We Can't Stop Cheating

[@Konigreich]

A problem with the "Monitoring then sending an always okay signal" thing is that they're just gonna highjack that signal to be always "Okay" and not have to use the hardware monitoring at all.

[@andrewcook_]

Super easy to network hijack, definitely agree. The only way to stop cheating is to community ban cheaters.

[@SourceMaster]

It could be easily remedied with a rolling code, like a car key fob.

[@PuntiS]

@@SourceMaster Then you're increasing the packet overhead. But that's irrelevant, since the hypothesis scenario is not reasonable to begin with. Would you really pay way more than usual to use hardware/software as would an inmate? There are just so many cheating "vectors" that even such a restrictive solution wouldn't be effective. Just have a different computer sniff the connection and ping into your ear whenever an enemy got close enough. How do you detect/counter that?

[@adriansrealm]

@@SourceMasterBut you can still decompile and figure out how the rolling code is calculated.

[@Bluscream]

@@SourceMaster current anticheat implementations like battleye always use a lot of encryption and signatures, it can all be emulated/spoofed at some point.

[@Necropheliac]

We used to have the very best anti-cheating solution. It was called PRIVATE SERVERS. They were run, paid for and moderated by people who actually played the game and paid attention to what was happening on the server. When you found good servers, you stayed there and had a good time because the server operators kicked cheaters out of the server. The reason we lost this was pure greed. Now game developers are constantly chasing their tails, with bad solutions, and failing to fix a problem that they essentially created by taking away private servers.

[@sbdnsngdsnsns31312]

Exactly. This is why I refuse to use the kernel anti-cheats. I am not going to subsidize the game publishers short-sighted decisions by making my computer more vulnerable to hackers. These companies get hacked constantly and we’re supposed to trust them with rootkits on our computers? The companies looked at community servers and just saw the potential income, ignoring the cost in volunteer hours of moderation and the ability for players to vote with their feet. Then, they try to make players install root kits rather than actually pay the cost to deliver the same quality of service we had with private servers.

[@omster_]

nostalgic take that doesnt apply to the modern gaming market

[@Necropheliac]

@@omster_ you’re wrong. There is no reason game developers could not license the server side software to the general public, and patch their clients to select a server IP. If they did, people would use it. There are still games that run private servers, like TF2, which still has active players having a lot of fun. Modern PC gamers will use private servers if game devs have the good sense to bring them back.

[@omster_]

​@@NecropheliacThe ability to host servers on a Game Browser should be mandatory by developers in case of the game's death, but in the case of a popular game, they can only run alongside a modern matchmaking service, they only work on a smaller scale. It isn't sustainable nor reliable to hope that nice weirdos continue to host servers out of the kindness of their hearts. Not only that, navigating and choosing a server in a browser can be a pain in the ass especially to an average user, as opposed to the simple usability of clicking a button and doing something else as the matchmaker finds you a dev-hosted game that wont be hosted by some powerhungry admin, a server with weird rules, a server that requires a subscription

[@combatwombat594]

Yeah, as someone who runs private servers for my little community, I have to say, we can tell if a random is cheating real fuckin quick like lol And then anyone with the power to do so, immediately bans that person, and they don't come back. Problem solved lol

[@judgywudgy]

The best anticheat is side-by-side multiplayer

[@sahtora.]

have u never watched on each others monitor?

[@zexal4974]

until they have aimbot in their mouse

[@eddythefool]

I mean, there was a tournament where they found one of the contestants had super hidden cheat software installed that was invisible on screen.

[@jarnobot]

@@slicqidden5891 That's cool! What games do you and your friends play on them?

[@newyorkcityabductschild]

@judgywudgy, that would involve being social, we know gamers are not social haha

[@TuringHopper]

People are already using AR glasses to display things like radar hacks.

[@Phantomdude]

That's like a cool gimmick at best, no better and more expensive than just using a second monitor. people can obviously see the wallhacks on the glass on your glasses

[@Psyden5757]

Yeah what's more actually dangerous in competitive settings like in a tournament is a cheat where you have airpods on and the earbuds beep when in close proximity to an enemy (saw this in a video, pretty f'ed up)

[@Uryendel]

you can just use a capture card and have a secondary PC control your mouse for auto-aim, it's not detectable

[@EikottXD]

​@@Psyden5757why wouldn't you just have your normal headphones beep. That sounds stupid.

[@samconroyy]

@@Phantomdude It's early days, imagine syncing to your game. Right now you just get a radar minimap, but imagine robocop style for gaming, being able to see through walls live, untraceable due to it being on separate hardware.

[@EyesOfByes]

It's like doping in sports, it's an inifinite cat&mouse race

[@AB-80X]

At least in pro sports, you still need to be uniquely talented at what you do, and you need to make a top level effort. In gaming, it's for many just a question of instant gratification and no desire to put in an effort.

[@IvanSal778]

​@AB-80X yeah I was about to say the same thing, I could start doping right now but I would still not be able to play soccer/football well. If you are already mechanically great then you get a big advantage but if not you are out of luck

[@he8535]

Imagine games only supporting "next gen" motherboards that have hardware blacklist for device or even worse only a white list and having to wait a few weeks for the game devs to allow your new GPU to be supported or specific keyboard revision

[@0106johnny]

@@AB-80X To be successful in gaming it's the same. Even if you cheat you will suck if you lack mechanical skill and tactical thinking.

[@johnmoore1495]

Eh sports leagues choose to be loose with the testing. They could force players to test randomly once a week and you’d see some guy’s physiques melt. New substances aren’t constantly being created. Video games tho are definitely more cat and mouse.

[@yaughl]

Anti-cheat measures fuel creative workarounds similar to how anti-Adblock measures essentially make Ad-blockers stronger. Both sides keep advancing like a game of cat and mouse.

[@kylekimberlin2]

Nope never give access to any company to personal camera footage don't care what the argument is wont do it will give up all gaming before do that. We all know that the data they collect would never stay local.

[@filonin2]

Exactly. You can't trust them as they are amoral profit machines, not people.

[@zybch]

Not sure how the hell linus jumped to the 'monitor me with heaps of cameras' thing immediately. I guess because he has his every movement tracked and recorded he thinks everybody else would be as fine with it as him.

[@LordOfNihil]

im not big on the nanny state either. if you want to install crap on my system, why not just bundle the game in an encrypted virtual machine image, with a locked down guest operating system doing highly audited memory management and sending network traffic on a vpn tunnel to prevent packet manipulation. require hdcp on all outputted video streams to prevent capture (sorry streamers).

[@SwarmofAngryBees]

​@@zybch It was just a what if scenario. 🤡

[@brod515]

@@zybch from what I can assess linus isn't advocating for this.. it's just a hypothetical situation to illustrate how bad the situation is. I'm not really sure what's going on these days but it seems the audience here is suddenly trying to put words into the hosts' mouths, constantly

[@Jumpzehh]

Bringing back the ability to host your own dedicated server with active admins is the only real way to prevent large scale cheating. The earlier COD games did it, TF2 did it, CS:S did it, the earlier battlefield games did it.. and none of them had a big hacking problem. It's developers forcing everyone onto unmoderated matchmaking that's the problem. Also the reporting system most games use now is rubbish, they just compile data for months and then do a ban wave which i guess is good but you've then allowed people to cause mayhem in the time they took to compile data.. only for a new set of cheats to be released maybe 2 days later. Community based servers with active moderators is the only answer. Edit: Making something free to play doesn't help either.

