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?"

Comments

Punkbuster

[Xlipse]

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.

similar question on misc@openbsd.org

[nocomment]

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).

Cheating Death

[cronostitan]

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.

Re:Cheating Death

[grumpygrodyguy]

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.

I'm a veteran CS cheater. My favorites were the old speed cheats, and the 'complete' aim-bot, auto-kill cheats that allow you to kill sometimes 15 to 20 people in 1 match.

I was shameless, and loved joining 32player servers just to rape everyone on the server until they left in disgust.

Now you proobably won't see that in a CD or PB server, but most servers are public and people play very casually...usually searching for thier favoriate map as opposed to thier favorite server.

Now I had a very good (6 months?) of whoreage before I was finally busted for good, there is some kind of network which is reported to by admins that regulates WON IDs for all players. If a particular WON ID gets many consecutive complaints...as surely mine did because I cheated like an SOB...then that person's WON ID can be blocked.

My WON ID was blocked for 6 months...that was it...I couldn't play any more CS for 6 months. Let me tell you it was very effective, and I stopped cheating as a result of that experience.(Well...stopped cheating at CS anyhow ;) )

BFSecure

[xankar]

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.

False Postives

[KurdtX]

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.

Re:Inverse

[dtfinch]

You beat me to it. I was moving my mouse to click reply, then saw that you already posted one.

I'm Dave, the lamer who wrote the most featureful bzflag cheat client out there, which I myself used on the cheat servers but was undoubtably used elsewhere after I released it.

That happened to me all the time

[Orien]

I don't really have time to play games anymore, but when I was still a student I was hooked on the original Unreal Tournament. Me and a friend of mine were in a clan together and neither one of us ever cheated. Ever. But you know what? We got accused of it all the time. Especially him. I would sit there and watch him and it was amazing how good he was. Almost every map we would play on any server he would have the most frags by about 100. I would be number two about 10 higher than most people, except on 'thorns'. Man, I loved that map. Both of us could get 200 frags and be miles ahead of everyone else. I used to get so tired of these whiny teenage wimps not having enough ego to admit that we were better than them. They would start calling us cheaters and convince the admin to ban us. It got hard to find servers to play on. Of course my friend didn't help the situation any because he loved to talk trash and that would further lead people to think that he cheated. You can imagine the senario:

"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.

I've used both of them.

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

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
______________________________________

Simply put.

[nekoes]

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.

So change the paradigm for games.....

[phouka]

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, ... and cheating.

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