And those aren't even cheaters using a full DMA module and separate PC which is nearly impossible to detect if done properly.
I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B)
It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all.
Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now.
It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.
As an aside it's recommended to keep latency under 20ms to stop motion sickness in VR.
Singlehandedly killed my desire in multiple games.
I was 4 when the first DOOM came out, 7 when Quake was released - I LOVE me some fps games.
But I don't find playing online fun anymore - The first 3 days are great, then you've ranked up a bit and start hitting the rampant cheating, and you realize it's just a waste of time sitting for 20 minutes in a game where some 12 year old (or much worse, some 30 year old) has just bought hacks to feel good.
To be honest - I actually blame the automated matchmaking systems more than anything else.
Give me the good ol' server lists back, where a real person is an admin, and you can make a group of friends. This monotonous, automated, matching bullshit sucks the soul out of most games. It's not fun anymore, it's designed to be a chore to prove that you're "better", with an intentionally game-ified rewards systems built to trigger gambling impulses.
Another good niche game with virtually non-existent cheating is Midair. It's mostly old-school FPS players reliving their Tribes days with good admins global banning the rare cheater.
Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. Draw enough attention and I think it's not unlikely someone would find evidence (not evidence of how your system works, but video proof that shows cheating).
And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected... then better players with more knowledge and game sense will consistently still win. You'd need to be a good player in the first place - which is actually where the danger lies. A pro player with an undetectable cheat they can toggle on momentarily, even just once a series at a crucial moment, could make all the difference.
I've given up relying on technical anti-cheat solutions for online games. If it is apparent someone is cheating by watching them play then that's enough for me (and I've seen some _very_ subtle cheaters get banned from leagues for the most minor of slip-ups.) The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
Hard agree here. There's always been people accusing semipros of cheating (see r/VacSucks for more) though, so unless it was pretty concrete, it wouldn't mean anything.
>And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected
It's not that the humanization is good, it's that the cheat is poorly designed enough to be only as good as a really good consistent human. Though you're right that it's not going to be the holy grail.
>The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
Hard agree as well. I've been hoping for online majors to be called off, but alas.
smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.
The goal of good anti-cheat should never be to eradicate it entirely, since that is obviously impossible. You just need to make it so the vast majority of players rarely encounter it.
Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)
doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?
I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected?
e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically
so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen
Apex legends does in fact do fully simulated bullet dropoff server side with temporal rewinding, and it doesn't stop hackers from just shooting you with 99% accuracy.
The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.
At that point the barrier to entry would be so annoying that online cheating will be reduced significantly, and pro tournaments will be done in person to let you prevent usage of robots. Also everyone will be using the same equipment probably provided by tournament organizers.
Naive aimbots will still have some artifacts (eg jumping to a new target as soon as the current one is occluded), but making an undetectable aimbot really doesn't seem hard, given the incentives involved.
I'm not saying I'm for any sort of cheat, including the built-in aim-assist for people who choose to play with a controller, but if I absolutely had to play against an unknown number of cheaters, I would prefer they were at least playing with the same deck as me.