Valve's Battle Against Cheaters 336
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"
VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
Team Fortress is overrun with cheaters and Valve seems completely unable to do anything about it.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
Atleast in TF2 if you are on a good server people are easily banned by unique ID.
My clan has been playing Modern Warfare 2 recently and if you find a cheater the only thing you can do is back out of the match.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Atleast in TF2 if you are on a good server people are easily banned by unique ID.
My clan has been playing Modern Warfare 2 recently and if you find a cheater the only thing you can do is back out of the match.
indeed, playing mw2 is a PITA, you can only hope that the cheater is in your squad, and VAC is doing nothing at all, maybe they'll get banned a month later but your game is already ruined, punkbuster may not be perfect but at least it kicks right away
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
VACs answer to banning people is purely based on stats, there is no checking of memory resident cheats at all.
I don't know whether VAC checks for memory-resident cheats, but I'm quite certain it doesn't base anything on stats, at least not in Counter-strike: Source. I know guys that regularly have k:d ratios of 30:0 or better.
Basing any sort of anti-cheat on stats would be a terrible idea. For example, basing bans on stats alone could get you banned merely for playing on a server with bots that don't shoot back (for training).
Or for a more realistic example: my k:d ratio is usually a crappy 3:4 or so, but every once in a while I'll randomly go a round or two at 20:1, and when that happens I usually quit while I'm ahead. Should VAC conclude that this abnormal spike in my score is the result of some hack?
No, I think it's quite clear that VAC does not operate based on stats.
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Basing any sort of anti-cheat on stats would be a terrible idea.
More to the point, you don't even need any automated system for that, if players can kickvote. In fact, all too often I see people kickvoted for being "too good", even when it's clear to better players that it really is probably just skill and not hacking.
Usually, the protection against that is player recognition. I've been playing Dystopia a lot lately and the relatively small community combined with the stats (and ranking) system provide that. You get good by playing a lot, which means that other players recognize you and your rank goes up. The model of having you spec other teammates between respawns also helps you spot cheaters without having to stop playing to spec them.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
A Modern Warfare 2 clan? Clans and matchmaking?
So what do you have to do to actually have a war? Add every member of the opposing clan to your friends list and play? Worthless game when it comes to having a competitive community. insert(no_dedicated_servers_whine);
On Topic: The fact that valve thinks anti-cheat is more important than anti-piracy means a lot to me. Compared to the absurd DRM protection Assasins Creed 2 (and other future titles from Ubisoft) has for example which requires you to have an active internet connection to play a single player game valve is a company that actually gets it.
I must admit though that PunkBuster has a lot more tools available for the admins AND the server users (like pb_power and pb_kick by users) and the ability for plugins to be added for streaming bans globally and implementing your own anti-cheat variables (CVAR checks).
There is little to no information available on how Valve's anti-cheat operates and I for one have no idea if it actually GETS cheaters for I never see any public messages of users being kicked (this might differ per game though).
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TF2 uses dedicated servers and allows server side mods. Therefore, votebans and votekicks are simple to use and many times don't even need an admin online to work properly.
MF2 however doesn't use dedicated servers, any one player is actually hosting the "server" on their machine. The problem (well, A problem) with that is that there is no Server admin or other person in control of the back end of the game, so if the automated systems don't pick up the cheats, the players have no recourse to expel the cheate
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A Modern Warfare 2 clan? Clans and matchmaking? So what do you have to do to actually have a war? Add every member of the opposing clan to your friends list and play?
Yes, that's exactly what you do. You form a private match and invite people to it, they select their team and you play without any other players in your way. Is it really that hard to understand?
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Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot keep cheating from happening unless you control the server (and even then it's not trivial). End of story.
I (and so many, many others) foretold that before MW2 came out and that cheating will ruin that game within days, possibly weeks, of release. Unlike others, I stood with my decision to avoid buying it, simply because yes, it would have been a killer game that I really wanted, but I also knew that playing it will be an ongoing frustration with cheaters running rampart.
