Gaming

Installing freaking rootkits on people's personal devices

If Valve is gonna do anything, I'd rather have them sandbox games from screwing with the environment, not the opposite. I'd like to be able to install random mods from Steam Workshop without worrying about whether some random modder might have malware attached to their mod that can compromise the whole system. I don't care if a malicious mod dicks up the save games for a particular game, but I'd rather know that it cannot go beyond that.

That doesn't solve the cheating problem, of course, but it's a case where anti-cheating efforts and security concerns are kind of at odds.

in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can't hide behind make-believe notions such as "they can't modify the client" – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games.

Sometimes, just for practical performance reasons, with realtime games, the client is gonna need access to data that would permit one to cheat. You can't do some game genres very well while keeping things on the server.

Consoles solve this by not letting you modify your computer. I think that if someone is set on playing a competitive game, that's probably the best route, as unenthusiastic as I am about closed systems. The console is just better-aimed at providing a level playing field. Same hardware, same performance, same input devices, can't modify the environment.

'Course, with single player games, all that goes out the window. If I want to modify the game however I want, I should be able to do so, as it doesn't hurt anyone else. I should be able to have macros or run an FPS in wireframe mode or whatever.

For PC competitive multiplayer, in theory, you could have some kind of trusted component for PCs (a "gaming card" or something) that has some memory and compute capability and stores the stuff that the host can't see. The host could put information that the untrusted code running on the host can't see on the card. It also lets anti-cheat code run on the card in a trusted environment with high-bandwidth and low-latency access to the host, so you can get, for example, mouse motion data at the host sampling rate for analysis. That'd be a partial solution.

Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.

Neither can a rootkit, which should be unconditionally illegal and send CEOs to jail for putting in their product. There are no exceptions and no scenarios where it can possibly be acceptable for a video game to access any operating system anywhere near that level. Every individual case should constitute felony hacking, with no possibility of "user consent" being a defense even if they do actually clearly and explicitly ask for "permission".

Server side anti cheat can't distinguish good players from aimbots.

I've been thinking about this, and I wonder how accurate this is. I think overuse of all this modern AI nonsense is a problem, but wonder if this might be a good use case for it.

A big game will probably have huge amounts of training data for both cheaters and non cheaters. An AI could probably pick up on small things like favouring the exact centre of the head or tracking through walls.

If a user has a few reports of aimbotting, just have this AI follow them for a bit and make a judgement.

It'll get it wrong sometimes, but that's why you also implement a whole appeals process with actual humans. Besides, client side anticheat systems also have a nasty habit of mistakenly banning people for having specific hardware/software configs.

However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms

Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn't profitable.

In case of CS2, it doesn’t even ban people who teleport behind you at the first second of the round. Or killing everyone through the whole map like here (Reddit): link

I made an anti-cheat for vanilla minecraft once, it's REALLY easy to tell if someone is cheating it's just developers are grotesquely incompetent when it comes to detecting that sort of thing or (more often) just don't give a shit. They'll just create a naïve solution then never test it. For example: minecraft's god awful anti-fly and anti-speedhack which is just "is the player in the air for 5 seconds" or "did the player go too fast" which is notorious for false positives and doesn't even stop people trying to cheat, just punishes players for its own fuck-ups.

It really is as simple as creating a model of what the player should be able to do, and then nudging clients towards that expected play. Normal players will not even notice (or will be pleased when it fixs a desync) but cheaters will get ENRAGED and try to cheat harder before eventually giving up. The point of a good anticheat is not to punish players for cheating, but to make it easier and more fun to play within the rules.

It's like piracy: We had years of systems built on punishment and all they do is create resentment and people trying to break your system, but you build a system on rehabilitation and you become one of the biggest platforms for PC gaming with people willingly downloading it.

how do you stop it on client side? I'm not sure if it has been deployed into the wild but these days computer vision is good enough to just work off the images. Capture image signal, fake usb mouse outputting movements calculated from image data. If this isn't already available it's only held back by the need for extra hardware.

I described a plan here: https://pawb.social/comment/4536772

Not perfect, but neither are rootkits.

I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.

I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.

You are either using hyperbole or you are lying. VAC is an incredibly good AC for CS. To have a cheater every other game is not possible unless your trust factor is in the basement/you are at 20k+ (which I doubt)/ or you are really low like <3k (most likely).

Game sense is a big thing in CS and it can be the reason for a lot of decisions that people make, which can be thought of as cheating. Go watch professional LAN tournaments of 1.6 especially on Nuke and see all the wall bangs that happen that's not wall hacks it's game sense.

While that's all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same... Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.

Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.

For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.

Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.

Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.

But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you're in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you're in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.

Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it's a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.

It's cat and mouse when it comes to banning, even with hwid signatures the cheaters are able to use sophisticated spoofing techniques. Also there are side effects like legitimate players buying second hand pcs that have been banned.

EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.

The problem is that for detection of identical programs, vac relies on program signatures. You could make slight changes to to program to change the signature and recompile it, or use something that changes the signature every time you compile it. That means even though those running the cheats are using essentially the same program sold to them by the same person, if one gets banned then VAC sees the other program and goes, "I've never seen this program in my life"

Other anti cheats will try to identify programs by their functionality (e.g modifying or reading memory of other programs) and using heuristics but that is both more invasive and requires higher level of privilege which many people aren't willing to give.

The other alternative valve is experimenting with is AI to detect aimbot, which could work in some instances, but is prone to false positives, and isn't able to as easily identify behavior such as walling