[@kalpamonx]

yeah you are correct! let me host my own mirrors edge server so my friends and i can still compete in parkour. If EA doesn't want to maintain it, then at least let me. What a waste of good games that can no longer be competitively played!

[@zybch]

Because no admin will ever give friends (or paying gamers) an unfair advantage...

[@Jumpzehh]

@@zybch admins like that have no players on their servers. I guarantee it.

[@asdion]

@@zybch That's the beauty of it, you can just play on a server with sane admins.

[@ZeldagigafanMatthew]

The one thing I'll say that banwaves do right, it keeps the cheat devs guessing at what triggered detection. Some will charge back, but I imagine most will just buy a new account. If I do an update to my cheat software and it immediately gets banned, I know not to commit that one thing to the repository, but for it to be a wave after like 10 things were added... where would I even begin?? I'm of the mind that we also need to sue these people. There are at least 2 clauses of the 4 or so applicable ones of the TOS and EULA that I can guarantee you are being violated, also, mods are not inherently fair use.

[@skyrianlord2684]

I just don't play multiplayer games any more. Now the only cheaters I face are the bots in RTS games.

[@xXRoofTopBoyXx]

Love when my scout finds the enemy base and they are already advancing skill tree faster than I can establish resource production

[@skyrianlord2684]

@@xXRoofTopBoyXx The worst to me is when I can actively see %95 of the map, know their economy is dead, all their armies slain, and yet out of the fog comes a full stack army of elite units that weren't there when my scout went by 30 seconds ago.

[@MrBlueBurd0451]

AI-based 'look-over-the-shoulder' anti-cheat, like an automated version of the Overwatch system mentioned, capable of identifying 'probable' cases of cheating that are then automatically referred to volunteer users in good standing for review, and 'definite' cases that are automatically blacklisted and put into nothing but servers with other cheaters.

[@modellking]

It seems that is exactly what Valve is working on...

[@TheYoutubeUser69]

@@modellkingdw, it will be ready in 10 years

[@FakeDeath_]

Won't detect esp or loot esp, max skills in games etc.

[@coolestto]

Ask Valve how well their "AI-powered" anticheat did at identifying "definite" spinbotters in cs2. Hint: they removed the system and reversed all the bans, including unbanning actual cheaters, because it was so awful and ridden with false positives. "AI" is a complete nonstarter.

[@FakeDeath_]

@@coolestto depending on the devs behind the ai. We all know that valve devs are a bit behind the rest of the world.

[@Stoeltzenjammer]

The amount of effort and the lengths that people will go to in order to cheat in a video game will always astound me and make me laugh.

[@defeqel6537]

Comes with the huge rewards (but also just some people like the challenge)

[@karlkarlsson9126]

I just never understand why any person would find something fun if you are not the one doing it, instead you have a cheat that does it for you.

[@Anarcho-harambeism]

Must be a tax right off

[@filonin2]

*write

[@Anarcho-harambeism]

@filonin2 nah, rights right right?

[@pieterrossouw8596]

jokes getting old

[@themanhimself3]

@@pieterrossouw8596 Your lame comments are getting old.

[@Gallaelwyd]

Could be where the tax left off

[@DemonaeTV]

I got banned from World of Tanks for cheating. I had thousands of hours, knew every spot to snipe from, understood armor pen, angles, knew weak spots on tanks, knew when to use HE and had maxed out crews. I never used a hack/cheat in that game. But my KD ratio was like 12:1 in my favorite tanks and somehow they decided I was a cheater. I don't play any game now that is a online fps. Either I am playing against cheaters, or I get accused of cheating if it is a game I am good at.

[@themanhimself3]

Found the dude leaking military secrets.

[@hunter-tm2kl]

whats ur username and server?

[@Astrothunderkat]

You did something against the TOS. there are so few people banned from world of tanks, everything is manually reviewed. You weren't in CRACKD so you're not that good.

[@Rexhunterj]

@@Astrothunderkat Yep, War Thunder has this same issue, so few people get banned but quite a large number of them obviously have an extra edge over you when you play. I just stopped playing last year, the constant R60Ms always locking me and never missing despite flares or chaff made me realise that there isn't a competitiver PVP game where another person _won't_ cheat because so many people are willing to throw their morals and ethics under the bus just to get ahead a little bit in their real life, of course they're going to try it in a virtual life.

[@Salsajaman]

Game is trash anyway. War Thunder clears

[@avenger2660]

If what linus laid out was the requirement to play a game, i just wouldnt play anymore. Id go back to single player only games

[@shivorath]

If what Linus laid out was the requirement (assuming the system actually worked), I might actually play an online game seriously again. Haven't been able to do that in years for all the reasons Luke said.

[@galc]

They are becoming less and less available / fun, unfortunately

[@NeonCoding]

Absolutely with you - that is fucking dystopian as ALL HELL, and just is utterly demotivating to play those video games, when they're such a small portion of people. Just play freeplay/casual/whatever it's called in your game, because unless you're playing for eSports and for money, that just is not worth it.

[@alexandresoutonogueira7675]

The most effective anticheating would be enforced cloud gaming.

[@the_undead]

What Linus laid out was something that you could connect to that would give you access to particular servers that only other people doing that same thing with that same device would have access to to dramatically reduce the quantity of cheaters in theory, I have thought about this device personally since Linus made this video and I've thought of all kinds of ways that you could make this more effective, although that $300 price tag would be very optimistic for the concept that I've had, and I would likely add a 20% buffer fee. Kind of like what happens with lead acid batteries where if you return it, you will get that back because it would come with a relatively large lithium battery in the device so that it does not get powered down, If it does lose power then you have to exchange it and buy another one, among many other features. But this would be optional different servers, not a base requirement to play the game on PVP servers

[@victor1882]

Human auditing is the only way forward, get a basic non-intrusive anti-cheat to at least apply some resistance, and let the community do the deep cleaning necessary. Implement some kind of input logging or replay, pass that through a computer to mark replays as suspicious, and then pass those to the community (like the overwatch system, plus a voting system, there are many ways of doing it)

[@themanhimself3]

AI anticheat is the future. It's still going to need humans but it will help a ton once its set up correctly.

[@Random_dud31]

​@@themanhimself3yes. Then AI anti anticheat software will be used to cheat. The knife cuts both ways with ai

[@themanhimself3]

@@Random_dud31 there are already AI cheats being used. The AI anticheat is being made specifically for those kind of cheats.

[@Random_dud31]

​@@themanhimself3 I agree. And there will be anti Ai anti cheats. My point is more about how it will escalate. The moment there is a an Ai created to stop cheaters, there will be an Ai to counter that Ai

[@JollyGiant19]

@@themanhimself3That’s how moderation for social media sites works and no one is happy with that

[@Nightfieldzop]

It's the same thing as cheating with online exams, no matter how robust the system is, someone will figure out a way around it.