Why bother buying a game, even if it was the best game on the planet, if you can't play it sensibly?
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We play AA2 CSAR at are the top clan on battle tracker but still certain clans look for any excuse to ban us from their server.
Not still. Because of that. And it's not even envy or inferiority complex.
It all comes down to "imagine it's war and nobody shows up". Or rather, imagine it's multiplayer and nobody wants to play on the server because the other side is simply a few leagues above your skill. Nobody stays for long on such a server. I am facing a similar problem, even though our team is far from the to
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This is why I haven't bought MW2 and never will. Yes, I purchased MW and used to play it online.
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Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Informative)
PunkBuster is awful. I don't need their shit running in the background 24/7. If MW2 used PB, I would not have purchased it.
The thing about VAC that people don't fucking get is that it runs on a delayed ban wave system. They don't ban people immediately for cheating. They want to flag as many cheaters as they can to keep the cheat writers guessing... then slam hundreds of cheaters with a ban all at once... often a week or more past the date they were flagged. This method is great for Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, but unfortunately not so much with a server-less game like MW2. In TF2 and CS, you can ban people from your server and not have to put up with them (and some servers have votekick mods as well), but MW2 doesn't have servers, admins, votekick, cheat reporting.... none of it. And that's a major roadblock to many people for an otherwise-great game, and I'm hoping that perhaps Infinity Ward decides to try and recover the PC community's image of them and make it up to them with better anti-cheater features. But for now, they're just giving us the middle finger.
Still a good game, though, and I still play it. The cheating isn't nearly as rampant as it was when any jackass could pirate the game and essentially have infinite copies to play online after being banned, and this matchmaking system that everybody bitches about is, imo, better than dedicated servers. Dedicated servers in CoD4 are absolute shit. The CoD community is shit. The modding community that people cite in their pro-dedi argument is inexistant. Matchmaking lets me not have to deal with laggy servers with useless mods and stupid rules and hammer-happy admins. Thank you IW for matchmaking... now fix it.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been playing TF2 almost every week since shortly after release; I've never run across someone using an autoaim or wallhack. What server are you seeing this problem on?
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
I, as well, have been playing TF2 almost weekly since its release. I have seen cheaters a few times. It's pretty obvious, esp. when a sniper has 300 headshots in a row and is on top of the board.
Hell, one of the cheaters was even spamming the URL to a website where you can BUY the cheat, so he was demo'ing his warez, if you will.
The best part was when everyone dropped to spectator and spec'ed him while he was playing. It was fascinating to watch the aimbot at work. After 30 seconds of watching his screen from the scope perspective, anyone's doubts were quickly erased.
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I forgot to mention that this was on several well-known and large servers, but I can't recall the names off-hand. It did stop after Valve released a patch to the game.
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Why would anyone do something like that if he wasn't prepared to face cheaters?
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You ultimately run the risk of Valve shitcanning your entire Steam account. If you can't sign in to Steam, you can't play online - and even if you worked around that somehow, you couldn't get updates.
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If they blocked access to all games in the account (including single player games) for cheating in multiplayer servers they could get quite legal troubles for it. It's far safer for them to just block access to VAC servers.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
I think cheating is only a problem when there is actual competition going on. Public servers in any FPS-game are so random anyway, that only a blatant aimbotter can affect the game negatively. Luckily, these guys are easy to spot and ban by the server admins.
VAC does its job brilliantly. It's a system designed to ban players that can be confirmed to be running a cheating software. It's designed to give no false positives, and so far the Valve's record is clear on that.
I play Team Fortress 2 competitively, and we have our [etf2l.org] own [esl.eu] leagues [cevo.com] from which we can ban players according to their Steam IDs. Every league has its own Anti-Cheat admins, who examine the recorded replays of official matches. There is only one player caught cheating in TF2 that has played on the highest level. He also attended LANs where you can't play with your own computer without a noticeable change in his skill level. So you can't really say that he profited that much.
