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Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?
Mr Wriggle writes "There is nothing worse than playing your favorite game online game, only to have someone frag you and your teammates blatantly using cheats. As many of you are aware, there are various Anti-Cheat systems available i.e. Punkbuster and Cheating Death. PunkBuster comes bundled in some games and is mandatory to play certain games on certain servers. I would like to ask the Slashdot community whether you think these systems work well, or do they cause more problems than they solve? Or is there a solution that the anti-cheat developers have overlooked? Additionally, is the locking-out of CD keys of people caught cheating the reason why more and more viruses attempt to steal CD keys of such games?"
I've used PB with the latest BF1942 release. I've had ZERO problems with it. I've also noticed a lot LESS cheaters (but still SOME!) on PB enabled servers, which is great. It's worked well for me... so far.
I only play on Enemy Territory servers that use Punkbuster. I have had no problems with them (except when my client refuses to update so I have to manually update it, no big deal)
I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
A similar question was asked about port knocking on the misc@openbsd.org mailing list the other day. I think it was said best by henning (i think it was henning) "you want to fix buggy software...with more software?"
I kind of have to agree, why not take the time to do it right the first time? Cheats are just creative uses of bad loops, or algorythms in the code (for example the long jump in quake III if you had a fast video card).
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
To a degree...
I play SOF2 on a PB enabled server... in fact, I search exclusively for those servers... I've noticed a couple of cheaters so far, but by far, it seems to work out quite well..
Same goes for Enemy territory - not very many cheaters, and generally makes the game 'funner' to play...
One thing I *did* notice was that when the 'sync gameplay' was enabled (I think thats what it's called) that it would slow everyones FPS down without really telling anyone about it... so people would have laglike issues on a BRAND NEW machine - but other than that no problems at all...
As far as bannign Invalid CD-Keys - what a waste of time....
Howabout a game that encourages cheating? Lag normalized, the constraints are the time you get to react to the incoming stream and build a response. Anything you can do with the incoming data is up to you. I know this gets away from "game" and more into code war, but that sounds more fun overall, especialyl if it lent itself to genetic algorithms. Eh, maybe I just miss Core Wars.
It stops most of the "Load up and cheat and go fuck with other peoples games" type players. However, the cheats are almost always ahead of the cheat protection, so there are always people(Usually the practiced, hardcore, i-cheat-to-seem-better players) who will be cheating.
A wise man once said,
The client is in the hands of the enemy, don't trust it. In an FPS game, it's nearly impossible not to.
We are running six Half-Life (HL) servers with Counter-Strike and Natural Selection Mods and have found that Cheating death is the best viable solution.
Valve (the makers of HL) are offering their own security engine but its almost worthless since it gets updated rarley and it is aimed to detect cheats only.
Cheating Death on the other hand is aimed not only to detect but to prevent cheats (for example by moving the things you arent supposed to see anyway (player behind wall) to the players back). Because of this Cheating Death can't catch a cheater but his cheats are becoming useless. In addition to that Cheating Death is updated very often and so it is able to prevent most cheats.
Conclusion:
A anti-cheating engine that isn't updated regulary is almost rendered useless in a long run.
Spelling errors were made for your amusement only...
Lately I've been playing Enemy Territory mostly, and only on PunkBusted servers. For a while, wallhacks were fairly common in ET (when you're spectating someone, detecting wallhackery is fairly easy) - but I haven't noticed a cheater for a long time now.
PB seems to work as advertised, and has never given me any problems. If it's letting some cheats through, it's not enough that it would affect my enjoyment of the game. If someone cares more about the outcome (or their performance), I suppose they may want a more foolproof tool - but PB is good enough for me.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Whenever you have a game that keeps score you will have people who try, and many times find a way to cheat. Even when there is nothing to directly gain from it. For the life of me i can't figure it out
Punkbuster is definitely excellent for public servers. It thins out cheaters hugely(but not entirely), and what cheaters there are don't last long on well-adminned servers.
