Anti-cheat Services in Video Games Are Now a Selling Point (axios.com) 78
"Destiny 2" is the second major game in a week to promise anti-cheat services as an upcoming feature. From a report: Cheating is widespread in many major online games, driving players, including influential streamers, to quit in frustration. No one likes getting shot by a player who is paying for a cheat to effectively snipe without aiming. Anti-cheat software isn't new. But in the ongoing arms race between cheaters and developers, the implementation of better anti-cheat tech is meant to tell players it's OK to play. During a Tuesday showcase of upcoming content for "Destiny 2," a developer said that anti-cheat was "one of the biggest asks from our community" and is being offered in advance of the highly competitive Trials of Osiris mode. (The studio teased the addition last week.) Last week, Activision devoted a portion of its blog post announcing the next paid "Call of Duty" game to note that "Warzone," its very popular -- and cheater-infested -- free battle royale, would soon get "a new PC anti-cheat system across the entire experience when it launches with the new map." Activision has banned more than 500,000 "Warzone" accounts for cheating since the game's 2020 launch, while Bungie has filed new lawsuits against sites that sell cheats.
Not new at all (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't even remotely new at all. This was a selling point of Diablo II Battle.net service to be "unhackable"... which of course, its since turned into an arms race. But yes, this isn't even a remotely new idea or marketing tactic.
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Absolutely, hence why the "client" is moving into the cloud. When people can't play fair, then society either removes them, or takes control away from them.
Re:Not new at all (Score:4, Insightful)
The main reason for moving things away from the control of the consumer and keep them under the control of the host in the cloud would be that it is pretty much the perfect DRM.
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Then that means we'll finally get answers to "I never would have bought it anyway" and "not a lost sale".
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"Freeshards" usually were so insignificant that many hosts didn't bother pursuing them.
Cheaters is why I don't play too many games anymor (Score:4, Interesting)
I use to play a lot of games, then when they begin to go online, I stopped playing them until the habit of playing games kinda got out my system.
The issue was the cheaters. I wasn't ever a big supper gamer, however I was OK enough to hold my own, not necessarily win but be able to play the duration of the game. However when cheaters started hacking the games and cheating more often, I just got sick of playing the games. Not because I lost the game, as I wouldn't normally win it anyways, because they are always gamer who were more skilled than I. But because the cheaters wouldn't even let me play the game.
Spawn, dead, Spawn dead, Spawn, move a few feet see a target, dead.
or in a strategy game.
Game starts, Lets get collecting resources, by the time I have enough to build some defensive forces, My location is found and the other guy somehow has a full army built. found my location and is doing a full attack.
While I play a game hoping to win, I am not so fixated on it, as it is only a game, but I do want a chance to play it, and put my skills up to the test. Not just creamed, just some guy who thinks they are hot shit, because they downloaded a cheat, can beat a guy playing by the rules.
If the game isn't fun, I don't play. Cheaters made gaming no-fun, so I often don't play online video games.
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That happened recently with me playing Unreal Tournament 3. I started becoming pretty good with a few months of practice. Note: I haven't gamed in over 12 years. Obviously the veterans were massively better - but still vulnerable, ie you could kill them sometimes or many times even. Then, a cheater would appear, switch on whatever script it was - and boom: 50 deaths, but you: no kill. And then insult you on the way out: 'bye noob!'. Really immature. The real pros, like the ones you thought was cheating - so
Back in my day (Score:2)
Back in my day, we only used to play with friends .. so cheating wasnâ(TM)t a thing other than joke accusations. I fear for people nowadays, when even your best friend is a stranger. Do kids growing up these days have friendships like we had in the 80s? I suppose it can still be had in places like the military.
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Oh, absolutely. Courtesy of Boston Dynamics and Elon Musk now everyone can have a tailor made "friend".
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Back in my day, we only used to play with friends .. so cheating wasn't a thing other than joke accusations.
That was before cheating was de rigueur, back when people had a sense of honor and responsibility and people would be shunned for cheating instead of receiving praise in media.
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Back in the day (coughCounterStrikecough) cheating was what friends DID to each other. I gave up on LAN parties as a player when I figured out I didn't like twitch games, and became the sysadmin, setting up 10-50 LAN stations, wiring, servers, and cheat detection. Had a bag of mice since at the time the easy way to cheat was to let me scan your machine and then plug your USB mouse/stick gadget in with the loadable cheats. Forcing screensharing onto everyone exposed the wireframe hacks, but scanning with a c
Banning matters little (Score:5, Insightful)
These people don't play to win, they play to ruin the fun of others. That's the "game" they are playing. Their idea of a fun time is to spoil the fun of others. Whether you ban their account doesn't really matter. At all. They just create a new account and continue.
