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Game:ref's Hardware Solution To Cheating In eSports
An anonymous reader writes: Cheating is a real problem in today's most popular online multiplayer games, and not just on public servers. Some of the world's top Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players have been banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat System (VACS) in recent months too, bringing a nascent eSport into disrepute. But one gamer is taking a different approach, creating a hardware solution called Game:ref to tackle the problem. Simple in design — Game:ref, which the creator hopes to fund on Kickstarter soon, compares on screen movement with your inputs — but powerful in potential, the device has the potential to catch out illegal macro users both on and offline. It's already attracting interest in the top flight too.
"I've had some people from [eSports teams] Complexity, SK Gaming, and a few high-profile streamers reach out. I would say everyone seems onboard with making online PC gaming a more enjoyable experience," says inventor David Titarenco, a former Counter-Strike pro himself. "After all, most cheating on consoles has been eradicated, why should PC be so far behind?"
"I've had some people from [eSports teams] Complexity, SK Gaming, and a few high-profile streamers reach out. I would say everyone seems onboard with making online PC gaming a more enjoyable experience," says inventor David Titarenco, a former Counter-Strike pro himself. "After all, most cheating on consoles has been eradicated, why should PC be so far behind?"
it seems a/etheletes are cheating... should just ban sports for profit/money
lols. koreans will cheat because... koreans
Advertising click fraud, Bank security, National Security...
It would need to be well designed though...
As I understand it, it uses hardware to try to catch software-based cheats. Anything that comes from your keyboard/mouse will be trusted. What's the use-case for this?
In one breath he cites tournaments - but shouldn't tournament organizers provide and lock-down the machines that people play on?
He also claims that cheaters were responsible for the death of DayZ and Rust - but it's not like Indie games are going to require you to buy a hardware anti-cheat device to play; and cheaters just simply aren't going to use the device.
(Also; if this adds any latency to your input, gamers won't use it. They're nerds like that.)
Has most console cheating actually been eradicaated, or is it just that people aren't being caught anymore?
Also, consoles are closed systems, whereas a desktop computer is an open system. I see eSports going the way of car racing: different events test different skills. We all know that cars can go faster than human reflexes can manage. Enter Formula racing, which is kind of analogous to console racing: everyone gets the same basic hardware, and can only tweak within those constraints. By comparison, PC eSports are more like a cannonball run, where everything goes as long as you can afford it and don't get caught.
I can actually see mobile gaming becoming more of a sport, as the hardware is both more limited and more standardized. Then, of course, you'll get people running Android under emulation under some supercomputer with a bunch of system-level tweaks. But stuff like this can be investigated for winners (just like sports drug testing). And if they're not winning, why is it a problem?
Sorry, but a hardware-based solution isn't going to be much different.
I say this because for years, software applications like 3DS Max/Viz required a hardware dongle latched onto the back of one's workstation before the app would even launch (it was replaced by a software version of C_DILLA eventually). Before and after, it was almost trivial to emulate the hardware, its responses, and 'plug' the emulated hardware into a virtual port. Today, most mobos don't have as much variety of hardware I/O (you're lucky to find a serial port nowadays), which probably means USB, HDMI, or Thunderbolt... and the original 3DS dongle required a parallel port, FFS.
Even comparisons of input-to-screen don't mean much, because the eventual circumvention/cheat will emulate one, the other, or both, and send the 'results' to who/whatever is monitoring the user's gameplay.
Furthermore, I daresay that once money gets involved (via eSports), the incentive to built/implement a seamless means of circumventing the cheat-detector will be far greater than the motivation of some asshat griefer who wants to punk on a few pub server players.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I mean, if someone has the hardware & software in their own home, there's really no telling what they're going to do with it. Maybe they're just mod the Game:ref to say you're not cheating when you are. Or some other method of circumvention.
The only game competition that I would trust is one where they all played on identical equipment on a controlled network in an room ('arena' seems too lofty for 'place to play computer games'). If money was involved, (10's of thousands or more) I don't think it's unreasonable to request everyone show up in a common location.
If this becomes popular somebody will make a cheat device that plugs into your Game:ref and simulates the mouse through it.
Or have we already forgotten the WTFast business?
First,
Consoles are almost completely devoid of cheaters because they provide anti-cheat solutions baked-in their hardware.
I'm not sure what consoles this guy has been playing, but cheating is rampant in pretty much every popular console game. Some kinds of cheats may be harder to implement on consoles, but they always find ways to do it.
Second, all his rig does is monitor USB inputs. The same USB inputs I can fake using literally the same Arduino hardware he seems to be using for his prototypes. Any kind of macro-based cheats would be trivial to implement on USB-capable microcontrollers. One's cheat program of choice just has to change from sending fake inputs directly to the OS over to passing the same input commands out to a simple piece of hardware which then sends them right back as USB HID inputs.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
those 'pro' gamers to upgrade from their FX5200s.
1) Cheating is reduced slightly. There's less cheat devices like game shark, but I'd you want to cheat in any multiplayer, it's not that difficult.
