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>I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it

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.

>climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious

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.

>Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious.

smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.

Once you start requiring external hardware setups like that, I think the barrier to entry for cheaters becomes high enough that they become far less prevalent.

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.

Very true. I wasted hundreds of hours doing this, if it takes an extra hour to do, cheating would drop overnight

People already pay hundred of dollars for cheats. I don't think it would make that much of a difference.

That's a small fraction of all cheaters. I was a dev of a free open source cheat and our download rates were insane.

Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that video game cheats are a billion dollar market.

To be honest I have completely given up on competitive fps games. The cheating situation has only gotten worse and I really don't see anti-cheat makers winning.

This is mostly where I am.

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.

I'm grave digging a bit with this reply... but I was around the same ages as you maybe a bit older at all those releases. The only satisfying time to play big name competitive PVP FPS is during Beta periods and the first few weeks after launch. However... I've found satisfaction for my FPS itch playing games like 'Squad' it's very niche I have my servers I subscribe to for a few dollars a month and sometimes on 'free weekends' we'll have 3-4 a night but admins ban them within a minute. Cheating is rarely a problem in niche harder to play / enjoy games but comes with a time commitment cost. I'd be embarrassed to say how many hours I have in that game but let's just say it's more than 500 hours in ~6 years.

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.

Play with friends only, like in good-o-days.

I wish I could reply to this with a rallying cry for you to keep trying. But it's true, every 14 year old kid with a keyboard can cheat in competitive now.

How does Stadia play a role in this? I don't play video games outside of Football Manager so not knowledgeable in the area but I recall reading about the competitive scene of one of these games moving over to the service due to the cheating.

I think it would kill the scene, Stadia is anti-performance, it's a video feed streamed over the internet, with all the problems associated with processing on a remote computer, the primary motivator for high refresh rate monitors and low latency input is FPS games I would assume, so going from sub 10ms end to end latency to a 40ms latency on a perfect connection, I just don't see it being accepted.

As an aside it's recommended to keep latency under 20ms to stop motion sickness in VR.

If only there were a way to play the single player parts of shooters without the intrusive anti-cheat...

Singlehandedly killed my desire in multiple games.

Developers can support this, if they want. Conan Exiles guides you to install the 3rd party anti-cheat, but you can opt out and play single player fine or even multiplayer on servers that allow it.

As a former CSGO player who would've said this previously... Valorant is impressively legit

As someone who was really into CSGO, I can tell you the cheating just gets more subtle.

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.

What about all the DMA radars? My buddy in Malta is making a ton of money selling them. It's not aim bot but full map knowledge can be very powerful.

>Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands.

doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?

At this point, I'm pretty sure any "human" pattern machines can find, other machines can fake. Simulating how a human would move a cursor towards a position definitely seems like something deep learning could approximate for cheap.

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.

Absolutely, it's a bezier curve with some random noise, I oversimplified.

> random noise

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

The hosts are so cheap they wont do a raycast from a player to an object to see if its in line of sight, they are not going to try and scan your input looking for randomness.

You're downplaying how genuinely hard it is to do server side stuff on a game with 60+ players, a lot of this stuff is O(n^2), and the bottle necks is network packet sizes as well where players will start to complain about packet loss because they play on WiFi connection with someone else who watches YouTube or Netflix.

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.

Its not _hard_ its $$$ expensive. You'll need bigger processors and more servers. I mean, I guess its _hard_ to choose what compromises to make, but not technically hard. Anyhow, I'm no expert.

The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.

Honestly think it's game consoles with keyboards and mice that are bound to proprietary crypto protocols, much like the anti-piracy that the current xbox has. Can't do video stream HID interception unless you make a robot, and you've just raised the barrier of entry so high to get rid of %99.9 of it. And in pro matches you can just watch them in person.

Unless you make a robot... Or you connect some wires to the sensors for the joystick.

The point of crypto locked controllers made by and for the manufacturer's console is that tampering will cause the device to refuse to run. Which leaves you at a robot to physically manipulate the device as I said. Since it doesn't have to be an standard like HDCP, this can be locked down pretty well like the xbox one is. [0]

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo

Congratulations on your fun project. Be careful about "literally impossible" though. If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you. If it isn't, there might be some statistical (in)consistency that's detectable with enough play.

>If it's truly identical to aiming by hand, it won't help you

Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)

What if some person or algorithm notices that you don't have those skills while walking or shooting at other body parts - only at heads? That's the kind of inconsistency I'm talking about. Or what if the nature of the mouse movements is consistently a little different between the AI and yourself?

Physical aimbots are a much fairer cheat than picking apart the render pipeline to see through walls. A good player can still beat them.

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.

Just out of curiosity, how does it fare with smokes?

Pretty well. It doesn't shoot through them, because it can't see through them. Sometimes it aims/shoots through them somewhat early before it dissipates completely, because rxn time is way faster than a human. But it's close enough to not be suspicious.