It's just so hard to cheat and stay on top of the competition and not get caught that most people just won't bother. I wouldn't say cheating is a major problem, at least in the TF2 scene.
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Late in the life? Cheating happened almost instantly on D1. It took me over a year to find out that the Grandfather wasn't actually 1-handed.
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Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
The police doesn't stop you from holding up a liquor store right now. The high-resolution 30fps CCTV system there won't stop you either. (A shotgun would, but that's a story for another thread.)
But with clear pictures of your face robbing a liquor store, you will have a police record. Do it a second time and you're on the wanted list. Do it a third time and they hunt you down IRL and no Pay-and-Spray will help you.
Security everywhere is hard to maintain, so it is sufficient to make sure that crime doesn't pay. Crimes that don't pay are not done.
In this sense, VAC could very well eradicate the cheaters altogether, if only with a lag of one month. Kids that download an aimbot that day will annoy the hell out of everyone else for a month and then they're gone permanently. People (=potential cheaters) will notice that and probably think thrice before downloading an aimbot themselves. People who still cheat then must be kiddies or junkies with no IQ, no idea of delayed gratification, no impulse control and not the faintest idea of self-discipline ("idjits") or actively gaining pleasure for hurting or impairing others ("griefers" = sadists). They can be banned all day long. Or slowly roasted on open pits, for all I care.
I could endure cheaters for a while if I knew they were never coming back, ever. If they have to buy a new copy of the game every time they get detected adds a good incentive for the game publisher to detect them with increasing accuracy and frequency. This means cheaters practically pay for their own detection and I like it that way.
Re:VAC is a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
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I resent the notion of 90% of all players being scumbags and bottom feeders.
But if scumbags play the game without cheats like everyone else, I have nothing to object and they're no scumbags.
If you are able to shoot them easily, they're not cheating and that's fine.
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I've got over 600 hours of time logged playing TF2. I've seen two cheaters in that whole time. Both times they didn't last more than a few minutes (server admin banned him).
The only place TF2 is overrun with cheaters is on the non-VAC secure servers. Chances are if you're playing there then you've already been caught cheating.
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I think I saw a cheater in TF2 once.
But largely my experience has been cheat-free. Play on VAC servers and you should have a similar experience I would think.
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I've seen more cheaters in CoD4 than in TF2, in spite of the former using Punkbuster instead of VAC. Perhaps its just the fact that no anti-cheat engine will ever be perfect and so we'll always have to deal with the idiots.
Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this (Score:4, Funny)
What all these anti-cheating efforts fail to realize is that cheating is an integral part of the game, especially in computer gaming. Given that such a cheat can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider cheating, they are removing key gameplay elements and ultimately changing the face of the game.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a rootkit just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior technology or extra knowledge. If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.
Crippling superior players is Communism.
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IMO every Quake Instagib server should have a (callvote) option for insta_weapon 1 (great fun, but
aimbot cheaters usually get bored very soon)
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>If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.
You're trolling right? If you really think it works like this you should try re-educating yourself when it comes to modern day cheats, we're not talking about iddqd game recognized cheats here..
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Y'know...I've seen some real STUPID responses before...YOU WIN!!
Cheating is NOT an integral part of the game. The playing field is always level? ROFLMAO go play against a 12 year old that has an Aim bot....tell me how level that is. You just wanted to use the word aggregate in a sentence didn't you? You didn't care the entire sentence was horse crap.
Superior technology...what a load of crap that is...setting it so the aim is always deadly and that it cycles through every weapon you own and fires them all wi
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Re:Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this (Score:5, Insightful)
What all these anti-cheating efforts fail to realize is that cheating is an integral part of the game, especially in computer gaming. Given that such a cheat can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider cheating, they are removing key gameplay elements and ultimately changing the face of the game.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a rootkit just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior technology or extra knowledge. If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.
