So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not enjoying playing those games anymore, although they are great games by itself. But the amount of occurrences being killed or playing against cheaters is at a height, where I don’t see the point anymore.
- Why I think Valve is the only company able to something against cheaters?
Because they have the tools with VAC already aiming to prevent cheaters. Valve has got the resources to actually invest into something more profound which could be used for any game where anti-cheat protection needs to be implemented. And lastly Valve is the company which is interested in furthering the ability to gaming on Linux, the anti-cheat solution needs to work on both operating systems. Only Valve has the motivation and means to achieve that with their knowledge and resources. What do you guys think about the topic? Is the fight against cheaters hopeless? Do you think some other entity should provide anti-cheat protection, why? I skimmed over “anti cheat in linux kernel” posts in the net, but I have very little knowledge about the topic, what is your stance on it?
Edited: Mixed EAC with VAC. EAC seems to be part of Epic Company. Both of these tools seem unable to prevent cheating like mentioned above.
Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.
It’s cat and mouse when it comes to banning, even with hwid signatures the cheaters are able to use sophisticated spoofing techniques. Also there are side effects like legitimate players buying second hand pcs that have been banned.
EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.
A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We’ve seen how this plays out already.
Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won’t be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.
It’s open source.
No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.
That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.
There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.
Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.
I didn’t describe what could happen, but what did happen in real life. Multiple times.
MCBans is open-source btw, yet nobody checked and changed the source code, as should be expected really. Operators whitelisted alts and friends. Blacklisted server owners who didn’t appreciate that the operators of their global ban list griefed their servers with backdoors.
Another typical example is 3rd-party Discord ban lists. They whitelist their own staff. They backdoor their bots to fuck around with servers. It’s just the reality of global ban lists.
If Erlite doesn’t abuse that trust, then someone with admin access will, or Erlite’s successor. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Email spam filters prevent single trust lists with scores, multiple lists, etc.
I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.
Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.
Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.
If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.
“At some point”?
Fuck, I can do that now. Training ai is trivial. It’s getting it to do well that’s hard.
But if you can mix in other things like regular object recognition it gets much easier
You could train a network with three nodes over 15 minutes with a dataset consisting of two screenshots of victory royales, and say you “did it today”.
But really you’d need a model that takes in the same inputs as a human (audio and display signal) then outputs the same inputs that a human would make (keyboard/mouse). This is orders of magnitude more complex than what even LLMs do.
There’s no easily accessible dataset large and detailed enough for training a model on any current competitive games, not to mention modern games are some of the most complex things humans interact with at all. Driving a car is a joke in comparison (in terms of complexity).
Looking it up, the most advanced game-learning AI is currently MuZero and it’s been learning old Atari games.
I disagree, replay files on something like starcraft work great for training. In fact, Starcraft2 was targeted after Go for AI gaming benchmarks, and it’s replay functionality is probably a reason why.
But yes, to set it up as a separate machine that is sending nothing but the same user inputs as a person to a computer running the game both completely bypasses and invalidates any of the anti-cheat malware that gets installed, and becomes more and more undetectable to server side code.
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yes, that people do for fun, as hobbies. With great success. And they are at the point where they have their own leaderboards and benchmark games. The ethics of it are the biggest reason why it hasn’t been applied to competitive games.
I did say current competitive games. I have no doubt it will happen, but I don’t think your claim that it’s doable right now if only all the right pieces were put together, is sound.
It’ll happen, but not tomorrow.