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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

This is really the endgame of cheating and anti cheat wars. The anti cheat has to basically become root kits. I wonder if they will eventually offer a unprotected server to people who refuse to install the root kits or not.

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It's interesting; their anti-cheat already is a root kit that runs as a ring-0 (or lower?) kernel module in Windows, yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month. But this goes beyond root kits. It's now apparently acceptable to operate arbitrary applications on users' PCs even when not playing the game. Utter spyware.

> yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month

It's not perfect but the cheaters generally get banned fairly quickly and it's far better than the alternative. I've played tons of games of Valorant at Radiant (the highest rank) and it's extremely rare to even run into someone that I suspect is cheating. In comparison, I get extremely blatant cheaters in about 25% of my games of CS and far more than that in CoD: Warzone.

> and it's far better than the alternative

There is, of course, a substantial issue re: privacy with this approach. A ring-0 driver can essentially do everything the system can (it's running in kernel mode). It's a two-sided coin.

Basically everything of interest on the average user's computer can be obtained without a ring-0 driver. Riot's incentive for the driver is extremely clear and it's not in their financial interest to abuse it.

Yes and no. In the case of e.g. Windows 10, without a kernel module, access depends on UAC specifics.

The very dedicated cheaters use special PCIe hardware to alter and monitor memory through DMA, there's always a step up.

The only way to prevent cheaters is to control the hardware. With modern Xbox and PlayStation being basically a PC that you control with a controller, I can imagine a future where you buy special online gaming consoles that you control with mouse and keyboard to play competitive games. Even that can be foiled, of course, because hardware can be manipulated as well, but it's the furthest PC gaming will go.

What I wonder about it why people put so much effort into cheating. I don't see how playing more than a few games with an aimbot is any fun. What are these people even getting out of it? Is it just having their name on a board somewhere?

You don’t even need special hardware. The hacker will use a bootkit to load driver to read and write memory. Vanguard is trivial to bypass.

> What are these people even getting out of it? Is it just having their name on a board somewhere?

Based on my observations (during 20k+ hours of playtime in multiplayer games), I don't think a leaderboard is even necessary. It often seems to be more about asserting dominance. Very simple and very primal. No deep thoughts, just imposing your will over others. It's satisfying. [1]

[1] Of course there's a spectrum of reasons one might have to cheat. Some might be temporary cheaters who are just curious about the possibilities, others might be aiming for a specific prize in a contest. With the dominance angle I'm characterizing a certain kind of obsessive regular cheater.

Xbox and PlayStation games can already use keyboard and mouse. Not many developers make use of them. Partially because consoles aren't installed used at a desk, partially because the difference in precision between a controller and a mouse makes it difficult to balance competitive games.

> This is really the endgame of cheating and anti cheat wars.

I'm of the opinion the eventual endgame is game streaming like Google Stadia (though I don't think Google Stadia itself is the final answer). Can't compromise a local client if there is no local client.

> I wonder if they will eventually offer a unprotected server to people who refuse to install the root kits or not.

Absolutely not, for one simple reason: that segment of their audience is insignificant to the bottom line.

There is still the possibility of computer vision based cheats, but a streamed game would pretty much make current cheats impossible. Even with a hardened OS specifically for running games (I think this has been proposed before) or a locked-down game console it is still possible, albeit difficult, for someone to exploit it.

Have built computer vision based bots for Diablo III, World of Warcraft, Bookworm (make words from letters), a real-life Scrabble solver on a phone, a real-world jigsaw puzzle solver on a phone, various online poker games, a proctored online test and a match 3 game on an iphone. Computer vision cheating is surprisingly easy and just getting easier.

A computer vision system is still disadvantaged in that it can only see what the player can see, and no more than that. For example a wallhack won't work well as the cheat simply can't get the locations of all the enemies, and can only highlight them when they actually appear on screen. Also most of the games you listed above are relatively simple to work with both in terms of rules and graphics - it would be much harder to have a functional bot for the many variables involved in a 3D FPS game with fog, bullet drop, friendly fire, and so on.

That is definitely the endgame for cheating. I know in WoW, they explicitly ban hardware input broadcasting for multiboxers yet actually detecting that can be quite difficult.

At the end of the day, we are trying to find technological solutions for social problems. What I think would really help would be to decrease the ease of duplicate account creation for services which care about cheating. Without that capability, punishing cheaters socially (i.e. bans) is never going to be particularly effective. I think social solutions can work because you don't need to stop 100% of cheaters like some people seem to believe. All you need to do is prevent enough cheating that people believe the game is honest overall. Locks only make sure honest people stay honest, but that actually works pretty well since most people are honest.

Camera pointed at screen with some image recognition and a bit of code to synthesize controller/kbm input. No need for compromising any sort of local client. Wouldn't be terribly hard to make a little rpi-based solution to sell.

As long as there's money to be made, cheating will continue. In fact, making it harder to cheat in games can make it more lucrative to develop cheats for them.

> In fact, making it harder to cheat in games can make it more lucrative to develop cheats for them.

Sure, but I don't see how that's a bad thing. More lucrative means higher prices means fewer cheaters can afford it.

Screen reading cheats have existed for a long time, I remember using this in like middle school https://www.robotzindisguise.com/

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