It’s really crazy how much the numbers have been growing across online shooters. Really makes you wonder if all those rootkit anti cheats are actually doing anything other than creating vulnerabilities and spyware on user machines.
Some cheats don’t even involve anything running on the hardware running the game. A raspberry Pi or something like that takes the video signal and mouse as input and acts as a mouse as output, analyses like 100x100 pixels around the reticle, and adjusts the mouse output to aim the reticle at any enemies it sees in that area.
You’d need some pretty good statistical analysis on the mouse signal to detect something like that, assuming the cheat is sophisticated enough to know it can’t break the laws of physics or natural human motion and thus keeps the first and second derivatives continuous (though bumping into your keyboard with your mouse will break the continuity of the second derivative and maybe even the first at mouse resolutions, but that happening consistently when you’re trying to shoot someone and resulting in high accuracy is very sus).
Or you could just make it shoot when the reticle is lined up with a hit and leave the mouse position alone entirely. Maybe set it up so it only does that even the player is holding a mouse button.
I think the endgame of the anti-cheat vs cheat arms race will be a system that limits cheaters to the best possible human skill, though I bet such a system will also catch some of the best players as it gets tuned or new stars rise up and beat the previous ones.
Instead of an arms race, they should back off on the day-to-day cheating detection so that cheaters spend time and resources on cheats that they can detect (but don’t ban immediately for so that they think they are avoiding detection), and then every now and then turn the cheating detection up and ban the cheaters.
Or maybe a shadow ban system where they detect cheaters and quietly move them to cheater queues. Maybe even add some bots that cheat even harder.
But the main thing is to get rid of any immediate and obvious feedback that a cheat isn’t good enough to beat their system so that those selling them think they can go to market with a shitty cheat rather than knowing they need to get better and most importantly, people writing reviews of the cheats will say the cheap ones work and the expensive ones aren’t necessary.
The put cheaters in a cheater lobby is one of my favorites
Idr what game but they unofficially called their anti cheat circles of hell
Small cheaters like a 10% speed boost hack or something that could be countered through skill would be placed with other minor cheaters and players above their skill
Meanwhile hard cheaters like flight and aim bot were only put with other cheaters
A part of me really wants to see how they react to putting effort into cheating, it working for a bit, and then suddenly they are back to an even playing field but their cheat still works. Haha the idea of a cheater ladder is kinda funny, too. “You suck, you’re cheater bronze level!”
I’m also imagining pro teams with one cheater that end up in cheater games all the time, then figure it out, boot the cheater, and suddenly jump up the ladder because they’ve basically been training on super hard mode this whole time and that becoming an important part of top pro gamers’ rise to the top.
Yeah it was really funny see really high skilled players go up against bad cheaters
A friend of mine introduced me to this, it’s a great idea. Hope it gains some traction. Basically a purposefully vulnerable online game to help educate developers and of course a cheaters sandbox. https://pwnadventure.com/
Naturally , there’s no money in it so it wont stop cheaters elsewhere but a cool idea nonetheless.
