I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
Unless you were already near the top, climbing rapidly up rankings (in a 3rd party ladder) is going to be very suspicious. Draw enough attention and I think it's not unlikely someone would find evidence (not evidence of how your system works, but video proof that shows cheating).
And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected... then better players with more knowledge and game sense will consistently still win. You'd need to be a good player in the first place - which is actually where the danger lies. A pro player with an undetectable cheat they can toggle on momentarily, even just once a series at a crucial moment, could make all the difference.
I've given up relying on technical anti-cheat solutions for online games. If it is apparent someone is cheating by watching them play then that's enough for me (and I've seen some _very_ subtle cheaters get banned from leagues for the most minor of slip-ups.) The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
Hard agree here. There's always been people accusing semipros of cheating (see r/VacSucks for more) though, so unless it was pretty concrete, it wouldn't mean anything.
>And if the humanization is so good that it can literally never be detected
It's not that the humanization is good, it's that the cheat is poorly designed enough to be only as good as a really good consistent human. Though you're right that it's not going to be the holy grail.
>The only way to be totally sure are if the game is played on a LAN and the equipment is sufficiently controlled.
Hard agree as well. I've been hoping for online majors to be called off, but alas.
smurfs are as old as competitive games, so I doubt it.
The goal of good anti-cheat should never be to eradicate it entirely, since that is obviously impossible. You just need to make it so the vast majority of players rarely encounter it.
I was 4 when the first DOOM came out, 7 when Quake was released - I LOVE me some fps games.
But I don't find playing online fun anymore - The first 3 days are great, then you've ranked up a bit and start hitting the rampant cheating, and you realize it's just a waste of time sitting for 20 minutes in a game where some 12 year old (or much worse, some 30 year old) has just bought hacks to feel good.
To be honest - I actually blame the automated matchmaking systems more than anything else.
Give me the good ol' server lists back, where a real person is an admin, and you can make a group of friends. This monotonous, automated, matching bullshit sucks the soul out of most games. It's not fun anymore, it's designed to be a chore to prove that you're "better", with an intentionally game-ified rewards systems built to trigger gambling impulses.
Another good niche game with virtually non-existent cheating is Midair. It's mostly old-school FPS players reliving their Tribes days with good admins global banning the rare cheater.
As an aside it's recommended to keep latency under 20ms to stop motion sickness in VR.
Singlehandedly killed my desire in multiple games.
Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B)
It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all.
Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now.
It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.
doesn't "line" made of mouse coordinates look oddly for human?
Naive aimbots will still have some artifacts (eg jumping to a new target as soon as the current one is occluded), but making an undetectable aimbot really doesn't seem hard, given the incentives involved.
I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected?
e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically
so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen
Apex legends does in fact do fully simulated bullet dropoff server side with temporal rewinding, and it doesn't stop hackers from just shooting you with 99% accuracy.
The solution to competitive gaming is streaming, not anti-cheat. Everybody gets the same resolution, same frame-rate, same latency. Fair is fair.
At that point the barrier to entry would be so annoying that online cheating will be reduced significantly, and pro tournaments will be done in person to let you prevent usage of robots. Also everyone will be using the same equipment probably provided by tournament organizers.
Except it's identical to incredible aiming (yet human) skills, which I do not have ;)
I'm not saying I'm for any sort of cheat, including the built-in aim-assist for people who choose to play with a controller, but if I absolutely had to play against an unknown number of cheaters, I would prefer they were at least playing with the same deck as me.
The cheating in the game is out of control and has been for half a decade. People still play and can find little pockets to play in to avoid cheaters (namely playing with friends or on paid services, that cut down on cheating due to the barrier to entry of cost), but it's inevitably unavoidable to consistently run into cheaters
My approach has been to run no client anti cheat outside of that built into the game (VAC), as I don't believe invading people's privacy (e.g. always-on kernel level detection) for the illusion of reducing cheating is worth it. There are better ways of hindering cheating than on-client detection, in my humble opinion.
When my platform launched 6 years ago, we were the first to approach the problem of preventing cheating via non-invasive methods. We required you to have played several hundred matches in-game before being allowed to join our platform. ESEA, who are widely considered to have the best client side CS:GO anti-cheat, just recently implemented something similar, proving that clientside anticheats alone don't solve the problem.
Typically games will either avoid putting low play count players in the pool with established or paying players. Both because they don't want the guy playing for the first time to be constantly creamed by heavily invested players which would drive them off but also because real time and real dollars are strong deterrent to most and at least an extreme slowdown to the remaining. The net result of anti-cheat is to make it unviable to continually cheat, not to never have hacks that temporarily work.
CS's problem is Valve has shit anti-cheat that doesn't really care to detect cheaters and even when it does it doesn't have strong new player segmentation to delay them from coming back. Both of these are reason's Valve is lax with cheaters not reason's anti-cheats aren't effective.
That is you came in on an account that had existing game time or existing purchases or you hop on with a friend in good standing or you bought something in game or anything to indicate your account is actually valued by a legitimate player in some way you won't even see this process.
On the other hand if you're a fresh account with 0 time, 0 spend, and the only people that will friend you are accounts that accept every request or are known for accepting new cheaters expect you aren't just going to be dumped into the clean player pool on your first night. Not only are you the hardest type of player to prevent false positives for but you're the least likely to ever be profitable to server anyways.
Even if you aren't immediately uplifted some strategies mean you may not care if your initial nights had a higher risk of cheaters anyways matter. E.g. Fortnite is F2P but your first night you aren't likely to run into many real players. Both because they want you to get some wins to get hooked but also because it dilutes the amount of cheating new players will see.
Do you have links for EAC & FACEIT?
I think your server could check for several cvars that are only enabled for cheaters using some cheats, to auto-ban them. Though this precludes externals and some better internals.
Since my users are mostly just playing friends I don't really have rampant cheater problems like other services.
And yes, hacks are "rootkits". It's kind of funny how they work. Some of them work at the memory level, or packet level. They require you to disable anti-virus, all firewalls, etc. The only incentive for them not to hack the user is a recurring subscription cost that's often more expensive than the game itself (leading to rage hacks where they are known to detected but the delay in detection-ban lets the user play still and farm RMT items).
Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.