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Comment by mildmotive | Hacker News Reader

This kind of anti-cheat would contradict the idea of having control over your own computer. It also wont end there in terms of invasiveness.

Instead, they should focus on non-invasive mitigations such as:

- Server-side anti-cheat.

- Pay-once or subscription models to deter cheating.

- Allow gaming coffee shops to authenticate themselves and give their customers privileged access to competitive worlds/instances. Because it’s much harder to cheat at these coffee shops already.

- Shadow-ban repeat offenders or apply punishments without them realising that they’ve been detected.

- Use bulk-banning to avoid giving cheaters a fast feedback loop which would otherwise make them understand what works and what doesn’t.

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> This kind of anti-cheat would contradict the idea of having control over your own computer. It also wont end there in terms of invasiveness.

I don’t want another player in my game to have control over his own computer to aimbot. I can exit or uninstall Riot Vanguard if I want.

However, it does seem inevitable that any anti-cheat could be overridden with some kind of clever virtualization or an external device that views the screen and sends input either via USB or sleek RGB gamer aesthetic robot fingers.

Then, I suppose, we’ll have to go back to laser tag.

What you describe already exists, a CV driven cheat that uses mouse inputs / screen reading.

Would also work for League of Legends "auto-hit" or "aura" cheats that will automatically trigger an ability aimed perfectly if someone enters a radius around you.

However: This would possibly require a hardware peripheral and you could analyze the inputs a-la captchas.

Escape from Tarkov does all those things apart from coffee shops and shadow banning and still has a massive cheating problem.

Honestly, I’ve never heard of Escape from Tarkov before, let alone know how they’ve implemented their mitigations.

However, I do believe that we’re able to create an entire subfield within CS just to serve the purpose of implementing server-side anti-cheat if we wanted to. Games companies can implement rather sophisticated solutions to fight this issue more effectively while putting less emphasis on controlling every consumer’s computer. It’s all about what our values are.

Valve has the biggest implementation of this with VACNet, but it requires training data (manual reports and a volunteer jury from the community) and a lot of compute. Client side anti-cheat is much cheaper, and Vanguard is generally more reliable than VACNet.

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