AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating
niila.fi140 points by duckling23 a day ago
140 points by duckling23 a day ago
There must be some statistical method or honeypot method to reliably detect cheaters. Like present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating. I don't know, there has to be a way. Cheaters are disease in online gaming. I know that sensible people won't want to sacrifice their anonymity to provide ID to play a video game but if it is in the competitive scene and they are playing for money, surely it isn't a stretch to ask for ID and thus ultimate accountability.
This is a thing, yes. Statistical cheat-detection methods are more or less required for online chess, for example, because anyone can run Stockfish. A lot of that came out of academia, so you can just find papers like this: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf
The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway:
- Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat
- Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be
- Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.
Is this what happens with Call of Duty? My observation is I would play very good for a couple of days, often 1st or 2nd player in the 12 people group. Then, next few days I am placed with a bunched of assumed cheaters (seemingly seeing thru wall, headshot but not dead, jump slide then shoot mid air with a gamepad...).
Activision CoD uses EOMM, engagement optimized match making. They’re optimizing for your to stay on, much like a gambler playing slots. You allow one win where the player is matched with lesser opponents, and then the next X games, you’re the lesser opponent.
It’s all tuned to keep you playing and want that dopamine hit of a win that’s always just around the corner.
If you're doing so well that you're saying CoD starts treating you as a cheater, then what's probably happening is you're playing people below your skill level until the matchmaker adjusts.
Then once the game puts you with people closer to your skill level, the best of them feel like they're cheating (and to be clear, some definitely are, but to the people you were stomping you also probably seemed similarly clairvoyant with impossible aim and movement)
Skill based matchmaking is controversial, but the truth is more games have been killed by an infinite loop of skilled players stomping new players so badly that the new players never become skilled players, than the opposite.
Also, have tools to record and replay games, and knowlegable moderators who can identify signs of cheating and ban offenders. This will count for a lot, even if someone can cheat well enough to appear highly skilled naturally (which almost always requires at least moderate skill at a game), it won't be quite so rage-inducing. This doesn't scale very well, though.
> knowlegable moderators who can identify signs of cheating and ban offenders
Oh boy, this absolutely does not work for chess at high levels. Endless debates and arguments.
Like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1ctj85n/viih_sou_upd...
A very good player invented a stupid opening and then somehow won a lot of games against top players with it, and chess.com decided he was cheating (without presenting evidence) and banned him. It really seems like he wasn't.
> Oh boy, this absolutely does not work for chess at high levels.
Magnus himself said this. If he were to cheat, he'd only get 1-2 moves per game, and sometimes not even the moves explicitly, but merely the notion that "there is a very good / critical move in this position". That would be statistically impossible to accurately detect.
Well, statistics would be the only mechanism. If a player was on average playing at level X in one setting, but at a lower level Y in a setting where it was considered impossible to cheat, that's about as good as you can do.
But it's pretty impossible to point to a single move and say "that's definitely a cheat move".
You can look at moves as a series of probabilities. For each move, classify if it's more a blunder or inspired move and then look at people's games and see if they consistently have 1-2 moves that are much much better than their typical.
The problem is that at that level they're more likely to make the absolute perfect move than not. Super GMs often play 95-98%+ accuracy games.
Top reply there:
> It sounds like if you want the answers you desire then you'll need to contact a lawyer and figure out if you have any right to them.
What legal recourse would there even be here? Some sort of civil action?
IANAL and not particularly familiar with the particulars here, but very likely, the answer is "there is no legal recourse."
As a private entity, chess.com is within its rights to admit or reject people for any reason it wants, except on the basis of certain protected classes (which cheating is not one of them). Furthermore, the terms of use for an account probably says something to the effect of "we have the right to ban you for whatever reason we feel like, and you have no real recourse." One could still attempt to sue, but the almost certain result is to flush tens of thousands of dollars in the toilet just to get thrown out on the motion to dismiss for lack of a case.
They may have a slightly stronger case for defamation or similar because chess.com said the account was closed for "fair play violation", but still.
The case for defamation is weaker than normal here, since chess.com (from what I can tell) never told anyone but the user that they considered them a cheater--there's no statement being made that can have the quality of being defamatory in the first place, except the statement being made by the user.
These days aimbots are so sophisticated and able to include fuzzing, that it's virtually impossible to tell because they can mimic a player's movement, miss occasionally, etc.
