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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the solution there is to stop making games be about the things computers are better at. They're better at aiming, fine, let them be. Put the aimbot in the game from the start.

Then instead you have a FPS with multiple weapons and it takes several seconds to switch between them. One has a high rate of fire but is useless against players with armor, another is the opposite. Cheaters don't know if the opponent is wearing armor (or what kind) because the server doesn't tell them that until they're in the same room, by which point it's too late.

Make certain weapons better against certain defenses, so it's a matter of predicting what your opponent will do and being ready for it. Make the humans do the things that humans are still better at, instead of trying to prevent a computer from beating them at things computers are better at.

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You can't tell people to play something else other than what they enjoy just because it'll "make cheating harder".

Many of the very popular games now require good aim. Some people spend countless hundreds/thousands of hours just practicing their aim and muscle memory. It's part of the fun for them. CS:GO is a notable example.

The problem isn't really that it's impossible to ban such cheating. ESEA do it pretty well in CS:GO - their anti-cheat is practically a RAT.

It's that banning cheaters and making a bulletproof anticheat has two issues:

1) To do it properly you need to basically code a RAT, which has some privacy issues. If Valve do it, it could hurt activity, platform support, and be controversial. ESEA have done it since day one, but their player base is much smaller and more competitive. ESEA is also limited to Windows.

2) It's not profitable. That's the honest truth. They ban obvious public cheats and the cheaters will buy another account and come back, probably use another cheat again, get banned again, repeat. Some games don't have awful cheat protection because the company can't make a good one, they have awful cheat protection because it's not profitable to alienate all the cheaters in the game away from the platform (and their many purchases per person; legitimate players only buy once).

It's somewhat worse than that, because anti-cheat and anti-anti-cheat are basically two things in ring-0 fighting each other. So it's a resource war, whoever spends more development time trying to win does. But the economies of scale favor the cheaters.

If only one game has working anti-cheat, it may not be worth the cheater's time to break it because it's only one game, and they can go cheat in a different game. If all the games had it then more people would try to break it and more would succeed. And once they have a working method, it can be employed against any other game that uses the same kind of anti-cheating, even if it's not the same vendor's, as long as the mechanism is similar.

But having all the vendors get together to pool resources and design one good anti-cheating software makes it even worse, because then it might be a little harder to defeat, but the prize for defeating it is being able to cheat in every game without even having to translate the cheating method to each new game.

So you get small victories or nothing. There is no winning at scale because increasing scale only increases the number of adversaries and the gains from finding an effective way to cheat.

It's basically the same problem as keeping the latest Hollywood releases off of pirate sites. They count success as occasionally having a week before a new release is on the pirate sites instead of being there the same day, and even that doesn't happen very often.

It turns out it's more effective to make it so it doesn't matter. In their case by making it so easy and cheap to watch Netflix on your TV that it's not worth most peoples' time to figure out how to use BitTorrent even if it has 100% of their content. In this case by making more games that humans are better at than computers, so you can't use a computer to cheat.

> But the economies of scale favor the cheaters.

I feel like the concept of "ban waves" ought to help a lot here. Wait a couple weeks between banning people, and then randomly don't ban some people during the wave. Should make it pretty hard to test your anti-anti-cheat.

That's assuming the way they test is based on whether they get banned or not, instead of analyzing the anti-cheat code to see how it works so they don't get banned to begin with.

Shouldn't most of the cheat detection be happening server side for exactly this reason? Is that not feasible?

Is that actually a thing that happens routinely?

Whether things happen routinely depends a lot on whether other effective alternatives exist.

It's a thing that enables cheaters to not get caught. They may not need it if they have some other way to not get caught, but you can expect to see it if it is or becomes the easiest thing that works.

So no then.

The economies of scale actually favour the game makers. People build cheats for profit, every person that buys a cheat is also buying the game (and rebuying) the cheat makers are in competition, and further the number of people that cheat is generally a lot smaller than the game playing population. Because they are sold for profit the most popular cheats are easy to find and detect. As long as companies can keep cheating at a tolerable level for their audience they win as do a small number of cheat makers able to make a living in the space.

Scale here isn't the number of copies of the game sold (which is basically independent and for these purposes fixed), it's the number of games that have strong anti-cheating mechanisms. The more there are the more resources go into defeating them, the larger the community around defeating them grows etc.

Is there any evidence this is actually true?

Many more people will play the fun game with cheating than will play the game you make to be “secure”.

In your game design not only is it dull because you have a 50:50 chance of having the right gun equipped to take advantage of a situation even if no one is cheating. But it’s still very amenable to cheating both because the cheat would be able to switch weapon the instant the client was informed of the state of the opponent, beating a human where it actually matters and would still be able to have a mechanically perfect aim.

Most videogames actually have the sort of human reaction prediction you are talking about and that’s why people cheat because they are bad at it. So make it up by exploiting information sent but not displayed or through mechanical assistance. The interesting case there is that mechanically good players that have a good read can beat cheaters.

Stuff like the DeepMind successes playing Chess, Go and Starcraft ultimately show that even with an environment where things are fairly level that computers have the edge in games albeit with an unattainable for cheat makers level of technology.

> In your game design not only is it dull because you have a 50:50 chance of having the right gun equipped to take advantage of a situation even if no one is cheating.

Except that it's not random, because you can try to figure it out. You know what's in the map. If you go to where a particular weapon is and it's not there, now you can expect the opponent to have it, so you start looking for defenses against it etc. Or you know that you're playing against Bob and Bob always goes for the same weapon like a chump because he doesn't know what to do with any of the others. Or you get a weapon and then go around collecting every defense against it on the map so the opponent can't get them.

> But it’s still very amenable to cheating both because the cheat would be able to switch weapon the instant the client was informed of the state of the opponent, beating a human where it actually matters and would still be able to have a mechanically perfect aim.

Which is why it's not about switching faster, it's about making the right choice to begin with. The whole idea is if you have to switch at all you're probably already dead and switching a half second faster isn't going to save you.

I’d suggest you build this design and try it out because you have some really rosey eyed ideas about how this will work.

first person/multi-player rock paper scissors. would be an interesting game.

probably family friendly.

should make it.

It doesn't even have to be that arbitrary. You've got an opponent with a defense against all your current weapons, but you can run faster than them, so you can escape but you still need to find something that can kill them. They need to find something that can make them faster so they can catch you, or take their chances by giving up the defense which is slowing them down.

There can still be strategy in it without leaving any easy way to cheat.

We don’t even need those fancy things, just the angle of view. If someone come up behind without being seen they can still knife the player. Alternatively, the aiming would be slower if you are looking at the peripheral.

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