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Comment by rpgwaiter | Hacker News Reader

I’m big into competitive Call of Duty. On that game (and any other shooter that uses a controller), the biggest undetectable cheat is auto recoil adjust. People call it a “chronus” for the same reason people call it Kleenex. You download profiles for the gun you're using and it basically does the recoil pattern in reverse, turning every gun into a laser beam. It’s undetectable because it modifies inputs from a legit controller while appearing completely normal to the console/PC. No computer vision needed, and it’s destroying the integrity of the game.

In the future I kind of hope the handshake from controller<->console becomes a lot more robust, maybe working in a similar way to HDCP.

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I don't think it will work. Nothing can prohibit users from desolder the stick and putting a microprocessor with DAC in place of them.

Actually, those kinds of mod is frequently performed by gamers, because lots of people wants to replace analogue potentiometer with hall-effect sensor with microprocessor, which provides much more durability compared to the Alps potentiometer stick. (and no one likes to play with a drifting Dualsense or Joy-Con)

At the end of the day, as long as there is player input, cheaters always can simulate it/enchance it.

But the deeper your anticheat detection, the higher friction there is for cheater.

Having to get extra hardware/modify existing one is a huge leap in friction, and probably filters out an overwhelming majority of wannabe cheaters

your point about "chronus" or auto recoil adjust cheats is a perfect example of how cheats evolve to bypass detection. By modifying controller inputs at the hardware level, it’s nearly impossible for traditional anti-cheat software to identify such exploits. It shows that as long as there is an incentive, people will find creative ways to gain an advantage, often blurring the line between legitimate skill and unfair advantage. I think moving forward, a hybrid approach is essential—one that leverages both server-side logic to prevent information leaks and robust client-side monitoring that can detect anomalous behavior patterns. Perhaps more sophisticated machine learning models that analyze player behavior in real-time could help in distinguishing between legitimate skill and enhanced performance due to cheats. It's a constantly evolving battle, and staying one step ahead is always going to be a challenge.

Would love to hear more thoughts on how to effectively balance these aspects without compromising the player experience!

Cheating isn’t a binary thing , it’s a spectrum. The number of people who are willing to install a random script that they drop into a folder that lets them win every Br game is vastly higher than the number who will install a kernel level driver, which is more than will _pay for_ and keep updated with a kernel level driver. Currently, “expensive dedicated hardware that replaces the gaming mouse that I like using” is significantly less of a problem than “install rootkit”

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