Comment by sas41 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sas41 | Hacker News Reader

Cheating in multiplayer games has become such a huge problem, it has destroyed trust across every major FPS.

I am a long time CS player, but I did briefly play one of the new CoD games, before they went crazy with Nicki Minaj skins and bong-guns.

A person was so convinced I was cheating, they started doing OSINT on me while still in a match, and they found my old UnKnOwNcHeAtS account as some kind of proof that I am cheating (that account was 12 years old by that point).

I abhor cheating, and I have a lot of interest in computer science, so of course I wanted to see how all of it works and did my research during my youth, taking care to never compromise the competitive integrity of the games I played, but if you look around, there is not a single game that I can recommend to people anymore.

Games like Escape From Tarkov are so busted, cheaters are stealing the barrels off people's guns and crashing their game/PC on command.

My beloved counter-strike's premier competitive game mode has a global leaderboard that acts as a cheat advertisement section within the game.

Games like Valorant are a cut above the rest on account of their massively invasive anti-cheat, but are nowhere near as clean as most fans claim, I mean, you could write a cheat for the game using nothing but AHK and reading the color of a pixel.

There is a whole industry of private matchmaking for counter-strike, built solely on the back of their anti-cheat and promises of pro-level play to the top players.

EDIT: I found the screenshot, it was MPGH not UnknownCheats, but yeah, they also had a game ban on their account.

We’re seeing a clear divide where both competitive gamers and hackers are retreating into their own ecosystems, away from public matchmaking. Public matchmaking has simply become too optimized/lucrative to sustain trust or meaningful competition. Private matchmaking and closed communities are thriving, raising the average skill ceiling in competitive. Similarly, hacking communities are evolving with easier forms of payment and distribution. The monetary aspects are huge. But most importantly, both cultures push each away. Your persona of someone who plays with integrity and crosses the competitive and hacker mentality is pretty much gone.

Escape From Tarkov was so busted, because first they've supported cheaters (one cheater, with bought cheat for a few $, made around $2k++ monthly boosting players etc.) when Tarkov dev banned them, they will easily rebuy new account. Easy money for both parties, win-win scenario.

Second, their code for networking was complete BS, they didn't even sanity-check player movement/location server-side and many more things. Ridiculous.

fwiw, cheating in CS(GO) taught me x86 RE and low-level programming way younger than is usual. sophomore year of high school.

I still recommend writing an HvH cheat to anyone that wants to get into proggin' -- you get a taste of both static and dynamic RE, memory-level programming, UI development, bare dxsdk (usually), a skid-saturated environment, sysadmin (if you try to set yourself up an uber1337 cheat page), and a bunch of other little things, all in an environment where you're quite directly competing with others in the same situation.

Most hackers in the space start out at the freshman year or middle school age, my dude. Was the case 20 years ago.

Usually by the time you are in working age people have outgrown the e-ego waving contest to be incentivized to cheat in an inconsequential video game*

*with some exceptions.

you're on a website called "Hacker News", man. you think the startup game is less of an "e-ego waving contest"?

it wasn't a brag or anything, i just don't know by what means i would've been introduced to that stuff other than game cheats. 15-year-old-me definitely did not care about crackmes or malware reversing.

i did start writing code in middle school, though. php, mostly :)

you sound like me, I was a little younger though ... aimbots, wallhacks, esp, textures, radar, it was all intriguing and I hated encountering cheaters in CS 1.4 and 1.5. I also began dabbling in writing bots around this time, as POD Bot was awesome!

php had also been a thing of mine, I spent many months in DALnet and EFnet #php. Primarily around the time of v3 prior to v4's big launch...

Did you end up releasing your bots?

i learnt a lot about virglrender, spice, opencv and ocr (and a bit of python but that was the easy part) by making a cv pokemmo bot

still, it ruined game for other players.

though personally I can't be that mad if you wrote cheats yourself, I will be a bit angry but impressed too ;)

The game I probably have the most hours in is Overwatch. In that time I've encountered not enough cheaters (at least those that are noticable enough) to say that they are even remotely a problem. I don't know what they are doing, but they don't use a kernel-mode anti-cheat (to my knowledge).

You simply don't notice since overwatch cheats tend to be very advanced. They also have a really strict system around reports and players actually use it.

EFT also uses kernel level anti-cheat “Easy Anti-Cheat” (as invasive as what valorant uses (vanguard)). Don’t know why ETF implementation sucks.

I’ve been on CS since 1.3, and i think their system is pretty good. Sure you get cheaters sometimes, but it’s not that bad, maybe I’ve been pretty lucky.

One difference between EAC and Vanguard is that the latter needs to be loaded on boot, so you need to reboot every time you want to play if you don't want to have it running all the time (which is a common use-case since it has a history of interfering with legitimate programs).

Remember having to install "Cheating-Death" to get on some CS 1.x servers? Always wondered what it even did to your computer.

Yes! Good times, probably.

EFT uses battleye. Most commercial anti cheats have had a kernel component for many years because cheaters moved there, anti cheats just followed them out of necessity. Valve VAC being one of the few exceptions, but its practically useless as an anti cheat. Vanguard is better because they designed the game with anti cheating in mind, not just slapping it on at the end as an afterthought. And it protects against certain cheats loaded at boot which other kernel based anti cheat don't protect against.

Unless you use multiple users on Windows a user space anticheat (or anything you run) can already read all your files and even memory of other processes (Windows provides an API for this), putting it in kernel adds the ability to do so for the other users. Invasiveness isn't really that good of an argument as normal software can already do so much.

around the year 2000, a friend of mine from school got banned from many large Half-Life servers because they claimed he was cheating. He was not, he was just that good. I swear even if you watched him playing you could have sworn he used an aim bot. The crosshair was almost permanently stuck to the other players' heads. But that's just how good he was. Shame that E-Sports wasn't a thing back then, he could have earned a fortune

> Cheating in multiplayer games has become such a huge problem, it has destroyed trust across every major FPS.

Is it because normal people are out of public competitive multiplayer so you're left with the cheaters and toxic hypercompetitives?

Personally I've quit when Starcraft 2 was new. Got tired of being called a stupid noob ... when I won.

Cheating is such a bummer in CS, even in casual matches. Luckily it’s usually pretty obvious and you can either kick the cheater or find a better lobby. Having friends on there has made finding good lobbies in general much easier

I disagree that cheating "has become" a huge problem, it was always a huge problem.

I can't remember a single multiplayer game that didn't have cheaters of some form or another. None. Zilch. Zero. It's kind of why I never grew beyond playing MMORPGs, and even that passion ultimately died out.

Back in the old days, before even xbox, online play was almost exclusively on computers on privately hosted servers, so you had mods actively banning anyone who gave any hint of cheating.

That doesn't refute my point, though; probably supports it, even. Private server owners went scorched earth in ye olde days because cheating was (and still is) a huge problem.

As a player it was just less annoying back in the dedicated server days, since cheaters were dealt with immediately. Nowadays you have to report them in most of the competitive games and then it can take anywhere from several hours to weeks before anything happens. It just feels like the protections have become more and more invasive, yet are still far behind the original community managed servers from back in the day.

If you are serious about CS and reach 10-15k elo, you could give Faceit/ESEA a chance - invasive, but essentially 100% cheat-free.

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