This is a thing, yes. Statistical cheat-detection methods are more or less required for online chess, for example, because anyone can run Stockfish. A lot of that came out of academia, so you can just find papers like this: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/papers/pdf/RBZ14aaai.pdf

The techniques they use will always be a little secret-sauce, though, because anti-cheat is adversarial. The best public anti-cheat mechanisms I know of are not technical anyway:

- Play with friends or a small community that you trust not to cheat

- Structure the game to remove incentives for cheating. This is the entirety of how daily games like Wordle prevent cheating, but limits how competitive your game can be

- Closely control and monitor the environment in which the game is played. This is sometimes done at the ultra high end of competitive esports: "We provide the computer you will use. You don't have the unsupervised access necessary to install a cheat." The most common version of this, however, is in casinos.

Reminds me many years ago I was playing online poker. The site I was on did this special anniversary giveaway thing. Every million hands or so, there would be a massive (in relative terms) jackpot. If you win the hand, you get the jackpot. It was so large, that you should never fold any hand, at all. (At these microstakes, normally a big hand was $5. These were like $300, so risking your whole stack of $2 was totally worth it).

At the start of the hand, the rules were announced, and there was a very long wait (10-20 minutes), so everyone had a lot of time to process what was going on.

I was dealt into two of these hands. In one, I raised all in and everyone folded. In another, someone else did this, and everyone except me folded.

That convinced me that almost everyone was a bot. There was no rational explanation for this behaviour.

With how bad it's gotten in some games I honestly just don't even bother playing PVP game modes anymore unless it's on a private server with close friends. The only modes I play public multiplayer on are coop or pve ones. The cat and mouse games from a developer vs cheat developer perspective from what it seems like is basically unwinnable outside of drastic actions like requiring ID/camera that no one is going to be willing to do for entertainment.

I can't really blame game developers for giving up on trying to fight cheaters for that reason. In an ideal world they'd be able to dedicate all their time/resources to game content itself giving us more to enjoy instead of having to waste an unreasonable amount of man hours and money on anticheat solutions that are only temporary anyways.

> present the players with a bot who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is cheating

Escape from Tarkov had/has something vaguely similar to this. They'll put a very valuable piece of loot in an inaccessible room under the map or inside a locked car and monitor which accounts pick it up. I think Call of Duty warzone did it as well with the fake enemies that only accounts suspected of cheating will see

The problem with a statistical method is you can't ban the best players. For most cheats, you can dial the cheat down until it's at a human level.

Yeah this would be my instinct even if someone somehow got a leaked TPM root EK and spoofed it with a bootkit. Your timings/latency/variance are still going to be different from a hardware chip, almost certainly. Yes you might be able to measure this and attempt to replay it but that gets hard, then you have to figure out e.g. how can you pin your hypervisor/mock TPM to a core so timings don't vary under load, etc. It's getting measurably harder to write good cheating software at this point.

I think statistical methods are the best primary option. There are a lot of other tools you can use but this is the most impenetrable from the outside.

The chances that the cheater is able to anticipate the statistical state of everything logged server-side is negligible. There is no way to "sandbag" performance on purpose if you don't know how your performance is being measured.

There is also the problem (solution) of sample size. The players' performance in one or ten games is ideally not relevant to the heuristic. There is a threshold that is crossed after hundreds of rounds of dishonest play. Toggling cheats within a match or tournament series would be irrelevant.

Theres plenty of what you suggest going on all the time, loot spawning in unlootable places etc.

Problem is, theres always some difference between valid and invalid target, and if the game knows it, cheat extracts that information and acts "dumb" around those honeypots. It wont shoot targets that the game doesnt render because the bot checks that attribute. It wont loot that honeypot because its in manualy upkept white/blacklist.

Its just another level of cat and mouse game.

Whose purpose. Who's means who is

> It's a mindset I don't understand.

one of the scenarios is the person that is not looking on the enjoyment of "winning", but instead diving on the "trolling" realms of ruining the fun of others.

its irrelevant if he gets a ban because when he hears someone getting mad at him or sad, he gets a boner.

the mentality of "trying to punch people that cant defend themselves" is the description that i give of these to people that dont play video games. (because most wouldn't cheat without the anonymity)

Peer pressure is hell of a drug. If your friend group mainly plays competitive shooters and you suck at them you can easily gain status by paying for a aimbot.

Also current hustle culture’s toxic “your time is valuable and should not be wasted” mentality plays a role. Many people hate playing video games and losing because they then feel like they didn’t achieve anything and wasted their time. With cheats you can make sure you win so you “don’t end up wasting your time.”

This is in the same vein as trolling and griefing: Some people give up at the first difficulty. Others will see it as a challenge and get a thrill out of overcoming it. The more challenging it becomes, the more invested they get.