On the other hand, It isn't too hot for competitve play. Updates aren't frequent enough.
I play bf1942 in the TWL 8-man ladder, and I must say, BFSecure is definitely a great tool. Updates are extremely frequent(at least once a week-- i only update before matches). It performs its job exceptionally-- the only thing we have to worry about is people using exploits.
Unfortunately though, as the name suggests, bfsecure is specifically for battlefield. I don't think they could keep up with the cheats if they had to handle multiple games.
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
The first goal of most games is to be 'playable' over broadband with moderate latency. In order to accomplish this certain tradeoffs must be made. These are not bugs.
The 'long' jump in Quake is hardly a 'cheat' that PunkBuster is designed for. PunkBuster purpose is to remove client mods that give you auto-aim, radar/enemy position info, and enemy texture/highlighting type cheats. All of these involve modifying the client.
Yes, the client knows where all the players are. Yes that is a weakness. No it can't be fixed easily, because we have to deal with 60ms-200ms one way latency. That requires some think ahead, which means giving the client more info than they should have. If this was any other type of software than a FPS game we could suffer performance for security.
Programs like Punkbuster use arms-race philosphy to try and stay ahead of the cheat makers. Far less time goes into defeating a specific cheat, then it does to build that cheat. One small change to the pb client and away goes 2weeks coding work of a cheat-maker. PB tries to guarantee the client environment, including memory, and what they see on screen. The pb screen captuing util is the best defeense for an admin.
Having said all that, it's logically impossible for them to do this 100% effectively. You can not control and audit access the the system memory and devices on modern day motherboards. Anything you have running to check this can be modified.
It will take technology such as Pallidum to make true 'anti-cheat' and balanced playing environments. I welcome the day game programmers can trust the client and leverage caching techniques that require pervasive knowledge of the game world. It will make games faster and more enjoyable for a broader range of peple in geographically disparate areas.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
punk busters is supposed to keep america's army players in line, and it pretty much does as much as it can.
however, it doesn't help that the developers decided to include a 'dev mode' or something that's basically providing a bunch of built-in cheats even in the latest 2.00a version.
In the only game or AA I ever played on the gamespy server (which is protected by punkbuster), half of the people in the game were cheating. I was so discouraged at the failure of punkbuster that I never played AA again, especially because it can't keep up with the new cheats because it covers so many games.
Just yesterday I was playing AA, and PB kicked someone off the server for cheating. The message was something about a skin hack.
So I know that PB works, because I've seen it in action.
However, I think both the previously made comments and the news report itself is asking a different question for a different topic. Read the title again.
Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?
Note the fact that it merely states 'Online Games', yet everyone here is talking about FPS games. Well what about games like Warcraft 3? Theres currently no Punkbuster support for it (although Blizzard is doing a fairly good job at monitoring and banning cheaters). Theres no (effective 1st party) support for anti-cheating programs for Half-Life and its mods (Punkbuster and Cheating Death don't count).
What I'm trying to say is that this generation of anti-cheat systems is nothing more than a "warm-up" for next-gen games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (and maybe UT2k4 we'll have to see how its accepted though since its shipping on SIX CDs). We know pretty much anyone who considers themselves a gamer will pick up either HL2, Doom 3 or both so the chances of cheats being written is obviously high. When HL2 comes out (since its being released first), expect to see a complete change in the way anti-cheat systems are implemented in games.
Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, they do work. For now.
It does seem to have gotten better, but sometimes I can't tell if someone really is that good, or if they're cheating. Of course, I don't like being shot round corners by cheaters; bots can also look like cheating players - they are very accurate over long distances, which normal players generally aren't.
One giveaway is ping: it's fair to assume that if someone has got a significantly better ping than you, they are going to get the shots in better. I've noticed that my playing is much better with a ping of 80 than with one of 120 - somehow I miss less the faster my ping is. For many, changing from an old modem to isdn/cable/dsl has at least as big an effect as any cheat would. I therefore think it's fair to suspect someone of cheating when they keep on fragging you although they have a 200 ping and you have 100.