About the only cheat you can really identify is glass-walling, because usually people who do it eventually slip up and aim/shoot perfectly at someone they plainly cannot see.
Really good players can get lucky pretty often because of game sense so even glass walling is hard to detect for certain if a player shoots through walls and kills their invisible opponent. We see this often even in pro play for tactical shooters.
High level Q3 games had a lot of predicted movement kills for ages, long before vision automated aimbots. I'm not sure how anyone could even distinguish a perfect reaction there from a predicted shot that worked out.
In the WarCraft 3 community they have a custom client and third-party ladder called W3Champions. It adds a few quality of life improvements like allowing you to not get matched against the same player again for 8 hours. But where it really shines is in the ability to moderate the community by banning bad actors. Some popular Twitch streamers tried out WC3 recently and in the official battle.net ladder they got players trolling them by making swastikas with towers or deliberately deboosting in order to snipe them. Once they switched to W3Champions the trolls all went away, but if any showed up they would get banned pretty quickly. One of the biggest benefits of building smaller communities is that it's actually possible to moderate them and elevate the gaming experience of everyone involved.
Another example is Apex Legends. Watching creators on Twitch and it's a massive quality of play (and stream) change going from random matchmaking and playing matches with a small selection of people.
Provided computers isn't part of "ultra high end of competitive e-sports" - it's pretty standard. The tourney just needs to pull enough eyeballs to interest a PC hardware company.
Cheating still happens.
Reminds me many years ago I was playing online poker. The site I was on did this special anniversary giveaway thing. Every million hands or so, there would be a massive (in relative terms) jackpot. If you win the hand, you get the jackpot. It was so large, that you should never fold any hand, at all. (At these microstakes, normally a big hand was $5. These were like $300, so risking your whole stack of $2 was totally worth it).
At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on.
I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded.
That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.
Once they get you hooked, they can match you with the other whales. Until then it's just training your reponses even when it costs them 300 fluffmarks.
With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment.
I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.
Game devs take on the problem by themselves by not releasing a server component. Older games used to release the server component, so people could self host or make their own ladder system. That allowed each community to come up with their own set of rules and restrictions for how much moderation was desired. But in the modern era where the game developer controls the server everyone is subject to a single set of rules.
It used to be standard practice for ISPs to host a bunch of game servers too, to minimize latency and cost.
That helps but there's still a huge burden on the community who end up having to self moderate. I think one of the biggest issues today is that cheating is not so easy to uncover anymore. It could just be rose tinted glasses or just lack of knowledge among the public about what cheat developers were up to but 20 years ago I don't really remember it being such a prevalent issue. I'd see rage hackers, spin botters, people blatantly using god mode or flying out of bounds or wall hacking but never heard much in the way of the kind of culture that seems to be prevalent now. It feels like there's plenty of extremely subtle cheats out there today and even "microcheats" that don't do much other than tweaking certain values by 10%~ in a way that gives a significant advantage to players with enough skill to leverage their play style around that without it being obvious that they are in fact cheating. And you'd go paranoid trying to catch them out because people are much more clever about how they use them.
I don't think you intended to be that specific, but the developers don't make any decisions at the level of "releasing a server component" thats an upper management/production leader decision.
I read “game devs” here as referring to studios/publishers/etc.
I would hope that we all know that the person who wrote the A* pathfinder code probably isn’t making choices at the product level.
> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating
Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see
The problem with a statistical method is you can't ban the best players. For most cheats, you can dial the cheat down until it's at a human level.
That seems… like, fine, right? Who cares? Most games do skill-based matchmaking anyway, so if players are using cheats to play at higher but still human skill levels, they’ll just get boosted up to higher ranks.
The main issue, I guess, is they’ll have lopsided aiming proficiency (due to the boost) vs game knowledge. But that’s basically a crapshoot anyway in mass-market “competitive” gaming.
>Most games do skill-based matchmaking
<Bitterly laugh-cries in Rocket League>
That's not how matchmaking works in many games, especially the huge multiplayer arena games.
Games "feed" less skilled players to higher skilled players - just enough that the less skilled players don't ragequit. Higher skilled players don't actually want to play in a lobby full of people their skill. They want a few people their skill, and then a lot of people they can stomp.
The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to performance KPI’s. Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably discriminating those signals is a hard problem.
> Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do
This tends to stand out like a sore thumb once you start looking at things from the perspective of the frequency domain. Even if you use an RNG to delay activity, the properties of the RNG itself can be leveraged against it. You may think taping a pencil to a desk fan and having that click the mouse button is being clever wrt undetectable RNG, but you must realize that the power grid runs at 50/60hz and induction motors are ~fixed to this frequency.
There is also the entire space of correlation. A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored. You could check for what are effectively [near] causality violations to determine the probability that the player is actually human.
But... humans kinda behave the same? Your FPS is 50/60 Hz and your reactions are pretty much tied to it; and human behaviour is a pretty lousy RNG, that's been known for ages.
> A bot running on random pixel events with perfectly human response times, while appearing "random", is not correlated with anything meaningful outside that one pixel being monitored
So would a human who is tunneled-vision at the center of the screen.
What if one were to train a neural network of sorts based on your response times and mouse paths toward on screen stimuli?
I’ve thought that trying to make a bot for personal fishing use would be a delightfully fun project, and this is how I pondered evading such anti-cheat heuristics.
Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.
I think statistical methods are the best primary option. There are a lot of other tools you can use but this is the most impenetrable from the outside.
The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured.
There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.
Theres plenty of what you suggest going on all the time, loot spawning in unlootable places etc.
Problem is, theres always some difference between valid and invalid target, and if the game knows it, cheat extracts that information and acts "dumb" around those honeypots. It wont shoot targets that the game doesnt render because the bot checks that attribute. It wont loot that honeypot because its in manualy upkept white/blacklist.
Its just another level of cat and mouse game.
Yep, the cheat engine designers get thousands and thousands of test cases. If the designer screws up your account gets banned, but quite often they can detect what did it.
Now, good cheat detection won't ban you immediately, it will allow you to build up a novel of sins and then ban so it's difficult to determine what action provoked it. Unfortunately that does mean those people are on the servers for some amount of time.
> theres always some difference between valid and invalid target
This information does not necessarily need to be made available to the client. Latency compensation can treat the phantom just like the real deal and the server can silently no-op any related commands (while recording your naughty behavior).
$5-500 monthly payments just to bypass a decent anti-cheat...Cheaters must reflash their BIOS, wipe their PCs, reinstall Windows, and create a new account to play again...every few weeks
This is fun? If it's eSports for $$ I understand the incentive, otherwise pretending to be good, all the while likely having not a twinge of irony hit you as you 'git gud the opposition... It's a mindset I don't understand.
> It's a mindset I don't understand.
one of the scenarios is the person that is not looking on the enjoyment of "winning", but instead diving on the "trolling" realms of ruining the fun of others.
its irrelevant if he gets a ban because when he hears someone getting mad at him or sad, he gets a boner.
the mentality of "trying to punch people that cant defend themselves" is the description that i give of these to people that dont play video games. (because most wouldn't cheat without the anonymity)
I'd also consider that, for these people, getting away with the cheating _is the game_ for them. What they're cheating at might be less important.
Yeah I don't even play videogames but this sounds more appealing to me than the game itself. Like I did a little bit of anticheat bypass stuff with some buddies a while back just because it was fun to beat the anticheat guys. We used it a bit and one guy dropped it on a forum after a bit just to cause some chaos and to get some laughs, but I don't think any of us were especially interested in sitting down and trying to use it for real. Breaking systems is a really enjoyable game.
Now what I do not get is why people just fork over a few hundred bucks for someone else's cheating solution. You aren't winning anything, you aren't breaking anything, you're just copy-pasting someone else's work. Not doing it yourself sort of removes that appeal. The game you're playing is supposed to be against the anticheat guys and by buying someone else's solution you're not actually playing that game at all. Regular players aren't really a fun target.
Let me preface this with a disclaimer. The games I cheat on are mostly private servers of active games, that exist in defiance of the companies Terms of Service. Mostly RuneScape servers or other MMOs being privately hosted. Whatever that caveat may lend.
This is exclusively what it is for me. I don't care about the games I cheat on at all. The game is finding ways to cheat that the host can't combat. If I can't beat them, I find a new private server. To be fair though, those guys generally don't have the resources or know-how to battle cheating to the degree major companies can and I'm a noob so it's a learning environment for me as well.