[@johnmoore1495]

Literally taped pieces of paper to my monitor lol

[@JonnyJKF]

Being able to work and play on the same machine used to be a selling point of PC gaming over consoles, but with modern invasive anti-cheat, integrated P2P always-online services and general stability, I no longer tust my gaming PC for anything important or storing any non-ephemeral data.

[@nathank-jw7uv]

You can always dual boot and encrypt your important drives

[@LordOfNihil]

@@nathank-jw7uv so many firmware level hacks now. remember the cheat devs permabricked goat's ssds, they would probably do so in scorched earth fashion. encrypted file systems would just get burned with the drives.

[@nathank-jw7uv]

@@LordOfNihil I'm talking about for the anti cheats unless you're implying that an anti cheat would do that then yeah that'd suck

[@LordOfNihil]

@@nathank-jw7uv its just something to be aware of so you can make proper tradeoffs. when i went to it school in 2002, the common consensus (which i disagreed with at the time) was that hackers cannot brick your hardware. now we know they can.

[@N7Toman]

"Would you play a cloud streamed game to be free of cheaters?" Machine vision, my man. And a device that adjusts input data from your keyboard/mouse before it goes into your rig.

[@exapsy]

the problem with such a device, not even taking under granted the second monitor, the external memory, the price ... is the fact that it's a home owned device. people can just .... break it.

[@ggwp638BC]

Cheaters became a problem because now all servers are owned by the company and need to monitor tens of thousands of simultaneous matches. It also got worse with the esport mentality of rank mattering.

[@0106johnny]

In CS 1.6 every server was filled with cheaters. The stupid, more obvious ones would get banned of course, but if you were even a little smart about it you could cheat as much as you liked and people did

[@Mr_C0R3Y]

Let's just bring back massive LAN party's with ranked leader boards.

[@andres.8796]

word.exe

[@aukora129]

@@andres.8796 all of those cheaters at tournaments are a result of the people running the tournament doing a frankly laughable job securing the things. Just restrict users to only plug in mouse/keyboard and use the associated drivers, theres no reason for a lan computer to be outputting visuals through a usb port unless it's mouse cheats.

[@krank23]

I'm pretty happy at this point that I just don't play or enjoy competitive play at all, or playing with strangers. I might be persuaded to play an MMO with a friend, but I'm just gonna treat it like a single player coop game at that point. I remember when "multiplayer only" games were controversial, and a bunch of people were annoyed that Quake 3 didn't have a campaign. I was among them. I'm happy single player campaign games are still a thing and occasionally even succeed (BG3, the Jedi games)…

[@iHelderScrolls]

One great implementation in my opinion was the one from Fall guys, where they secretly put you on a different server pool than other players, and you only played with other cheaters. That way you have no cheaters playing with legit people, no ban waves that will guide cheat makers into what got them caught/detected, and you still make revenue from both cheaters and non-cheaters.

[@goodman854]

Linus's idea has a major issue. His device that does everything local and spouts out an OK alarm. Ok so it's local you can reverse engineer it or just spoof the ok alarm without it even being on or you having it. Seems pretty easy to circumvent.

[@Uryendel]

there is even a simpler solution, you stream your game to a secondary PC who then control your mouse, can't be detected

[@user-rd5qf4oh6u]

​@@Uryendelso cloud gaming? The issue I see with this is the added cost of contracting someone for the servers and the computing time. And even then. If all your anticheat measures rely on cloud gaming, then you expect all your users to play using cloud gaming servers, thus locking your player base to that streaming platform. And all of us remember what happened to Google Stadia.

[@Uryendel]

@@user-rd5qf4oh6uhow cloud gaming change anything? you are still have an image that go to your monitor, image that can be analyzed on a secondary PC which is going to move your mouse Also I don't know why people talk about stadia for cloud gaming, they were not the first to it, and nvidia who launched their offer at the same time is still here

[@aukora129]

@@user-rd5qf4oh6u Cloud gaming also doesnt remove pixel bots and visual input cheats.

[@patx35]

Invasive kernel level anti cheats such as Vanguard is already bypassed with multiple hardware cheats. From simple programmable mouse and keyboard macros (which can't be stopped), to exploiting Thunderbolt and UEFI drivers to have a second computer read the memory off the client machine. The only way to stop cheating is with analytical tools, with the assumption that the client can never be trusted.

[@sbdnsngdsnsns31312]

Or, have a client that the end-user cannot modify without bricking it like a console is supposed to work. The issue is doing this to PCs would render them useless for a lot of actually productive purposes people need to accomplish for hobbies or even to put food on the table. You cannot just have a toggle either, because the cheaters will just toggle off the anti-tamper and then turn it back once they are done. The Switch debacle has proven they will even solder new chips onto the motherboard if the demand is high enough.

[@patx35]

@@sbdnsngdsnsns31312 Again, proving my point. Anything client side can never be trusted. The best way is analytical tools to determine cheats. How is this player being able to exactly pinpoint other players? Why is their clicks impossibly consistent? Why is this player constantly shooting through walls?

[@misham6547]

I thought macros weren’t considered cheating for most games

[@arcturuslight_]

​@@misham6547Most games dont allow automated input of any form, even, like, mechanical auto clickers. Most of them just don't enforce this rule unless necessary.

[@The-Caged-King]

I wouldn’t play a game with the stipulations that Luke agreed too. Even if it was free and was guaranteed to get rid of all chances of playing with cheaters, and there was zero chance of data being sold or leaked, I still wouldn’t use it. It would just ruin the gaming experience, it would make gaming so uncomfortably unfun, it would make the experience feel to weird. Because at that point it would be more a more entertaining and enjoyable use of my time to go play a single player game, or watch KZbin, or go do anything else.

[@NoOne-ye5jf]

How does it change the experience though? If you are not cheating it would not change anything about the way you play. I mean obviously the specifics matter a lot but if I could buy a device that would just let me play with guaranteed legit players I'd go for it

[@mattm3023]

I think the real answer for pervasive cheating has been singleplayer (and private servers for multi) this whole time. Bots are getting better and better intelligence and it will get funner and funner to play singleplayer in just about every genre. If you really love the human element, find online friends and play privately. Random matches are terrible and toxic.

[@killingtimeitself]

literally just host your own server and play with a group of people you can moderate yourselves, that's the solution there.

[@The-Caged-King]

@@killingtimeitself horrible solution to anyone other than people who both have the capability to host a server, and know enough people who want to play on said server

[@The-Caged-King]

@@NoOne-ye5jf gaming for me would just feel too weird and non-immersive if there was three cameras pointed at my eyes hands and screen

[@hedgeearthridge6807]

I've basically resolved to stop playing PvP multiplayer games, they're frustrating anyway. Cooperative games that don't rank people against each other or reward them differently (like DRG) foster a fun atmosphere where people aren't competing against each other, they're working together. There's no financial incentive to cheat (unlike Tarkov), cheaters can be kicked, and even if someone is cheating it's not too big of a problem. I've even started playing Rust alone, treating it like a single-player survival game, and it's actually great.

[@MrPelzi91]

i would never install valorant or any game that has a kernel level anti cheat because they essentially have a backdoor to my pc at that point and can do anything they want without any antivirus software noticing it being there.

[@joshuablaz]

Imagine playing basketball with your friends and suddenly Tyler insists everyone needs to be microchipped and drug tested daily to avoid cheating. Play the damn game with your friends and stop putting backdoors into your machine.

