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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work? 131

Posted by simoniker from the i-am-aimbotting-joo dept.
Mr Wriggle writes "There is nothing worse than playing your favorite game online game, only to have someone frag you and your teammates blatantly using cheats. As many of you are aware, there are various Anti-Cheat systems available i.e. Punkbuster and Cheating Death. PunkBuster comes bundled in some games and is mandatory to play certain games on certain servers. I would like to ask the Slashdot community whether you think these systems work well, or do they cause more problems than they solve? Or is there a solution that the anti-cheat developers have overlooked? Additionally, is the locking-out of CD keys of people caught cheating the reason why more and more viruses attempt to steal CD keys of such games?"
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Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work? More

Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?

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  • Punkbuster (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xlipse ( 669697 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:41PM (#8264138)
    I've used PB with the latest BF1942 release. I've had ZERO problems with it. I've also noticed a lot LESS cheaters (but still SOME!) on PB enabled servers, which is great. It's worked well for me... so far.
    • I play America's Army on PB servers, and again, not every cheater is chased away by it. The problem is that PB will only stop the commmon, every-day cheats like aut-aim and ilk. If someone is dedicated and smart enough to write their own cheat, or use a cheat that PB didn't think of, they can slip through the cracks. The common one I used to see made it appear as if the player is lagging even if they have a low ping, so that they "jump" around and are harder to hit.
      • I've never heard of that fake lag chaet, but I've had low ping with loads of lag on many occasions due to packet loss. Jumpin like a jackrabbit with a ping of 70.
      • I play many games with PB, and I've never seen a cheater. Now in some older games (ie. JK1), I HAVE seen lots of cheating. Maybe I just dont play enough.
    • .. and how many times is the 'cheater' just on a funny connection? which brings to the point that if the cheat is not even run on the computer then the anti cheating software has very little possiblity of catching the cheater(and really, how can you trust that the cheater isn't cheating the anti-cheat program as well, surely they can run after released hacks and add detections to them and crc checking but that's pretty much it anyways). it can't detect taking amfetamine either(well, i'm pretty sure some kor
    • No offense but why are we modding up recounts of peoples experience with PB as +5 insightful?
      • Uhm.. because we were supposed to share our experience and give our opinions on Anti-cheats... :) As I stated, Punkbuster cut down on cheats, but doesn't totally eliminate them. It also seems to run perfect for me, stability-wise. "I would like to ask the Slashdot community whether you think these systems work well, or do they cause more problems than they solve?" :)

  • Punks! (Score:5, Informative)

    by mahdi13 ( 660205 ) <icarus.lnx@gmail.com> on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:44PM (#8264168) Journal
    I only play on Enemy Territory servers that use Punkbuster. I have had no problems with them (except when my client refuses to update so I have to manually update it, no big deal)
    I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them
    • I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them

      Same here.

      OTOH, I don't really mind the cheaters so much anyway except in tournaments. Any other time, they'll still lose in the long term. Cheats are a crutch that rot the mind that uses them to the point that the person can't think for themselves.

      I'm almost embarassed to say that I find it amusing to imagine the cheaters saying 'my precious' to themselves over and over eve

  • similar question on misc@openbsd.org (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:48PM (#8264210) Homepage Journal
    A similar question was asked about port knocking on the misc@openbsd.org mailing list the other day. I think it was said best by henning (i think it was henning) "you want to fix buggy software...with more software?"

    I kind of have to agree, why not take the time to do it right the first time? Cheats are just creative uses of bad loops, or algorythms in the code (for example the long jump in quake III if you had a fast video card).

    • Different goals... (Score:5, Informative)

      by malakai ( 136531 ) * on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:06PM (#8264402) Journal
      The first goal of most games is to be 'playable' over broadband with moderate latency. In order to accomplish this certain tradeoffs must be made. These are not bugs.

      The 'long' jump in Quake is hardly a 'cheat' that PunkBuster is designed for. PunkBuster purpose is to remove client mods that give you auto-aim, radar/enemy position info, and enemy texture/highlighting type cheats. All of these involve modifying the client.

      Yes, the client knows where all the players are. Yes that is a weakness. No it can't be fixed easily, because we have to deal with 60ms-200ms one way latency. That requires some think ahead, which means giving the client more info than they should have. If this was any other type of software than a FPS game we could suffer performance for security.

      Programs like Punkbuster use arms-race philosphy to try and stay ahead of the cheat makers. Far less time goes into defeating a specific cheat, then it does to build that cheat. One small change to the pb client and away goes 2weeks coding work of a cheat-maker. PB tries to guarantee the client environment, including memory, and what they see on screen. The pb screen captuing util is the best defeense for an admin.

      Having said all that, it's logically impossible for them to do this 100% effectively. You can not control and audit access the the system memory and devices on modern day motherboards. Anything you have running to check this can be modified.

