The World's Top-Selling Video Game Has a Cheating Problem (bloomberg.com)

China's Tencent Holdings is going after the cheaters and hackers that infest PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as it prepares to bring the world's top-selling game to its home turf. From a report: Ahead of its official debut this year, the biggest gaming company on the planet has enlisted Chinese police to root out the underground rings that make and sell cheat software. It's helped law enforcement agents uncover at least 30 cases and arrest 120 people suspected of designing programs that confer unfair advantages from X-Ray vision (see-through walls) to auto-targeting (uncannily accurate snipers). Those convicted in the past have done jail time. Tencent and game developer Bluehole have a lot riding on cleaning things up for China, which accounted for more than half the game's 27 million users, according to online tracker Steam Spy. It's also the biggest source of cheat software, undermining a Battle Royale-style phenom that shattered gaming records in 2017 and surpassed best-sellers like Grand Theft Auto V. The proliferation of shenanigans threatens to drive away first-time users vital to its longer-term growth.

Comments

Poor Programming

[FeelGood314]

Some cheats can't be avoided but others like seeing through walls? The server should be able to figure out what my client can see and not tell me of the positions of players not in my field of view.

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

The problem with that is that then the server will need to have visibility testing on its side. Anyone who has done some amount of research in this area should be able to tell you that this kind of testing is impractical for a server that needs to provide information to multiple clients.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Then it shouldn't be considered cheating to use whatever data the server sends you to build your view.

I used an obfuscator on my Minecraft server for a long time. It caused all sorts of problems, like coming around a corner and not getting a refresh. It also slowed the server down overall. But I had to do it, because so many people use X-ray, up until such time as the player base settled into the same six people and I was able to turn it back off.

If you don't have the CPU power to do checks, and you don't have the human operators to watch the activity of suspicious players, you're going to get cheaters. The smart ones won't get caught, because they will be able to distinguish between what they should see and what they shouldn't and act accordingly. They will just always seem to get lucky when they have to make guesses which way to go.

Re:Poor Programming

[vux984]

" The server should be able to figure out what my client can see "

Sure, it just has to raytrace the scene and account for everything from reflections in water, to mirrors, to fog, to construactable / destructable terrain elements. And partial occlusions -- you can't just project from my view point to their center of mass... what if I can just see their head? Nor can you project to their extents... maybe I can just see his knee while looking up from a basement window to him outside.

Then it also needs to consider the terrain materials in the area, capability -- i might not be able to see playerX all, but if he's stomping around the roof above me, perhaps I can hear him, or maybe i hear the rusltling in the leaves outside the window. Or maybe he's unloading his shotgun into someone, and I can hear all this positionally rendered in 3d surround so my PC will still need position info in order to give me all those audio cues properly.

To top all that off it would have to consider latency and a potential movement. Sure I might not be able to see you *NOW* but based on our relative movement, I'll be able to see him 50 milliseconds from now. If you don't want him popping into existence in front of me with the next update from the server, I need to know he's coming up to the corner... just that is going to give my 'cheat tools' enough advance notice to create a usable advantage.

Re:Poor Programming

[parkinglot777]

Then it shouldn't be considered cheating to use whatever data the server sends you to build your view.

As long as the data is visible to the software of the company itself; thus, the data is not for others but its own software. If you read the data using your added on software or tools, you are a cheater.

Then you have no idea how multi-online players work? The problem is NOT CPU power. The bottle neck is your Internet. That is a part of reasons why the data is sent to client side for much faster rendering/action.

Re:Poor Programming

[exomondo]

Visibilty testing server side is very straight forward it's not a hard problem. You just need basic representation of geometry via bounds and test for line intersection.

Well no, that's a naive oversimplification that won't actually work in the real game. You do have things like windows so you can't just do the bounds of geometry. You also have to consider environmental effects like reflections and fog/smoke. It also isn't just a simple test for line intersection, the player's positions are not just an infinitesimally small point in space, they have mass (and that varies significantly if they are in a vehicle or not). That's a significant load on the server to do this for all the players against all the other players.

Re:Poor Programming

[chispito]

Visibilty testing server side is very straight forward it's not a hard problem. You just need basic representation of geometry via bounds and test for line intersection.

That's not based on research, that's based on actually implementing it for real games.

This is so not even close to reality. See this Stack Exchange comment for an explanation https://gamedev.stackexchange....

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

Visibilty testing server side is very straight forward it's not a hard problem. You just need basic representation of geometry via bounds and test for line intersection.

Straight forward and easy does not automatically mean scalable, which is what you need for a server. Visibility computation isn't really that hard, but it's still far too time consuming in the general case to relegate to a system which has to serve dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people simultaneously.

Re:Poor Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it shouldn't be considered cheating to use whatever data the server sends you to build your view.

And this attitude of "if you sent it to me i can do whatever i want with it" is why software is moving away from running on users' machines and onto the cloud.

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

Then it shouldn't be considered cheating to use whatever data the server sends you to build your view.

By that logic, rearranging a couple of pieces on a chess board while your opponent steps away momentarily to grab a beer from the fridge shouldn't be considered cheating because you still had physical access to the board the whole time.