[@davguev]

Setting up a 5v5 game with friends is kind of hard, though.

[@joshuablaz]

@@davguev It's become tougher as game companies push matchmaking and drive community servers extinct. Still, I urge you to join discords and take part in any community event you can. Back in ThE gOoD oLd DaYs, I knew most of the people that played on my favorite TF2 and Minecraft servers. It wasn't the same 10 people playing every night, but there was a pool of ~100 people you recognized and saw often plus some randoms who drifted in and out. Admins and moderators were people you could talk to, who knew you - at least in the way bartenders know their regulars. And if a bunch of the regulars say XxXTommyDarknessXxX is suspicious, the bouncer is throwing that creep out. I know, I know, I'm an ancient Zoomer talking about how things used to be better, but I really do think something of value has been lost.

[@aukora129]

Yeah because playing with friends only is so fun. People can already do this, and they dont. Playing with the same 9 people every day for a 5v5 isnt fun.

[@hymnsfordisco]

Cheating is part of the larger issue in multiplayer that there's lots of people out there who are just not enjoyable to play with. Either they're cheating, they're rude, they give up too easily, or whatever other thing. The real thing that matters in the end is just the lost enjoyment of the game due to another player, not the particular reason that caused it. The obvious solution (in my opinion) is to just track how much people enjoy playing with particular players. For as much as there is invested in skill based matchmaking, we should have as good of a system for "enjoyment based matchmaking" where the game puts you in a match with people you will actually enjoy playing with and against.

[@nonyabidness8676]

The problem with that is some people are only having fun if they're dunking on people. And I could be wrong about this, but most people don't want to be dunked on relentlessly. I do wonder why those people are playing competitive games if that's all they want. There are plenty of really great single player games out there they could be spending their time on instead.

[@CigsInABlanket]

@@nonyabidness8676"most people don't want to be dunked on relentlessly"; which is one of the reasons why nobody likes SBMM. I remember the ol days, when you could sweat to be the MVP for a game or two, then relax for awhile and still be average. Now, if you sweat, you better keep sweating, or you will be dunked on relentlessly.

[@somenameidk5278]

@@CigsInABlanket but what about the noobs that are tired of 1000 hour veterans shredding through their lobbies? the point of SBMM is to avoid giving players super one-sided matches, which sucks for players on the winning side of those matches, but benefits those that would otherwise be subjected to the losing side.

[@CigsInABlanket]

@@somenameidk5278Leave the match and join another, if its that bad. Yet another downfall of SBMM, no more sticking around in lobbies full of people you enjoy playing with, you're now forced to find a new lobby for every match.

[@timothychartier]

I work in the game industry, this is my 2 cents on fixing the issue: Pretty much everything is a band aid on top of the core problem, which is the engines and networking architecture. Unreal, Unity, in-house engines from the major studios, none of them were built properly to prevent cheating, because that wasn't the goal when building the engine. I don't mean to imply the engines are poorly built, just that there aren't the proper architectural decisions made at the lowest levels of the engine framework that would have been had to have been made to really prevent cheating. It requires a fundamentally different programing approach than typical software development and game engine development. It necessitates using a memory safe language, but those are relatively new, they aren't well understood, and there isn't a huge library of modules to import to aid with development. It also requires using an extremely server authoritative networking architecture, but there are major drawbacks to doing this. It significantly drives up server costs because you need better and stronger servers to handle all the game state processing that instead could be done on the user's machine, you use significantly more data, and it can create very negative player experiences during gameplay because their local client doesn't have any real authority, so they will frequently be shot behind walls, miss shots that look like obvious hits, etc. One of the greatest ironies is that to make it impossible to cheat in a game, you usually have to make your game less fun, and despite all that sacrifice people will still find a way to cheat just in fewer numbers and with greater effort. Even the cloud gaming setup pitched in this video has vulnerabilities. So what is there to do? It is absolutely worth it to make cheating as difficult to possible. We need a mainstream commercial engine built in a memory safe language from the ground up with anti-cheat as one of the core development philosophies. That alone will take us huge strides. Next we need a networking genius to come up with a perfect client-server relationship architectural concept that can be applied during development to minimize cheating while still providing a net positive gaming experience, and for that genius to document it well and teach it to the rest of the industry. Both the engines and the networking will inevitably still have vulnerabilities, but this will drastically increase the complexity involved in exploiting those vulnerabilities. Lastly, we need to socially foster an environment where cheating is unacceptable and carries with it social consequences. Shun the cheaters.

[@Rexhunterj]

Actually C++ is memory safe as long as you're using it's featureset correctly, class constructors and deconstructors handle all the freeing and allocating of memory in a safe fashion while still allowing your team to add in low-level C code wherever It might be needed. So many people are scoffing at the old langauges because these new fangled ones came out and 'replaced' them. C# and Java are not good replacements for C++, they are better alternatives for different kinds of projects. Too many developers make games in what language they feel comfortable in, rather than what language would be best for the project. In the 1990s, it was the wild-wild west for C/C++ games, we have a Standard now today and C++ has many of the same 'managed memory' features of it's 'successor' C#. But yes everything else you said was spot on, not only are most games made in one of two engines (Unreal or Unity) which makes them ridiculously easy to break apart and understand (Unity in particular is easy to develop cheats for with memory dumps), the teams developing them either don't realise they need to engineer the core parts of the game in a secure way or they discard security for timeliness to finish the project for their corporate overlords. Also when the devs get called out on it they almost always unilaterally refuse to admit they didn't bother to 'secure' the game, yes I know PR is responsible for holding their tongues but let's all be real, in America you have a freedom of speech, no ordinary company contract can stop you from telling the world the truth about your work. I literally sank the company I worked at because they were fraudulently obtaining copies of commercial software (and cheating me out of money too). People need to grow a backbone and stick to their morals and ethics, too many of us are weak willed and do whatever the loudest person says.

[@michaelkreitzer1369]

Cheats don't usually exploit memory handling bugs. Your favorite "memory safe" language built game is no harder to hack than any other.

[@Ch40zz]

Im sorry but what the fuck has memory safety to do with cheating? Do you even know how cheats work? Cheats acquire higher or equal execution rights than the game and then read the games memory to extract the needed data, drawing it on the screen and injecting input data to automate tasks in the game like moving viewangles or shooting. Memory safety has literally nothing to do with cheating unless you're talking about the 15 year old CoD RCE exploit that is still not fixed by activision in the older titles (thanks btw). Quake had it all figured out 30 years ago, cheating was basically limited to what the server told you about. Whats possible in new games due to games being entire client-sided is laughable at best. We lost the ability to write proper server/client netcode long ago, everyone is either developing shit or pasting quake (Counter Strike, Call of Duty, etc).

[@timothychartier]

@@Ch40zz there's a significant amount of irony in you dismissing the relevancy of memory safety then immediately talking about acquiring rights over memory to inject new memory. If you are under the impression that memory safe languages are only used to prevent memory leaks and do better cleanup, you're mistaken. There is much more to it and it absolutely relates to cheats. Many cheats exploit memory that has not been properly protected (specifically buffer overflows and use-after-free). Memory safe languages reduce the risk and likelihood of dangling memory out in the open for it to be read or written to. I'm not sure you know what you are talking about to the degree you think you do.

