I'm curious about what data the "cheats" were reading and how it gave them an advantage
* A flag on each CDOTA_Unit which includes heroes for example CDOTA_Unit_Hero_Weaver has a called m_iTaggedAsVisibleByTeam which allows you to tell which teams this entity is visible to, so you can tell if the enemy can see you or not.
* Particles (which affect things like Town Portal scrolls, Smoke of Deceit, attacking neutral camps, etc). There are some things that happen in the game that need to be sent to all clients (even if it's happening in the fog of war for this client), otherwise things would look weird if you were to suddenly get vision of these areas. There's a great explanation by one of the Valve Dota devs on this exact topic and why it's hard to solve: https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/uywfxi/comment/ia85u...
* Some other cheat modules are able to see spells cast, so they can track cooldowns of spells (with indicators above each hero). They can also track cooldowns of specific events: when a player uses buyback there is a cooldown before they can buyback again, when Roshan is killed his respawn time is randomly decided within two bounds so you want to track those bounds.
- Tell you where the enemy is during TP. This is really useful for, for instance, Zeus, who has a stun (stops TP) that can be placed anywhere on the map.
- Show you where enemy has vision, which makes de-ward a trivial task, and therefore makes sure the enemy has basically no vision.
- Instant skill casting when an enemy comes into vision. Useful for heroes with instant stuns/silence, makes them be impossible to be jumped, basically an impeccable counter-initiate, but not always an advantage when initiating.
This phrase makes me feel old, haha. No idea what it means.
As a programmer with no game dev experience what are the most common technical mechanisms used for cheating? Are they modifying outgoing network traffic on the fly or something like that?
Let's translate to the more commonly understood First Person Shooters. In a FPS, you don't know if someone is hiding behind a door. But with cheats on, the cheat program could be reading game data and know that someone is behind a door. It could highlight that person on your screen in a red color, that way you can see them even tho they are hidden.
It could also move your mouse cursor automatically for you so you get an easy headshot without even trying to aim.
Neither of these involve modifying outgoing network traffic.
- Reading from and writing to memory (either by direct means provided by windows, by custom drivers, or by exploiting installed vulnerable drivers to bypass secure boot and such)
- Reading network traffic (particularly nasty because it can be done on a device where the game and Anti-Cheat is NOT running provided you get access to SSL decryption keys)
- Having an external device react to your video feed only (either "dumb" aka on colors, pixels shapes etc. or fancy with AI and stuff) and then react by a "faked" input device (mouse, controller, etc).
- Modifying game files (e.g. replace texture walls with transparent textures)
- The very easy way: Simply exploiting game bugs. E.g. you can cheat in Fifa on console (!) since years by doing stuff in the system menu. Fifa will just disconnect the game without giving you a loss for the match.
For example - VR mods for older games give me great pleasure and a ban because they used internal hooks would make me very angry.
1. Self hosted servers. Let communities do their own moderation.
2. As part of #1, cheating/sandbox lobbies.
I must be honest, I don't particularly care about competitive multiplayer but I do hate cheats and griefers.
But I don't like overly broad bans based on flawed heuristics either. Or restrictions on software that I "own" and want to use in sensible ways.