Crippling superior players is Communism.
What all these anti-murder efforts fail to realize is that murder is an integral part of life, especially in America. Given that such a murder can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider murder, they are removing key life goals and ultimately changing the face of humanity.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a police force just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior ability to murder or extra knowledge of how to carry it out. If life is so difficult with frequent random murdering allowed, perhaps we shouldn't have been made mortal
Crippling superior murderers is Communism.
The problem with Ayn Rand is that her hysterics appeal to a lot of high school students who forget to think about them in more detail when they grow up.
Re:Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this (Score:4, Funny)
Which is why I only play local multiplayer and break my opponents' fingers off with a hammer. If God hadn't intended me to cheat as such, He wouldn't have made people so squishy. Or they could've shown up in full-body armor, though I guess that wouldn't save them from my 'welding torch' backup solution.
Re:Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Who needs steroids and hard work when you've got a tire iron?" - Tonya Harding
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Barry Bonds was one of the best players in baseball before he started doping. Then he started doping and became the best player in baseball. What'd he lose? Potentially being a hall of famer? So what. He made his money, and sometimes that's all people care about.
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they should also be ethical; examples to us all as to what we can achieve
I can never achieve the genetics of a pro athelete. I can, however, take steroids. The "ethics" are completely arbitrary here.
Games have rules, and one of the rules for many pro sports is "no steroids". Steroids are unethical in the game way that a corked bat it unethical: because it's against the rules, and not because some people are silly enough to confuse atheletes for heroes.
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Re:Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that top sportsmen/women don't use drugs ?
On which planet ?
I'd actually be surprised if a single one of the top 20 athletes in every sport was NOT using drugs. Popular team sports seem to suffer less from the issue than athletics only because they are more commercial, thus care less about fairness and the health of their practitioners, thus enforce much less strict controls. It took deaths on the Tour de France for cyclism to tackle the issue.
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Your comparison is laughworthy. Think of an athlete using an "aimbot" at speerthrowing for example, we would then imagine a machine standing at the point where the athlete would stand with the athlete behind it pushing one button and the machine calculating the exact shot and shooting automaticly.
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the comparison is between cheating and cheating... is that hard to understand ?
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You must be too young to remember the original Quake 3, then.
Learn how to adjust your FPS in the console to make yourself move faster than other players!
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Obvious troll is obvious, you're all posting in a troll thread. Don't feed BadAnalogyGuy, you know him, he always trolls.,
Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know that doing anything client-side will work, for the same reason that DRM doesn't work. I guess it might deter the casual cheater, but then there's also the possibility that raising the bar will entice people to break the anti-cheating code just for the challenge.
The long-term solution I think is to design the game in such a way that the server can verify clients are playing by the rules. If wallhacks are a problem, the server could send fake data to the client telling it there's an enemy hidden behind a wall (when it's really not). Legitimate players won't be aware of this, but it would alter the behaviour of cheaters and thus they could be found out. Aimbots could perhaps be detected by supplying an invisible model that a legitimate player wouldn't be shooting at. Essentially, give the client bogus data that won't affect the experience of legit players, but will out cheaters.
Maybe it's easier to keep changing the client-side checks fast enough that it's not worth the time to work around, but I don't know if that kind of strategy is working in practice. Who will pay for the constant development?
Re:Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Privacy? (Score:4, Funny)
A chemo for the cancer that is killing TF2? - I'm in :)
BF2 Project Reality does similar things, I think. Once in a while I see something flickering at the side of the screen for a single frame or so. I guess an aimbot would trigger and react instantly while a human player wouldn't even notice unless camp^w tactically waiting somewhere for a while.
This mod has been out for several years and they probably won't leave any visible graphics glitch in there if it was a mistake. The server code is not freely downloadable and obscurity is probably one of the reasons for it.