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Whether you ban their account doesn't really matter. At all. They just create a new account and continue.
Which is why companies need to do things like tie the account to some real-world identity, like a credit card.
Which results in Slashdot exploding over the terrible, terrible practice of tying accounts to some real-world identity, like a credit card.
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Have you seen the flood of identity thefts lately?
Tying a game to a real world person is a *terrible* idea.
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I don't follow your connection between those two things. Is the concern that people would get their identify stolen because they've used it in an online game? Or that the protection would be ineffective because griefers would just register with the fake ID?
I don't see how the former is a significant problem. In all likelihood I already gave someone my name, address, and credit card number when I bought the game in the first place. If you ever shop online, you should probably assume that information is co
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It doesn't work.
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How many credit cards do you need?
And I'm not even talking about illegal shit.
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Whether you ban their account doesn't really matter. At all. They just create a new account and continue.
Which is why companies need to do things like tie the account to some real-world identity, like a credit card.
Which people can get around by using virtual credit cards or prepaid credit cards.
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> Which people can get around by using virtual credit cards or prepaid credit cards.
Which then also get banned. A game that keeps banning will eventually get the cheater gone. Only the rarest and most dedicated of cheaters will persist, and in many games, even those do not exist period.
Anything you do to make a cheater have a hard time is good. Stop focusing on Chad Cheatyface, the best cheater in the world. Focus on the fact that out of 100 cheaters, anticheat and bans will push over 90 of them out
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Whether you ban their account doesn't really matter. At all. They just create a new account and continue.
Which is why companies need to do things like tie the account to some real-world identity, like a credit card.
Which results in Slashdot exploding over the terrible, terrible practice of tying accounts to some real-world identity, like a credit card.
Not necessary, they just need better programmers.
In the chess world, the best cheat detection is at lichess.org and they're a free server!
Detecting dup accounts is not actually that hard if you're serious about doing it. Perhaps the companies requiring payment are not better positioned to do it at all? Perhaps they have perverse incentives and don't really want to be too good at it, they just want to extract payments from the cheaters?
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Detecting dup accounts is not actually that hard if you're serious about doing it.
Only if the player is not serious about avoiding your detection.
They've got root access to the machine. Your algorithm only sees what they want you to see.
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False.
You are correct that you don't do it on the client machine. (Duh.)
If it sounds stupid, it means you missed my point, kiddo.
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Ok, feel free to type out your awesome algorithm that properly identifies duplicate clients only from the server that can never be bypassed.
I can't wait for it to be something like the MAC address that folks constantly bring up as the silver bullet because they don't understand networking, and don't know those are changeable.
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You didn't read my comment, or you'd already know where to find real-life code that works.
You're just being a moron. You thought I was talking client side? What? I talked about doing it on the server, and gave a good example of somebody doing it right. Reading comprehension. You know want to argue, but you haven't figured out what you're arguing about. Did I talk about a silver bullet? No, I did not. MAC addresses? Did I talk about that? No. Chargeable? What? Are you just drunk?
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You thought I was talking client side?
No, but I do understand the need for belligerence to cover for the fact that you don't have an answer.
I talked about doing it on the server, and gave a good example of somebody doing it right.
Just so you know, I got curious, and have 4 duplicates now.
Tell me again how this is unbreakable.
Chargeable
When you're going to use "reading comprehension" as your attack vector, you really need to not read "changeable" as "chargeable".
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There is a market to have someone else play a game for you?
That's like buying two chess computers so they can play each other while you go to the movies... why the hell would you not just NOT play the game?
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I'm not about to do that shit, but perhaps there are things that you can't have without grinding and you don't want to do the grindy parts.
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The #1 reason I don't play any MMORPG is because I firmly believe that my time is not being respected. Once I get home and do the housework and eat dinner I have probably 4-5 hours in the day. The fact MMORPGs demand ludicrous amounts of time farming gear, daily login bonuses, insane and unreasonable XP requirements, and so on means that what little time I have for my leisure is not being respected.
I can see where the market is, but the problem is 100% the games themselves. I should not have to treat it as
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A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
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Stockholm syndrome, gotta love it.