[@marsimplodation]

​@@timothychartierbut you could still read the memory, it is still local afterall, so wall hacks and all this stuff would still be possible. Even if you can't directly manipulate the game state, I doubt a memory safe language will help in not giving players the control of reading memory.

[@justanoman6497]

Unless the program compares the footage with actual game session on the server end, there is nothing stopping you from feeding it a pre-recorded "healthy" session. And if it is doing the comparison, it defeats the purpose of doing it locally--it is sending way too much data for many users to be comfortable with. You can only ever mitigate cheating, you can never stop it. Ultimately, the most fundimental mitigation measure is to make the punishment actually hurt. Having your $70 game nuked is a decent disincentive, whereas ftp simply allow people to cheat with impunity. Now, that doesn't mean we can't have ftp games, but perhaps there can be split lobby pool for player whose account have value (be it monetary or time as a sufficent amount of achievement/collection earned via gameplay) versus those that aren't. And the value can be more than just in the one game, but any other game that is in the account (again, both money and time). I'd feel a bit more comfortable if every player have to post a "bond" of either $200 or 200 hours. Would probably work best on steam, as 200 hours of active game play (measured by some calculation of achievements, not in game time, to prevent idle farming) across the accounts is hardly uncommon there.

[@94leroyal]

The "everyone remote play" really does feel like the best way to eliminate the vast majority of cheating methods.

[@dillzilla4454]

remote play means that i literally cannot play the game due to bandwidth limitations. the real solution is the old solution. just allow community server hosting like they used to do. games with community hosted servers don't have this problem

[@Shemegory]

There will be AI screen reading cheats within 5-10 years if they don't already exist.

[@Smart-Towel-RG-400]

And there will be a.i cheats that get around the ai cheat detectors ...it would be like how cops need radar detector detectors lol​@@Shemegory

[@0106johnny]

Input manipulation is a thing. Even then you could just have a PC there that "looks" at the video output and corrects your input to be more beneficial. This is already possible now and will only get easier over the next few years

[@aukora129]

@@Shemegory They've existed for 5-10 years lmao

[@skyjetende4391]

old school runescape has a secret world where mods send "bots" and can kill them at will which essentially also permabans the character. they've streamed doing it twice.

[@lezlienewlands1337]

Botany Bay.

[@cubiss1273]

"kernel level anticheat is the only way forward" No, it's not even a way forward. You simply can't stop cheating on machine where attacker got full access. What is happening is an arms race of making it harder and getting around it. And it's a total nonsense to trust someone with access to *everything* on your PC just to play games. Especially if you can't hold them accountable.

[@0106johnny]

With reading memory via UEFI drivers kernel level anti cheat is already fully circumvented today.

[@johnmoore1495]

It’s called a console. Honestly I (and I think many others) would be perfectly fine having either a separate PC or preferably just a separate hard drive with dedicated gaming OS that effectively locked down the computer for the sake of playing games. Ranked competitive games are no fun if there’s cheaters and I would do just about anything to never play with them.

[@0106johnny]

@@johnmoore1495 Consoles are also full of cheaters

[@cubiss1273]

@@johnmoore1495 My issue is that it's pointless. You simply can't stop cheating with software, when players have exclusive access to hardware. The only solution is building robust infractructure where game clients only have information they need and the server doesn't accept bogus commands from clients.

[@cubiss1273]

Consoles don't suffer with cheats that much since you'd probably need to do bunch of soldering. But PC is by its nature easy to modify and all players need is "Buy this extension board and follow this tutorial".

[@notbfg9000]

*We could stop cheating if we removed the incentive to cheat: PUTTING REAL MONEY INTO VIDEOGAMES.* End microtransactions, end paid cosmetics, end grinding for useless tat. Just the game. But they won't, that's their entire business model.

[@random_profile_4046]

How that's stop cheating?

[@notbfg9000]

@@random_profile_4046 Why would you cheat if money or status isn't at stake? No ranks, no mone, no cheating. Simple as.

[@random_profile_4046]

@@notbfg9000 No game, no cheating. Yeah you're right.

[@notbfg9000]

@@random_profile_4046 No big loss. I never played 90% of that junk anyway.

[@OrionKaelinClips]

Cheating can only truly be fixed at the player level with each individual choosing not to do so. Friends groups can help by peer pressuring them not to do so if they know or suspect another friend of doing so, but it also goes the other way too. The best thing an individual player can do is not do it themselves and try to influences others not to and call it out when you see it.

[@Rexhunterj]

A large majority of cheaters just dont have friends or family and live alone, isolated. They wake up, do a day job to pay for their bills, come home to an empty lonely house and log into their shady as hell computer system to begin a night of ruining other peoples nights.

[@OrionKaelinClips]

@@Rexhunterj Obviously nothing to do about them in-person, but not even all friends or gamer groups live together either. Whether they are a real life friend and they moved away, or a Discord buddy you occasionally game with, or a random match made in-game, calling out when you see cheating and reporting it and dissuading it, ally or not, is basically the best actual solution. People who cheat that you team up with, knowingly or not, are a danger to you as well as sometimes teammates of cheaters are also suspended and/or banned for their teammates or friends actions.

[@ZeldagigafanMatthew]

We could also build our games in a way that are strongly server dependent. Certain MMOs had this figured out back in like 2005.

[@OrionKaelinClips]

@@ZeldagigafanMatthew A decent approach in some aspects, similar to one idea they brought up here, but it still doesn't prevent botting or other similar non-code manipulative cheats. Thats still on the player.

[@xDELTAGIx]

You fix it at the server level. Never trust what the client sends to the server is used in all of computer science except gaming for some reason. Some games like CSGO do have this, but im not sure entirely how its implemented since the clients seemingly can still cheat. So obviously there are ways around this or valve is using a mixture client/server authoritative systems, but if the only thing you can do is send inputs to a server and you get returned a data packet of game state this is much harder to cheat in. But the reason we don't do this is because its expensive because we have to simulate the server and all events that happen on the server and send it back to the client. To my knowledge there also doesn't seem to be a good server simulating system outside of companies like Bohemia Interactive who do it all in house. So most game servers act as a relay server. Where this server just sends the state of other players games back to all the other connected players, SC2 did this notably at launch allowing hackers to see through the fog of war. We could also implement machine learning on suspected players and compare to players that are known to be good and not hacking and that could easily automate the report system, notably Valve also implemented this, but not sure if its fully rolled out. Again though cost is a lot.

[@Hyperus]

CS is entirely server authoritative but the client has to get info for rendering anyways. Know your position and the enemies? Aimbotting is simple trigonometry. Wallhacking just drawing a funny box.

[@ForOne814]

You still need to rely information to the client and take information from the client back. Otherwise you can't play the game. And you don't even need to interact with the game with some modern cheats, they just use visual information and then emulate a mouse to move the cursor and shoot. It can be run on an external device that reports itself as a mouse.