Re:Poor Programming

[gweihir]

The problem here is that ping-times of many people are still way to bad for this. On the other hand, it seems the PUBG developers really made it especially easy for cheaters. Gross incompetence at work. There are certainly things that can be done, but they need more than cheapest-possible coders.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Yes, the problem is latency. But the servers still need to stop sending everyone's location to every player, if they don't want that information exploited. If that means having to make a unique status packet for every player from the ground up, instead of attaching player specifics to a generic report, then so be it.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

If that is the only way that the rules of the game can be enforced, then that is how it needs to be done. You can't trust the client.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Except the other player can take the game state at the time they stood up (a simple photo will do) and confirm it looks the same when they get back. They don't have this power in an online game -- they can't even stop the game by stepping away.

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

Probably true... but that doesn't mean it's not cheating if the client is doing something that breaks the implicit contract of being an honest player.

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

Perhaps... but that doesn't change the fact that it's still cheating.

Re:Poor Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

How about if you check their cards in a poker match while they use the toilet?

No easy way for them to know you looked. And it's still cheating. And matches this situation perfectly.

Re:Poor Programming

[orlanz]

Both aim bots and xray are really old problems. Counter Strike solved them 15 years ago.

I don't remember Aim Bot anti-cheat very well, but the destination point (head) was given jitter so that your Aim Bot shook and you had a small but significant chance of missing.

XRay, the server only gives you the data of those that you could see. Additionally it determined if the bullet trajectory was valid based on point, direction, & velocity of initial firing. They ended up being able to have partially penetrable walls and boxes. Even if the user had XRay, you would be invisible behind the box. But if he fired, the box would protect you against a submachine gun, but not against an AWP.

Additional protections include providing a mini virtual environment that checks all game files for tampering. If anything didn't add up, the server wouldn't connect.

All of the above and similar stuff still allowed some people to cheat. So the perfect anti-cheat... in game voting. This was very simple, since killed off people could observe live plays, people could initiate kick votes that kicked a player suspected of cheating. Of course good players got kicked too, but they were clearly playing against armatures and should have moved onto more competitive grounds.

The article's legal mess is basically the company offloading their development costs onto society rather than hire people with brains to deal with the real world.

Re:Poor Programming

[vux984]

"No need to be that difficult."

Yeah, it does.

" If there is reasonable chance the client can see a particular player - send the coordinate"

see or hear

Which mostly reduces to are they within a box around the player, which is what they do.

"If you are sure the client can't see a player (solid wall "

lots of games have mirrors and reflective surfaces now. Behind a solid wall doesn't mean I can't see you. lots of games have positional audio -- if you are behind the wall, I might still know exactly where you are, between the creak of a door, footsteps, popopop of your rifle.

Some games, like Ghost Recon iirc even had stuff like heartbeat sensors as gear.

"- or another part of the map) "

Yes. Maps can be divided into pre-computed regions that can't 'see/detect' eachother, that's basically another version of the 'distance box' --and is very low overhead to compute, and you see it in most big open world zombie sandbox games for example. it only sends you the other players coordinates when they are in the same or adjacent regions.

Unfortunately it doesn't help when the enemy is near, when you are dancing around a farm house with shotguns. And that is where cheaters get the most advantage, and where it is exceedingly difficult to simply 'not send the information', because the two players may be able to see, or hear eachother or may be within milliseconds of seeing or hearing eachother throughout the encounter.

Re:Poor Programming

[Anubis IV]

That an analogy breaks down when stretched in ways it was never intended to apply doesn't negate the fact that it still applies to your original line of logic. Nor does it negate the fact that it highlights the glaring flaws in your original logic.

As for your new line of reasoning, you seem to be suggesting that whether or not the cheating can be countered by your opponents has an impact on whether or not it was cheating in the first place. It doesn't. It's wholly irrelevant. That something is possible does not mean it is permissible. Sadly, that distinction seems to be flying right over your head, suggesting you're either trolling or that you somehow missed out on key childhood lessons.

Re:Poor Programming

[exomondo]

But the servers still need to stop sending everyone's location to every player

You very often have to do that, just because you don't have line of sight with a player's body doesn't mean that player's position won't have an impact on the game. The local system needs to know players' positions and velocity for all manner of things from rendering reflections to positional audio. Even if you don't send the locations the the player effect the world in ways that allow you to determine their location - the art of gameplay is the human having to do that and not using software tools/hacks to do it for them - for example if the local system needs to produce the visual and audio effect of bullets whizzing by it's going to be reasonably easy to deduce the origin of the shots.

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

Windows would be part of the geometry. You know where they are.
Same goes for doors that are shut/open/blown off.

You don't have to do all of this at all times for all players. PUBG is particularly awful at basic server checks. Even just checking line of sight when firing or imposing a max distance on shots would be a huge improvement. Currently, a cheater can ride around in a buggy and one shot an entire server regardless of where they are. Behind a building? Dead. Behind a mountain? Dead.

Don't bring latency into it - if PUBG card about latency they'd implement a ping lock (or even just a region lock). But as it is you can go onto a server with 300 ms ping or 5000 ms ping and just fuck around ruining everyone else's experience. Further, the netcode is awful and the tickrate is abysmal - 10 Hz or less!

