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Gabe Newell Responds: Yes, We're Looking For Cheaters Via DNS
dotarray writes "Valve has stepped up to answer allegations that the company's anti-cheat system was scanning users' internet history. Rather than a simple, sanitized press release or a refusal to comment on 'rumours and innuendo,' Valve CEO and gaming hero Gabe Newell has personally responded."
Newell or not, not everyone will like the answer. The short version is that Yes, Valve is scanning DNS caches, with a two-tiered approach intended to find cheating users by looking for cheat servers in their histories. Says Newell: "Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered this second check, accessing the DNS cache. 570 cheaters are being banned due to DNS searches."
Is this search in the TOS, or is it an "unauthorized" search?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This is why I don't like the idea that games seemed to have moved away from hosting your own server. Online games were great when you knew the guy you were playing against. There wasn't as many problems with cheating, or perhaps you could agree on which cheats could be used, and the in-game chat was a lot more tolerable. Now that you're just playing against a random selection of people from the internet, I just don't get as much enjoyment out of it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Cheats have evolved beyond file tampering. Most are done with code injection, and boy is that history a long one. I suspect the actual DNS being hunted for are the cheats' "DRM" servers that ensure you paid the guy who made the cheat money. CheatHappens.com or whatever they're calling themselves these days was one of the first to start doing this in a big way.
Why not just shuffle anyone detected cheating into a separate game room? If they're paying customers, then they can all cheat together, and everyone wins.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Like you I imagine, I've been playing online games for a long time. I even ran a half dozen TFC / Natural Selection / CounterStrike / Half-Life Deathmatch / etc. servers for three or four years. I never found cheating to be common except for CounterStrike. For some reason that game attracted cheaters like crazy. The other games, not so much. Cheating wasn't just uncommon - it was rare.
When PunkBuster and similar products became popular it was amazing how much better I became compared to other players when playing on a protected server. (o:
VAC has, in my opinion, done a very good job overall of keeping up with the cheating crowd. I can't remember the last time I came across a player that I suspected of cheating - and having had to do detection manually by watching player behavior, I'm very confident in this.
There's a few things you can look for manually when looking for cheaters.
Your typical aimbot is easy to detect. Jump into spectator mode or whatever and pick the first person view for the selected player. Instead of the smooth movements a typical player will have, you'll see the player's aim snap to positions on a screen. It's rare to see these anymore because detection is so incredibly easy.
Driver hacks to provide see-through textures, or model hacks that have a long cross through them that extend through walls, are also pretty easy to detect by watching the player. Is someone across the map and scoring head shots through walls? Does he always seem to know where the enemy is? He's using one of these.
The interesting cheat is the second one (wall / model hacks) which allows one to see opponents behind objects, because it's not a mechanical advantage like an aim bot; it's a strategic advantage, an information advantage. It doesn't change the ability of the cheater to aim more accurately; it changes the cheater's behavior. A player without the cheat information will act as if the opponent is not there; a player with the information will.
So, you'll see tactical advances / retreats, shots fired / grenades thrown, etc. that would not occur in normal non-cheating game play. Yes; there will always be the person who gets the lucky what-the-hell shot. That happens.Sometimes more than once. What you need to look for is a consistent pattern over time that cannot be attributed to simply being "good", having a better overall strategy, or having an unusual play style.
I bet that with enough information collected it would be possible to detect this kind of behavior and flag individual players for follow-up manual inspection. It would be a fascinating bit of research, really.
Resource hacks are very dead these days, as information about resources (ammunition carried, money earned, life amount, etc.) are all stored server-side for most games. There's no way for the client to fiddle with that data.
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>Explaining something does not justify it. They should not go rummaging through my computer. Period.
Do you understand how VAC and similar anti-cheat software looks? It will scan through your memory looking for certain DLLs loaded, look through your computer files for cheats, and so forth.
Other than you being ignorant of what is actually happening before, I don't see anything that has changed with this announcement.
It's not like they're recording all of your metadata, uploading all your facebook posts to a data center in Utah, and targeting people for drone strikes using cell phone records.