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Valve's Battle Against Cheaters
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"
I am an admin in one of the larger gaming communities in my country, and have a history of competitive gaming. I was never a gamer before I saw the teamplay in CS 5on5 matches (example video). I still play the orginal game once a week or so. Just for the record, CS is a team-game where aiming and firing is only part of the skill. Knowing and practicing with your team is essential just like any other sport.
If you didn't already know, Counter-Strike (CS) is still one of the largest on-line games out there, peaking 75k users yesterday. I'm talking about the version 1.6 and not the CSS (CS Source) version. There is still a larger userbase for other Steam-games, but we still regard the original CS to be the game played by the eSports community because of its smooth gameplay and predictable recoil patterns when firing guns. Many "elite"-players have tried moving on to newer games, but get disappointed and still comes back for the good old CS 1.6 where graphics may suck, but you get a predictable gameplay where the player is not that much affected by randomness.
The story of cheating in CS has been a long annoying trip. People have even been cheating at LAN-events where they used aim-key, and they even won price money and got away with it. The story is long, and websites profiting from selling cheats are very active today. Some of the cheats go very deep in kernel and hide itself just like a root-kit. Ring 0-cheats are common.
VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) has been the attempts from Valve to stop the cheats, however VAC has always been ages behind any new cheat and has never taken all cheats available for free at the net. There has been attempts from the community at steampowered to scare users with passive detections and delayed bans so users could not be sure which cheat got them banned, but mainly VAC seem to me being a low priority project at Valve. Valve is still, like any other company, prioritizing new projects and just leaving maybe one programmer doing some cheat-detection-code on his free-time. The situation is a win for cheaters and others. And also a win for Valve, since there are a lot of people trying cheats and thus they sometimes get banned, ending up buying a new copy of the game (the price for a new CS at Steam is currently available at 7,99€ which is annoyingly cheap). Valve still sells a lot of copies (in the years 1999-2008, Valve had sold 4,8 million copies!).
Various anti-cheat communities has gathered during the years, where one try syncing ban-lists and communities constantly have players monitoring other players trying to spot cheats by spectating. As VAC is such a failure, many still go undetected. Especially if one hides their cheats well. The community RADAR is one of these initiatives which accept new communities for sharing such ban-list.
The latest addition; Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) is a project created by a skilled programmer that is based upon deep-level detection accompanied with screenshots. This programmer may seem hard-core, and this is mainly because he used to be a cheat author(!). This is currently the best anti-cheat system available for CS, but it's still only used in Clan Wars/eSports. The public-area for normal players is still depending upon VAC, as the EAC requires a 3rd party client installed which is a tough barrier to overcome.
The future now seem brighter, as we have now left VAC and we are mainly no longer depending on it. I wish Valve software good luck in the future, but it seem to me that if VAC remains a low-priority project it will still annoy thousands of everyday players and leaving a few cheaters laughing, destroying the on-line experience.
Yours
PunkBuster is awful. I don't need their shit running in the background 24/7. If MW2 used PB, I would not have purchased it.
The thing about VAC that people don't fucking get is that it runs on a delayed ban wave system. They don't ban people immediately for cheating. They want to flag as many cheaters as they can to keep the cheat writers guessing... then slam hundreds of cheaters with a ban all at once... often a week or more past the date they were flagged. This method is great for Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, but unfortunately not so much with a server-less game like MW2. In TF2 and CS, you can ban people from your server and not have to put up with them (and some servers have votekick mods as well), but MW2 doesn't have servers, admins, votekick, cheat reporting.... none of it. And that's a major roadblock to many people for an otherwise-great game, and I'm hoping that perhaps Infinity Ward decides to try and recover the PC community's image of them and make it up to them with better anti-cheater features. But for now, they're just giving us the middle finger.
Still a good game, though, and I still play it. The cheating isn't nearly as rampant as it was when any jackass could pirate the game and essentially have infinite copies to play online after being banned, and this matchmaking system that everybody bitches about is, imo, better than dedicated servers. Dedicated servers in CoD4 are absolute shit. The CoD community is shit. The modding community that people cite in their pro-dedi argument is inexistant. Matchmaking lets me not have to deal with laggy servers with useless mods and stupid rules and hammer-happy admins. Thank you IW for matchmaking... now fix it.