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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it.

Exactly. It disgusts me to my core, the audacity of these corporations.

> To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior.

Partially agree. This is especially relevant in skill-based games but I assume such statistics can be poisoned by cheaters over time, increasing false negatives. There are also game designs where bots are literally indistinguishable from sufficiently addicted players. Think anything with a reward schedule in the game design: MMORPGs with timed spawns, mobile games with timed rate limited gameplay. Especially the latter.

In the end, Linus Torvalds is right about security: if the word "trust" isn't involved, it's not security, it's masturbation. We should be playing games with friends who we trust instead of randoms from the internet.

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At an individual level, if a player goes from 1.3K/D avg over a sample and then it jumps to 8K/D over the same sample duration later, it’s pretty obvious.

Wall hacking and aim bot can be caught with behavior and statistics. Not in real-time but damn near.

People who play video games high or drunk shouldn't be punished when they're finally sober. :)

Which is why you sample an average. If you play high or drunk, it’s probably a pattern.

If only there was a way to teach computers to identify patterns based on a large dataset...

Not quite. I understand that's a piece but if you've ever tried to solve this problem it's not even close to being as easy as you make it out to be.

1. The stats you cited (k/d) is well within normal variance

2. It's not super common for cheaters to run around spinbotting/blatant wallhacking. I would actually say that's the minority.

3. Depending on the game, that would never happen because MMR just matches you up with people based on your new "skill" i.e. 2 games with 8K/d puts me in harder games and I go back down to something reasonable. Again, most cheaters don't continue to just dominate, those are the minority and get caught easily.

So it’s not as trivial as I make it sound, yes, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. People are working on just that. These things wouldn’t get you banned, but these are “early warnings” that you’re cheating and warrants further review of game footage (which most games store in the cloud now). It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science. AI behavior patterns combined with game footage review combined with a judiciary would cause one to be banned. The future of esports though is in closed edge networks with dedicated hosts. Provide them with the Internet cafe appliance. I just want to play some Counter-Strike. If I were to average my K/D over 1000 games I would get a pretty good statistical spread of how I play on certain maps. Granted theres a degree of variability depending on my mental state, but still a good enough sample to get an idea of how I play Dust II. Sudden and consistent outliers above norms would flag me for review. 2,3 kill cams and footage review would tell you that I’m cheating. Someone in Burma or Thailand could do that job until the AI is trained to spot aimbots, cough I’m sorry, “flick shots”.

Measuring inter-account variability in performance doesn't work for players who only play with cheats on that account

Damn smurfs, good point. I would be defenseless. In reality you would go with a multiple angle approach but you are certainly correct. Behavior modeling would suggest you’re the GOAT. 100% of the time.

My own stats in games have fluctuations more extreme than your example.

Some days I’m multitasking while I play games. Some days my mouse battery dies mid game. Some days I’m really sharp and I’m up against people who aren’t as good. Some days I’m not as good and I’m up against people who are really sharp.

Wild fluctuations are normal for a human casually playing games.

Diablo 3 ladder top 20 or so on Nintendo switch’s

You can see that gear is hacked items. Invalid stuff.

Nothing is ever done about it. Absurdly blatant, and discouraging.

I’ve made top 10 on hardcore at early portions of a new season before. But only before these regulars get online and instantly get to the top.

Yes. Obviously what happened is that the player is away - on holidays, in hospital, etc. - and their younger sibling uses the opportunity to play the game on their older sibling's machine. And the younger one is much better at this class of games.

That, or any other of many scenarios that go against the idea that an account is used by one and only one person.

Funny, you know what disgusts me to my core? Cheaters. Ruin their PC for all I care. Send em to prison.

Funny, that's exactly the kind of profound lack of empathy and awareness my ex-wife had. "Do anything you want to prisoners; there's absolutely NO WAY I can possibly imagine being in that position myself" (I find this particularly amusing since she did far more actually illegal stuff like drugs etc in college than I ever dreamed of; but these emotions are always outwardly oriented:).

The whole point of this thread is that these systems are not installed on cheaters in a targeted way. They are installed on everybody's computer. They make far far far more innocent gamers suffer than they punish cheaters. And we've seen time and again that these systems misidentify cheaters badly. Think of all the times your Norton of McAfee misidentified your bit torrent client or your open source utility or your own crypto mining software for malware, and multiply it by a thousand.

This is the real meat. Anti-cheat malware is installed on everyone’s machine. Guilty until proven uninstalled.

Fine, then propose and implement a viable alternative that effectively cuts out 99% of cheating in online games.

Or just don’t? If the game isn’t fun with cheating and the developers can’t do anything about it without malware just don’t play it

Everybody's PC is getting ruined, except the cheaters'

Hilarious. They're just people exercising their freedom. It's their computer, they can hook into the game's code if they want. I bet many of them are themselves hackers, worthy of respect. I bet many of them post here. When I was a kid I remember seeing people in forums who hacked games to make them harder because they played the shit out of it and were bored already.

These corporations? They are merely guests on our systems. Every single thing they think they can do? It's because we allow it. We allow their game to run at all. We refrain from modifying it. Everything they do, it's a privilege and we can revoke it. Ruin their PC? Good luck with that. If people care enough they'll reverse engineer your game and make their own version without all your bullshit.

"Hackers"? No. You are being "hilariously" ignorant about the current state of cheating in online games. The vast, vast majority of cheaters could be described most charitably as script kiddies, and even that is a stretch. They pay monthly subscription fees to cheat makers to get the ability to exercise their "freedom" to grief other players.

Whatever. I guess I never lurked in those circles. The real hackers used to shame them and run them out of forums. Maybe you shouldn't be playing with these skids at all instead of aksing for non-solutions that do nothing but normalize intrusive corporate malware.

I don't fault the skids either. As far as I'm concerned they have as much computer freedom as I do. The only solution is to whitelist the people you play with.

It’s a multi-million dollar business now. Make a cheat, add a paywall, charge people. Lookup “The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov” on YT [1] (nvm, here is link). This is an epidemic not some leet hacker proving he’s master over his domain. It’s kids and young adults paying Mr.X $9.99/mo to see thru walls and auto shoot your dome.

[1] https://youtu.be/p5LfGcDB7Ek

So what. It's literally just a game. Not important enough to sacrifice our freedoms and control for.

People kinda get attached to the media they play. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlIXK2L_180 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRmU91YJFo4

Competitive integrity is one of the things that makes competition fun.

If only false positives didn't occur.

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