With that said, I don't play on many servers that require anti-cheat programs like punkbuster, although the newer (steam) versions of HL and co seem like they might now have anti-cheat stuff built in.
-- Steve
There is nothing worse than playing my favorite game online game, only to have someone frag me using mad skills. Some of these guys are so good (or is it that I'm so bad?) that I don't even have a chance to get off two shots after I respawn before I'm killed, AGAIN. It is so frustrating. America's Army is the worst. It seems like everybody out there is so much better at the game that I am. Even newbies kick my ass all the time. It is so embarrassing.
The only way I even have the slightest chance is if I cheat. Otherwise the game is so unfair, it's not even fun.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I knew a guy in college (back when the anti-cheat programs were just getting popular) who was really good at shooters (particularly UT). In fact, he was too good: if he played on servers that had aimbot detection on he would get banned if he was having a good night. On servers without anti-aimbots the players would decide he was cheating and ban him after a while too. Unfortunately he had to completely retreat from public servers, and only play with people who knew him, although they still bitched about how accurate he was. I actually sat behind him and watched as he would catch a glimpse of someone on the other side of the map, move to a better location, and then heatshot them a few seconds later. He mostly used the sniper rifle, but just because of it's increased power (he got body or head on 90% of shots, so he mostly didn't need more than one shot), he usually made most of the flag caps for his team too.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
how can you even ask the question in terms of unsupported games? You are suggesting that people are overlooking unsupported games. We can't know whether it works for those games until we try it out, but so far we do know that it does work for supported games.
So really your question is Is there anything holding back support for those games?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
There will always be cheating, there is nothing you can do about it. Ventrillo is supposedly a feature but it is just the perfect way to cheat. People used to wacth each other's screen's now they don't even need to do that anymore, expect it. If you are playing on a server there will be people who cheat, some of them may not even think they are cheating by your definition. Just enjoy the satisfying feeling you get when you awp a speed hacker or wall fire a wall hacker. Don't cheat, it makes you a worse player.
Don't you know THEY kill all the subscribes as the first setp of the conspiroy
I corrupted your mom's back door! Yeah yeah, mod me down! You know I'm funny!
Banning CD's keys sounds like a good idea to stop cheating but in the end it only hurts the naive players. Those who cheat generally have no problem scamming people out of their cd keys. They are already proved they are dishonest by cheating in the first place.
The only alternative is to use a hardware driven, trusted computing set of keys that validate that *the* hardware is there and that a real 'punkbuster' program is running. Although, in theory, if you can hack this key, you can get around even this, although the key can be made sufficiently difficult so that you will need centuries to crack it and you lack the ability to physically pull apart a CPU.
Working against any cheat is publicity. Most hackers do not make the cheat for their own purposes but because they WANT publicity (I am guessing about the 'most' part - I have no imperical evidence). And once a cheat is publicized, Punkbuster, etc. can break it.
Of course, we have a the hackers who only share with their clan or just use them themselves, but their impact on the average player should be limited.
ProQuake is a modification to the original Quake (NetQuake, not QuakeWorld) code to provide some client-to-server verification of maps and models.
I'm curious if anyone here has heard of any attacks on this cheat-free method?
Thanks
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
"How did you kill me!!!!!111 I had full armor and health!" :("
"It's called a headshot. Get used to them."
"WTF!! You kill me every time I walk around that corner!"
"It's called 'aim', you should get some"
"This SUX0RS. You are using an aim bot
"Aim bot? Is bot short for robot? I don't have one of those, but your mother says I love like a robot"
1@|\/|37_69 voted to kick+ban You_Suck
So let that be a lesson to all of you out there. Sometimes people ARE just that good.
SCO.com uses Linux
I hate cheaters, but I hate laggy performance even more.