But you're still ruining other people's fun for selfish reasons. Why not find some fun activity that's not a zero sum game?
The type of cheating I do rarely interfaces with other players, outside of enriching them with the spoils of my effort when I'm through. In a protracted way I can agree this "ruins the fun"...but not in the way that griefing does. I just spike in-game economies and leave. Balance is shortly restored.
> outside of enriching them with the spoils of my effort when I'm through
For what it's worth, to me and I assume a lot of other people, this ruins the game. There's nothing I dislike more than getting invited to a survival minecraft server (or whatever) and having someone dump diamond everything on me as a gift. What even is the point of playing the game anymore at that point?
The first bits of code I ever read and wrote were due to botting in Runescape.
Peer pressure is hell of a drug. If your friend group mainly plays competitive shooters and you suck at them you can easily gain status by paying for a aimbot.
Also current hustle culture’s toxic “your time is valuable and should not be wasted” mentality plays a role. Many people hate playing video games and losing because they then feel like they didn’t achieve anything and wasted their time. With cheats you can make sure you win so you “don’t end up wasting your time.”
This is in the same vein as trolling and griefing: Some people give up at the first difficulty. Others will see it as a challenge and get a thrill out of overcoming it. The more challenging it becomes, the more invested they get.
> It's a mindset I don't understand.
As someone who used to cheat in online games until I got a real job...
I could create my own story. I would cheat on servers where other people wanted to play in that story too. Eventually cheats become mods and mods become permitted. Once everyone has access to that story then the story is boring.
Think about a dungeon master who brings their own tools and props to some other board game and then invents a whole new game. Plenty of games or game mods kind've started in similar ways.
Plus it was fun to sometimes exact revenge upon other cheaters.
I think a lot of people are simply delusional. "My teams are holding me back, I only turn it on when they're throwing the game" or "I have the game sense of a masters player, I just don't have time to practice execution / grind rank". Boosting account ranks is the same deal, and it's a big industry.
Oh absolutely, used to see it in LoL, people would complain about their teammates holding them back and really deserving to be two leagues higher.. all I could say was that if you watched better players you'd see that the game they are playing and the game we are playing are only superficially similar, and that if you were playing on that level it'd be obvious (cause you'd be winning). Don't think it ever penetrated though.
I'd imagine the people who want the hardcore undetectable stuff are making money by charging others to boost them.
Cheat dev is a meta-game in itself, but I agree, paying for cheats is a really weird concept.
The mindset is simple to understand.
It is the self-deluded individual who enjoys abusing and torturing others, and has willfully blinded themselves to anything else.
More beast walking on two legs than human, and meets a relatively objective definition for evil people.
Willfully blinded through acts of false justification, repeated acts of destruction and active torture on others.
These are things if they did it physically they would go to prison or be put to death under capital punishment. Psychological harm isn't being treated with the same rigor as physical harm though.
I recently played cs2 for 4 months until the paranoia of closet cheaters got me.
There are pro players who get caught cheating, this game is rotten to the core.
Valve doesn't seem to care because apparently, players don't care about cheaters since they are so addicted to gambling with skins.
There is a solution, but no one wants to hear it. Anonymity is the problem and the only way to curb cheats like these are to have extreme meatspace penalties and some sort of central ID mechanism that requires some sort of real and personal identification
Those people will next use their mother's ID, their grandparents' IDs, and so on. Then move on to stolen IDs. Which is not preventable unless you do full-on hardware attestation tied to real ID, which means China-level surveillance.
Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)
You mean a system where when you get misidentified (this will almost always happen at scale) you get effectively banned forever, across multiple games? Yeah... I think I know why people aren't keen on that.
(And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)
That doesn't mean he is wrong. That _is_ the only way.
It's not a realistic solution that can be applied. It's the way in the same way as a bomb in your desktop that explodes if you're found cheating is the way.
Besides, there is another way, which is just as stupid: just ban everyone. No more video games, ever. And there you go: no more cheating in video games.
That is not a solution because it blindly solves one problem in isolation while creating a whole host of other problems that are equally if not more destructive.
It is improper to say this is a solution when you swap out the problems for something worse as a surrogate at the same time.
When you are tied to one physical ID, you give disproportionate power to the game manufacturer, which enables them to monopolize, and engage in coercive, and corrupt behavior more readily.