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I play regularly on a server that typically has admins on on peak hours (8pm-12am EST) and it remains fairly clean. Anyone new is usually scrutinized pretty hard; and the existing players are all there to have a good time. The banhammer comes out quick if you're cheating.... Even quicker if you mouth off to the admins or start spouting racial slurs.
Oh yea, they also toss anyone under a reasonable (16-18) age range, since we get kinda foul mouthed and taunt back and forth. If you sound like you're 10 year
Re:Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite what the league players would have you think Valve's games are not generally played with (or designed for) less than 16-24 people, and 32 is not remotely uncommon. What your suggesting effectively doubles the load on the server AND each affected player.
Plus most cheaters would not readily be detectable this way. Aimbots tend to be activated by the player right before firing after the player manually gets pretty close to the target on their own, and wallhacks are generally used as an advantage in information rather than open combat.
Re:Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you made a poor platform choice.
The PC in general is an open platform because you can easily and trivially run whatever code on it you want and peak and poke the memory as you see fit, even if the OS itself is closed.
If you want a gaming platform where cheating is not an issue, you need a closed platform, like a console, where it is much easier for the developers to detect and prevent cheating, if there is even any in the first place. Despite being 5 years old this year, whilst it has suffered some game logic cheats which are easily patched, the Xbox 360 has yet to be prone to a single aimbot or radar cheat for example.
PC's are great for general usage and single player/cooperative gaming, but not for competitive gaming where cheating is largely an unsolveable problem without closing the platform, which goes against what PCs are great at. Even assuming in a few years you move everything server side and just pass images to the client there's still the possibility that people will write pattern recognition apps, to recognise enemies and send control messages to aim at them like any other aimbot.
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Amen brother.
I still hope they will squash cheaters because in my personal view they are scum comparable to child molesters. I would not want to have the "open platform" PC abandoned for games because of them.
It would be a shame to see more platform balkanization or a joypad-only environment for all the games. The moment a closed platform is exclusively established, running fees will come running, I know that. And I actually like to have one notebook for everything, gaming, working and internet. It's extrem
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No no, it makes perfect sense.
You see, these "Games" are for kids. After all, only kids play games. So, anyone who corrupts that experience is obviously a predator, aiming at taking away the innocence of these children, and they're doing nothing more than virtually molesting the poor children by cheating at these games.
Obviously we mustn't stop cheaters, but save the children just by banning games completely! Otherwise your children will be molested by cheaters!
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superserious (Score:2)
Re:superserious (Score:5, Funny)
EXCELSIOR!
Threat to privacy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Threat to privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
VAC secured TF2 for Linux is platinum rated on Wine, depending on how buggy the most recent update of TF2 was (it varies widely from week to week)
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=9901 [winehq.org]
But for the most part it's very playable. Looks like today it's "just" silver. Heck I've gotten it to run briefly on my netbook using Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix with the unsupported GMA 950 and an atom processor(!). Most of the bugs listed are bugs in the windows version too (like multicore support)
Trust Nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
So the crazy idea is this: don't tell the client systems where the avatars are located. Maybe your system says "I'm here, looking this way", and all you get back is a bunch of data for drawing textured triangles. Triangles might be part of another player's avatar, or a wall, or who knows what; but your system doesn't know of what it is either, so there's nothing for an aimbot to go on to do its thing. It's more data, and more work for the server, but maybe it's not TOO MUCH more data or work for the server, and it'd be cheat-free.
(Unless you write some spiffy image recognition software, but hey, at least we get some advances in AI out of the deal that way...)
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2. Aim
3. Fire
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4. Boom! Headshot!
Re:Trust Nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody who works in the games industry has ever thought of your idea, tested it, and realised that it's an unfeasible proposal. Because valve don't read slashdot, they'll miss your comment and this groundbreaking new proposal to solve the problem of in-game cheating, which they took seriously enough to INVENT VAC. They certainly wouldn't already implement something very similar that simply neglects to transmit a player's location unless you have a line of sight. That's totally something they aren't already doing, and haven't been for several years, nay, almost a decade.