2) Bluestacks is an android emulator for pc and has existed for a few years already. "Hacking" on it merely requires that you know how to install cheat engine.
what about local severs / local gaming stations with no internet maybe with software like deep freeze that refreshes the systems each boot and they reboot at the end of each match.
Anti cheating techniques are successful at first, then there is the circumvention, nothing is bullet proof however using certified hardware in an controlled enviroment is a good start.
For online gaming high stakes = high interested = much energy leading to:
a.) broad band solutions for common cheaters
b.) specialised expensive hand crafted cheats
History: ..
1.) Nvidia looking glas hack - driver version detector+screenshooter
2.) dummy OpenGL dll wrapper - file scanner+screenshooter
also solved rat auto fire.
3.) game engine hooking - game engine hooking detector - game engine hooking detector unloader - detector for this - special cheat drivers running top priority - special anti-cheat drivers running top priority
What I want to say:
Cheating has evolved and ever will. Console play perhaps is now free of cheating because the stakes are too low and the dangers are too high.
Raise the stakes, get a horde of chinese DRM hackers flipping bit by bit till the consoles break, have cheating enabled again.
guess for the future:
FPGA & DSP + CV enabled cheating - looping through the DVI/HDMI signal capturing at 50/60Hz 1080p (the grabbers for this res & freq. is affordable) automatic object recognition.
feeding in commands direct into the mouse and keyboard.
AntiCheat would be statistics & pattern based.
AntiCheat: for direct signal capturing: using 4k
Anti AntiCheat: splitt mirror or (two) cameras with an angle and polarized filters (->3D) and CV again lower res but who cares..
The evolution is about to start, again!
Irony: ;)
I call the Google Car a cheater car
The added difficulty of cheating on a console is often offset by the fact that most console game developers get lazy and start trusting the client.
I'm not plugging my 1000 DPI mouse into something that sits between it and my PC. We're trying to reduce input latency, not create it.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
We have some limits on what we consider cheating. Corked bats are not allowed in baseball. Steroids are considered bad everywhere. But in bicycling I can spend millions in a wind tunnel and devise ways to drop the mass of my bike. We have swimsuits which improve water flow for speed. So my question is this: Why have we decided that macros are cheating?
Assuming that a professional gamer isn't going to go down the script-kiddie road, any macros that a top-tier gamer would use would be based on experience, knowledge of the game, and an understanding of when and why to use them. The skill is knowing how to play the game. We allow high DPI mice, weighted mice, custom keyboards, and many other things to make it easier for a gamer to be able to execute moves at an incredible rate. The limit to operation speed is how fast an idea can be turned into controller actions to impact the game. If somebody can think faster than they can move, why shouldn't they be allowed to macro?
I consider the interface of the game to be the command structure the developers have give me. Assigning an arbitrary limit on input speed based on the device I use to communicate with that interface seems arbitrary. And I'm not a power gamer who uses macros. I tend to avoid most of the games that are becoming popular eSports because I don't issue commands at what has become the "normal" speed, and most of those games aren't the kind of experience I'm looking for when I play games. So I'm not defending the macros, or trying to justify how I play. I just don't understand how the current idea of what constitutes "cheating" came to decide that keyboard/mouse skills are fine to develop, but creating macros, which you'd still need to employ intelligently to win a game, are frowned upon.
Absolutely the consoles are filled with cheaters. Explain how online players have infinite health, armor that never degrades or run out of ammo (assuming ammo, of course).
The pitch is that cheating is solved, but the facts are exactly the opposite. Xbox 360 has been cracked more than once. The PS3 is infinitely hackable. The new consoles are effectively cheap PCs and as such will be cracked if they aren't already. Then there are the modified controllers, the use of a PC or an Arduino (et.al.) as the input device replacing the standard controllers. The controllers are nothing special, any communication protocol that uses wireless, or wires, can be hacked. Macros are rampant and the best way to avoid cheaters is to not play online except on private servers. If you know the operator of the server, otherwise - easy pickings there noob.
lolwut? Whoever wrote that must not be playing any popular online console games.
"After all, most cheating on consoles has been eradicated"
BULLSHIT! People cheat constantly. It's either modding, glitches, file manipulation, modded controllers, artificial network delays, packet manipulation, etc and the only difference is console makers can't go anything about it because it's a walled garden instead of a real computer.
Bladder endurance is not a skill!
If any of you play CS:GO Competitive, you probably know what a "smurf" account is. This device does nothing to address the growing problem of people who are skilled at the game from buying it cheap on sale, gifting it to false Steam Accounts, and ruining the fun of newer players by showing up and owning them. That happens often, and won't be detected by this.
Sure, it might help similarly skilled tournament players avoid cheaters, but it won't do shit to make the game accessible to others. It's market is less than one percent of actual CS:GO players.
But all of the game producers would have to be on board for it to work efficiently. Which comes down to salesmanship and it's licenses cost.