UltimateAntiCheat
github.com
github.com
While I have a massive disdain for anti-cheat enough that I've built hacks just so I can fix the games my employer pays me to fix, I'm not going to encourage developers to drop them if they truly think it's needed. But please, contact gpu manufactures and provide them the tools or builds needed to fix and debug your game.
I still like my idea for a third-party reputation service that has consequences for not just one game but every multiplayer game participating in the program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28634784
I really do think it would make cheating non-existent, and allow developers to focus on building cool games instead of building invasive & ineffective rootkits we have to install just to play games online fairly.
As someone who was super competitive about the games they played (reformed, no longer play), I can tell you online cheating is completely out of hand.
There are cheats nowadays that don't even require software to be on your computer. You just put up a camera on your screen and an AI bot helps you by manipulating your controller (e.g., aim) - it really is a cat and mouse game and I don't think the issue in general will be resolved anytime soon.
I know there is an entire industry built around gaming and custom PCs so this is a pipe dream, but I'd love it if instead of all the time and effort that goes into supporting these rigs, the business models for consoles were optimized such that consoles could be top of the line rigs with very strict upgrade paths. This is really the only way I can see us actually putting a dent into this problem
It would be a true "gaming pc" in the sense that it would really only be good for gaming with very restrictive hardware and software.
I can also get more then twice as many headshots if I plug in a mouse inplace of a controller when dose that become cheating for people wanting to play from the couch?
Not sure if any vendor verified hardware program can avoid lockin due to economics, but it would certainly be nice.
Would be great if they strictly enforced what versions of windows you were allowed to run.
I haven't paid much attention to that scene in a few years, but I'd be a bit surprised if things had advanced this far already. Do you have any names/links I might search about this?
So, essentially China's Social Credit Score, just for gaming... a bad idea IMHO, a really bad one.
For one, that centralized reputation service that actually has data linked back to government-issued credentials (ID cards, passports, ...) must be ridiculously secured, because it will be among the juiciest targets on the planet - be it trolls or deranged stalkers of either gender (although most tend to be male [3]), people are willing to go to ridiculous lengths to abuse fellow gamers, especially (large) streamers. Ordering pizza, SWATting, or even cases of rape and murder [1][2], all of that has happened. Give 4chan enough incentive and they will crack open anything. Or they'll just outright infiltrate the company, someone has to run it after all, and whoever has admin access, no matter the audits and internal controls, will find a way to exfiltrate stuff.
And even assuming the reputation service doesn't get hacked, the participant games are another target - this time, not for the data that's held by the reputation service, but for reporting "cheating" by the target person. Either technical bugs or infiltrating the customer service, both can yield results - game companies largely crap on code quality, even the biggest ones (remember Rockstar's GTA JSON bug lol), and customer service jobs are low paid and have high attrition, easy targets for infiltrators.
And then gamers themselves are also valid targets. Manage to get a piece of malware onto a streamer's computer that gets detected as a cheat, boom. And that's easy to do, RCE vulnerabilities crop up every now and then for major games (Minecraft for example had BleedingPipe and log4j, GTA had one in 2024 and in 2023).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/11/us/podcast-husband-killed...
[2] https://thelmaarose.wixsite.com/whattaweek/post/a-female-gam...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitch-streamers-are-being-s...
We only really replace shaders to fix issues that the game devs won't fix, and only then when the game isn't updated very often since it has a high chance of breaking our patches. On top of that I don't believe there is a good way to pull the information back from the driver in a reliable way, so it would be very hard to rely on any information that comes back from the driver.
1) We're dependent on external tools for capturing and debugging shaders, most of which are detected as debuggers by anti-cheat and will kill the process before we even have a chance of reproducing the issue.
2) The other thing is driver signing, our solution use to be just production sign drivers and test with those, but Microsoft didn't like that we could sign as many drivers/dll as we wanted every single day. So they limited us to X per day and told us to use Test Signing which anti-cheat still detects and blocks. We have other methods too, but they're all slowly being detected by anti-cheats.
When I've only got an hour or two to game and my gaming friends can only get everyone together once a week, it's crushing to have a good game ruined by cheaters.