I know of a server admin who used to host a RTCW server back in the original release with RTCW when punkbusters didn't exist. He claims the ping times and average server ran fine on 1 gig of RAM. He later upgraded to 2 gigs.
Since the introduction of punkbusters, he has had numerous times when RAM would just randomly be used. Despite all the player's ping times looking normal, performance just didn't feel the same. Even myself as a player have to admit the game just feels slower on punkbuster servers.
That's an example of ONE "cheat" which was a result of a programming problem. But to say ALL cheating is a reasult of bad programming is ridiculous. Bad programming is not what enables some people to use hacks that turn walls invisible, or allow bullets to fly through walls.....
I would think the way to detect most cheats would be to encrypt as much data as possible and to do regular CRC/checksum/hash checks on it for the server to verify (although I would assume this would slow the FPS). Can someone explain this better? I am not a programmer (like you couldn't guess that).
meep
The current crop of "anti-cheating" software mostly tries to analyze when a player is playing "too well." This does not solve the underlying flaws in the system.
There are some CS research papers, which are starting to address cheating from a more fundamental (theoretic) point of view. Here's one that applies cryptography to prevent cheating for distributed game protocols:
Cheat-Proof Playout for Centralized and Distributed Online Games
From the SIGNL lab at UMass, Amherst.
Anyone know of any more?
First off lag, anti cheat technology means it takes longer to connect to servers and there is lag present once you arrive. Not a big problem anymore but no one likes losing a fps or two for no reason.
Restrictive net code often leads to problems inside the game, several games have issues where if you walk around a corner the opponent may not be there for a second then suddenly appear, this is a bigger problem than cheating.
I've started playing CoD recently, and the killcam is a great way to spot aimbots. I haven't seen many on clan servers, but they're out there in numbers.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Until PB works in a manner that is completely transparent to the user, it will remain a great technology that is poorly implemented. Why should anybody have to spend hours educating themself about the intricacies of PB to play online? Personally, I am tired of the constant warning messages that I receive even when I am playing Quake 3 offline. I should not have to configure this thing...
I admin a server, for a half life modification and the only way I've found thats surefire and true is that you just figure itou t on your own, its kinda obvious when a guy has 400 kills and 8 deaths in a server full of people, and also their attitude has to do a with a lot, if you ask them a qustion and they get defensive it generally is a yes, if they play it off as nothing and laugh you just need to push farther and its generally a YES, and the rest just kinda chill out an say nah im not hacking. But otherwise if your good enough as an admin, you can just see it. especially speedhackers.
You have been sig'd
You didn't actually see it working. You saw it claim to be working.
All you saw was a message from PB claiming that it kicked off a cheater. For all you know it kicked off an innocent person, and left one or more cheaters on the map.
Don't get me wrong, I like the program and use it, but its own activity reports do not constitute proof of effectiveness.
The short version: if you do enough verification to be totally cheatproof, your game will be so slow as to be totally unplayable.
The problem with both of them, at least when I last played them both, is that both of the anti-cheating devices are not associated with the companies of the games the devices are used for.
_
I used Punk Buster with Quake 3 Gold and was not able to get it to work due to the lack of help from Id and a problem with XP that prevented the PB updates from fully setting.
I used Cheating-Death when playing the Half-Life WW2 Mod 'Day of Defeat'. On the plus side, this program sucessfully weeded out all the hackers and cheaters very quickly. Updates were made much more frequently than VAC (Valve's Anti-Cheating solution) ever did. I LOVED that CD found the cheats and updated them within a week of being known. VAC? You would have to wait until they released their updates which were few and far between.
The Drawback was that the program WAS developed independently of Valve and the program gave the playing experience many 'challenges'. Most of which were lag related.
So yes, they work but the game companies need to work more closely and quickly with these solutions as they are EXCELLENT solutions to the cheating problems in on-line games.
Dolemite
_____________________________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I once got 343 kills on a CS server, with maybe a dozen deaths, over the course of a whole day. I wasn't cheating, I was just a lot better than the people on the other team. And they absolutely refused to learn from their mistakes.