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

A PUBG match has 100 players, and many die off in the first few minutes. It also only runs at about 10 Hz on the server.
Even if you only enforce checks 1 of the time (for performance considerations), you'd find a whole lot of cheaters you could deal with later.

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

You don't know how bad PUBG is. It's not a question of how a player saw you, it's a question of how their bullet traveled through 2 buildings and a mountain to find your skull.

Re:Poor Programming

[CanadianMacFan]

I doubt the companies are going to be doing that as they would need vastly more servers to perform the computations.

Re:Poor Programming

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You just need a list of rectangular hulls for viewer and objects. Some (map) compile time later, you are done. It is similar to the vis programs for walls currently.

Then the server just looks up where you are and where person is and send info on whether, and where, to draw them.

This is neither prohibitive in ram or runtime cpu. Searching for containment of point in a few hundred or thousand solid rectangles (don't need fine granularity) is almost instantaneous nowadays.

Re:Poor Programming

[rtb61]

The problem in reality is much simpler than that. PvP (what I like to call purse vs purse, think two people battering each other with their handbags who can spend the most), attracts arse holes. People who like to make other people miserable and for whom cheating is winning. Lets be real, most PvP gaming is about cheating, specifically selling cheats for real world dollars build in developer cheats, compete equally no, but this cheats, you know 20% at a time, 20% stronger, 20% tougher, 20% more powerful and 20% faster, hey it's only 20%, nope it's 80% plus compounding affect. The sell the opportunity to be an arseholes to wipe out the people who do not pay.

They are not opposed to cheating, they are just opposed to unlicensed cheating where they are not the one making money. Stat boosts, zero cost to them, total profit from your dollars and other players misery until they wake up and give up and the game dies, all psychopaths and no norms left to kill.

My solution, too easy, PvE only, the arseholes tend to stay away, you just work you way through at your own pace. Generally selling account improvements seems the way to go, new areas, new stories, better account features, storage, crafting (forget grindy stuff, if any part of you game is grindy than that part is just shite and should not be there at all, think you are making you game unappealing on purpose making it more difficult for you to sell).

PvP as a gaming style will always be problematic, from approved pay to win cheating, to hostile game play to illegal cheats and hacks, they draw that toxic player base (get you knickers out of a knot, in part, not in total but that part can be a large and dominating percentage and when norms give up the game dies not victims for the cheats to victimise and paid buffs are cheats make no mistake).

Re:Poor Programming

[exomondo]

Windows would be part of the geometry. You know where they are. Same goes for doors that are shut/open/blown off.

Yes but it isn't a simple bounding box of the geometry, it's more complex as is the actual intersection testing itself, it's not a simple line test. As I mentioned in another post you have the environmental effects of the player that while they may be obstructed they may cast a shadow or be reflected and spotting these things is part of the skill of the game, as is the positional audio not just of footsteps and vehicle engines but of bullets whizzing by where you have both a graphical hook and an audio one to process with which, again, you can use hacks to eliminate the need for the skill in determining where it came from so while the players' locations are indeed needed for many things even eliminating the player location isn't going to do that much in terms of cheating.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

My point is that ultimately, the server has no control over what is running on the client end. Even if they insist on scanning the client machine for cheats (which is perpetually taken to excess and I do not personally allow on my system because I don't trust them either, same reason I will not disable my ad blocker), there are ways around it with the use of a second machine controlling the client machine.

That something is possible means someone, somewhere, is likely to try it. If it works, they'll keep doing it. If you cannot determine that they are doing it, then you cannot enforce a rule against it without getting false positives, such as accusing people of using an aim-bot when they really are that good. If you can't think of a practical way to enforce a rule, don't even make it a rule. It just makes all the other rules seem equally open to question. Certainly you can consider the rule internally, but any actual binding rule must have a means of enforcement or it is a waste of time.

Re:Poor Programming

[Paradise Pete]

By that logic, rearranging a couple of pieces on a chess board while your opponent steps away momentarily to grab a beer from the fridge shouldn't be considered cheating because you still had physical access to the board the whole time.

I get your point, but if you're playing with someone who can't remember where the pieces are then you sure shouldn't have to resort to cheating to win.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

The dealer is there to watch for such activity. Also, walking away from the table folds your hand (unless you are all in). The game itself is set up to prevent other players from peeking at your cards -- but if you are picking them up so far your neighbors can see them, that's too bad for you. (I've been seated next to such a player. I told him what he was doing, once. After that, you bet your ass I looked at his cards when he kept doing it.) This is more like the dealer insisting on looking at everyone's cards, and then being sloppy about it so that information is exposed. In that case, change the careless dealer! (Or server, in this case.)

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Hiring someone with a photographic memory to take a test and then tell you what all the questions were sure sounds like cheating too, but it is exactly the business model for Mike Russ Financial Training Centers. This is legal, they've been doing it for decades, and it works exceptionally well. Regurgitating canned answers when you've only learned a small set of them looks exactly like regurgitating canned answers when you have (attempted to) learn the entire book, and the latter is what everyone else is doing. The main difference is that the Mike Russ trainees generally do it faster, unless they consciously stall between questions (as they are instructed).

