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A comment on Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other. Parent comment

Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again... by bri3d on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @03:06PM (#4107813)
Keep in mind there's another balanced approach: trust the client instantaneously and back-check the game asynchronously. Record replays of every game and re-simulate them using trusted client and server, and note any discrepancies.

Then, one could even have a limited set of extremely beefy full-game simulation machines that run in lockstep against a certain sampling of active game sessions (like 10%), banning a large enough subset of cheaters in real-time to ensure player confidence in the game's anti-cheating system.

I think some recent AAA titles work this way, although I'm not 100% positive as I have no insight into the server end of their systems (and what I observe as automated asynchronous cheating detection could be a vast number of human observers as well).

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Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again... by icebraining on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @03:24PM (#4107918)
That only prevents impossible actions, like teleporting or such, but that's already not feasible with most games, since the server double-checks those. The hard thing is knowing whether a certain sequence of actions was done by a player or by an All-Knowing cheat doing it for them.
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Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again... by Retric on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @06:47PM (#4108871)
Another option is to send false information to a client. So someone using a wall hack might see 7 people on the other side of the door and or players only get shown in their correct location when it's possible for someone to actually interact with them.
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Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again... by icebraining on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @07:07PM (#4108955)
You can't really do that in many FPSs nowadays because you can interact with others even without seeing them; for example on Call of Duty 4 (2007), you can shoot and hit people through most opaque walls, and you get feedback from hits. So if the server were to put fake players behind walls or doors and a player just happened to shoot it, the game would provide false feedback.
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