As for your second point, that's why VAC monitors the entire computer, and not just the game's binary. There are a family of aimbots that jiggle your cursor until it's over a "I'm a head" texture - so your circle of aim for an accurate headshot needs to just be within 100 pixels of any given face. These ones basically sit in memory, monitor the graphics drivers and tweak the mouse. Hence, such draconian methods to detect them *without false positives*.
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you can just avoid sending the position of not visible players, but the problem is that _as soon_ as one is visible the aimbot will kill him all the same. also another problem is that in "somewhat geared toward realism" games as modern warfare (seriously kids, famas&m16 are not 3 round burst only) you have to give position away to allow for bullet penetrations. and then you still have to send sound effects, which give away your position to a potential aimbot/wallhack.
Good point, but it would be a start to improve things. Let's discuss it in more detail:
1) Why not do bullet/target collision detection on the server? That way, you don't need to transmit the position of not visible players to the other clients. Instead, someone shooting through a wall would do so blindly even if he has installed a wallhack, and the server would decide if he hit someone.
2) The sound effects could be somewhat distorted to prevent calculating the position of the other player from the sound. If
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This is completely unworkable: it massively increases the amount of data that needs to be passed between client and server, and the amount of work the server must do, and makes movement far more pause-filled. If we were all on gigabit Ethernet on a local network, and all had top-of-the-line game machines, it might be workable. But not for reasonable hardware and modest network connections.
Also, certain triangles would be pretty recognizably face images.
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You could do the entire graphics processing server-side with only a video stream transferred to the client. This is less bandwidth-intensive than outsourcing the things that travel the PCIe bus on a traditional gaming system.
The cloud-gaming start-ups are trying to do precisely that, BTW,
And you would still have the problem of client-side programs looking for patterns in the image, which would cause cheaters insane amounts of work to continue their deeds.
This will work wonders in realistic shooters where pe
Reputation systems to the rescue (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheating is a social problem, not a technical problem. Technical solutions for social problems usually do not work. However, we have fixed this problem already with various other online activities, where people even regularly spend real money to buy something from complete strangers. Reputation systems like eBay and Amazon use seem to work quite well, but then of course you can no longer blame the cheaters for poor sales.
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There are a class of problems that can most easily be solved by fundamental changes in human behaviour. This will never happen, unfortunately.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/ [penny-arcade.com]
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"Cheating is a social problem, not a technical problem."
I always wondered why they didn't do a statistical analysis of human input by looking and comparing demos. Maybe uploading demos to a central server for analysis would be a good thing, then you can ban the cheaters accounts.
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they also may game the system as groups (giving each other good reputation and undesirables bad reputation)
This is seems like something that would be extremely likely in games where people join clans/guilds/etc. Clan war breaks out? Give bad reviews to anyone displaying the other clan's tag. Plus the same thing could happen anyone that just doesn't get along with a clan member. And if the clan agreed to give each other 100% ratings after every game they played together, belonging in a clan might even turn out to raise your rating enough that you never have to worry about your behavior.
Then besides the whole
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This is a very real problem.
When I used to play CounterStrike, I played nearly all the time on a server that was run as a demonstration of Qualcomm's CDMA wireless technology. (I plug them because it was hands-down the best server I ever played on.) I was probably only an average player, but was a bit below average on that server. There were about a dozen players (who were regulars) whose skill fe
Total, utter gobshitery (Score:2)
If they're so super-serial about cheating, why oh why oh why do they keep developing games with vulnerabilities designed in?
Whack-a-hack is always a losing prospect. If you trust the client, then you're boned. There are far more people with far more incentive trying to pop your cheat cherry than you've got available to protect your virtue. Your best case scenario is that you make a profit before your game is totally owned.