Hopefully gamedevs can work with people like you to fix bugs. However, leaving anti-cheat out of multiplayer games is a complete non-starter in today's environment. Even if anti-cheat only slows the cheat devs down and turns into a game of whack-a-mole with cheats, it's still preferable to having every game get crushed by cheaters every time you play.
Does that simpler social approach not work anymore?
Yes, but the bots have to play on the official servers to get random drops of collectible hats. These items can be sold for a lot of money
This started about 5 years ago and continues today. They aimbot, spam both voice and textchat, dodge bullets, can fly, and hijack any vote to ensure their continued survival. If you can't get an invite to a private lobby you may as well play a different game. Either one that has anticheat or something singleplayer. If there was a silver bullet that made online play nice and respected your computer, someone would have shot it by now.
Who says they're not?
Proper "cheating" is not about wreaking havoc. Although there are plenty of weird people who do weird things - but cheats are not a problem, they just enable those weirdos to do weird things.
It's just automation, all about offloading work to a machine - a principle that the whole human civilization is built upon. And developing an aid that actually helps you to improve is - surely - a personally gratifying experience. If someone has difficulties doing something the "intended" way, but can think of and implement an alternative approach to achieve the same effect - that's just humans being humans, it's as fair as life can be.
After typing that I realize this is like coming to understand just how many people are on steroids to get a physique they want. It's like nah no one takes steroids except EVERY HUGE PERSON you've ever seen, barring the extremely rare genetic outliers.
Fascinating.
I believe there is also hardware cheats but I'm not sure how common those are. EDIT: See "DMA cheats" or "DMA cards"
Several hundred hours of my "the finals" experience have been helped by this :)
You’re also going to never be able to have a professional relationship with an athlete or gamer ever again. People who have dumped thousands of hours practicing to get good at something, and you’re proud of cheating them and people like them?
Enjoy your s3 emerald skins. I’ve reported your accounts to embark.
Just as a hypothetical situation - what if one had built a similar tool on their own, or used this as a foundation but trained a new model? Does it count, or are we denying this as a personal growth and limiting it strictly to playing exactly by the book?
Alternatively... What if someone has a physical condition that limits their manual dexterity? Is it different from having a physical condition that limits their eyesight and have to wear glasses?
I'm trying to draw a line. Or challenge the status quo where the existing line is drawn.
Have we, really?
In the professional sports there's WADA and similar agencies, that, obviously, have to push this idea really hard (and make everyone believe that everyone else thinks so, because this is how you do it in modern times). But that's because that's what's literally keeping them afloat. But they're already struggling, trying to figure out what to do those gender-to-chemicals mismatches. And as sciences and societies evolve, I suspect it's only going to get more interesting, and I have this hunch that this status quo has cracks in its foundation and will likely shatter in the future.
They also have to make sure that athletes are safe enough and don't just wreck themselves - which makes things a quite bit different. Unless we count risks of issues in some people with predisposition to toxicity, that is associated with cheat use /s (no love for those folks).
But back to the "have we" question - do people actually care about all this stuff in non-professional sports when played recreationally? (Just like video games.) I really doubt so. People just try to balance around it, fixing the matchmaking rather than players.
But - you certainly have a point - I would suggest to exclude professional scene entirely and narrow the scope strictly to recreational gaming. Pro sports and e-sports are more controversial.
To get to the point, I think this is why less people seem to care in non professional sports if some random guy who is on performance enhancers shows up to your amateur soccer match or pick up basketball game. The gap at the amateur level between a clean amateur and cheating amateur is not so large and certainly overcomable if the clean amateur has more training.
People absolutely care, because a cheater in a lobby will ruin the experience for a dozen or more people and ultimately waste their time, taking it away from their lives.
The cheater is doing it willingly and knowingly and with a full intent to cause harm - take away someone’s time which is really the only thing we have. Cheaters shiho absolutely be punished beyond just video games, not sure how exactly though (I wouldn’t trust state nor mob with that task for sure)
A non-roided pro can still sometimes somehow beat a roided pro.
With videogames there is zero chance you can actually beat a cheater. Maybe you can score a lucky point / frag against him/her once in 100 instances, but actually beat him?
Imagine idk Mike Tyson in his prime comes up against an underdog and the underdog can teleport or has a perfect reaction time of a standard auto-aim cheat?