Example 1: The idiot who always, always ran to the same hiding place to try for an ambush. After about two rounds, I started shooting through the crate to kill him. He claimed I was using a wall hack, but I really just knew he'd be sitting in the same place again.
Example 2: The other idiot who didn't know the map. He kept accusing me of using a speed hack to get to the target before him, but the real problem was that he was taking the long way around.
sorry for huge essay, but if you're not interested dont bother reading.
I only have experience with Punkbuster on RTCW and Enemy Territory - playing, running servers and modding a large forum.
Detecting cheats is the big selling point of PB, and fundamentally what it is for. How well it works at removing cheaters depends on your point of view. PB generally only picks up cheats the developers have found - those posted on cheater sites/forums or submitted by players who have come accross them. PB is then auto updated to scan the player's memory/hard disk and if it finds a match, the player gets kicked and the cheat violation logged on the server for the admin to look through and set a pernament ban.
Evenbalance have no qualms admitting the software is unlikely to detect cheats that are kept private, i.e. someone who makes his own and keeps them to himself. There are exceptions to this, for example if someone just modifies a detected cheat and doesn't change what gets picked up, or its a simple game file modification and PB simply detects the files are not as they should be (not logged as a cheat violation, but still stops them being used). Further, the detections are always going to lag behind the cheats being made available - though as said in a post above, the effort for the hacker is liable to be significantly more than that for PB to pick it up. PB also get paid for it.
So PB only picks up publicly available cheats? This in itself is more than worthwhile - you might still have cheaters, but maybe at most 10% (total guesstimate) of these guys can get past PB. 90% less cheating? Yes please. Sure I'd like 100%, but back on planet reality this isnt going to be a possibility any time soon. Anyone who cant figure that 90% less is massively better is either an idiot or likes cheating.
There is a secondary cheat detection method that comes with PB, although it is less reliable and takes significantly more effort for the admin. PB can be used to return a screenshot portion from the player. With this, it is possible for the admin to find someone who is using even a private hack they made themselves that is not detected by PB. Admins can set PB to automatically take these screenshots from all players, and also they can take screenshots at specific moments from specific players. The system isnt exactly perfect though, the admin will have to regularily download and look through all the shots taken, so it takes a lot of admin time for a relatively tiny hit rate. For busy public servers, this is liable to not be worth the effort (except where admin has spotted a dodgy player and so gets screens from him specifically), for example I've downloaded several hundred of these screens and only picked up one player cheating with it. However, for clan matches, this becomes much more worthwhile - both because there are far fewer screens to look through and because the "value" of a detection is far higher. A further weakness is that not all players return a proper screenshot to the server, I'll not go into why but the function is hardly reliable, though evenbalance have said they are completely rewriting the code to improve it. I havent seen on any cheater forum that anyone has sucessfully managed to write code to bypass it yet though, like they did for CS (NB: PB now is very different from PB in CS, where it wasnt even integrated to the game properly).
Actual detections are only part of the anti-cheat effect of PB however. The deterrent is at least as good as what it actually picks up. Nobody who has involved themselves in a bona fide community wants to get caught cheating, because they will lose their online buddies. And then there's the issue of having to buy a new game to play on their fave servers again...
I said earlier that detections are the selling point of PB. As an admin, I dont find detections to be the actual number one feature. The best part of PB is the bans are by GUID - a one way hash of the CDKey. Banned players stay banned, for them to come back to your server me
Personally I wouldn't mind if someone was using a cheat to play at my level. What I do mind is when someone uses a cheat to rape me. For me, as long as there is a ladder or ranking system so that I can play people of about the same level as me (whether lousy players with cheats or medium skill players), I don't mind too much about people's methods (but then I'm not good enough to be in it for the glory. I just play for the game).
I play on Passworded servers, most of the time. Keeping the players to a 'elite few' allows for quite a different game than on the public servers.