[@ZotyLisu]

if you're not supposed to see someone, the server should not send that information to the client. it's wild that in fps games the info is still sent when someone is behind a wall

[@wotsurn]

@@ZotyLisu csgo used to be better, in that it wouldnt render enemies from across the map, while cs2 will show a wallhacker where the other team is even if they are in the opposite spawn. But your going to have to send some infomation to the client anyway, ie where positional audio of footsteps is coming from. Also you have to give positional info before the enemy is on screen so that you can a) render shadows before they come round the corner, and b) so that the enemy doesn't just pop into existence when they come round the corner - especially if players have high ping.

[@xDELTAGIx]

@@Hyperus Thats true, but aimbot can still be detected by using statistics from head shot percentage, distance, enemy movement speed. But companies dont always track these data points. Wall hacking actually can be solved by send data points on portions to draw, but this is also insanely complex computing. So if the server says hey you cant see that player than his data points. But this is complex and requires alot of compute power.

[@revcrussell]

There is a way to stop cheating and that is more server-side involvement. Pass the user only information that they are allowed to see. We have bandwidth for this now. As for input cheating, that analog hole could be plugged by properly controlling the USB HID. So I think you could do it but it would require turning you system into a quasi-dumb terminal and locking the HID down really hard.

[@plcdfa]

It's not really a question of bandwidth but latency, which has some hard limits based on physics. Not sure we'll ever get there in certain types of games without compromising the gameplay experience.

[@sbdnsngdsnsns31312]

Doing any of that properly would be a lot more expensive than throwing a root kit into your installer and hoping that scares off enough cheaters.

[@sp3edy787]

And yet there's forms of cheating that work off an entirely airgapped second system. Uses a capture card to recieve visual data, machine learning to interpret it and an intermediary usb device that passes through user kb&m inputs except for the ones it "adjusts" to be more "beneficial". Obviously higher barrier of entry than just some basic cheat software but it's ceaselessly surprising how far people are willing to go over this stuff. I do think some of your ideas may have potential for the right game to make it significantly harder to cheat but not impossible and with significant drawbacks.

[@0106johnny]

The problem is that for most games the client needs to "see" a lot to determine stuff like sounds. Plus latency is a huge issue, the client needs to "see" things before they are actually visible, otherwise you'd have several frames of delay. And input cheating will always be possible by using a second system.

[@Nexalian_Gamer]

Locking down the HID is useless when a KZbinr built a robot that physically moves a mouse around the table using omni wheels. Combine that with a camera pointed at a second monitor and good luck stopping it lol

[@David_Quinn1995]

even if Tarkov just did a post-raid (meaning once the raid has ended 00:00 timer) it would help, you could rewatch that moment you died and where from, if it was sus you could repost them then BSG has someone rewatch that raid, and boom ban, it would help. delete replays every 24 hours or something, allow people time to rewatch things but don't data hoard it.

[@miserablepile]

I could see cloud streamed esports titles being a thing in like 5 years. Especially with highly distributed servers and E and S band low latency fiber. I think a company like Riot has the resources to do something like this, and hardware and software are getting more streaming friendly. That would mean anti-cheat will only need to monitor M+KB, and could be done serverside. AI input analysis can flag weird inputs for CS overwatch-style manual review.

[@Nate_the_Nobody]

I thought I was going crazy feeling like MORE people are closet cheating than ever before in first person shooters, felt like A LOT of people just knew where I was at at all times now when in the past I could usually stealth my way around, now, during peak gaming hours, I'm struggling to maintain the edge over certain people, never had these issues before say 2019, I feel like a lot of people are using simple cheats now to maintain the illusion of being legit, radar cheats are probably more common than a lot of people think.

[@callmerahro]

i wouldn't work under such condition let alone play something... human moderating the way valve has done is is the most successful and practical.

[@kmancometh]

In some FPS games, have ghost characters that run around the game to expose aimbotters/wall hackers. These ghost characters are A.I. controlled that you can't see, hear, interact with, or are a part of the game. They are designed for aimbotters to lock on them becuase it thinks they are real players, or may look real when tracked with wall hacks.

[@oreonproject]

I think a good idea that could help the anti-cheat situation, is by having the game kinda "freeze" or pause when the window is not active. What I mean is that the game cannot interact with the host system until the user goes back to that window. Another option would be a vote to kick system like you discussed.

[@sisig2419]

I really feel that Valorant doesnt have cheaters. I have 1000 hours in the bottom 50% in ranked, and there was 1 time one player felt suspicious, but not obviously cheating. That's really good enough for me.

[@СЛАВАНАУКРАЙНА]

I honesltly thing thath ONLINe comptetive matchmaking is a mirage. We all know what latency + wide variety of configs (not only hardware but software tweaks too) are. People are never goingt to be equal in competitive MM , that's why majority of players actually start cheating. Because they want to have fun instead of bean headbanged alll the time - because of lag , less fps , less skill or gamesense or whatsoever. People want to win. That;s why no anti-cheat will stop cheaters only Overwatch can ,but componies dont want to lose any more players. So is the kernel-level anti cheat a solution - Lol he never was . The way is just play normal single player games.

[@haste953]

How is no one talking about what Korea does for League of Legends and a lot more games, how you pretty much need a phone number which is validated by ID and if you cheat or get banned you can't do anything about it? That would legit solve issues but it would bring issues for privacy. Also what Riot does for people who were banned once, they ban your entire machine and if you log in with another account you're automatically banned again, and I mean permabanned not temporarily. Ofc people could just use another pc but that just makes it less profitable. Tbh I gotta say the device with cameras idea is just pretty stupid. There's just no way people would buy that, like another guy said, they can just highjack the signal and no amount of software work is going to prevent it.

[@MacVerick]

Online pvp is dead to me right now until cheaters are perminantly dealt with. Wot waste my time anymore.

[@ab2aasd]

If you get caught cheating in CSGO they make you play a match of overwatch? Is that allowed under the Geneva convention?

[@cosmicusstardust3300]

This is why Mutahar uses a Windows KVM ontop of Linux and I love it so much lol

[@ConReese]

I think what we need is to have many of the different anti cheat companies to share a giant ban list of the most obvious cases. Categorize the cheaters based on detection method and then ban them across multiple platforms in multiple games by multiple companies. Make it so difficult and expensive to recover from cheating that its just not worth the risk.

[@DigitalJedi]

The invasiveness of certain software is why I dual boot right now. PopOS for my day-to-day user experience, and a windows partition that has enough space for the games I currently want to play.

[@Monsuco]

I remember reading about a few games that, rather than banning someone for cheating, simply matchmake detected cheaters into matches with other cheaters. Cheating is bad because it takes away from legitimate players. Wanting to play with an aimbot on and getting paired with normal players gives you an advantage but getting paired into a match with a bunch of dudes with wall hacks, aimbots & infinite grenade hacks on is just a different way to experience the game.

[@TrowGundam]

The problem with everyone remote streaming is there are cheats that use a camera and machine vision to be aim bots. No memory access or anything, just a camera and USB hookup (to emulate Mouse and Keyboard input).

[@defeqel6537]

At that point you aren't even playing the game, just watching AI play it

[@WereCatStudio]

@@defeqel6537 It's not like you're playing the game when you're cheating anyways.