      It will take technology such as Pallidum to make true 'anti-cheat' and balanced playing environments. I welcome the day game programmers can trust the client and leverage caching techniques that require pervasive knowledge of the game world. It will make games faster and more enjoyable for a broader range of peple in geographically disparate areas.

      • Re:Different goals... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Nyhm ( 645982 )
        I agreee with malakai's philosophy: anything in the client is suceptible to attack by the local player. However, I do not share malakai's optimism that Palladium (and other DRM technologies) will solve any of this. Rather, it'll just be another level of the same "arms race."

        It is a fundamental flaw to attempt to secure what is in the hands of the enemy (to paraphrase a well-said post below).

        (OK, so I don't have anything of substance to add, yet. Sorry, I was deliberately wasting your time.)
      • Well, a revolution in distrubuted game servers could also do the trick. You could theoretically just send the client spews of raw image data(and send back inputs), but it's super expensive. This is the reason the thin client never took off.
        However,(this is actually an area of research that I am involved in), there is another option. Basically, when the game is distributed, you make sure that each copy of the game is different enough such that a cheat that works for hacker x won't work for script kiddy

      • I can't help feeling your post was a Trojen FlaimBait (+5 Informative for pro- Palladium on /.), but anyway:

        If you want hardware based DRM to protect your games why not use a console? Okay M$ are hoping that Palladium might actually work (as opposed to the current Xbox BIOS locks), but this sort of thing will always be much easier to implement on limited function consoles then multi-function PCs. If you aren't going to mod the games anyway then what is the advantage of a PC?

        As always Palladium doesn't act

    • Re:similar question on misc@openbsd.org (Score:5, Informative)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:07PM (#8264413)
      Cheats are just creative uses of bad loops, or algorythms in the code (for example the long jump in quake III if you had a fast video card).
      No, those are exploits. Most cheats hook programs or key DLLs (like opengl.dll) and replace parts of the code, for example to aim for the player or make his walls transparent. If you're not that familiar with Windows, it's functionally identical to... I forget the exact environment variable name, it's LD_PRELOAD or something. It's not possible for programs to prevent this, as the replacement occurs at the level of the dynamic linker - the application has nothing to do with it.

      The issue is that you can just as easily use this trick to bypass protection methods like CD and PB. And, much like antivirus software, even small changes of existing cheats/viruses will usually elude the fingerprint checks of countermeasures.

    • I think it was said best by henning (i think it was henning) "you want to fix buggy software...with more software?"

      Well then henning doesn't know what he's talking about. Cheaters are more often than not exploiting client side tweaks rather than game bugs.

      Opening the enemy textures in photoshop and painting them bright pink isn't a software bug that needs fixing, it's a cheat.

      Punkbuster makes sure that I haven't modified my maps or textures. It makes sure I haven't hacked OpenGL to turn off Fog. It

  • I like it (Score:4, Informative)

    by ptrangerv8 ( 644515 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:49PM (#8264218)
    To a degree...

    I play SOF2 on a PB enabled server... in fact, I search exclusively for those servers... I've noticed a couple of cheaters so far, but by far, it seems to work out quite well..

    Same goes for Enemy territory - not very many cheaters, and generally makes the game 'funner' to play...

    One thing I *did* notice was that when the 'sync gameplay' was enabled (I think thats what it's called) that it would slow everyones FPS down without really telling anyone about it... so people would have laglike issues on a BRAND NEW machine - but other than that no problems at all...

    As far as bannign Invalid CD-Keys - what a waste of time....

  • Inverse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) * on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:50PM (#8264231) Journal
    Howabout a game that encourages cheating? Lag normalized, the constraints are the time you get to react to the incoming stream and build a response. Anything you can do with the incoming data is up to you. I know this gets away from "game" and more into code war, but that sounds more fun overall, especialyl if it lent itself to genetic algorithms. Eh, maybe I just miss Core Wars.

    • Re:Inverse (Score:3, Informative)

      by nocomment ( 239368 )
      bzflag already exists. There are in fact cheat servers out there. Pretty fun game too :-)

      • Re:Inverse (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dtfinch ( 661405 ) *
        You beat me to it. I was moving my mouse to click reply, then saw that you already posted one.

        I'm Dave, the lamer who wrote the most featureful bzflag cheat client out there, which I myself used on the cheat servers but was undoubtably used elsewhere after I released it.
        • can I have it? I"m not a lamer i just want to fly around and stuff...but I can't :-(
          • Source code:
            http://www.mytsoftware.com/misc/bzsrc.zip

            Win32 binary:
            http://www.mytsoftware.com/misc/bzcheat.z ip

            Note that I intentionally impaired the binary version to keep the kiddies off the servers used by the general public. It'll only function properly on 1.7e6 servers and below, and it'll advertise that they're using a cheat client. The source code version has 1.7g2 compatibility with most cheats. Most of the cheats are subtle, and can give a player a serious edge without being caught, hence the i
    • Well, then you might as well play Progress Quest. The whole point of something like chess or counterstrike is to use a game to test your mind agianst my mind. Sure, you could sit there and let chessmaster plot your moves, but what's the point? Where is the mano-e-mano contest of champions?

