvious side benefit.

Often they get enjoyment from ruining other people’s fun, too.

I used to love playing multiplayer FPS games, without worrying about collecting rare items or my global ranking, because they were fun (e.g. Quake 3). Yeah there's still a "local" ranking (within a game), but the incentive to cheat is a lot lower since it's so localized. Yes people will still cheat, but some of these insane cheating methods won't be worth the effort.

I stopped playing most modern games because they stopped being intrinsically fun. I'd like to enjoy them again.

Some people will cheat in any multiplayer game, even when there are no persistent "rewards" for winning. They are just maladjusted losers who get off on being the center of attention at everybody else's expense.

Competitiveness is never going away its as human as breathing.

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.

I would hate playing a game like this.

Millions do play games like this. But if you don't want to, then just... Don't

I don't have insider info and it's been a long time since I've played, so I apologize if my info is wrong, but my understanding is Riot Games tried to do this with League of Legends and ended up implementing a kernel mode anti-cheat system instead. Presumably, the reporting system either wasn't very effective or it was too expensive to run.

Is that really a way forward for the people who play games most affected by cheating? I can’t imagine CS:GO players flocking to Animal Crossing just because there aren’t aimbots in that game.

I get there are a lot of people who care about that, and that "remove the incentives" might be unpalatable for them. But it's definitely desirable for me, because I don't enjoy chasing social statuses in a gaming universe.

bring back lans

You know, the Steam Deck might be good for that.

I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will be going back to game rooms, so you go to a place where you pay to sit in a fixed PC with no available USB ports or any way to use cheats, including cameras to catch anyone whose hands movements don't match his digital input, and there you play against other people in the same network/brand of game rooms (not necessarily the same physical location).

» "I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will be going back to game rooms" …

I bet at some point in the next 20 years we will all have much more important concerns than anything related to gaming.

Just some of us, meanwhile the wealthy ones will live in semi-closed environments free of most damage made by climate change and other environmental issues.

> There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today.

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.

There might be for now. You just have to train a second model that actually moves the cursor towards the target on normal player behaviour, eventually it becomes essentially perfect, and what then?

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.

> "It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know."

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.

> It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know.

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.

> Sounds like a scary arms-race

Or a GAN

Also, there is enough variance amongst human that eventually the generator network can actually slip under the noise floor and become 100% undetectable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018

And it's not working too well.

Yep. At least for simracing, it is only enjoyable with the same people race after race.

Random drivers are just too stupid/reckless.

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