A few years ago, I used to play EFT with friends after work and putting my kids to bed quite frequently. For a group of friends living quite far apart it was one of our favorite gaming experiences as a group. But our feeling on it soured as the game was slowly but surely taken over by large amounts of cheaters in every single match we played. The developers weren't able to deal with it at all and eventually we all quit playing. There's nothing that takes the wind of your sails in gaming like sitting down to unwind for the hour or two a week of free time with your friends and just being completely unable to enjoy that time because a significant portion of the lobby is made up of selfish cheaters. I can remain friends with someone who cheats in a multiplayer game but I never play with them after finding out they did so. I don't hesitate to report accounts. There's no benefit to you as a player keeping them around unless you're somehow making money off cheat sales.
But in general I'm not upset with cheaters anyway. People are always going to push boundaries. It's a fact of life.
I also believe that most cheats, at least the more invasive ones, are only possible because the game was poorly designed, without cheating in mind. Instead most game companies seem to just slap a commercial anticheat product on top and hope for the best.
I do agree that developers should put more effort into thinking about proper design and anticheat protections. But it's also a huge ask for smaller or more inexperienced studios when they have to waste time dealing with bad actors that could have been better spent on game development, and an excuse for antisocial cheaters to keep behaving poorly. People want to assume the best out of each other. In an ideal world, people who can't keep themselves from making their hobby that of making others miserable for pleasure would be the ones being punished instead of laying the blame on those naive enough to assume that everyone is good natured and cooperative.
Glad to see that my comment caused quite the shit storm though.
Despicable rather
> Razer and Wooting’s SOCD features both let players automate switching strafe directions without having to learn the skill. Normally, to switch strafe directions in a first-person shooter, you have to fully release one key before pressing the other. If both are pressed, they cancel each other, and you stand there for a moment until you release one of the keys. SOCD means you don’t need to release a key and you can rapidly tap the A or D key to counter-strafe with little to no effort. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224261/valve-counter-st...
Also seems impossible to ban given the ubiquity of custom keyboards running something like QMK. Those run user code and could send a fake vendor id to the host.
With a regular keyboard its very possible for a person to not release one key before pressing the other in a tense situation when they have less than 1 second to react. For example even a professional baseball player making millions of dollars can drop a routine fly ball.
Specifically, if I'm holding A (moving right) then I press D (move left), in most games in I would stop since I now have both keys down. These keyboards automatically raise the A key even if you're still holding it, allowing an immediate swap of momentum.
They just allow you to set them up such that when you start strafing (ie moving) in an opposite direction by pushing an opposing key (ie you're holding down "move right" -> "d", but now start holding down "move left" -> "a") that there is no overlap between the "d" and "a" being held down, as some games (CS) punish having both down at the same time. Valves idea is that minimising the time gap as you switch directions, while never having the two keys overlap as pressed, is an important learned skill that novices should not be able to do as cleanly as pros, and have said that keyboards that support this seamless transition will be banned.
“Report last key that was activated” means that rapidly switching/alternating between, say, A and D to switch movement directions is a matter of just pressing the next key instead of coordinating the lifting of the other key.
AFAIK this has existed as an autohotkey script for a long time, but it’s so simple a legitimate hardware implementation detail can be another vector, and wouldn’t fit in the “unauthorized software” definition of cheating so needed a separate callout.
What is meant are PCIe hardware devices that can use DMA to read and write data without being detected by software processes at all.
They've been around for quite a while (5+ years?), but I doubt they'll ever get mainstream adoption.
They're also used in malware analysis at times.
Seems like removing an opportunity for cheating is a better strategy for game design than policing cheating.
Balancing a game doesn't depending on specific challenges, just ensuring there are enough challenges.
Or as a non-avid gamer, am I missing something?
My buddy and I were actually just discussing ring 0 anti cheat circumvention and we started researching these units. Our guess is that the hardware slightly changes every iteration with updated firmware to circumvent general heuristics like HWID.
I wonder if there are software dev counter-parts that would build cheats just to soft-brick cheaters PCs...
Its a constant arms race, at least until the AC devs bow out.
There is no 100% perfect solution. There are tons of ways to circumvent anti-cheats using a second computer as well.
Gaming companies care far more about these kind of hacks, but frequently lump them into the "cheating" category for better optics.
Bad games don't deserve your time any more than they deserve your money.