Without an enforcement mechanism, a rule has no teeth and breeds only contempt. With too aggressive (or too arbitrary) an enforcement mechanism, either people get excluded because of inability or unwillingness to jump through all the hoops, or people (usually the very best players) are falsely accused.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Then where is the line?

Is it cheating to use macros to automate repetitive tasks that are little more than pushing buttons in the right order? Or to use macros to spam a low-cost attack as a form of suppression fire? I have hardware that can do that. Are my 18 button mouse, Nostromo controller, and Cherry programmable keyboard now cheats?

I have a few macros specifically for Minecraft. One switches to the bow and draws it back until it is released, consolidating two button presses into one. When released, the shot is loosed as usual but then the macro immediately switches to sword on the assumption that I'm still fighting. Another button switches to the sword and raises the shield when pressed, and lowers the shield and swings the sword when released. Again, this is just consolidating two button presses into the down motion, and another two button presses into the up motion. A third one (very useful for mining) switches to whatever light source I put in slot #6, places one, and then switches back to the pickaxe. Yet another switches to the slot which should have food, holds the button down long enough to eat, and then switches to sword. The assumption is that if I'm using it, I'm probably in combat, and if I'm not, drawing the sword does no harm.

The X-ray rule on my server was always that you could not use X-ray to gain a competitive advantage. You can't use it to make a beeline for diamonds you shouldn't be able to see. You can't use it to spot someone's underground base. But if someone pranked you and put a chicken under your floorboards, I didn't care if someone enabled X-ray to locate it. Likewise, if someone's redstone mysteriously stopped working, I'd actually recommend they enable an X-ray resource pack to find the problem, instead of tearing out walls in desperation. Either way, the only way I (or another mod) was able to determine if someone was using X-ray was from their actions. The client does not require hacking, just the loading of a resource pack which is something practically every player does just to make the game easier to look at. The client does not inform the server what resource pack is in use, so if someone enabled X-ray and then kept the use so subtle as to escape detection, it was simply not possible to stop them. Thus, the only choices remaining were (1) suck it up and hope players didn't abuse it when nobody else was around (and then roll back whatever they did, if it was sufficiently obvious), or (2) make it worthless with some sort of obfuscation. I started with option 2, and eventually settled on option 1 when there were no longer new players to be suspicious of.

There was a list of rules. Rule 0 was "Do not make unenforceable rules." Somewhere down the list about 5 or 6 was "Don't be a dick. You will be informed if you are being a dick. Continuing to be a dick will get you banned. I run this server because I like to play Minecraft with other people, not because I love administering servers, so if you are a persistent thorn in my side, you will be gone." I only had to invoke the ban part of the rule once, and that player literally had to demolish the entire city center to earn it.

Re:Poor Programming

[alexo]

Rearranging a couple of pieces on a chess board does not get the police after you, and this shouldn't either.

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

PUBG is dogshit on every technical level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

And an example of the ridiculous kinds of hacks that Chinese players ruin everyone's games with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Poor Programming

[drsquare]

The client does these calculations when it works out whether to show the other players on screen, no fundamental reason why the server can't do the same thing in parallel.

Re:Poor Programming

[mjwx]

Then it shouldn't be considered cheating to use whatever data the server sends you to build your view.

By that logic, rearranging a couple of pieces on a chess board while your opponent steps away momentarily to grab a beer from the fridge shouldn't be considered cheating because you still had physical access to the board the whole time.

Drinking chess requires two timers, one for the turn, one for the pre turn drink. If any less than 1/6 of a standard European 35 cl beer is drunk, the drinker receives a time penalty on their turn.

Re:Poor Programming

[Ranbot]

My solution, too easy, PvE only, the arseholes tend to stay away... PvP as a gaming style will always be problematic...

True and true, but I think the high points of of PvP can be as good as it's lows, and it's your choice to focus on one or the other. Live players can and will do things that are more interesting and often times fun than an AI opponent. Even really good AI imparts a feeling of puppet strings being attached, and when you feel the AI puppeteer in your game it changes the experience... too easy? ...too hard? ...too scripted or contrived? ...too predictable? When you play against or with a human those nagging questions fade or disappear, but they can be replaced with another set of concerns. I fully understand and have experienced how cheating and caustic attitudes can ruin a multiplayer gaming experience, but there are equally wonderful moments of pitting wits and skill against live opponents, or times I am laughing out loud at really funny things live players do or say. These are experiences that would never happen in a PvE experience, and why PvP is popular, despite it's other inherent problems.

Needless to say, the experience can depend heavily on the people you play with... If you're hanging with the dick-waggling 133t pros, you'll have one kind of experience. If you play with people who are relaxed, mature, and have sense of humor, you'll have a very different experience.

Re:Poor Programming

[mark-t]

Probably not, no... a permanent ban of the player from the community should also solve the problem. If they can't figure out who to ban, then they wouldn't be able to figure out who to send the police after either.

Re:Poor Programming

[MoralCharacter]

There's a bit of difference between moving chess pieces, and writing/using software that actively interferes with the operation of someone else's software and their customers.