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You may be right. I think there is another group, though, of people who cheat and delude themselves into thinking they legitimately won. I had a roommate in college who cheated on every single homework he did in his CS program. For his senior design project, he called me the week before it was due to ask for help... he was supposed to make a super simple daily event calendar app for the university, and he wasn't able to get past the code that was autogenerated when he created the project in his IDE. Somehow
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These people don't play to win, they play to ruin the fun of others. That's the "game" they are playing. Their idea of a fun time is to spoil the fun of others. Whether you ban their account doesn't really matter. At all. They just create a new account and continue.
Those people exist for sure. But I suspect most cheat for the same reason people cheat in any sport, winning is fun and it helps them win.
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But they would know.
I mean, when I cheat, and I win, I didn't accomplish anything myself, it's the cheat that won.
If I cheat and I lose... boy, that must be a kick to the ego to suck so badly that you can't even win when you cheat.
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But they would know.
I mean, when I cheat, and I win, I didn't accomplish anything myself, it's the cheat that won.
If I cheat and I lose... boy, that must be a kick to the ego to suck so badly that you can't even win when you cheat.
So?
Is winning an online game without cheating anymore meaningful than winning it with cheating?
Humans are wired to compete and an unfair win is still a win.
That's not to excuse or endorse cheaters, in fact, I'd expect people who cheat at online games to partake in any number of other unethical actions.
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Umm... yes. When I compete, I want to know that it was me that won, not my equipment. Why would I want to compete with someone (at least if there is no additional motivator like prize money) when I know that they don't stand a chance?
I'm a pretty good chess player. Not good enough that I care about my ELO rating, but competent enough to win most games I play. Why would I sit down with a 3 year old who just learned how the pieces move to compete? I know that there is no chance in hell he could beat me. There
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Imagine you're playing a much better chess player in front of a small crowd. Wouldn't it feel good to win? To have all of those people look up to your mastery and acknowledge you as the better player on the day?
Now imagine you have the ability to get moves from stockfish without being detected and achieve that win. Sure you'd have the guilt at having cheated, and some loss of satisfaction from the same, but you'd also have the adoration of the crowd.
It's perfectly understandable if the feelings of guilt out
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Why'd I give a fuck about the crowd? I would know I cheated. How am I supposed to enjoy the admiration knowing that what they admire isn't me?
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Why'd I give a fuck about the crowd? I would know I cheated. How am I supposed to enjoy the admiration knowing that what they admire isn't me?
I feel like we're having two slightly different conversations.
I'm not trying to endorse or defend cheating or make any sort of moral argument, rather, I'm trying to explain why people who cheat do so.
Being admired is a nice feeling, it's not as nice as if it's unearned, but it's still a nice feeling. Cheating is a way for people to achieve that feeling.
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I think I'll never understand humans.
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Banning matters a lot. I play a shit lot of games, and in all of them, bans work great. They work especially great if they are automatically detected, as teleport hacks are.
What game, in particular, is bothered by players who "create a new account and continue"?
Because anti-cheat measures have resulted in a nearly cheat-free environment in at least Star Wars Squadrons, an incredible low number of cheaters in Fortnite (for a game of its popularity), Star Conflict, and World of Warcraft. Anti-cheat is ofte
I don't do multiplayer anymore (Score:2)
I had the most fun with Day of Defeat, mainly because I played on a private server where the owner dealt quickly and firmly with cheaters. No warning, instant banhammer.
A few months back my PS4 needed a hard drive repla
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I could play DoD, accused of hacking when I climbed the cliff on the beach as a sniper and annoyed the bunker rats.
Can new players tell the difference? (Score:2)
Was I getting creamed by cheaters, or just simply annihilated by experts who were camping out in newbie stages for laughs? I'll never know. I suspect many other beginning players in games like that can't tell either.
Should cheaters be p
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Remember one game paired all the cheaters together. Taste of their own medicine.
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Was I getting creamed by cheaters, or just simply annihilated by experts who were camping out in newbie stages for laughs? I'll never know. I suspect many other beginning players in games like that can't tell either.
Either way, your experience was ruined and the game lost a player due do people who have no respect and no honor and just want to ruin the game for others.
Should cheaters be punished? Of course they should. But that doesn't mean everyone is suffering because they exist
Actually, it does mean exactly that. The only people who don't suffer are the cheaters. Bracketing is a completely different problem from cheating.