Actually, this is the main reason Clans are formed. There just a bunch of people who want to play together, without all the idiots on the server with them. That, and the fact that if you play with the same people enough, you get to know who is good at what--and who to stay away from.
Also, having a teamspeak server helps out--as having private and secure comms between teammates (and not having it sound like crap) helps out a bunch. I can't tell you how much better my game is, when I have a mic and all my teammates do too. Having them listen to you helps, but at least this way you can yell to your teammates when a sniper is around the corner. And that isn't cheating. It happens in real combat all the time. duh.
Anyway... I think that the solution isn't having another client to check the client, but checking who you play with first.
About 5 minutes or so later, a sys message comes up: x_player is using hack #32432 (or whatever) and is being banned. I laughed so hard I couldn't play anymore. Talk about classic.
I play UT, and in our community, our admins ban together and share knowlege and we don't have much problem with rampant botters. Our protection give the player a shakedown regardless of if he's playing too well, sucks, or just stands facing a wall. If they are cheaters, they will be kicked, ips posted publicly, and banned communitywide. And our protection hardly slows anything down. I ping our server as well as most others at between 30 to 50.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
CD adds lag and uses system resources. Playing any game--we ran a Half-Life Firearms server--with and without Cheating-Death, you notice a difference, even if your ping stays mostly the same.
It works fine. It catches cheaters.
What it can't catch is people who exploit bugs in-game. Firearms, for example, had several exploits that we knew were out there, but didn't know how to reproduce or stop. You need to have good, trustworthy admins who aren't afraid to wield the ban stick. And they need to watch people.
Do they work? Nope.
Are they worth the effort? In my opinion, nope.
Cheats will always be out there that cannot be detected, blocked, or otherwise foiled by these 'anti-cheats', so why bother to trouble the legit players with annoying software? At least in HL mods, where a seperate program must be run asside from the game. It's just not worth my time, so I avoid these servers like the plague. The actual amount of cheaters that play CS is probably a lot less than people would like to think, and it's not hard to find a cheater-less non-software regulated server. My tip is play on friendly fire servers, when a real cheater is around, usually the player base can deal with it themselves. Otherwise, nothing beats a well-admin'd server. Find a player community that you can play with and come to trust. Be a reg. It helps the game experience a lot, because you'll have friends that you can trust, and the server will hopefully be administrated well. That to me is a lot better than any big-brother cheat software.
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
Having used hacks for various online games (Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, Quake 2, etc.) and having seen the source for them, and knowing many coders in the "aimbot" community very well, I can tell you there are plenty of cheaters out there.
Now, some of them are obvious (like me) and just go on, cheat, laugh and leave. Others actually try to play themselves off as being "good" players, which seems silly to me.
Cheating will never be prevented in online games that run on the PC platform. It's way too open. Game makers encourage people to make "mods". Beyond direct hacks for the games themselves, you have speed hacks, and ones that can hook into OGL to do various things to the graphics on the screen to help you out (ie, wireframe mode). Most aimbot coders are only motivated by anti-cheat technology. They see it as a coding around them as a challenge and a way to earn "scene points". I would also estimate, that for every aimbot/hack that is released to the public, there are two that are kept private.
If you want a fair game, you would have a better chance on a console (other than the xbox) where the OS, Graphics cards, and parts of the game source code might not be as well known and easily manipulated. Of course, then you have to deal with the llamas with game geneies
The best bet for cheat free gaming is to play on private servers with the same people over time, that you know don't cheat.
Think of cd key banning as
1) punishing cheaters
2) a evolutionary force to weed out dumb people who don't secure their computers
3) a way to ensures that people smarten up and don't give important info online to random people
4) it forces cheaters to get more cd-keys. makign it harder for them to play.
All around, it's a huge bennifit. As long as there are few false positives then it's good. The people who get scammed should know better. And even when they do it's not my problem.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You're wrong, but understandably so.
The correct phrase is "mano y mano". The original Spanish phrase does indeed translate literally as "hand and hand", but it is idiomatically equivalent to the English phrase "man-to-man".