Re:Poor Programming

[Ranbot]

Counter Strike solved them 15 years ago.....So the perfect anti-cheat... in game voting. This was very simple, since killed off people could observe live plays, people could initiate kick votes that kicked a player suspected of cheating. Of course good players got kicked too, but they were clearly playing against armatures and should have moved onto more competitive grounds.

CS never solved the cheating problem, but they at least implemented basic functions to weed out the laziest of all the cheaters (VAC, updates, etc.), then the in-game vote kick gave the players the power they needed to regulate themselves. Of course good legit players were/are kicked but they can go elsewhere for a game more suited to their skill level. While that might not be completely fair to good players, it was no less fair to them than allowing them to pub-stomp everyone else playing.

The article's legal mess is basically the company offloading their development costs onto society rather than hire people with brains to deal with the real world.

Agreed on this. Putting the burden on government resources instead more effort on game development is an odd tactic and I'm surprised the police didn't tell the developer they have better things to do with their time.

Re:Poor Programming

[gweihir]

I have never played TERA, but this is a nice confirmation. Thanks.

Re:Poor Programming

[ImprovOmega]

The problem is that visibility checking difficulty increases as a function of the square of the number of entities you are checking against. Client side you only have to check for the visibility from your character to the 99 other players. Server side you would have to check visibility for a K100 graph of point sources (minimum 4950 checks if you avoid duplicate checks and assume people are bi-directionally visible to each other and to themselves).

But then in a 3d environment it's not necessarily point to point. What about a sniper under cover who is essentially looking through a pinhole vs. a target in an open field? The sniper can *easily* see the open field target, but the sniper is so occluded that the open field person could in no way see the sniper. So bi-directionality is not assured. Add in other pitfalls such as camouflage, uneven terrain, environmental affects (smoke, fog, rain, etc.) multiple ray traces per character (did he see his foot, his head, his chest, arms, etc.) and suddenly you're talking about real-time tracking of hundreds of thousands of ray traces minimum once per second per match and you VERY quickly make it uneconomical to do that server side.

Heck, even client side there's only basic visibility checks for annealing and avoiding bothering to render the obviously non-visible objects. Mostly it just renders things that are probably in the sight line and projects that onto the 2d display with the foreground objects obscuring the background.

Re:Poor Programming

[sexconker]

You don't understand at all. The issue isn't about whether or not someone can see someone else.

The issue is whether or not the bullet fired from point A can hit the player at point B. You only need to verify this for each bullet that hits a player.
PUBG is on a whole other level with the bullshit. LOOK AT IT https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Poor Programming

[exomondo]

You are think of something like raycasting against mesh geometry. That's not how it's done.

Yes that's what I'm pointing out, but then what you go on to describe is not visibility testing, it's the way physics engines work which is much more coarse grained that what you need for visibility testing.

Re:Poor Programming

[exomondo]

The client does these calculations when it works out whether to show the other players on screen, no fundamental reason why the server can't do the same thing in parallel.

So how do you know to render a shadow or a reflection if you don't know what is casting the shadow or reflecting? In order to do that you need the player's location despite the fact that the player might be obstructed by something. Thus the hack can then immediately point out where that player is. And of course it is prohibitive to do all your rendering from every player's view on the server just to determine whether environmental effects have had an influence and that's before you even begin to consider the spatial audio processing side of things that needs the location where shots have come from for bullets whizzing by or for players' footsteps or vehicle engines and other noises.

Re:Poor Programming

[Mal-2]

Drop me in a new situation with unwritten rules I haven't been around long enough to witness, and I'll have to ask because I can't just figure it out. It's just not one of my strengths to figure out the rules by context, I need them spelled out. That's not being a dick, it's being somewhat oblivious to social clues, and there are a substantial number of other people like me out there -- especially in geeky pursuits like gaming. This is why I spelled it out that dickish behavior would be pointed out before it would be acted on -- so that players didn't feel like they had to walk on eggshells. I can't define everything that counts as dickish, but it's only fair to cut everyone some slack for the very same reason.

Re:Poor Programming

[chispito]

You just need a list of rectangular hulls for viewer and objects. Some (map) compile time later, you are done. It is similar to the vis programs for walls currently.

Then the server just looks up where you are and where person is and send info on whether, and where, to draw them.

This is neither prohibitive in ram or runtime cpu. Searching for containment of point in a few hundred or thousand solid rectangles (don't need fine granularity) is almost instantaneous nowadays.

I get this is an old topic but I think you're ignoring the size and geometric complexity of PUBG maps and the player counts. It sounds like it would work better on older simpler games.

The solution also ignores games like Fortnite Battle Royale which include player-built structures or deformable terrain and ignores the difficulties with differing client latencies and popping into and out of view, how to handle audio for unseen enemies, etc.

It just sounds like a much bigger hassle than good match making and reporting/analytics (as suggested in the linked stack exchange).

I'll say...

[h4x0t]

It's a 50/50 shot my kill cam footage is some dude killing me from 1000 meters away shooting at the side of a mountain.

Re:I'll say...

[dave562]

It has gotten a lot better since 1.0 came out. It is not perfect, but the kill cam has helped a lot. And BlueHole does seem to be doing a decent job of banning cheaters. They ban in waves though, so it might take a while.