Say they decide after the fact that they don't like your objective review of a game you bought because shocker it was "unfinished". They decide to ban you, that ban alerts all other manufacturers, and they block you as well. Or someone who can issue those bans decides to blackmail or extort you.
If you don't comply, in the process, they revoke access to all your licensed purchases. It is tied to a real ID, so there's no way around it. You've just been cancelled from games/entertainment as a whole.
If this touches on physical aspects like interfering with your ability to get food, hold a job, etc, you've just been forced into the dregs of society with no due process outside a rule of law. "There are plenty of people that haven't had this scarlet letter attached, ... we'll just choose anyone but them", is how it will go.
This is not a new concept, in fact it is one of the common elements found in Maoism and collectivism in general.
So the solution you propose is communism by another name. Any educated person knows Communism fails in common ways intractably, and as a result this cannot be a solution.
A good rule of thumb is, if it involves a centralized hierarchy structure; its more likely than not going to be some form of communism/socialism (fabian/globalist/its gradual neighbor)/or collectivism, and one must consider slippery slopes where once you adopt one thing, you slip all the way down to another.
Ludwig von Mises wrote a book back in the 1930s-1950s covering all of the intractable failures, under the title "Socialism". The detailed problems he describes are intractable, and naturally occur in such systems.
Communism and its derivatives are all about obscuring its origins deceitfully to trick you into thinking and agreeing its a solution. They don't give you the whole picture and they strive to mislead towards pipe dreams which never happen in practice, towards control you can't take back.
Sadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're not the ones who paid for / installed them.
My personal experience (mostly TF2) is that a lot of players just don't pay attention to chat and votes.
I mean this is bog standard human behavior.
"Jon is a drug dealer, but his money still spends"
"Tom is insider trading, but I'm not since I don't actually 'know' that"
etc, etc
I would love if Valve developed a multiplayer server system for CS2 (and maybe generalisable beyond that) that only sent other players' locations when they were very close to being visible to the player, and sent audio and damage events in a way that only gave soft information away as well.
So if you snipe through a wall, instead of sending the location of the shot source and direction, the server has to do slightly more work - calculate who got hit and what noise everyone should hear, but then the client doesn't need to know the location of the firing player.
I know it's not the only way to cheat, but the fact that the client has all the information has to be a large factor.
This is a really old idea. It was implemented in CS:GO in ~2015 [0], although community anti-cheats like SMAC have implemented it for years before then [1]. Riot have an article about their implementation of the same idea in VALORANT's that a good read from a technical perspective [2].
Sadly, CS2, from what I've gathered, broke this.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/opt...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkhQgYB4lAA
[2]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
It’s amazing the lengths people will go to just to ruin something fun for other people.
this is why solos are better, you can’t blame your teammates.
handcam anticheat when?
kernel anticheat is necessary but not sufficient.
Cheating in solo games is more fun than you realize. I only cheat in offline games for the most part, its fun to see how badly I can break a game.
solos doesn't solve cheating, but it removes the team dynamics and social meta games that team modes bring. like wondering whether your teammates are cheating, or failing to compete because you can't find a good team.
obviously cheating is cool. we all love to code, to build, and to hack. there should be a place to cheat, even in pvp games.
there should be a league with open cheating. cheaters need a place to game too!
there should be a league with moderate anticheat, like what you see in games today. it kind of works, and stops all but the most motivated cheaters.
there should be a league where cheating is impossible. where one doesn't have to doubt, ever, whether they died to a cheater or a god. this is where kernel level anticheat is not enough, and solos only should be required.
cheating is about validating inputs and outputs. valid screen displaying into human eyes. valid output out of human hands to mouse and keyboard.
if we take a step back, this is very achievable. it's not like doping in the olympics, we don't need bloodwork. we just need a little more information than we get from anticheats today.
I'm pretty sure the person you are replying to is talking about single player games.
> I only cheat in offline games for the most part
Well, my online game cheating days are over. Y'know when they say Pool's Closed, they are missing a lot of lore. ;)
I just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point?
I forget where I read this, but somehow, some people have the "brain stimuli award" associated with the "winning" aspect even when they are using cheats. So winning is winning.
I'm still having hard time believing in this, but I haven't found better explanation for cheaters.
For a single player game, that might be a good explanation.
