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?"

Comments

I don't understand

[Fwipp]

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.)

Re:I don't understand

[Penguinisto]

...shouldn't tournament organizers provide and lock-down the machines that people play on?

This, right here. Wanna play for money? Use our computers - each one is normalized, matched, patched, and clean of everything but the game... hell, fill the USB and other ports with epoxy if you're worried about someone sneaking in a geek stick with cheats, and proxy the hell out of it to prevent Internet access. Allow players to configure the game through the UI if they want, but otherwise no other action allowed outside of the game itself, and seal the cases with tamper-evident tape.

The only possible obstacle is from players who demand to use customized config files for their game of choice. Example: the Quake 2/3 WeaponsFactory** MOD relied *very* heavily on players using fairly heavily modified key/mouse mapping configs, because otherwise you'd never be able to do much in the game - it was that complex when using some of its team characters for best effect.

Of course, the tournament could audit the config files to insure no cheating, but there's a lot of gray area in there (e.g. having a specific combination of player events tied to one key or click that can perform fairly incredible stunts, etc).

** WeaponsFactory was the Quake2 answer to the lack of Team Fortress in that game version.

"Most cheating on consoles has been eradicated?"

[Em Adespoton]

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?

Won't work for long...

[Penguinisto]

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.

Anti:Game:ref

[Lumpio-]

If this becomes popular somebody will make a cheat device that plugs into your Game:ref and simulates the mouse through it.

Re:proformence enhancing

[Sowelu]

Nah, watching a bot you wrote operate is pretty damn fun. I'd like to see more bot vs bot tournaments in all kinds of games.

Two things...

[wolrahnaes]

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.

Re:"Most cheating on consoles has been eradicated?

[mattventura]

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.