      Actually, One game that matches your plan is corewars and its' spinoffs. You code a bot that plays a bot I coded.
  • It stops most of the "Load up and cheat and go fuck with other peoples games" type players. However, the cheats are almost always ahead of the cheat protection, so there are always people(Usually the practiced, hardcore, i-cheat-to-seem-better players) who will be cheating.

    A wise man once said,
    The client is in the hands of the enemy, don't trust it. In an FPS game, it's nearly impossible not to.

  • Cheating Death (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cronostitan ( 573676 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:51PM (#8264237)
    We [kiez-clan.de] are running six Half-Life (HL) servers with Counter-Strike and Natural Selection Mods and have found that Cheating death is the best viable solution.

    Valve (the makers of HL) are offering their own security engine but its almost worthless since it gets updated rarley and it is aimed to detect cheats only.

    Cheating Death on the other hand is aimed not only to detect but to prevent cheats (for example by moving the things you arent supposed to see anyway (player behind wall) to the players back). Because of this Cheating Death can't catch a cheater but his cheats are becoming useless. In addition to that Cheating Death is updated very often and so it is able to prevent most cheats.

    Conclusion:
    A anti-cheating engine that isn't updated regulary is almost rendered useless in a long run.

    • Re:Cheating Death (Score:5, Interesting)

      by grumpygrodyguy ( 603716 ) on Friday February 13, 2004 @03:24AM (#8267420)
      We are running six Half-Life (HL) servers with Counter-Strike and Natural Selection Mods and have found that Cheating death is the best viable solution.

      I'm a veteran CS cheater. My favorites were the old speed cheats, and the 'complete' aim-bot, auto-kill cheats that allow you to kill sometimes 15 to 20 people in 1 match.

      I was shameless, and loved joining 32player servers just to rape everyone on the server until they left in disgust.

      Now you proobably won't see that in a CD or PB server, but most servers are public and people play very casually...usually searching for thier favoriate map as opposed to thier favorite server.

      Now I had a very good (6 months?) of whoreage before I was finally busted for good, there is some kind of network which is reported to by admins that regulates WON IDs for all players. If a particular WON ID gets many consecutive complaints...as surely mine did because I cheated like an SOB...then that person's WON ID can be blocked.

      My WON ID was blocked for 6 months...that was it...I couldn't play any more CS for 6 months. Let me tell you it was very effective, and I stopped cheating as a result of that experience.(Well...stopped cheating at CS anyhow ;) )

      • Re:Cheating Death (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I was shameless, and loved joining 32player servers just to rape everyone on the server until they left in disgust.

        Well, at least the rest of the world can take comfort in the fact that you're never likely to have children.

      • Are Aimbots more of a myth than reality? I play a lot of Wolfenstein and run a server, and was interested to try one out just to see how it works, and how much easier it makes the game.

        I searched and searched and searched some more, and came up blank on p2p networks and on google. Which leads me to the question - how much do Punkbuster stand to gain from publicising the abundence of aimbots which in all reailty are pretty difficult to find?
      • You probably got caught by Valve's VAC (Valve Anti Cheat). Not the best detection system around, but it has the capacity to ban you from ALL servers for a long period of time based on your WON ID (or if you are a modern type and not a Neanderthal, your Steam ID).

        But luckily for some, Valve offers up a form where you can plead your case. The above parent author? Ehh don't bother.

        http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=cheat _f orm
    • The problem with Cheating Death is that every time Valve updates Steam, Cheating Death has a stroke and we have to wait for the next update. Other than that it's good(tm).

  • PunkBuster works pretty well (Score:5, Informative)

    by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:51PM (#8264239) Homepage
    Lately I've been playing Enemy Territory mostly, and only on PunkBusted servers. For a while, wallhacks were fairly common in ET (when you're spectating someone, detecting wallhackery is fairly easy) - but I haven't noticed a cheater for a long time now.

    PB seems to work as advertised, and has never given me any problems. If it's letting some cheats through, it's not enough that it would affect my enjoyment of the game. If someone cares more about the outcome (or their performance), I suppose they may want a more foolproof tool - but PB is good enough for me.

  • Whenever you keep score (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12, 2004 @07:54PM (#8264277)
    Whenever you have a game that keeps score you will have people who try, and many times find a way to cheat. Even when there is nothing to directly gain from it. For the life of me i can't figure it out
    • Further, whenever you have a game that keeps score and has a possibility of cheating, you get players who accuse others of cheating just for being different to them.

