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Fighting Online Game Cheating in Hardware
Monk writes "Multiplayer games these days have one problem. Cheating. Cheating is out of control because of failed attempts by software such as Punkbuster, and VALVe's Anti-cheat (VAC). Now it seems that could change change with Intel's own Anti-cheat Software/Hardware."
for a social problem
anything designed by a man can also be broken by a man
the only remedy for human antisocial activity is human social activity. no technology will change that fact. and if you think it can augment those who intend good, then you're right but you must also bear in mind that it can also augment those who intend evil
this applies to security cameras, file trading on the internet, etc. as well as game cheating
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because many of these games aim to be realistic, that's why people play them. Adding an "aimbot" as a powerup is not something that would have happened the 101:rd airborne when they dropped down over normandy, so when you play that scenario, neither do you want it or should have it.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Yeah, make an FPS game where everyone automatically has immortality, omnipotence, omnipresence & every conceivable weapon.
Sounds a lot of fun.
The whole concept of anti-cheating is based on making a chip comparing input on mouse/keyboard to input into the program.
So how about:
1: Software that wraps this chip, and returns "true" all the time ?
2: Cheats that does not emulate keyboard or mouse input ? (like radars, spike skins, you name it)
3: Software that generate keyboard/mouse interrupts ?
4: The fact that someone would not buy a CPU/MB with anticheat stuff in it if you intend to cheat. You'd just have a dummy driver emulating this hardware or something.
This only seems to be able to solve a very small portion of cheats.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Exactly like DRM, I am sure this restrictive method will work flawlessly! I think Intel is making the right choice by using something you can't update against an entire army of hackers!
Blame Canada!
I'm looking forward to the time when I can't play a game online because some POS hardware/software thinks that my MP3 or video encoder is a cheat mechanism.
Lame, very lame. And you KNOW this will eventually happen. Some harmless software program running at the same time as a game will screw your online play without lube.
Why can't the game devs shift focus away from DRM & etc. and try building a solid product that doesn't NEED a third party anti-cheat software running? It's called internal testing, FFS. You made the software yet you can't find the holes, meanwhile some smartass 15 year old Russian just reads your code and goes "Oh! Look at what we have here!"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
..is that the server, at some point, has to trust the data the client is sending. Now there's client-side anti-cheat software that will do things like try and make sure that external applications (not entirely unlike the old TSR cheats of lore) aren't altering the data in RAM before it sends the info back to the server. But that client-side anti-cheat software can-and-will be defeated. Eventually there might be an anti-cheat relying on TCPM sort of things, but eventually somebody will just make a TCPM-less version indistinguishable from the TCPM type by the server.
/kill'ing them (rather than banning - as they'll just be back) and ousting them in public. )
So the only proper anti-cheat lays with the server. But there you hit a problem. You can, for example, prevent some cheats that way. Somebody lobs 2 nades while the server knows he only has 1? Cheating. Somebody moves all over the screen, faster than the player can actually run? Cheating. Wait - or a laggy connection.. or a bug. Tread with caution there. Caution means a margin. A margin means a margin for cheating. Okay, so you don't have your cheat make your player run at 200% - you just make him run at 105%. Still an advantage, and the anti-cheat won't catch it because of the margin. And even when you can detect all the -technical- cheats (more ammo, faster reloads, increased speed, greater jetpack fuel (if there's any), that leaves you with the cheats that cheat the User Input. Aimbots and the like - which can be extremely difficult to detect.
In the end, you can't 100% prevent cheating. But you can make the landscape unattractive enough to cheat in by at least trying to prevent it and having an actual human being look at suspicious behavior from time to time.
( I admin at one of the more popular Soldat servers - we're virtually cheater-free because the cheaters know they'll be busted in no time and their cheating fun ruined by us
Really? Just one? What about:
Bad design
High prices
Poor performance
Steep system requirements
Bugs
All software anti-cheat systems are flawed because they include things other than cheating. I get kicked by Punkbuster for high ping on gaming servers.
The trouble with anti-cheat systems is that the developers have no ethical standard. They tolerate inconveniencing legitimate players to ensure that the cheaters are stopped as well. The law would see things differently. The law believes in letting some criminals go to ensure that it never punishes an innocent man. Flawed though it may be, it works far more often than it fails. Punkbuster is the complete opposite, and what's worse is that Punkbuster is full of bugs. I get kicked from servers several times a day and the only message I get is:
"Punkbuster
[Ok]"
All complaints to the company fall on deaf ears. And because EA chooses PB, I am stuck with a company granted an artifician monopoly by another company, and have no choice but to have a greatly diminished experience. Nothing is worse than screwing a gamer over in the heat of a competitive match, and that's what PB does too often.
Not really. The real problem is that there's always a small minority that wants to cheat. They drive off the large majority that just want to play a good game.
You can't trust the person, you can't trust the hardware or the software you can't trust anything which comes back from the client machine.
Da fix? A cross game registry of gamers with identities linked to real addresses and bank details. Something which all the online games can query, though I'd go with hashed values for bank details/address etc rather than real ones. You get caught cheating, you get marked as such. To get rid of the marking you need a new identity.
Will it stop it? Mmm look at the athletes who take drugs, I doubt it. What getting caught would do though is ruin the gaming life in all the games which use the registry. Gaming environments could be split into two areas. One for trustworthy gamers, one for cheating scum.
Deleted
Personally I've been leaning back towards LAN parties. Cheaters are much easier to deal with, you just chuck an empty beer bottle at them after the first offense. The second offense involves dragging them out back for a little wall to wall counselling session.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
For fark's sake people. A statement like "there is no technological fix for a social problem" is just important-sounding nonsense. Really? We seem, after all, to have prevented the problem of people physically reaching out across the internet and strangling people... I have yet to see anybody do this (as much as I'd like to sometimes). Parent poster completely ignores the obvious problem with his arguments: that ALL defense mechanisms are not about absolute defense, but about reducing the rate of successful attacks and/or increasing the barriers to entry (such as technical sophistication, equipment, time, etc) that an attacker must invest in to be successful. Security guards and alarm systems do not prevent all bank robberies - but it is safe to say that there would be more robberies if those things didn't exist. Same here. You may have technological issues as to exactly how much such a hardware defense would decrease the amount of cheating, but it seems fairly obvious that, if implemented, this figure would be greater than zero.
Incredibly poor logic and a crappy analogy.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
Ah, ESR. I like this quote:
"If Quake had been designed to be open-source from the beginning, the performance hack that makes see-around-corners possible could never have been considered -- and either the design wouldn't have depended on millisecond packet timing at all, or aim-bot recognition would have been built in to the server from the beginning."
Which is really just another way of saying that it wouldn't have been developed at all. Great solution.
I hate cheating too, but I'm afraid it'll always be there. I just assume on public servers that there is some cheating. When I get sick of it I set up a private game with people that I trust.
Cheers.
Camping is not cheating. It may be lame to you, but they're not cracking any executable or intercepting packets to make them shoot someone in the head as soon as they come around a corner. Huge difference, I'd say.