I mostly play online shooters. Been playing them for about 25 years and the amount of hackers in various games is unbelievable and it pisses me off how much its down played everywhere. I cant be the only one...
Now, there are various articles here and there that briefly mention it when its extreme for a particular game. Places like Reddit seems to have a complete ban on letting players show examples of it, and I believe for a few reasons.
First, they probably dont want to discourage new players from trying the game if they see people complaining about cheaters. Second reason being, I believe, they dont seem to want to spend much money resolving the issue.
I feel the largest drawback in this policy is that no one seems to really be discussing it and therefor we are not addressing it. Wouldnt it be best if there were thousands of people brainstorming a solution of some kind?
Two games I spend most of my gaming time on are Overwatch and Apex Legends. Overwatch doesnt have a large advantage to using Aimbot or wall hacks given the nature of the games so its pretty rare that I cross another player that is even suspect.
Apex Legends on the other hand is out of control. I am not a pro player but I have 1,000 hours on the game and play in diamond rank so I am not terrible player and have pretty decent mechanics. That said I feel like I have and extremely good sense of when I come across a cheater, especially when I view them afterward.
Living on the west coast puts me in a time zone where something happens at a specific time of day. My friends and I call it the Chinese hour. Around 1am Pacific very low level players start to shit on me. Every other match is lost to a cheater, and many times its a whole squad of cheaters. Their ping is so bad that I can see them skipping around. Their looking and movement is garbage yet they know where everyone is and have laser aim. Its stupidly obvious. I cant express how annoying this is and I cant understand why we cant resolve the majority of this issue.
First off why cant they just region lock Asia from the US? That would tamper down some percent of them. Second, why dont they just block users based on Ping? If you have 250ms ping then you cant connect to the server.
Another proposal is just autoban or issue warning based on accuracy? We have data from the pro players and we know what the best of the best can do. Anyone who have better aim than the pros should get a few warnings then autoban. Another way would be to autoban based on sight snapping to enemy targets through walls. The games know where everyone is and what they are looking at. So if another player is snapping to targets repeatedly through walls that they clearly wouldnt know the position of autoban. Its one thing if they look toward an area they hear footsets or gun fire, but its another thing when they are having a hard time shooting another player because they keep snapping to another target behind an enemy they are engaging.
I give and example. Cheater is inside a building, holding looking at a door, they can see through the walls and press a button to aimbot when firing so the first person through is downed. Then they shield and crawl back out side. Its at this time you can see them trying to aim at another player peaking the door, but keep snapping to the downed target. I have seen this, time and again. I have seen them snapping to targets far off in the distant that are directly behind and enemy that is near.
With little consideration I have just thrown out a few ideas. I am sure other people could develop or expand on these concepts to eliminate cheats with little human review. In general a cheating account tends to be new. You could probably expend the parameters of very old accounts, and tighten them on newer accounts, especially from problem regions.
I would love to hear from someone who is knowledgeable in this area or field. Why is dealing with cheating software so difficult? why isnt there a team automatically downloading the software from cheating websites and just reverse engineering it? The software sells, and eventually people get banned, and just create a new account immediately. Eventually there is a fix for that software and the cheaters just update to get around it and it starts all over again. Why isnt there someone just spending 20 bucks immediately the date the update is released and creating a fix?
My intuition is that they dont want to really invest the time and money into it and if they ignore its its mostly fine as long as they dont lose players and if they can keep people from talking about it then the majority of players wont realize how bad the issue really is.
Thoughts? Other than "git gud, noob" tolling?
Not sure you can in entirety dismiss the query to a yes or no in regards to if there are methods to distinguish a human input from a computer input, since that is obviously possible, the doubt comes into how large margin of error you allow.
But how would you go ahead and create this algorithm which computes input and then classified them as valid or non valid,First you would need to gather a large database of input in the format of whatever the game uses, This input would then need to be classified into series of inputs(the data need to be over time due to a classification on each individual input would not catch anything except for input that is out of bounds and give a lot of false positives) (This step would make it probably more difficult to use data from other games due to even though fps are similar to each other there are sequences which are fair in others (e.g aimbot exist in overwatch as part of the soldiers gameplay)) thus the data itself need to be prepared for each game. You then need to also gather data for a subset of different hacks and how they affect players input and generate some data from this, then the algo needs to be trained on this data ( my knowledge is not up to date atm on how to build the algo itself with the latest techniques) and it's result tested until you at least get 90% accuracy, once this is done you then need to implement the system to run the trained algo and here comes a new problem, you do not want this algorithm to affect performance of the game (we are already screwed with communications over the internet degrading performance) so this would undoubtedly stop it from running at the same time as the match is going (might work if there are low amount of player input to consider to have it done in realtime e.g 5 vs 5 or 3 vs 3) which means you need to save all the match data and then run it after the match is over even then this solution will still give false positive especially at the start of its deployment when you have minimum of data thus getting to my point of having a process of appealing a ban (Most of these security software in gaming works by having their process hidden in how they function in attempt to stop people from learning how to bypass them too quickly which would limit appeal since it would be the corporation itself judging if they are in right or wrong and simple cases such as your brother would be fine (unless they would find that it is more profit to ban people and make them buy the game again and again) but the hard to define would most likely be defined in favor of the corporation, which I would be fine with if there were a option to run my own server of the game thus the ban would only limit my ability to play on the corporation server but not the game itself)
The above example would cost quite a bit to implement and since it would most likely only be good for one game and perhaps even only one version of the game and if the game has a low entry cost such as apex then it would only train cheat maker in making a better software thus we get into the idea of an arms race, which I think current corporation do not find to be profitable at the moment.
The current software for driving a car down the road is limited to some extent when it comes to handle things in realtime and with other human drivers and pedestrians thus can mostly be classified as assisted driving rather than self driving in that it need a human operator on standby to handle more difficult environments.
Now to my very limited understanding of current anti-cheat software (due to their own secrecy) to some extent they use machine learning and algorithms but they mainly uses them in order to try and determine if the extra process you are running is a legit process or not similar to how anti-virus software try to match signatures of possible viruses running on a computer the problem being is you can quite quickly build a virus with some intended effect and then check with all the anti-virus vendor if they catch it and if they do try to obscure the process so it no longer matches their signatures thus the defender always have to react to the attacker meaning that they will most likely be one step behind.
So once more the optimal solution is to minimize your liberty even more and give the corporation full control since it is the most cost efficient method for them in order to remove all cheating, while my solution of having more decentralized will only limit the extent of cheating by making people naturally group together with non cheaters over time but not remove it in its entirety.