      Case in point: Agents [2y.net], a web based game that I play has someone posting regularly on the message boards accusing huge lists of people of using a script to play the game. I happen to be in one of those groups, and to know quite a few of the people he's accused; we're all playing it just for fun. Yet he's not happy being at the top levels of the

    • Well, one the best example of this would be the Seti@home cheaters. You should have a look at this story [slashdot.org].

  • BFSecure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xankar ( 710025 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:05PM (#8264398) Journal
    Punkbuster is definitely excellent for public servers. It thins out cheaters hugely(but not entirely), and what cheaters there are don't last long on well-adminned servers.

    On the other hand, It isn't too hot for competitve play. Updates aren't frequent enough.

    I play bf1942 in the TWL 8-man ladder, and I must say, BFSecure is definitely a great tool. Updates are extremely frequent(at least once a week-- i only update before matches). It performs its job exceptionally-- the only thing we have to worry about is people using exploits.

    Unfortunately though, as the name suggests, bfsecure is specifically for battlefield. I don't think they could keep up with the cheats if they had to handle multiple games.

  • America's Army - cheats are "built in" (Score:4, Informative)

    by jspraul ( 146079 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:24PM (#8264605)
    punk busters is supposed to keep america's army players in line, and it pretty much does as much as it can.

    however, it doesn't help that the developers decided to include a 'dev mode' or something that's basically providing a bunch of built-in cheats even in the latest 2.00a version.

  • saw it working just yesterday (Score:3, Informative)

    by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:30PM (#8264660)
    Just yesterday I was playing AA, and PB kicked someone off the server for cheating. The message was something about a skin hack.

    So I know that PB works, because I've seen it in action.
    • You didn't actually see it working. You saw it claim to be working.

      All you saw was a message from PB claiming that it kicked off a cheater. For all you know it kicked off an innocent person, and left one or more cheaters on the map.

      Don't get me wrong, I like the program and use it, but its own activity reports do not constitute proof of effectiveness.
    • When I played Counter-Strike, some anti-cheat softwares used to kick me. But I never used cheat with that game. People that get kicked are not always cheaters.

  • Push hasn't come to shove yet mostly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:30PM (#8264661)
    After reading everyone else's comments, I noted that most of the "successes" anti-cheat programs have attained are largely in the FPS genre and centered around only a few games (namely BF1942, Enemy Territory, Half-Life+mods, and SOF2).

    However, I think both the previously made comments and the news report itself is asking a different question for a different topic. Read the title again.

    Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?

    Note the fact that it merely states 'Online Games', yet everyone here is talking about FPS games. Well what about games like Warcraft 3? Theres currently no Punkbuster support for it (although Blizzard is doing a fairly good job at monitoring and banning cheaters). Theres no (effective 1st party) support for anti-cheating programs for Half-Life and its mods (Punkbuster and Cheating Death don't count).

    What I'm trying to say is that this generation of anti-cheat systems is nothing more than a "warm-up" for next-gen games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (and maybe UT2k4 we'll have to see how its accepted though since its shipping on SIX CDs). We know pretty much anyone who considers themselves a gamer will pick up either HL2, Doom 3 or both so the chances of cheats being written is obviously high. When HL2 comes out (since its being released first), expect to see a complete change in the way anti-cheat systems are implemented in games.

    Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, they do work. For now.

    • how can you even ask the question in terms of unsupported games? You are suggesting that people are overlooking unsupported games. We can't know whether it works for those games until we try it out, but so far we do know that it does work for supported games.

      So really your question is Is there anything holding back support for those games?
      • Thats right, I am suggesting that people are overlooking unsupported games. Thats because unsupported games constitute the majority of games out there. Did Quake 3 ship with anti-cheat software? Did Jedi Knight 2? What about No One Lives Forever 2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Not Enemy Territory)? Did Half-Life?

        And to answer the question which YOU posed, "Is there anything holding back support for those games?". My answer is: Yes there is something holding back support for those (presumably future) games

        • I was thinking more along the lines that some types of games can't be cheat proofed, but I could be wrong there. As for the cash motive, well I hate to say it but you'd see more games supported if users were to pay for it rather than game companies that might feel insulted by the proposition that someone outside fix something that really isn't a bug just simple inevitable environment abuse.
        • Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Not Enemy Territory)?

          RtCW didn't ship with PunkBuster, but it was added a few months later in a patch... compare the number of known cheats in the v1.0 RtCW (grenade spamming, etc) with the number of known cheats in the latest version and I'd say that PB seems to work great.
    • I noted that most of the "successes" anti-cheat programs have attained are largely in the FPS genre

      Well, yes. That's where most cheating happens. RTSs and MMORPGs are much harder to cheat in, simply because of the way the games work. The worst you can do in many cases is a maphack, and often even that's not really possible.