Re: I'll say...

[Hognoxious]

By the time he heard it the bullet should have already hit him. Unless you're using an arquebus.

Re:Those convicted in the past have done jail time

[mi]

Those convicted in the past have done jail time.

That's the scariest part... Maybe, those denouncing American KKKorporation$ for going after intellectual property violations with fines, ought to put things in perspective...

Lovely lunch in the park

[DontBeAMoran]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

jail time? So doing something that the EULA = jail

[Joe_Dragon]

jail time? So doing something that the EULA says you can't do = jail

About time

[Snotnose]

I'm so sick of cheating assholes in my online games, about time some of these assholes get tossed in the pokey a while.

Re:About time

[93 Escort Wagon]

Seriously? On what grounds should a game cheater get thrown into jail... are they stealing your money or something?

I can understand why it would be irritating - but let's have some perspective here.

Re:About time

[0100010001010011]

It sounds like they just need a better algorithm to rank players. I don't care if I'm playing a bot or a human as long as we are near the same skill level.

Come up with a better ranking system and just group players by how well they play. Hell I'd watch a 'bot only' league

Re:About time

[gweihir]

When something like that happens, I just leave. Scum can be scum together with other scum but without my participation.

Re: About time

[N_Piper]

So every foul in a PUG of basketball BOOM! Jail.
False start in a sprint? BOOM! Jail.
Offsides in Soccer? BOOM! Jail.
pass interference in football? Boom! Jail.
Think about real life sports, you break a rule in the game you get punished in the game, break too many you get kicked out, that's it beyond that anything that has ever happened is in the context of employment or racketeering.

Have you ever watched "Yugioh Abridged"? The main running gag is that the central plot element of this universe, the thing upon which empires and souls are wagered, is "a children's card game".
Try that in this situation, replace all nouns and pronouns referring to "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" with "a children's videogame"
[Tencent and a children's video game developer Bluehole have a lot riding on cleaning a children's video game up for China, which accounted for more than half of a children's video game's 27 million users, according to online tracker Steam Spy. It's also the biggest source of cheat software, undermining a children's video game that shattered gaming records in 2017 and surpassed best-sellers like a different children's video game. The proliferation of shenanigans threatens to drive away first-time users vital to a children's video game's longer-term growth.]

Re:About time

[jader3rd]

On what grounds should a game cheater get thrown into jail... are they stealing your money or something?

You used you're money to pay for an experience, and the cheaters are now changing the expected experience. Also, cheaters may give the game a bad rap, which will reduce sales. So it would be altering the contents of the sale after the sale, and lost profits for the provider.

Re: About time

[sexconker]

Thanks for your input, Kaiba. What's next from you? "Screw the rules, I have money."?

China has a law about this shit. This shit negatively impacts millions of people, is part of an illegal industry, negatively impacts businesses, etc. This is a tamer version of the US's CFAA, because China is using on people who are actually guilty.

Re:About time

[thegarbz]

On what grounds should a game cheater get thrown into jail... are they stealing your money or something?

It would be consistent with all the other completely stupid reasons why Americans jail their citizens.

Re:About time

[kyncani]

On what grounds should a game cheater get thrown into jail...

On the ground that they were game cheating ?

A country is still allowed to have its own law, for better or for worse.

Re:About time

[Toad-san]

Stealing my money? Well, yes, actually they are. I paid to play a game with non-cheaters, playing as I play. Their cheating is destroying that expected, paid-for experience. Plus, I hate cheaters almost as much as I do Illinois Nazis.

Re: Just kick the hacker countries off US servers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God Americans don't hack :v

They probably don't - they're not good enough, being too busy with their Ethnicity and Race Studies classes

Hey, they do have to learn how to say, "Do you want fries with that?"

Re:jail time? So doing something that the EULA = j

[OrangeTide]

It's a fundamental problem with a legal system that cannot separate criminal law from civil law.

Also

[OrangeTide]

People should spend a night in jail for talking in a movie theater. Interrupting fun is downright criminal.

Old news

[gweihir]

Bought it on release, got killed 3 times in 6 games by obvious cheaters (one suicide by clumsiness), asked for a steam refund, got it and that is it.
If they ever get the cheater problem under control, I may have a look again, but as it is this is just sadists against masochists. (No idea what else a cheater would get out of a game like this. It must become exceptionally boring to play as a cheater...). As I am neither, I am just not interested.

On a related note, how incompetent must the developers be to make it this easy for the cheaters? None of the cheats used is in any way innovative or new. Well, it seem the supply of sadists and masochists (and plain idiots) is large enough to make them a lot of money despite that.

Re:Old news

[King_TJ]

I waited a while before buying it, largely because of a number of poor reviews from folks complaining about cheaters. I finally dove in and bought a copy, since it was still one of the top rated and played games in the last part of 2017.

I can't say I was clearly/obviously affected by cheating players, but I DID get the overall sense that the developers are just kicking back and enjoying all the money rolling in, vs. putting a lot of work into continuing to improve the game. I mean, the fact that it's still only been called a "beta" this whole time? It has to be almost unprecedented how many copies have been sold at "retail like pricing" for a game that's not even officially released as a v1.0?

