Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

Yup, At top level play, players know the games and the maps so much that they can get some kills through walls just from knowing that its is likely that an opponent WOULD be at the other side at second X after seeing/hearing them at second Y.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

But what if they only cheat occasionally? A top player would only need a handful of moves to go from say 3rd in a tournament to winning.

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.

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...).

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z-kmSF5Qxk

Haha, I cheat at Worlde all the time, losers!

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