  • Can't really tell... (Score:4, Informative)

    by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:41PM (#8264740)

    It does seem to have gotten better, but sometimes I can't tell if someone really is that good, or if they're cheating. Of course, I don't like being shot round corners by cheaters; bots can also look like cheating players - they are very accurate over long distances, which normal players generally aren't.

    One giveaway is ping: it's fair to assume that if someone has got a significantly better ping than you, they are going to get the shots in better. I've noticed that my playing is much better with a ping of 80 than with one of 120 - somehow I miss less the faster my ping is. For many, changing from an old modem to isdn/cable/dsl has at least as big an effect as any cheat would. I therefore think it's fair to suspect someone of cheating when they keep on fragging you although they have a 200 ping and you have 100.

    With that said, I don't play on many servers that require anti-cheat programs like punkbuster, although the newer (steam) versions of HL and co seem like they might now have anti-cheat stuff built in.

    -- Steve

    • That happened to me all the time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Orien ( 720204 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @10:58PM (#8265897)
      I don't really have time to play games anymore, but when I was still a student I was hooked on the original Unreal Tournament. Me and a friend of mine were in a clan together and neither one of us ever cheated. Ever. But you know what? We got accused of it all the time. Especially him. I would sit there and watch him and it was amazing how good he was. Almost every map we would play on any server he would have the most frags by about 100. I would be number two about 10 higher than most people, except on 'thorns'. Man, I loved that map. Both of us could get 200 frags and be miles ahead of everyone else. I used to get so tired of these whiny teenage wimps not having enough ego to admit that we were better than them. They would start calling us cheaters and convince the admin to ban us. It got hard to find servers to play on. Of course my friend didn't help the situation any because he loved to talk trash and that would further lead people to think that he cheated. You can imagine the senario:

      "How did you kill me!!!!!111 I had full armor and health!"
      "It's called a headshot. Get used to them."
      "WTF!! You kill me every time I walk around that corner!"
      "It's called 'aim', you should get some"
      "This SUX0RS. You are using an aim bot :("
      "Aim bot? Is bot short for robot? I don't have one of those, but your mother says I love like a robot"
      1@|\/|37_69 voted to kick+ban You_Suck

      So let that be a lesson to all of you out there. Sometimes people ARE just that good.

    • Upgrading computers makes that much of a difference too...

      I remember back in the days that I was playing Quake and Doom in 320 windows with 15-30 fps.. luckily, was solo or only one other player (ahh, the days of modems).

      BUT, when I upgraded my computer, I owned; after playing with such crappy conditions, the upgrade made a huge difference.
    • If you play counterstrike with the new netcode enabled, you get shot around corners pretty often. Don't sweat it. Basicly, his computer does not show you as being behind the corner because of lag compensation. If you run right up to a corner and stop, the server may assume that you kept going. You see yourself behind a corner. He sees you out in the open.

      Not to mention that most of the guns can shoot through up to 3 feet of wall. Standing behind a door or right behind a box or a corner is useless for

  • There is nothing worse than playing my favorite game online game, only to have someone frag me using mad skills. Some of these guys are so good (or is it that I'm so bad?) that I don't even have a chance to get off two shots after I respawn before I'm killed, AGAIN. It is so frustrating. America's Army is the worst. It seems like everybody out there is so much better at the game that I am. Even newbies kick my ass all the time. It is so embarrassing.

    The only way I even have the slightest chance i

    • um.. the solution to this is to play with people on your own level, and work your way up. most games have "newbie" servers, or try playing with friends on a LAN first. sorry, but i have no sympathy with you at all, saying "the only way I even have the slightest chance is if I cheat". if this was allowed, where would we draw the line? do you turn the cheat off when you're doing well "oh, but i was having so much fun". no. cheating = wrong. getting better the honest way is also so much more fun. if you really
    • So your philosophy is "I suck, therefore all other players must bow before me while I cheat my way to the top"?

      You, sir, are the problem and why we need anti-cheat systems in the first place.

      Play games with single-player modes against bots to develop your skills. Play on heavily-populated servers where there is wide range of players and skills to challenge. Success does not happen overnight, like any game practice is essential to become decent at it.

      Only a selfish clod would ruin the game for everyo

    • The only way I even have the slightest chance is if I cheat.