[@frikharamy1649]

The most effective solution to combat cheating in online games, particularly in first-person shooters (FPS), is to implement a system where all players must create verified accounts linked to their real identities. For games that require players to be 18 years or older, identity verification would be mandatory during the account creation process. This verification would involve confirming the player's real identity, ensuring that they meet the age requirement. By tying accounts to verified identities, any player caught cheating could be permanently banned, with their real identity preventing them from easily creating new accounts to continue their dishonest behavior. This system would serve as a strong deterrent against cheating, fostering a fair and competitive gaming environment.

[@destinyforeveryone3659]

Cheating in video games is so engrained into the experience you cant even avoid it by playing with your opponent on split screen.

[@youtubenotifications2150]

Overwatch is not immune to cheater's I'm not going to pretend that at all Especially since it has went f2p However I think something that ow1 did that was very neat is that even when playing against someone who is rage hacking the game was still winnable (which I think I experienced like 3 times in my years of playing the game) even when the enemy was supporting a blatant cheater Ow1 was a game where mechanical skill was inherently not as valuable as it is in other games, in addition due to the nature of having six people per team your individual impact isn't as great and higher TTKs allows for someone to outclass someone through other means then just mechanically + paired with character designs that facilitate that Now over the years of ow1 balance changes and the shift to ow2 these are no longer the case as much as they used to be but it still runs true that the ability of a single person utilising cheats to dominate a lobby in a game like ow is significantly less than that of something like tarkov, cs2 and COD purely because of gameplay design

[@JeffDM]

I like how the headline makes it seem like you might be a compulsive cheater.

[@L0CKW0OD]

i like how linus jus whips the bag of chips and starts crunching away on them (hahah)

[@clawwer4404]

One thing that would probably help with cheating but not stop it. Would be a world wide "gaming id" that is not directly connected to your personal id, but would require to use your personal id to set it up (and the setup, would have to go trough your government I would guess.). And this id could be used for social media aswell, so it's not really a "gaming id", but an online identity. And leave the cheaters to play on servers that don't require this "online identity" setup. The penalty for cheating would be permanent ban on all games, or 5 year cooldown. But they would still be able to use the "cheater servers". I think an implementation of "online id" is a must, the way internet and technology is developing.

[@hoefkensj]

only way to prevent cheating is to control the entire stack , and that would only be possible on lan parties , and provide the game in kiosk mode not allowing anything else on screen and have the players send their HID preferences and configs to the organisation beforehand so they can be preloaded on the systems , and verified , and the periferals plugged in and locked off , and any other ways to load or program the HID's covered up or disabled. and have the players agree for random testing of their equipment during the year similar to cycling and olmpic athletes. then maybe

[@henriquealves1957]

I would say finding each player behavior signature or play pattern (like mouse config, manneirisms, movement/actions per minute, etc.), then compare the signature to a statistical model based on rank or style of play. If it deviates by a margin, the player is blocked from competitive matching until it gets a signature check (just to not see if it's just trying new ways of gameplay or meta changes). If deviates from any possible human standard, then the player is banned. How it would be implemented? God knows, but is the closest to a fair tradeoff since telemetry and data farming are on everything and you wouldn't need kernel level to make it possible.

[@cheeseisgreat24]

TBH this is why I wish public-private server gaming was still a thing they designed games around so that you could just play with friends and boot out those who cheat. Like Among Us is the most recent example of a modern game where cheating is rampant, but you can just boot people out of the room mid-game. So people do absolutely cheat, but nobody wants to play with them so once they’re figured out they’re gone.

[@TimeWisely]

Imagine the privacy risk of this

[@MrMilkyway]

I can be browsing TikTok and livestreams of people cheating will pop up. It’s crazy. It’s such a big problem

[@siffrin_]

vanguard is so broken at the kernel level i had to stop using my desktop for real audio work... using vanguard with a professional audio interface just made the system a little too unstable and it started throwing kernel errors every now and then.

[@thebigpurplefloof]

I’ve got a fix for most wall hacks, it seems that on esports ones the wall hacks wireframes seem to be the same as global spectator cams so remove debug code and spectator cams from global releases, having a master full copy for the esports events or hard lock bans on os keys for cheaters like hardware

[@thephantom1492]

There is some things wth optical lenses and the like. You can combine the image from two sources, but only visible in a very narrow angle. So you just need to set the camera outside of the combined view. And, if you put the camera too close anyway it would get in your way, or you would hide the monitor with your head, so it need to be quite aside.

[@MLeoDaalder]

That hardware setup reminds me of those certification exam booths, a privacy monitor with 3 degree viewing angles and a load of cameras where I only have a very painful posture where I am visible for the proctor and can actually read the screen. And also the conflicting requirements where you need to have your government ID visible, but aren't allowed to have anything (such as the ID) visible on the camera. XD

[@21Y211]

The entire game is streamed to the gaming device. Your device just renders it, then you use AI to determine if the inputs you give on their controller are valid. The device controls its output so it can also watch the screen data before getting sent to the monitor and see if anything on screen is being used

[@Uryendel]

k, i put the cheat on a secondary PC which take the video signal of the first monitor, what are you going to do?

[@21Y211]

@@Uryendel the AI will determine if ur inputs are human

[@Uryendel]

@@21Y211and my AI will make my inputs look human

[@21Y211]

@@Uryendel my AI will kick your AI’s but

[@__-ni1kz]

It’s a side affect of being free to play. Have never encountered a cheater in 6v6 CoD (after the 360 era), but they’re rampant in Warzone. One benefit modern consoles have is there’s no cheating with crossplay off, especially after MS solved the Cronus problem by requiring a approval for aftermarket controllers to function.

[@coleeto2]

Best roast by Luke ever!! I’m here for it

[@Genzzry]

The easiest method would be to simply use statistical analysis on data sent back to the servers. The servers already know where you're looking in game, where you're walking, time between hearing/seeing someone, how fast you turn and aim, etc... ...so just look at that data for statistical anomalies (any data points that dont clump with other users) and flag those for human review (or when damning... bypass the human and ban). We already have this... it doesn't need "fancy" machine learning or new software... its just not implemented much, because most devs really dont care about cheating, as long as they can still generate revenue from their game.

[@JuliaYamYam]

Actually with AI and statistics such a personal tracking device could maybe work, i think it would deal with 2nd monitor issue just right

[@enemy-og]

Love the PCMR rallying for the death of consoles, while simultaneously complaining about the cheating epidemic, all while begging for a "closed eco" device.. What? Like a console? 🤣

[@charltonblake9967]

How about shuffle updates that would scramble the software just enough to break third party cheats that would be running in the background? New shuffle every week, and it wouldn't even need to be a big download because all the assets are already on your device.

[@defeqel6537]

4:20 you can just overlay the image on the same screen by combining the outputs of the two PCs

[@REMY.C.]

What if the core files of every single multiplayer game were heavily encrypted and downloaded from the developper servers everytime you load the game. Only those signed and encrypted files would be valid to play and they would be checked every few minutes, like a encrypted key or something. It would also be encrypted on the pc when data is sent to memory and cpu or gpu or whatever. Would that work?

[@plcdfa]

You have to decrypt the data in memory at some point to actually use it, and from that point on any malicious process can read and (if it has the permission) modify it. You can run something that checks the integrity of the data in the memory, but then again, what's stopping the hacker to modify the checking process itself?