I've found I'm just not particularly good at the game, so I don't make it to the end, regardless of being shot at by a cheater. After a while though, the game just lost my interest. You're always playing in the same VR "world", whereas most 3D shooters have additional maps that keep them visually interesting and entertaining from a strategy viewpoint, for much longer.

Re:Old news

[dave562]

It has improved. It is not perfect, but it is improving. I have been playing for a little over 30 days and I don't feel like I want quit. The kill cam has made it pretty easy to spot the cheaters, and BlueHole has been doing an okay job of banning them. I say okay because it takes a while. They seem to enforce the bans in waves.

The game needs something along the lines of a CS:GO style validated account, where players have to play for a large number of hours before they get access to servers dedicated to long term players. That way if the cheaters lose their long term accounts, they have to grind away again. After a while, it becomes a losing proposition for them.

There was a pretty good thread on reddit a week or two ago that fostered some discussion about potentially effective ways to deal with cheating in PUBG.

Re:Old news

[gweihir]

Sounds like a conspiracy-theory to me. PUBG uses the Unreal 4 Engine. There are lots of people that know how to render something in this engine and there is lots of example code. They may have been able to just port existing cheat-code over.

Re:Old news

[gweihir]

There was some game that did not ban cheaters, but put them on "cheater" servers. Do not remember what it was, but I like the idea.

Re:Old news

[M.D.Smith]

It seems a lot of folks here are missing the incentive piece. The loot crates they added have created the incentive to cheat, much like the gold farmers from WoW days. When you unlock a crate, you get an accessory item that can be sold or traded after 7 days. With a super popular market right now, I've seen some of the more rare items go for over $100. The winner of each match gets the bulk of the 'Battle Point' reward, as well as bonuses for each kill. You then in turn use those BP to buy crates. It still costs a small amount of real world currency to unlock each crate once you've bought it with the in game currency, but with the marketplace being a seller's market at the moment, it's generally a winning proposition to take.

The only way to combat it will be to remove the incentive, or to find a way to significantly dampen it without knock on negative effects for the community. Even most MMOs struggle to fix this. WoW recently threw in the towel and started selling the gold themselves, I guess deciding that since it couldn't beat them, it may as well profit from it. The 1.0 patch in PUBG has helped a good bit, adding in a kill cam and a means to report a player via recording. They've also tried to tighten up BattleEye, the anti cheat mechanism. Honestly it's just going to be a matter of enforcement. If they can discover and ban a hacker on average before the account has a chance to become profitable (reasonable profit - (game cost + crate cost)) then we'll start to see it decrease. Otherwise bans won't be effective. Most cheaters aren't here to have fun any more than the Chinese gold farmers were playing WoW for leisure. This is what happens when you open a vector for indirect profitability and they shouldn't have been surprised, but loot crates tend to be easy money for a developer. I personally think making them openly available for direct sale was dumb to the highest order without significant cheat protection and let's be real, this is the Unreal engine we're talking about.

Region locking would be somewhat successful due to this. Obviously the occasional cheater will find you because there will always be curious shithead little 13 year olds, but the amount of people doing this simply to turn a profit, the professional farmer types, will almost instantly drop from our (US) servers. There just isn't enough profitability to support a large market of cheaters in first world countries, and bans are fairly effective against non-professional cheaters. That may not be exactly PC according to Mr. PlayerUnknown, but it's kinda hard to deny.

Re:Old news

[gweihir]

I did indeed miss that. Not that it matters much to me now, but it nicely explains the problem. How could they have been so stupid to not see what that would do? Or do the PUBG developers just do not care at all? I mean, their business seems to be going fine while a large faction of their customers are getting screwed over. Not that this business model is new in any way.

Re:Such an enlightened government!

[gweihir]

Since China is preparing a "social score" system, they are just being consistent by this. Will be interesting to see whether they will be able to avoid full-blown fascism, but I somehow doubt it. Not that the rest of the world is doing much better in that regard at the moment.

The No#1 reason I left CS and CSGO

[MindPrison]

Same story all over again. Those kiddos can't get enough of trolling and "cheap thrills" from no-effort gaming, while the rest of us who are actually honest player, rages to the brink of needing a psychologist over the fact that some trollers are gaming you (literally "gaming" you) till insanity. Too unhealthy, life is too short for that, there are so many other things to do. Cheating killed multiplayer.

However - when we feel like some multiplayer action - me and my friends run exclusively on private servers, because no one of us cheats, and we're not quick-fix instant-gratification teenagers anymore, so we like a good honest game and a lot of laughts. Playing on our private servers is a blast, because if someone actually makes it there, we know the history of the players, we know they're good, and everyone's struggle is real. Here you gotta work for your experience.

Re:The No#1 reason I left CS and CSGO

[Anonymous Coward]

Some kids just have too much time on their hands.

I play a perma-death game with a mostly public discord group where people chip in money for dungeon keys. However, you always get this dedicated group of tweens that make throwaway accounts to join the discord and group and spend the entire time making things difficult/trying to get people killed. Because that's apparently whats fun for them.