      Before I get into this, let me just say that I am one of those guys thats in the bottom 10% of FPS shooter players, but I LOVE playing these games. I play FPS team games whenever I have the chance and for the most part, that's unfortunately not very often. I constantly get my ass kicked by people who are good, people who cheat, and people who are just plain friggin lucky. There are times when I get so frustrated I belt out the occational "Jesus

  • False Postives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KurdtX ( 207196 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @08:57PM (#8264895)

    I knew a guy in college (back when the anti-cheat programs were just getting popular) who was really good at shooters (particularly UT). In fact, he was too good: if he played on servers that had aimbot detection on he would get banned if he was having a good night. On servers without anti-aimbots the players would decide he was cheating and ban him after a while too. Unfortunately he had to completely retreat from public servers, and only play with people who knew him, although they still bitched about how accurate he was. I actually sat behind him and watched as he would catch a glimpse of someone on the other side of the map, move to a better location, and then heatshot them a few seconds later. He mostly used the sniper rifle, but just because of it's increased power (he got body or head on 90% of shots, so he mostly didn't need more than one shot), he usually made most of the flag caps for his team too.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Sounds like a bad way to decet a aim bot. I would think a better way to detect most cheats would be to encrypt as much data as possible and to do regular CRC/checksum/hash checks on it to verify. But I am not really a programmer so if someone knows better please post.
    • Sounds like my girlfriend's kids when I play them at games. Her youngest son started calling me a cheater when I hit him with at 10 piece combo at the YuGiOh fighting game for the PS2.

      LK

    • Re:False Postives (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Friday February 13, 2004 @01:16AM (#8266795)
      I knew this other guy who was playing a bit of Doom 2 against a friend down the hall in the dorms. The guy down the hall had the plasma gun, and was shooting across a wide open room at him. But this guy weaved in and out of all the shots without getting hit, popped the other guy twice with the berserker pack, and killed him that way.

      Much swearing was heard from the other end of the hall :)
      • Similar:

        In Quake 1 using threewave CTF:

        I managed to grapple to an enemy who had a quad lightning gun, full health, switch to shotgun, and kill him that way.

        Impressive as that is, we were both in the university lab [20-30 machines with people doing schoolwork]. So after that he stood up, slammed his headphones down, turned and yell "You son of a bitch!".
    • When you're that good and playing against someone who isn't of nearly the same skill as you, maybe you should try to be a good sport (just a thought). Set fewer traps. Use less powerful weapons. Don't go get armor. Try a different play style or oddball strategies. Whatever.

      It's not like completely slaughtering everyone else is fun for long, unless you get a kick out of making people angry. If the latter is the case, you probably shouldn't be allowed out in public.
    • It may be offtopic but for "normal" players, there is not much difference between playing with really better players and playing with cheaters. In both case there is no fun (for the "normal" players).
  • There will always be cheating, there is nothing you can do about it. Ventrillo is supposedly a feature but it is just the perfect way to cheat. People used to wacth each other's screen's now they don't even need to do that anymore, expect it. If you are playing on a server there will be people who cheat, some of them may not even think they are cheating by your definition. Just enjoy the satisfying feeling you get when you awp a speed hacker or wall fire a wall hacker. Don't cheat, it makes you a worse play
    • yeah, two guys with ventrilo and good teamwork is almost like a living wall hack. i'll admit that whenever my clan and i go to pubbing on CS we vent like crazy. many a times we were called wall hackers.

  • Banning CD keys (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Carthum ( 751946 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @10:12PM (#8265539)
    Banning CD's keys sounds like a good idea to stop cheating but in the end it only hurts the naive players. Those who cheat generally have no problem scamming people out of their cd keys. They are already proved they are dishonest by cheating in the first place.

  • Ultimatly, only with 'trusted computing' (Score:3, Informative)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @10:20PM (#8265614) Journal
    The games will never be secure because a good programmer can make a Turing machine that can fool the host.

    The only alternative is to use a hardware driven, trusted computing set of keys that validate that *the* hardware is there and that a real 'punkbuster' program is running. Although, in theory, if you can hack this key, you can get around even this, although the key can be made sufficiently difficult so that you will need centuries to crack it and you lack the ability to physically pull apart a CPU.

    Working against any cheat is publicity. Most hackers do not make the cheat for their own purposes but because they WANT publicity (I am guessing about the 'most' part - I have no imperical evidence). And once a cheat is publicized, Punkbuster, etc. can break it.

    Of course, we have a the hackers who only share with their clan or just use them themselves, but their impact on the average player should be limited.

  • Cheat-Free ProQuake (Score:3, Informative)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @10:38PM (#8265732) Journal
    ProQuake [planetquake.com] is a modification to the original Quake (NetQuake, not QuakeWorld) code to provide some client-to-server verification of maps and models.

    I'm curious if anyone here has heard of any attacks on this cheat-free method?

    Thanks
    -molo
  • I hate cheaters, but I hate laggy performance even more.

    I know of a server admin who used to host a RTCW server back in the original release with RTCW when punkbusters didn't exist. He claims the ping times and average server ran fine on 1 gig of RAM. He later upgraded to 2 gigs.