The English phrase "hand-to-hand" refers to close quarters physical combat without weapons, which is not appropriate to the context.
Bios_Hakr had it right phonetically as the "y" in Spanish is pronounced the same way as "i" is pronounced in Spanish: with the long "e" sound found in English.
The phrase is also occasionally encountered as "mano i mano" in Spanish, though I am a bit fuzzy on when "i" is an appropriate substitution for "y" (both meaning "and"). Perhaps it is one of the many differences between European and Mexican Spanish? I don't claim to be fluent.
I think that most people are missing the point in their furor over cheating.
The real issue is one of a level playing field, right? That's the basic problem with cheating: it unbalances the game in favor of one player.
That in itself isn't a big deal. Lots of things unbalance a game: hardware (if my bigger badder machine draws frames four times as fast as yours, I'm probably gonna kick yer butt more often than not), network latency, skill,
Obviously it's easy to deal with hardware, latency, and skill: use some sort of game-matching system to pair people up appropriately. That leaves cheating.
It seems to me that the most effective way to combat cheating is in your game design. For instance, a game that gradually tilts things in favor of the loser (say, by giving them advantageous starting positions or any of a million other things) helps bring balance back to the playing field.
Someone with true skill is still going to be able to rock: they'll just overcome a disadvantage. Someone cheating is going to find their cheats less and less effective as the game goes on.
Just some thoughts....
Pooks
I think the important factor is management. The anticheat programs are good, and I've seen lots of benefits from them, but they are part of a management tool. The admins still have to watch the server and take care of the system. Then it becomes a secure and fun server.
What else can we blame when get our butts kicked?
The only way I even have the slightest chance is if I cheat.
Before I get into this, let me just say that I am one of those guys thats in the bottom 10% of FPS shooter players, but I LOVE playing these games. I play FPS team games whenever I have the chance and for the most part, that's unfortunately not very often. I constantly get my ass kicked by people who are good, people who cheat, and people who are just plain friggin lucky. There are times when I get so frustrated I belt out the occational "Jesus Christ! your older brother load the latest hack on your machine or something?" but who doesn't?
If I have the time to totally zone out and play for a few hours straight I can see that I do get a little better over time, and thats fun, but the real enjoyment I get is when I'm playing on a really good team that plays as one.
Guys who think like the poster above are true examples of the "American Hero Syndrome." They can't comprehend having fun unless they're the top of the heap, king of the kill, fragmaniacical; in other words "special." Everyone wants to be Special these days, and very few are content being part of the action and doing whatever small part they're pathetic skills are capable of adding.
I, and other craptastic players like me, are just tickled pink to get the shit blown out of them for 30 minutes just to find themselves in the right place at the right time to win the round for their team . (sounding a little self-righteous? maybe so. whatever.)
Wanna be the top of the heap? Winning a game that friggin' important to your screwed up self-esteem? Then install some bots on your machine, make them stupid, and spank their asses. Leave the general public the hell alone. We paid just as much as you did to have fun playing a game, you assholes.
"People who cheat make Baby Jesus cry."
s'wut i sed.
Hypothetically, we know how the client's executable and data will be layed out in memory, what would be the problem with the server periodically asking for checksums of particular subsets of it? It would require more space on the server's side, but on the client's, they're guarunteed to have all that data, uncorrupted, in memory. For any cutting-edge game, circumventing it would require enough memory that any player wanting to cheat should see a significant, hopefully prohibitive, performance penalty. Am I missing something?
Personally I think the anti-cheat software programs are a bit of a hassle. I wish more developers would take the time as Blizzard has to create their own gaming environment online where they can moderate what's going on and ban cheaters. If someone did the same thing Blizzard has done but made a buisness out of it and hosted games from different developers and let those developers moderate their own games so that they can ban the CD keys of cheaters then I think we'd see a decline in cheating Wait a second... That's just like Xbox live...