Sometimes I almost wish there was a system similar to S. Korea where essentially you have an SSID associated with your account. More of a deterrent to act like a malicious jackass when people know who you are.

Re:The No#1 reason I left CS and CSGO

[apoc.famine]

That's what we ended up doing for a decade or more. Our own private server. Anyone who wasn't fun got banned. Anyone who was fun was engaged with, treated with respect, and generally welcomed. We had plenty of children lose their minds with the first warning, and plenty of script kiddies spam and threaten us after they got banned.

Whatever. We were there to have fun, and it was our sandbox. Fuck off if you don't like it. Made online gaming sooooo much more fun than it ever was playing with the general public on someone else's unmanaged server.

Re:Just kick the hacker countries off US servers.

[Khyber]

That does absolutely nothing about US players using Chinese-made hacks.

Mod parent up

[mark-t]

This. exactly.

What about consoles?

[sunking2]

Are they inherently less prone to cheaters? If so then that is the real death knell for pc games as consoles get more powerful.

Re:What about consoles?

[Tukz]

Are they inherently less prone to cheaters?

Since it's a lot harder to mess with the software, yes they are.

Re:What about consoles?

[jittles]

Are they inherently less prone to cheaters?

Since it's a lot harder to mess with the software, yes they are.

You don't have to mess with software. A lot of games these days use one of the players as host. Usually being host confers all kinds of advantages to that team. You can manipulate who the host is. The latest CoD (WW2) seems to give preference to people with shitty network connections, however. You can just stream netflix on a bunch of computers until you're down to 1 bar and then run around shooting everyone while they see you teleporting across the map. You can also modify saved game data to exploit bugs in a game when it reads your profile. That was a pretty common exploit years ago, I don't know how common it is. So yes, cheaters still exist on consoles.

If you ask me, the latest CoD game is a pile of shit anyway. I have gigabit ethernet and often get stuck with host. With the exact same lobby (no change in players), I can see myself going from 1st or 2nd on the team to last place once I have host. From a positive 2.0ish KDR to less than 0.3 when I am host. I only play hardcore and can open up on someone pointblank with 15 rounds into their back while they turn around and one shot me. I can tell that I am host because host is blessed with the ability to hear everything that anyone says in the game (on either team). So determining that you're host is quite trivial.

For cheating? A video game?

[duke_cheetah2003]

It's helped law enforcement agents uncover at least 30 cases and arrest 120 people suspected of designing programs that confer unfair advantages from X-Ray vision (see-through walls) to auto-targeting (uncannily accurate snipers). Those convicted in the past have done jail time.

Yeah, cheating in games does kinda ruin it for the fair players.. but ... JAIL TIME for cheating in a video game (or making cheat programs for others), really? That seems a bit extreme. The times we live in.

Bet that goes over really well in jails. "Whacha in for?" "Cheating to win a video game." Ouch.

Pay

[dohzer]

Can't pay-to-win if there are cheaters.
Or gamble on matches.
Let's face it, that's the main reason for the police getting involved.

Re: Just kick the hacker countries off US servers.

[sexconker]

Has Donald Trump been sent to prison?
Has he been convicted of anything?
Has he been put on trial for anything?
Has he been charged with anything?
Has any evidence for anything been put forward?
Have a bunchy of angry little shits bitched and moaned and hashtagged and faked news?

I don't support Trump, and I voted against him. But you fucking losers are pathetic! You're grasping at imaginary straws.

Re: Gamer phags

[sexconker]

Gettin a blowjob ain't gay.

It is when you're blowing yourself.

100% game makers fault

[Stan92057]

These exploits should never have made it into the release version for F sake. those 2 exploits x-ray/see through walls/aiming bots have been around in every shooter for 20 plus years now. that's the game makers fault but will they take responsibility for them hell no. games have to depend on other programs punk buster and a few others to catch these well known cheats. lol play EA battlefield every single version online these is a consent toggle of names of players getting booted for using cheats..cheaters are scum but companys like EA are doing a very poor job too.

China ; Commercial interests

[DrYak]

1. It's China.

2. If cheating is a problem, Tencent won't be selling as many units as they would like. It would mean commercial problems, loss of revenue. They need to do whatever they can to maintain (or in this case: guarantee future) profits (and this being China, they can actually a lot).
So one guy in the giant multi-million corporation goes to talk to his neighbours' friend who happens to be a high ranking official. Some kick-backs are exchanged. New laws and policies are written.
Tencent guy sees it as a good investment of money to secure profit. Gov guy sees it as nice side revenue to his gov job. The rest of the world pretends to be appalled to how much politicis is fucked up (even if nearly every one is doing it, though at a smaller scale and a lot less in the open, in their own home countries).

Wait, what?

[Lord Kano]

People who cheat in online games piss me off. They're first class jerks but why in the hell should it be a police matter?

Men with guns being sent to arrest people for making software to cheat at video games. Is no one else alarmed by this?

LK

Re:Such an enlightened government!

[gweihir]

They are not doing that either. The problem here is your reading comprehension or choice of "news" outlet. They have arrested cheat _developers_ (i.e. ones that make cheats and sell them for money) not users, and that is a whole different thing.