    Since the introduction of punkbusters, he has had numerous times when RAM would just randomly be used. Despite all the player's ping times looking normal, performance just didn't feel the same. Even myself as a player have to a
  • I would think the way to detect most cheats would be to encrypt as much data as possible and to do regular CRC/checksum/hash checks on it for the server to verify (although I would assume this would slow the FPS). Can someone explain this better? I am not a programmer (like you couldn't guess that).
    • The short version: if you do enough verification to be totally cheatproof, your game will be so slow as to be totally unplayable.

    • Re:How do cheats work? (Score:2, Informative)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

      The main reason there are cheats is that the game clients know too much. In ideal world, the game clients would be completely stupid and would only know what's necessary (for example, in FPSes, the client would only know of the players that are in the player's view).

      However, implementing things in "dumb" way is not efficient or particularly lag-friendly, so clients have to know a lot of things. The more secure you make the client protocol, the slower and more unreliable the game becomes.

      In particular, t

  • The current crop of "anti-cheating" software mostly tries to analyze when a player is playing "too well." This does not solve the underlying flaws in the system.

    There are some CS research papers, which are starting to address cheating from a more fundamental (theoretic) point of view. Here's one that applies cryptography to prevent cheating for distributed game protocols:

    Cheat-Proof Playout for Centralized and Distributed Online Games [umass.edu]

    From the SIGNL lab at UMass, Amherst. [umass.edu]

    Anyone know of any more?
  • First off lag, anti cheat technology means it takes longer to connect to servers and there is lag present once you arrive. Not a big problem anymore but no one likes losing a fps or two for no reason.

    Restrictive net code often leads to problems inside the game, several games have issues where if you walk around a corner the opponent may not be there for a second then suddenly appear, this is a bigger problem than cheating.
  • I've started playing CoD recently, and the killcam is a great way to spot aimbots. I haven't seen many on clan servers, but they're out there in numbers.
  • Until PB works in a manner that is completely transparent to the user, it will remain a great technology that is poorly implemented. Why should anybody have to spend hours educating themself about the intricacies of PB to play online? Personally, I am tired of the constant warning messages that I receive even when I am playing Quake 3 offline. I should not have to configure this thing...
    • As a player, there's no PB configuration. If you run a server, then sure expect to. You are bascially laying down the rules for your server. The only PB error messages I get it online where the game server admin has specified game-specific settings, and I have to configure my *game* .ini file (game cvar settings) not PB, else I get the kick.

  • I've used both of them. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dolemite_the_Wiz ( 618862 ) on Friday February 13, 2004 @07:04AM (#8268065) Journal
    The problem with both of them, at least when I last played them both, is that both of the anti-cheating devices are not associated with the companies of the games the devices are used for.

    I used Punk Buster with Quake 3 Gold and was not able to get it to work due to the lack of help from Id and a problem with XP that prevented the PB updates from fully setting.

    I used Cheating-Death when playing the Half-Life WW2 Mod 'Day of Defeat'. On the plus side, this program sucessfully weeded out all the hackers and cheaters very quickly. Updates were made much more frequently than VAC (Valve's Anti-Cheating solution) ever did. I LOVED that CD found the cheats and updated them within a week of being known. VAC? You would have to wait until they released their updates which were few and far between.

    The Drawback was that the program WAS developed independently of Valve and the program gave the playing experience many 'challenges'. Most of which were lag related.

    So yes, they work but the game companies need to work more closely and quickly with these solutions as they are EXCELLENT solutions to the cheating problems in on-line games.

    Dolemite
    ______________________________________

  • PB (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sorry for huge essay, but if you're not interested dont bother reading.

    I only have experience with Punkbuster on RTCW and Enemy Territory - playing, running servers and modding a large forum.

    Detecting cheats is the big selling point of PB, and fundamentally what it is for. How well it works at removing cheaters depends on your point of view. PB generally only picks up cheats the developers have found - those posted on cheater sites/forums or submitted by players who have come accross them. PB is then auto

    • Re:PB (Score:1)

      by iseth ( 258694 )
      I agree that there are a few technical issues, including one that I have, and have heard of existing for others. Namely, PB with Enemy Territory seems to react badly to Certain nVidia GeForce drivers. I.E. causing the PC to completely freeze. Only does it on PB servers. So far, the only remedy is to revert to older video drivers, but this is a pretty big hassle, especially if I play a different game that requires the newer ones. So I'm not a huge fan of PB right now, as it's not exactly seamless.
  • Personally I wouldn't mind if someone was using a cheat to play at my level. What I do mind is when someone uses a cheat to rape me. For me, as long as there is a ladder or ranking system so that I can play people of about the same level as me (whether lousy players with cheats or medium skill players), I don't mind too much about people's methods (but then I'm not good enough to be in it for the glory. I just play for the game).
    • The problem with ranking systems: How would you ever really get better? I got good at Halo and BF1942 because I _had_ to be good in order to even survive. Defense is as important as a good offense.
      I don't know if I'd want to play with people my same skill level. Having more advanced people on a server is cool, because then someone can fly the helicopter in and drop the newbies off on the enemy base while defending them from above...
      Eh, I dunno. I say if a server has too many elite players or newbies on it
      • I suppose so, but it's never really much fun to play someone massively better than you.