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No, they generally can't tell the difference between good players and cheaters. And they have no clue about the effects of latency, etc. Back in the day I played way too much of a particular game and got very good at it. I was frequently being accused and kicked for "hacking". In many other games since, I've seen lots of kids raging, but precious few actual cheaters.
Yeah, there is actual cheating out there, but in my [anecdotal] experience, it's much less common than ignorance and paranoia.
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A lot of these games would benefit from better bracketing so that beginning players can have a chance of getting better.
I believe that they call that "Single Player Mode"
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A lot of these games would benefit from better bracketing so that beginning players can have a chance of getting better.
I believe that they call that "Single Player Mode"
It is certainly possible for that to work in newer FPS games; I don't have direct experience with them to know. I can tell you that with Quake, Single Player Mode was absolute garbage for making you better at multiplayer. You could put the monster at maximum difficulty level and they still couldn't hold a candle to the young psychopaths who played it around the clock and waited for newbies to appear for easy kills.
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A lot of these games would benefit from better bracketing
This, absolutely this. People should be matched against people at a similar skill level, otherwise it's not a fun experience for anyone. This is how games in the 'real world' work. Think chess; a grandmaster will have no fun playing a beginner, and a beginner wouldn't enjoy being beaten soundly by a grandmaster within the first few moves of a game. Tournaments are organised by skill level, not (like most online games that I've tried) randomly against players of all skills.
As it goes, I had this exact proble
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And to be frank I don't care how people spend their time. If people want to spend 10,12,18 hours a day playing the newest FPS that's fine. I won't ever be in their league on that
Sure, in video games as a service (Score:2)
If there's a service involved you want it to function.
If there isn't, you don't want anti-cheat, because you might want to cheat. And it's not hurting anyone else if you do.
Depends on who is defining cheating (Score:3)
Personally, I only ever play single player or small private server games, so anti-cheat systems just serve to frustrate me in either preventing me from adding mods, adjusting my inventory or just running a basic server for a LAN game.
For people like me the selling point for anti-cheat is how intrusive it ISN'T, if it has to be attached to the game at all. The more it stays out of my way, the better.
Sometimes I just want to see the story, or I want to skip the boss fights while I collect wheels of cheese or manage a settlement. I paid for the game, it's mine, let me play it however I want!
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You know how many people yell "cheater!" when you just ask in the forums for some console codes? It's ridiculous. Devs that put in the time and effort encrypting save games, disabling consoles and anything else to prevent you from obeying their sadistic grinding vision when all you want to do is build an awesome base in peace.
So no, I'm definitely talking about anti-"cheating" measures.
Cloud gaming is the future (Score:2)
Can't run screen hacks when the game video and audio is streamed to your device.
At best you could hack the input, but I don't see how that would work.
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Multiplayer AAA cancer. (Score:1, Insightful)
If those "games" actually had any purpose or use in the world at all, then none of this nonsense would even be a thought in anyone's mind.
They only make everything online because DRM doesn't work and they realized the only way they can keep stealing money, is by turning games into "service" that holds parts of the game hostage.
They'd have a legitimate business model, if they actually made something of value for that subscription money. Something that is useful, and not just a addictive-by-design time sink.
The perfect anti-cheat strategy (Score:2)
Just don't play multi-player games. Single Player FTW.
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Unfortunately, whenever you have more than a handful of people, you're going to have at least one asshole. If there's no practical way to hunt down these people and ban them from the Internet, you have to avoid them.
If a game doesn't have a complete and satisfying single-player mode, I'm not interested in it.
Its not a buying point (Score:2)
Anti-cheating is like anti-virus .... (Score:2)
They'll never make one that works 100%, and it will always be a cat and mouse game to keep up with it.
That's fine, in the sense if I pay the high asking price for today's online multi-player game titles, they really should be actively trying to prevent cheats and keep things patched as part of that contract.
I don't play many online games because I just don't have the free time for them these days. (Hey, I'm not some teenager just trying to kill boredom.) But all the cheaters who grief/kill you constantly
Sea of thieves (Score:2)
I always am running into cheaters in Sea of Thieves. It is frustrating when people have Aim Bots and such and just sit on you for 20-30 minutes spawn killing you.
It is frustrating because they don't really need that to kill me because I am terrible to begin with, but I mostly play to blow off a bit of steam and just relax. Cheaters just ruin it because it makes people give up on the game and then it becomes less fun for everyone.
I just don't get the thrill of cheating. Cheaters didn't win anything in a game
Punkbuster! (Score:1)
y'all remember Punkbuster?