For a multiplayer game, though, it's not hard at all to see what's happening. If a cheater cheats and gets away with it, then they rationally should expect to receive social reputational credit, which I want to believe is something that instinctively makes most of us feel good, us being social creatures.
Makes sense! Thanks for the necessary addition.
I should have mentioned the social aspect of the winning.
Interestingly, I didn't even think about the single player game...
Maybe the Octalysis Framework? That is the most well known material that covers this tangentially. There are a good number of whitepapers on this type of research in Adtech/Social Media, though you need to know the specialized language they use to search for it.
This is not a new concept, in fact many games and apps use this research which includes sophisticated operant conditioning to induce associations, which then later trigger dopamine spikes through those associations.
Its why people who spend most of their time gaming or using their phones start acting like junkies. Its completely destroyed the dating scene because they do this in dating apps. Nothing is a bigger turn off then dating a junky, and they often don't even realize it.
Much of this type of game design material has been rebranded from its original contextual use. It originates in PoW torture camps during the Korean Conflict, and narcosynthesis/narco-analysis was known all the way back to WW2.
Victims are easily controllable, misled, and often gullible, since rational thought is greatly reduced as they fall into an involuntary state of hypnosis and become highly suggestible.
Brain development to combat addiction also doesn't fully develop until your early 20s for most.
You see this element embedded in almost any FPS that has an audio trigger associated with a headshot. I know for a fact BF1942 did this with a cha-ching sound. Games, and apps too.
Why would people take performance enhancing drugs, why would you drink coffee, why would people use AI even when it's banned? It's all about getting ahead in a competitive environment. Games are just as 'real' as the real world to the people who play them. Cheats can be on the continuum of a really fast PC and a quality mouse - taken too far. They are even the kind of thing that happens when two nations are at war - no holds barred. Famous Tour de France riders, I don't think cheated only for the money. It was also for the glory.
Why would people take performance enhancing drugs, why would you drink coffee, why would people use AI to do coding assignments even when it's banned? It's all about getting ahead in a competitive environment. Games are just as 'real' as the real world to the people who play them.
>I just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point?
Vindication. The average cheat buyer is someone who gets beat down in the game, and feels personally slighted. This is also why avoiding detection is more important than just worrying about bans. The whole point of modern cheating is to be subtle enough to pass yourself off as a top player, with all the social/financial perks that entails, not to run around in god mode griefing people.
People that choose to abuse other people for fun, are a blight on humanity, there is no valid defense.
Some people cheat, and think "its just a game", falsely justifying that abuse. The false justification, however; is an act of self-violation. It warps their perception willfully blinding themselves to their evil acts.
That is not what is happening, it is not just a game. It was a competition where the two parties agreed to follow rules, and that one person broke the silent implicit agreement, they did so deceitfully to impose cost on others, delude themselves, and take like any drug-addled junky would.
Worse, writing tools and publishing them to enable such destructive behavior induces others to committing similar acts. Corrupting others, inducing them towards such, are also evil acts and its consequences.
They are fundamentally evil people because they have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their destructive actions, which are evil actions, and they have no resistance or thought against repeating those actions.
Like evil people, they continue repeating these choices until someone else stops them.
They do this despite there being a severely broken symmetry between the benefit they receive, which is diminishing and is ill-gotten and just fuels more junky-like behavior; and the loss their victim feels when its clear that contract was broken, or worse when they can't tell.
The things you choose to do in the small things of life that don't really matter show to the world what you will do when everything is on the line.
Showing deceitful behavior, or worse torturing people, shows a lack of credibility and character first and foremost, and that behavior is destructive in everything it touches. There is no place for people like this in any team, or cooperative, and since life in general is through a cooperative distribution of labor, that pretty much sums it up.
When the rule of law fails, and current society can no longer defend and protect these people. The natural law will hold sway, and throughout history in such environments, evil people are often granted a final mercy of peace and stopped.
If you cannot control yourself to engage in beneficial behavior for yourself and others, someone will do it for you; and you will not like it. The longer it takes for a correction, the worse it will be.
We can only cross our fingers and hope that the rise of unblockable cheats annihilates the market for the subgenre of competitive online games that team you up with randos and/or pit you against randos. What a cesspit.
Agreed. To be more precise: I think the solution is small, community-run servers. This allows large, consistent groups of players to play together regularly with a much higher percentage of admins who can handle cheaters manually.
