Question for people that build hacks: given how robust this open-source anti-cheat is, does building the cheat give more reward than playing the game? It seems like it would take a ton of hours to be effective..
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.
I believe there is also hardware cheats but I'm not sure how common those are. EDIT: See "DMA cheats" or "DMA cards"
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?
> 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.
“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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
Most of my users seem to agree that yes, it is more reward than just playing the game.
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.
Who says they're not?
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.