Wonder how soon there will be a market of PCI-e cheat rigs for DMA attacks...
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[1] Yep, gamers are literally accepting rootkits that allow arbitrary remote code execution on their machines.
That's certainly risky and rather horrible, but what's the alternative? Multiplayer games are a huge business and a huge culture, and all that goes down the drain if people cheat.
Game companies have millions of people around the world competing for prestige and money. They're running game software on their own personal computers--machines that are also full of their financial records, naked pictures and personal correspondence. If your game is full of cheaters, you're done. If your game gets players hacked, you're really done.
I have no idea what the solution is, and I'm really glad it's not my job to figure it out.
If you get a competitive advantage from doing something like grinding, which computers can do better and more tirelessly than humans, and humans tend to dislike, then inevitably you will have cheating. (e.g. WoW)
If on the other hand the competitive advantage is from working out a strategy of in what order to play your cards to maximise your chances of building up your strength while attacking the opponent and yet keeping something in store for surprises the opponent may spring on you - a really complex strategic task - then that's something people enjoy doing and the computer sucks at. (Hearthstone)
People may be addicted to the first kind of games, but is that something that should be protected? It's kind of similar to people addicted to slot machines... sad, a reality we have to accept, but not something we should expend vast amounts of intelligence trying to sustain.
Of course, there are people who will do it for the money, and don't stop them, but realise that they are basically just a few steps short of people refining formulae for meth to make it more addictive - the fact there's a business case that exploits a human weakness doesn't mean it's a productive use of intelligent people's time.
One of the examples you gave, Hearthstone, actually had many bots running on the ladder for a time. Their goal was grinding, but even so, a number of them was better than a significant portion of the human playerbase. With the recent advances in artificial intelligence, computers are not that bad at this kind of task.
Overall, I don't disagree with your main point though. I have no qualms automating boring and repetitive tasks in non-competitive games. And if a competitive game has those parts, I'd probably avoid playing it. I'd rather spend my time coding than wasting it grinding because it's part of some game I otherwise enjoy. I feel it is indeed a more productive use of my time. I wouldn't go as far as judging other people who like the grind though.
E.g. turn the opponent's textures bright purple so you can see them better. Make the walls transparent. Aimbots that spoof mouse input.
The server must be authoritative or all bets are off, but you still do need client side anti-cheat countermeasures (stuff like verifying screenshots).
This stuff can't be made 100% fool proof, so competitive games where big bucks are at stake must still take place with the organizers providing the hardware and the players located in the same room.
Ultimately no matter what you do, some small percentage of your players will cheat. Every major game on the market has paid cheats which fully bypass the protections available for it. It's better if those cheats can only buy them a little than buy them a lot. It's not worth investing a lot of effort in more than basic cheat protection, it is worth investing it in handling as much as you can server side and exposing as much as you can client side as that is something cheaters can't game.
This sort of behavior becomes impossible. If they have to aim in a fairly human manner, they can still be killed by anyone walking up behind them for example. It may provide some bit of unfair advantage. But not nearly as much as is possible in many games today.
Honestly, I immediately smell naivete BS when someone says "the solution is simple"...
If a company wants to attract competitive gamers, then they have to develop games you can't cheat in during competitions. Right now, the most reliable way of doing so is server side, with all the challenges that entails. Otherwise, they have to install what essentially amounts to rootkits - which isn't exactly what most gamers want to encourage.
(Alternatively, run game in VM? I guess performance would suffer too much with that approach?)
I lost interest in game RE a long time ago, but http://www.unknowncheats.me/ seems to be its successor, though from a cursory glance I see there are a lot more cheats and less technical information.
GD we miss you.
Made gaming IRC channels utter chaos for weeks.
I used that to bot on WOW back in the day, this tool was fabulous and can be adapted to probably any game. Knowledge of C++ is required to create an extension, after that you can code your bot in C# or Lavishcript (their own script language, quite powerful).
Things like Punk Buster, et. al. are more like anti-virus software: they try to find the signatures of known chat clients.
So it's best to write you own...and rename your debugging process to "Google Chrome." He got pretty far with his auto-walker in some MMOs. He had limiters so his runs wouldn't be too fast and would go up/downhill correctly...or so he though. He forgot to multiple by -1 somewhere and the server banned him for attempting to fly of into space.