[@REMY.C.]

@@plcdfa make sense. So there would be no protection from middle man when the deciphering is happening? I wonder how encrypted messengers and password wallets manage that danger.

[@WereCatStudio]

@@REMY.C. Your encrypted messages and wallet could get compromised the same way if someone has physical access to your device and can extract data from memory. The issue here is that someone would break into your house and do all these modifications without you ever noticing. With cheating in games people do this on purpose. It's the same thing but very different scenarios.

[@LazarNaskov]

The solution to me is hilarious: Bring back the internet cafe. Imagine an online multiplayer game that's only playable from an in person location where the setups are provided (and are being monitored) and, while you can bring your own peripherals, cheaters just don't get to come back. Ban evasion IRL is much harder than online.

[@ArKtiKPanda]

As a every day player of the finals right now cheating is fucking crazy and people find the stupidest ways of doing it, like using software to mimic controller inputs for aim assist on mouse in key or using the scroll wheel as the fire button for semi auto weapons. Its honestly so pathetic how bad cheating is right now to the point that its become so clear that 80% of content creators are obviously cheating in the finals

[@ClokworkGremlin]

I saw a trailer the other day for an anti-cheat system that monitors player behavior and flags players who are acting suspicious. I think that's honestly the only non-invasive option going forward. Basically the same as CS Overwatch, but without the manpower bottleneck.

[@AstonishedByTheLackOfCake]

what about that one mashine learning anti-cheat concept that iirc is currently being developed where it would build a profile of your playstyle _(mouse movements, keyboard input, etc)_ and detect major deviations from it, as well as being able to compare the play behaviour data with that of known cheaters? the idea being that play behaviour for someone, for instance, using walls / esp would be fairly consistent across all players that use these types of cheats this would also be able to ban someone across accounts if they simply make an alt adter being banned or a new account just for cheating

[@WereCatStudio]

So you'll cheat all the time so that the AI learns it's your playstyle and when you turn off cheats you get banned? :D

[@AstonishedByTheLackOfCake]

@@WereCatStudio lmao

[@hunted4blood]

I think the solution is just server side machine learning anti cheat. If the cheating is so subtle that cheaters are indistinguishable from real players, it's not really going to affect most people's enjoyment.

[@86Kiaser]

If they stop double IP's addressed, leading to bans. That would stop and kill all LAN parties/dual screenplays.

[@BrenoBGR]

One way to mitigate cheating is by restricting the number of accounts created per user. Cheaters often create multiple low-level accounts to cheat or sell level-up accounts to other users. Trying to identify hardware parts and computer IP can maybe alleviate the issue that the same user can constantly create multiple accounts. In Valorant, SA servers are currently affected by a massive cheater wave, with users that play in a party with a cheater to rank up her accounts. A lot of new accounts with 50 wins in a row that do not even have 100 hours. Accounts that were in lower ranks in other seasons gained immortal rank and radiant rank. Maybe even having to register a phone number and do a face scan to authenticate the creation of an account can help with that, you need to install a third party app on cellphone that identify your phone number and scan your face to verify your a human and a single identity to create a account on the game.

[@rivo8774]

To be fair I play quite a bit of Overwatch and dont feel like there's much of a cheating problem at least for PC. I think a big reason is the full replay functionality they give, you can save any game you played, and watch it from any perspective, from 0.25 to 2x speed. If you think someone's cheating you can easily verify it urself and in the report write out the replay code which is public with sus timestamps. I do know the console version is very bad in terms of cheating, specifically people using mouse and keyboard which isn't allowed, while also taking advantage of the aim assist designed made for controllers

[@Jev55]

This is exactly why I only play single player games now. I gave up on multiplayer gaming years ago and won't go back.

[@AlexMint]

In TF2's Mann Vs Machine mode, there are tons of cheaters. A lot of people tolerate them because they view the gamemode as a slow slot machine, but lots of people want to actually play.

[@cheako91155]

The data about how often a player moves in the optimal direction is available, players who are unusually lucky would stand out. What's needed is only for server admins to act on that information, these solutions would be game dependent but built into the game should be a system to undo the actions of accounts later discovered to have cheated.

[@aaronplays_]

Now, I don't have the full understanding or knowledge of how it works, but isn't it possible to have a completely isolated system, like Flatpaks on Linux, where only the verified input and output systems can be passed through? They can have a database of verified HID devices, which can be updated as new hardware comes out, or gets reported to the devs. If there's some obscure cheap or knockoff device that looks fine, they can allow that and have it reported to the devs if any future issues popup with the player ID that's using the device.

[@dyllgood]

Dedicated servers/private servers are the solution

[@CyberPirate2008]

The only way to stop cheating would be for competitive games to be streamed/cloud gaming, which would suck but it would ensure that no one can run cheat software on the system. Other than that, put up with it and keep building software to counter it.

[@zoox3732]

If the device knows how to send a bad signal, then I'm sure exploiters are bound to figure out how to block it

[@JoshuaDoesTech]

It isn't possible to detect everything, but I argue for server-side anticheat only - the second you trust the client, it's game over What I'm doing in my own custom game servers is simulating each client on the server, and having the real clients control the simulated clients, so the server does all the game logic and it cannot possibly be misaligned, not unless the client is lagging or is trying to change the world state It does require somewhat beefier servers, especially depending on the game, but it has many benefits including making it easy to design event-based networking (rather than ancient polling/ticking systems) and keep bandwidth usage lower so it's easier to play on worse connections

[@JoshuaDoesTech]

Bonus points: Design your server to also be what's used for singleplayer modes if you have any, you'll never have duplicated code for the same logic

[@Waitwhat469]

An interesting space to look at is the confidential computing space. So use intels SGX extensions or maybe AMD's Secure Memory Encryption (SME) to provide hardware level memory encryption and other system attestation measurements to ensure the secure enclave is made. Added benefit, it separates the game from the OS quite a bit, which is good for the OS too (looking at spyware anticheat systems). Problem is you probably want to go with a system like Linux, and maybe even unikernels.

[@Theredmengroup]

On Overwatch console once you get past diamond 2 there’s a Xim user in every 3rd lobby. It’s not anywhere as bad as other games on PC but it’s still annoying when you see it

[@RifterDask]

Right now (and with contemporary games only) the best way to get around kernel level AC is to just run the game under Linux. As far as I know the games that allow this never actually touch the Linux kernel itself, monitoring the mocked-up Windows environment that Steam creates instead. Feel free to correct me if I've got it twisted, but if you're super worried about the security issues surrounding rootkits that seems to be one path to take.

[@Wiiownyou]

The only way to guarantee no-cheaters is for a modern equivalent of the arcades to return. Uniform machines, only able to connect to other verified machines housed in other monitored locations. No custom mouses, keyboards or controllers, everything provided by the playing center. It sounds like overkill but pixelbots are going to eternally prevent anti-cheat from working, there will now always be a way for bots to read the visual state of the screen and auto aim in some way.

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

There's ways to catch cheating in the reverse side. Systems like Overwatch where players can watch suspect replays allow a way to catch suspects. There's ways of using cryptography to make games more secure against cheating, but that incurs a higher computational cost. Really, the best way to counter cheating is a combination of good game design and a huge amount of metrics from your PC.