They did make one. It was called FairFight[1] and was mainly used by EA in the Battlefield franchise. It also was a dumpster fire: bans were applied to legit players all the time, moderators were overwhelmed and manual review took too long and many times resulted in nothing.

Behavioural anti-cheats are not the answer. Implementations are crap and under-developed, and I don’t blame them: you would need tremendous (server-sided) power to correctly process the models considering how complex multiplayer games are, and it just isn’t worth the investment and complexity to them.

It’s just cheaper to pay rootkit developers (like EAC or BattlEye) and knowingly infect client devices. Hell, their drivers are even WHQL signed by Microsoft. And when false positives hit? Just blame the anti-cheat vendor. Potential HR problem dodged.

[1] https://www.i3d.net/products/hosting/anti-cheat-software/

Valve do this, here's a good talk:

Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc

As a former CSGO player (not a very competitive one) this trust factor really sucks, and Valve oversells it.

If you play with lower ranked friends and do really good in matches you will get reported a lot which will tank your trust factor and almost guarantees it that will only see hackers from them on.

They say they use other factors like account metadata, but I have a 10 year old account, with purchased games and verified phone and still got "Low Trust Factor" after playing with friends and started to have an obvious hacker every other match.

That is why I am a former CSGO player

This is kinda weird, CSGO has spinbots and xp-farming bots: one moves faster than is humanly possible, the other moves on the spot or in a circle with exact constant rotation ... the only conclusion I can make is CSGO want these bots, because auto-blocking them seems trivial.

Why use deep learning when so, so many bots (and their host accounts) could be blocked with trivial heuristics? My only guess is allowing spinbots/farming somehow provides a financial gain in CSGO?

> My only guess is allowing spinbots/farming somehow provides a financial gain in CSGO?

Valve devs have a lot more leeway than your average developer. They honestly might have just thought it would be cooler.

Beyond that they now have the infrastructure to detect more subtle forms of cheating through deep learning using Overwatch (the reporting system, not the game) as ground truth data to train their AI.

Incorrect, there’s lots of cheats that are completely seamless and just improve your performance without being a completely binary “perfect headshot” vs “always miss” or something.

I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…

The great part is many games have the aimbot built in. Players use a hardware dongle to make a keyboard/mouse look like a controller input, and the game applies aim-assist to the keyboard/mouse input.

You don't get mouse axis movement though -- it emulates it through a Controller stick so it's not exactly an ergonomic and mouse-like experience, from what I have heard.

Have you ever played Warzone? People sniping 700+ meters and they can't even see you on their screen. Obvious map hacks, aim bots, and even some hilarious shit like super speed or the ability to drive a car through walls to run you over.

Besides, it's not just a matter of improving accuracy. Elite players are elite in multiple facets of the game. Movement, general awareness, map awareness, accuracy, etc. Many of these metrics are easy to measure.

Cheaters will show up as outliers and it is at that point that their accounts should be manually reviewed.

With casual gaming I really don't even care if someone is "cheating" to improve so long as I feel the game was fair. I can put a red dot on my screen to improve my aim, as an example.

Warzone is weird. I can't understand why speedhacks, 'silent aim' (you can shoot in a direction different from your view angle) or flying cars are even a thing.

This was impossible in Q3A (1998) without introducing an input lag thanks to client side prediction. Server also didn't send you updates on other clients that are too far away, behind a hill - you'd pretty much only receive positions of those you could see, hear or that could see you. In Warzone, you can see everyone on the map with a wallhack.

I really wonder why the game is designed this way. I guess it might be to limit required computation power of the servers? They still do stuff like hit detection, so server surely has some idea of the physics.

On top of all that, this stuff is possible even today, months or even years after such exploits being widely known. They do have a kernel-level AC driver, but they don't even seem to detect trivial hacks from the server-side.

If other players can't tell someone is cheating then it's not actually a problem since everyone will feel the game was fair.

In competitive gaming, having an actually fair game matters more than having a fair feeling game.

In proper competitive gaming (ie. with a prize pool) you can apply much more rigorous standards like kyc, a live video feed; even standardized hardware and drug tests.

In magic the gathering, the standards are divided in three: casual (called regular), competitive and professional. Basically the competitive mode is for people who play the game to win, sometimes with small prizes, but still want a very clean playing field. I feel that the standardized hardware and drug tests are feasible at professional, but not competitive, and anti cheat rootkits is interesting in competitive.

The area between thinking others are "absolutely not cheating" and "definitely cheating" is huge, and where most online gamers end up spending their time. Absolutely cheating is not a problem, because most games allow you to report people, and they'll get enough reports and be banned shortly. Not being able to tell is the problem, because you feel something was unfair (which you might also feel when it actually is fair), but you feel it more often and it leads to poor experiences and people quitting the game.

Cheaters quit after a while because the game loses its challenge, and people being cheated leave because the game.feela unfair, and eventually there's not much of a community left.

Ah, the old Lance Armstrong argument.

If you want to detect obvious cheating behavior shouldn't you train the recognition software on cheating behavior not elite players?