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Because games run alot better when more work is doen client side. Try doing hitbox detection on the server, and people complain about the lag. Do it on the client and 99% of people have a great time, and 1% get an aimbot.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, duh. So cheating is not a serious issue, which is actually consistent with Valve playing whack-a-hack in the wild.
Please note the title of my post: what I'm calling Valve on is the inconsistency between their actions (vulnerable designs) and their words (ZOMG cheating > piracy). Gobshites.
2 Main Problems with VAC (Score:2, Informative)
There are two big problems with VAC over PunkBuster
1) All power resides specifically with VAC. There are no tools for the server admin to make things like md5 or cvar checks, no screenshot facility to check players, or even the ability to kick a player. As such, you HAVE to rely on VAC doing all the work, and you as a server admin have nothing to say about it. If you see a cheater that VAC is failing to catch, your outta luck.
2) VAC gives no information as to what it is doing. You never see a player b
Maybe a bit too zealous (Score:2)
Cheats do spoil the game (Score:2)
The only real way to enjoy the game is to join a dedicated server where the admin is online and can kickban the player. As a poster mentioned above, it's pretty easy to confirm a cheat by spectating their pov. Unfortunately votekick rarely works, even with a really bad cheat there are too many that won't bother.
Phillip.
Speaking for the Counter-Strike community, VAC (Score:5, Informative)
I am an admin in one of the larger gaming communities in my country, and have a history of competitive gaming. I was never a gamer before I saw the teamplay in CS 5on5 matches (example video [youtube.com]). I still play the orginal game once a week or so. Just for the record, CS is a team-game where aiming and firing is only part of the skill. Knowing and practicing with your team is essential just like any other sport.
If you didn't already know, Counter-Strike [wikipedia.org] (CS) is still one of the largest on-line games out there, peaking 75k [steampowered.com] users yesterday. I'm talking about the version 1.6 and not the CSS (CS Source) version. There is still a larger userbase for other Steam-games, but we still regard the original CS to be the game played by the eSports community because of its smooth gameplay and predictable recoil patterns when firing guns. Many "elite"-players have tried moving on to newer games, but get disappointed and still comes back for the good old CS 1.6 where graphics may suck, but you get a predictable gameplay where the player is not that much affected by randomness.
The story of cheating in CS has been a long annoying trip. People have even been cheating at LAN-events where they used aim-key, and they even won price money and got away with it. The story is long, and websites profiting from selling cheats are very active today. Some of the cheats go very deep in kernel and hide itself just like a root-kit. Ring 0 [wikipedia.org]-cheats are common.
VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) has been the attempts from Valve to stop the cheats, however VAC has always been ages behind any new cheat and has never taken all cheats available for free at the net. There has been attempts from the community at steampowered to scare users with passive detections and delayed bans so users could not be sure which cheat got them banned, but mainly VAC seem to me being a low priority project at Valve. Valve is still, like any other company, prioritizing new projects and just leaving maybe one programmer doing some cheat-detection-code on his free-time. The situation is a win for cheaters and others. And also a win for Valve, since there are a lot of people trying cheats and thus they sometimes get banned, ending up buying a new copy of the game (the price for a new CS at Steam is currently available at 7,99€ which is annoyingly cheap). Valve still sells a lot of copies (in the years 1999-2008, Valve had sold 4,8 million copies!).
Various anti-cheat communities has gathered during the years, where one try syncing ban-lists and communities constantly have players monitoring other players trying to spot cheats by spectating. As VAC is such a failure, many still go undetected. Especially if one hides their cheats well. The community RADAR [gaming.no] is one of these initiatives which accept new communities for sharing such ban-list.
The latest addition; Easy Anti Cheat [easyanticheat.net] (EAC) is a project created by a skilled programmer that is based upon deep-level detection accompanied with screenshots. This programmer may seem hard-core, and this is mainly because he used to be a cheat author(!). This is currently the best anti-cheat system available for CS, but it's still only used in Clan Wars/eSports. The public-area for normal players is still depending upon VAC, as the EAC requires a 3rd party client installed which is a tough barrier to overcome.