I also maintain that human judgement, can still catch things anti-cheat software is yet incapable of. Example: it doesn't matter how well hidden your aimbot is, I still notice cheaters when their accuracy is wildly out of proportion with their strategic understanding of the game.
It also seems similar to mastodon communities. Get too toxic and your server is so isolated you can’t bother people. Get too sensitive, and you block so many servers you can’t interact with anyone. Of course you could just have a server that’s for your little group(intentionally isolated) and that’s fine too.
> To be more precise: I think the solution is small, community-run servers.
That was the normal way to do things. Essentially all modern games go out of their way to prevent you from doing this.
Yep, and that's what I stick to today. I just worry how much longer until the remaining games that support this die out...
I play fortnite and marvel rivals with my family. We have lots of fun. I think this genre of game is fantastic if you play with people you know on voice comms. "Solo queuing" in these types of games is not fun for me at all, so I get what you are saying, but they are popular for a reason!
All things considered, the younger generations would likely consider this to be, excuse the language, a "boomer take".
Disregarding that the most popular game genres today are exactly the things you are saying need to be annihilated is wild to even consider. Some (well most) people enjoy it, some (less) people don't.
Fortunately for me, both young and boomer alike are capable of having bad takes.
It's going to become cloud only
I have created an AI bot that plays by itself on Xbox cloud gaming using a custom browser and a virtual joystick emulating an Xbox controller. Cloud gaming isn’t safe either :)
I have a pretty foolproof system for evading cheaters. Just be so bad that any cheater will be far above me in the rankings. gg ez.
That is where I am in online chess. But every so often I get a message from chess.com that I was refunded some rating points because my opponent from a couple of weeks ago violated the fair play standards. I honestly don’t think about it much. Some of those games I played poorly enough that I deserved to loose either way, but at the end of the day I played much more fair games that this one particular game doesn’t really bother me.
My meta-comment is that it's a really sad state of affairs that we don't as a society have an immune system that makes it so that an individual who posts openly about creating software whose sole (and even if not "sole" then certainly intended) purpose is to enable others to deceive and cheat their way to "success" is made a pariah.
It's a hobby project I decided to share. I won’t deny it’s problematic. I understand both sides of the argument, but if I was going to make it for fun anyway, why not publish it?
Posting it publicly on GitHub is the main reason I got invited to job interviews this spring. I'm a third-year student with no prior IT experience, and now I have a great summer job lined up.
And for the record—I enjoy playing legit. I don’t cheat.
"Pariah"? Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment? Okay, they will do this quietly. Then what?
Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge. Many people are doing this for fun and I don't see any problem with this. Cheating is another question, though.
> Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment?
They're not ruining my entertainment, I don't play any such online game. Even still, poisoning any element of trust in society should default make you a pariah. This is no different from anyone else who purposefully breaks the social contract in any other context for their own gains.
> Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge.
Getting into street fights with strangers is a good way to obtain a ton of self-defense related knowledge. I still think that's no excuse for someone to get into street fights with strangers. There are plenty of other ways to gain similar knowledge that don't require poisoning the community well.
> Cheating is another question, though.
??? How do you think you figure out how to bypass the good anti-cheat???
It's clear this isn't a topic you have any familiarity with, so why such strong opinions?
It's clear you're incapable of making a substantive contribution to the discussion, so why bother posting at all?
Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills, and it's obvious the world does not work this way. And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.
> Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills
No it wouldn't and I don't lament its absence as such.
> and it's obvious the world does not work this way.
Agreed which is my lamentation.
> And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.
I'm very clearly not, but even given the case that all communication around this moves to anonymous is itself fine. The impact of people understanding that they would be pariahs for developing such tools is itself a good deterrent. That social deterrents do not work with perfect 100% efficacy is not an argument against their usage.
You mean half of all AI products?
The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used…
It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.
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Please edit swipes out of comments. It's fine to state why you disagree with or dislike a post, but please keep within the HN guidelines, particularly to be kind and to avoid snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The title of the article is "why you didn’t notice your teammate was cheating"
Then you have the answer here:
> Cheats have escaped the host PC
> [...]
> Colorbots are quite hard to detect. You can essentially just plug in a capture card to your PC and pass the images to another PC that the cheat runs on.
If the article is low effort I would say that your comment is not great either because you seems frustrated to not have more information and just blame the author for not writing more about the subject.
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