        I wouldn't really gain much from playing against Andre Aggassi or Gary Kasparov. I'd get beatdown too much.

        I generally find that ladder systems are much better in the long run. There's enough variation that you do play people better (and worse) than you. But never by too much.

  • Passworded servers? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Spokehedz ( 599285 )
    I play on Passworded servers, most of the time. Keeping the players to a 'elite few' allows for quite a different game than on the public servers.

    Actually, this is the main reason Clans are formed. There just a bunch of people who want to play together, without all the idiots on the server with them. That, and the fact that if you play with the same people enough, you get to know who is good at what--and who to stay away from.

    Also, having a teamspeak server helps out--as having private and secure comms be
  • I had direct experience with them last night. I had installed the Galactic Conflict mod for BF1942, and jumped into the most popular server. Being a '42 veteran, it didn't take me long to discover all the unbalanced things and take direct advantage of them. So, as I was racking up the kills with the E-11 sniper rifle, someone, we'll call him/her x_player, accused me of using a hack. I laughed and then hunted that individual exclusively.

    About 5 minutes or so later, a sys message comes up: x_player is using

  • I play UT, and in our community, our admins ban together and share knowlege and we don't have much problem with rampant botters. Our protection give the player a shakedown regardless of if he's playing too well, sucks, or just stands facing a wall. If they are cheaters, they will be kicked, ips posted publicly, and banned communitywide. And our protection hardly slows anything down. I ping our server as well as most others at between 30 to 50.
  • CD adds lag and uses system resources. Playing any game--we ran a Half-Life Firearms server--with and without Cheating-Death, you notice a difference, even if your ping stays mostly the same.

    It works fine. It catches cheaters.

    What it can't catch is people who exploit bugs in-game. Firearms, for example, had several exploits that we knew were out there, but didn't know how to reproduce or stop. You need to have good, trustworthy admins who aren't afraid to wield the ban stick. And they need to watch people

  • Simply put. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nekoes ( 613370 )
    Do they work? Nope.
    Are they worth the effort? In my opinion, nope.

    Cheats will always be out there that cannot be detected, blocked, or otherwise foiled by these 'anti-cheats', so why bother to trouble the legit players with annoying software? At least in HL mods, where a seperate program must be run asside from the game. It's just not worth my time, so I avoid these servers like the plague. The actual amount of cheaters that play CS is probably a lot less than people would like to think, and it's not hard

  • No, they don't work. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having used hacks for various online games (Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Quake 2, etc.) and having seen the source for them, and knowing many coders in the "aimbot" community very well, I can tell you there are plenty of cheaters out there.

    Now, some of them are obvious (like me) and just go on, cheat, laugh and leave. Others actually try to play themselves off as being "good" players, which seems silly to me.

    Cheating will never be prevented in online games that run on the PC platform. It's way
  • Think of cd key banning as
    1) punishing cheaters
    2) a evolutionary force to weed out dumb people who don't secure their computers
    3) a way to ensures that people smarten up and don't give important info online to random people
    4) it forces cheaters to get more cd-keys. makign it harder for them to play.

    All around, it's a huge bennifit. As long as there are few false positives then it's good. The people who get scammed should know better. And even when they do it's not my problem.
    • This is about how Valve's [valvesoftware.com] Steam [steampowered.com] system works with VAC (Valve Anti Cheat).

      VAC doesn't get updated REALLY fast, and it doesn't catch every cheat. Those who use the latest "cutting edge" cheats can still cheat. HOWEVER, here's the big difference: if it catches you, you're screwed - banned for 5 years from ALL Valve game servers running cheat detection. Currently this is about 85% of all servers running Counter-Strike [counter-strike.net], Day of Defeat [dayofdefeat.net], etc.

      So the basic model for VAC is to have not the best cheat detection,

  • I think that most people are missing the point in their furor over cheating.

    The real issue is one of a level playing field, right? That's the basic problem with cheating: it unbalances the game in favor of one player.

    That in itself isn't a big deal. Lots of things unbalance a game: hardware (if my bigger badder machine draws frames four times as fast as yours, I'm probably gonna kick yer butt more often than not), network latency, skill, ... and cheating.

    Obviously it's easy to deal with hardware, latency
    • While it makes sense in theory, there is a problem. If you do things like the give loser an advantage, you essentially punish those who are better and make them less "good." What this does is make those who have the actual skill to compete at the top have to get even better to beat the advantages given to the loser. Eventually, those who are really good (or cheating), will get better again, making the advantages have to go up to level things out. Its not that an unbalance playing field is bad, because i
  • What else can we blame when get our butts kicked?

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