Cheat behavior is obvious. Ridiculous long distance accuracy. Weird movement. Weird map awareness. Weird awareness of other players. Etc.
Behavioural anti-cheats are not the answer. Implementations are crap and under-developed, and I don’t blame them: you would need tremendous (server-sided) power to correctly process the models considering how complex multiplayer games are, and it just isn’t worth the investment and complexity to them.
It’s just cheaper to pay rootkit developers (like EAC or BattlEye) and knowingly infect client devices. Hell, their drivers are even WHQL signed by Microsoft. And when false positives hit? Just blame the anti-cheat vendor. Potential HR problem dodged.
[1] https://www.i3d.net/products/hosting/anti-cheat-software/
Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
Why use deep learning when so, so many bots (and their host accounts) could be blocked with trivial heuristics? My only guess is allowing spinbots/farming somehow provides a financial gain in CSGO?
Valve devs have a lot more leeway than your average developer. They honestly might have just thought it would be cooler.
Beyond that they now have the infrastructure to detect more subtle forms of cheating through deep learning using Overwatch (the reporting system, not the game) as ground truth data to train their AI.
If you play with lower ranked friends and do really good in matches you will get reported a lot which will tank your trust factor and almost guarantees it that will only see hackers from them on.
They say they use other factors like account metadata, but I have a 10 year old account, with purchased games and verified phone and still got "Low Trust Factor" after playing with friends and started to have an obvious hacker every other match.
That is why I am a former CSGO player
I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…
Cheaters quit after a while because the game loses its challenge, and people being cheated leave because the game.feela unfair, and eventually there's not much of a community left.
Besides, it's not just a matter of improving accuracy. Elite players are elite in multiple facets of the game. Movement, general awareness, map awareness, accuracy, etc. Many of these metrics are easy to measure.
Cheaters will show up as outliers and it is at that point that their accounts should be manually reviewed.
With casual gaming I really don't even care if someone is "cheating" to improve so long as I feel the game was fair. I can put a red dot on my screen to improve my aim, as an example.
This was impossible in Q3A (1998) without introducing an input lag thanks to client side prediction. Server also didn't send you updates on other clients that are too far away, behind a hill - you'd pretty much only receive positions of those you could see, hear or that could see you. In Warzone, you can see everyone on the map with a wallhack.
I really wonder why the game is designed this way. I guess it might be to limit required computation power of the servers? They still do stuff like hit detection, so server surely has some idea of the physics.
On top of all that, this stuff is possible even today, months or even years after such exploits being widely known. They do have a kernel-level AC driver, but they don't even seem to detect trivial hacks from the server-side.