> A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means.
Absolutely! At least for the kind of people who like cracking games. Think of it as a puzzle game.
Being able to play the game as a cheater is like getting the final weapon in a game where it requires completing the most challenging part. You have fun for a bit, destroying everything in your path, that's your reward, but you quickly lose interest as you have nothing interesting left to do.
Most of my users seem to agree that yes, it is more reward than just playing the game.
Even in something like an FPS, if player movements or action patterns could be compared to normal patterns, it would be incredibly obvious who is cheating regardless of HOW the player managed to cheat.
Even something as elaborate as a full AI-powered robot that physically hit the keys could be detected when it made a move that was not within the patterns of human players.
Of course, the cat and mouse game then becomes more about the cheat algorithms learning to act more human to avoid detection, but they have a long way to go. Plus, each time they have to adjust and become more human, the less and less of an advantage the cheater has!
No, like, literally.
Anti-cheat needs to be more or less a kernel level remote code executor.
Maybe it's time to just give up on PC gaming and use dedicated game consoles instead, which are locked down by design? The only real alternative seems to be running a cryptographically-verified known-good OS signed by one of the big three OS companies, which is also locked down enough such that cheating becomes impossible, or installing what is essentially kernel-level malware, just to play the latest games.
Modern games all have 10GiB+ updated constantly that you're not disassembling.
What's the difference?
I don't think this is possible on Windows without administrator. It certainly shouldn't be, if it is.
But anyway, the fact that any userspace software can read all your personal files without any user confirmation as soon as you double-click on it is not a good thing, and as I said, all desktop operating systems are attempting to address this problem in some way, including Windows. I imagine the normalization of rootkit-style anticheat has become a pain point for the security team at Microsoft.
But I was asking why people believe that they're safe from userspace software they install as that can read all the files and memory of processes of your user anyway.
You can monitor every userspace software. You can't monitor drivers.
Most people would say there is a clear difference in security there.
It’s super problematic from a security perspective.
That being said, I’ve played competitive FPS games my entire life, and valorant is the only game I’ve never ran into a cheater in. So it works, and I’ll say, it should be a hard requirement going forward for the anti-cheat to be a core part of the game architecture. A game getting popular enough to attract cheat developers to make an sdk for a game isn’t “suffering from success.” It’s a death sentence for the game. There are popular streamers and YouTube content creators out there that go through extreme lengths to avoid cheaters, but in the end they always just stop playing the games.
Not that it matters that much for data privacy if you game on the same user anyway as userspace anticheat can access all your users data.
In a video game, different interpretations will give different people different, unfair, advantages. There is an "agreed upon" representation from the developer of the game that's supposed to be "fair" for everyone. Displaying audible ques as visual ques is a "cheat". Highlighting a piece of information or an object is a "cheat". Auto-interpreting information you're supposed to parse yourself is a "cheat". Not every cheat is God-Mode breaking-the-physics-of-the-game cheat. Plenty of cheats are just about having a slight edge over others.
For example, your game has a minimap. Part of the "gameplay" is that you scan the minimap every X seconds to check if something is approaching. It's a situational awareness skill that some will be better at than others. A flashing red map when something approaches would give you an edge. Or the server is sending spacial audio information about where a sound is coming from. It's an auditory skill that you develop and some will be better at it than others. An arrow on the screen pointing to where the audio is coming from would defeat that part of the game. Being able to see a moving shadow in the distance, or when to break/turn in a racing game, or an odds-calculator/card-counter in a cards game, a parry/counter attack indicator in a fighting game, etc are all "skills" that you are expected to develop to become "good" at this game. They are what make these games fun/rewarding for people. Having tools to help you with these tasks would be considered "cheats" in these games.
At the end of the day, there are "cheats" that no software can catch. Having a friend sit next to you who just watches the minimap, or who calculates stuff for you, or watch a different part of the screen for you are all "cheats" that no software can catch.
Obviously there is some stuff to be done to limit the "exploit-ability" of the information. Don't have the server send information that the client doesn't need like the location of all players all the time. Have the server reject invalid moves, like a player flying when there is no flying mechanics/ability for that player. But at the end of the day, the minimal amount of information needed to play the game can be exploited by someone if they find a different way to represent it to themselves that gives them an unfair advantage.