An important thing to point out is that it requires a lot of reversing work and low level knowledge to make a cheat, and usually at the end of the day cheats all end up with the same core features anyways. This means that there’s a huge stigma amongst cheat developers around knowledge sharing, which makes a lot of that initial work all the more arduous. Anticheats further increase that initial work, and incur an ongoing maintenance cost since each update can break your cheat (especially of you specifically work to break the public methods that everyone is using).
Last time I looked at VAC, it was doing stuff like looking for stuff like modifications to the .text section to detect hooks implemented by writing e.g. jmps to some injected code, but never actually adapted when people started just modifying vtable entries (most source engine constructs are exposed to developers as pure virtual cpp classes). Since they stagnated, it got easier and easier to cheat over time as more and more people spread knowledge on how to hook in an undetected way. Hell, in gmod some lua anticheat developer (gmod is a sandbox game with a lua scripting interface) found a vuln in the clientside lua implementation that allowed arbitrary memory io and used that primitive to implement checks for injected dlls when people started cheating at that level in that game, which was far more effective than VAC ever was.
BE was another universe, it felt extremely prohibitive to touch the game in usermode & even in the kernel I started to feel cramped. You can still totally get past it, but it felt more like writing a very specific rootkit than actually making a cheat.
So, from the other side, anticheats raise the cost of initially developing and maintaining a cheat. If used effectively, they can also kill paysites. I think they have value, even if they aren’t achieving a 99.99999% success rate.
What is BE?
Valorant and Edan.gg's defender [1] has the best fog of war system I've ever seen. CSGO has probably the worst; in fact, at one point, the game had NONE and sent player pos's to everyone at all times.
I completely agree, but there are a lot of server-side mitigations that haven't been nearly as explored as I'd hope.
Your cheat couldn't see those players because the server was doing a very cheap and primitive visibility calculation, deciding the player entities are dormant for you, and choosing to not send you the data for them.
This is different from the later-enabled player PVS system, which does more expensive ray casting once you get a certain distance away, which cut down on wallhack cheats a lot more [although they are still very useful]
Would an anticheat work if you did the opposite of this? Send the client random movement data above and behind them and if they spin and shoot towards it instant permaban forever
Random wonder. I have no idea in or around anticheating, please do feel free to shred it as an idea to pieces
Check out https://edan.gg/defender to see the comparison between CSGO and a better FoW system.
Like how someone wall hacking would behave differently from someone who is not. Maybe by reacting before the player is actually seen.
Maybe I'm just thinking it's more impressive than what it actually is.
Let me guess, you have not played CS:GO? There is an insane number of obvious cheaters, more than in other games I played.
Also, there is TeamFortress 2 that's just has been abandoned and they can not an anti-cheat to it, it seems.
It seems winnable so far if you look at the Xbox One and later, at least. I'm not aware of anyone successfully modifying game code on those consoles.
The downside is that it a requires a completely locked down system.
But on a PC? Where the user can install whatever software they like? Much harder.
It feels like stopping aimbots will ultimately fail as eventually we'll see bots that use machine-vision to spot heads and pick them off. You wouldn't even need to run it on the cheating machine, this could be a separate device doing passthrough on the mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
Even if they turn on HDCP, you could just get a low-lag monitor and point a camera at it.
Yes, you're just a successful cheater as all cheaters are deceptive by definition.
It can work well enough if your goal is 'ban/hellban cheaters relatively quickly'. If the time/money cost of creating a new account is non-trivial, this can very well get cheating down to some acceptable level.
Server-side statistics can be used in addition to this kind of client-side monitoring, but there's only so much that can be inferred from statistics. It may not be too difficult to determine if someone is using, say, an aimbot from statistics, but it's very difficult to determine if they are using a radar - because the cheater still has to make fuzzy, human decisions, based on the information that radar gives them - and because its difficult to tell radar apart from good gamesense.
You can emulate an android and run snapchat and screenshot the emulator, but the screenshot reporting inside of snapchat is still valued by millions (and shapes the behavior of millions).
Server side cheat detection actually don't detect that much, like how do you known someone is wallhacking?
As for manual review it just does no scale, when you see that CoD banned 100k cheaters, imagine if one person from activision would have to review every cases.
Cloud gaming is the solution against cheats.
There are cheats doing CV on video stream and they work on consoles. I guess they would also work on cloud gaming services.
but nowadays idk whether it stands
The solution to cheating is to stop playing with strangers.
You are right, though; my estimate is just personal experience