The future now seem brighter, as we have now left VAC and we are mainly no longer depending on it. I wish Valve software good luck in the future, but it seem to me that if VAC remains a low-priority project it will still annoy thousands of everyday players and leaving a few cheaters laughing, destroying the on-line experience.
Yours
Cheating is enabled by the engine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not infecting my system(s) with Steam. (Score:3, Insightful)
No thank you.
I don't cheat.
But I also don't want programs running arbitrary deep-level scans on my system and phoning home either.
ESPECIALLY since I can't see the data.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the intent is closer to:
"Cheating kills your game because it makes legit players not want to play it anymore, whereas pirates don't affect your legit users"
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until I need a disk in my CD/DVD drive and/or an Internet connection for single player mode. Or until it's used as an excuse to inflate the price of entertainment.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This might have been a sound argument if the DRM crap actually affected piracy..
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
A cheater killing you instantly every time you come within a few lightyears of his avatar is still orders of magnitude worse than having a DVD in your DVD drive when you start the game.
It may be inconvenient, maybe even damaging the DVD drive, who knows. Replacing the DVD drive after 3 years and the DVD you possibly have to buy a second time when you got a minimal scratch that messes with the copy protection is just money. Unnecessary money, but you could factor it into the experience of playing an expensive game.
Cheaters on the other hand will ruin the game experience altogether. No amount of money will get you a balanced and fair Modern Warfare 2 right now. (Short of setting up your a LAN tournament on tightly secured computers you own and control)
One pirate is just lost income, who maybe would've never bought it full price anyway. One cheater can frustrate 63 paying customers per server all day long. As a paying customer, I would rather play with 63 pirates than with 63 other paying customers with one cheater among them.
Re: (Score:2)
Until I need a disk in my CD/DVD drive and/or an Internet connection for single player mode. Or until it's used as an excuse to inflate the price of entertainment.
The game companies do that, not the pirates. So blame them. CD/DVD checks are ineffective, and they'll blame their price increases on anything but greed. Yet pirates continue to crack their games while legit users keep having to deal with the problems. Don't give your game dollars to companies that penalise legitimate users. Simple.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF are you smoking?
You are apparently living in cheaterland, where you have no hand-eye coordination and you rely on software to play for you.
None of modern existance is automated. You are just trying to rationalize your cheating. Epic FAIL!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On the flip side, how many of these "bugs" are due to cheaters trying to weasel their way back into VAC servers?
There's sadly no way to know for sure, really, except for maybe people you know IRL.
Re:The casualties of the battle are ... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Hardware failures and software bugs."
What hardware "failure" looks like a wire grid and wallhack on screenshots? And why should I as a server admin care if you unknowingly or willfully used this bug?
What software "bugs" will have a detection signature like the latest aimbot? Which software bug will produce a registry entry and ..\system32-fallout like a wallhack?
We know how likely an md5 hash collision is with hack X and legitimate program Y. Not very. With an increasing number of wallhacks and legitimate programs, we will see hash collisions sooner or later, but I'm not really convinced unless you have dozens of very very rare but innocent programs on your system that no one else has AND anyone else having them is also banned.
Think of the online arena like a dance club: you paid for entry and yet the bouncers can throw you out at the first hint of trouble. And all other guests are cheering and complimenting them for doing so. A few dimwits, idjits and griefers can just cause so much fallout in such a short time that even drastic and unwarranted measures are usually applauded by the audience.
Face it: bouncers and anti-cheat admins don't have the resources to assess every single case pondering over preponderance of evidence. It would twentyfold the cost of operating a dance club or game server and most customers are not willing not pay for a Constitution-class jury system.
If the choice is having "1 collateral damage for 50 cheaters banned" or "0 collateral damage for 25 cheaters banned" - or a huge increase in paralegal costs for the server admin, I will opt for the collateral damage. War is not fair anyway.