> It's a mindset I don't understand.

As someone who used to cheat in online games until I got a real job...

I could create my own story. I would cheat on servers where other people wanted to play in that story too. Eventually cheats become mods and mods become permitted. Once everyone has access to that story then the story is boring.

Think about a dungeon master who brings their own tools and props to some other board game and then invents a whole new game. Plenty of games or game mods kind've started in similar ways.

Plus it was fun to sometimes exact revenge upon other cheaters.

I think a lot of people are simply delusional. "My teams are holding me back, I only turn it on when they're throwing the game" or "I have the game sense of a masters player, I just don't have time to practice execution / grind rank". Boosting account ranks is the same deal, and it's a big industry.

I'd imagine the people who want the hardcore undetectable stuff are making money by charging others to boost them.

Cheat dev is a meta-game in itself, but I agree, paying for cheats is a really weird concept.

The mindset is simple to understand.

It is the self-deluded individual who enjoys abusing and torturing others, and has willfully blinded themselves to anything else.

More beast walking on two legs than human, and meets a relatively objective definition for evil people.

Willfully blinded through acts of false justification, repeated acts of destruction and active torture on others.

These are things if they did it physically they would go to prison or be put to death under capital punishment. Psychological harm isn't being treated with the same rigor as physical harm though.

Those people will next use their mother's ID, their grandparents' IDs, and so on. Then move on to stolen IDs. Which is not preventable unless you do full-on hardware attestation tied to real ID, which means China-level surveillance.

Source: Living in a country where gaming accounts are already tied to real identities :)

You mean a system where when you get misidentified (this will almost always happen at scale) you get effectively banned forever, across multiple games? Yeah... I think I know why people aren't keen on that.

(And yeah, I'm ignoring the general issue of how you id people, how you secure that data, what happens in a highly toxic game environment when someone breaches that, etc.)

That is not a solution because it blindly solves one problem in isolation while creating a whole host of other problems that are equally if not more destructive.

It is improper to say this is a solution when you swap out the problems for something worse as a surrogate at the same time.

When you are tied to one physical ID, you give disproportionate power to the game manufacturer, which enables them to monopolize, and engage in coercive, and corrupt behavior more readily.

Say they decide after the fact that they don't like your objective review of a game you bought because shocker it was "unfinished". They decide to ban you, that ban alerts all other manufacturers, and they block you as well. Or someone who can issue those bans decides to blackmail or extort you.

If you don't comply, in the process, they revoke access to all your licensed purchases. It is tied to a real ID, so there's no way around it. You've just been cancelled from games/entertainment as a whole.

If this touches on physical aspects like interfering with your ability to get food, hold a job, etc, you've just been forced into the dregs of society with no due process outside a rule of law. "There are plenty of people that haven't had this scarlet letter attached, ... we'll just choose anyone but them", is how it will go.

This is not a new concept, in fact it is one of the common elements found in Maoism and collectivism in general.

So the solution you propose is communism by another name. Any educated person knows Communism fails in common ways intractably, and as a result this cannot be a solution.

A good rule of thumb is, if it involves a centralized hierarchy structure; its more likely than not going to be some form of communism/socialism (fabian/globalist/its gradual neighbor)/or collectivism, and one must consider slippery slopes where once you adopt one thing, you slip all the way down to another.

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book back in the 1930s-1950s covering all of the intractable failures, under the title "Socialism". The detailed problems he describes are intractable, and naturally occur in such systems.

Communism and its derivatives are all about obscuring its origins deceitfully to trick you into thinking and agreeing its a solution. They don't give you the whole picture and they strive to mislead towards pipe dreams which never happen in practice, towards control you can't take back.

My personal experience (mostly TF2) is that a lot of players just don't pay attention to chat and votes.

I mean this is bog standard human behavior.

"Jon is a drug dealer, but his money still spends"

"Tom is insider trading, but I'm not since I don't actually 'know' that"

etc, etc

This is a really old idea. It was implemented in CS:GO in ~2015 [0], although community anti-cheats like SMAC have implemented it for years before then [1]. Riot have an article about their implementation of the same idea in VALORANT's that a good read from a technical perspective [2].

Sadly, CS2, from what I've gathered, broke this.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/opt...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkhQgYB4lAA

[2]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...

Cheating in solo games is more fun than you realize. I only cheat in offline games for the most part, its fun to see how badly I can break a game.

I forget where I read this, but somehow, some people have the "brain stimuli award" associated with the "winning" aspect even when they are using cheats. So winning is winning.

I'm still having hard time believing in this, but I haven't found better explanation for cheaters.

Why would people take performance enhancing drugs, why would you drink coffee, why would people use AI even when it's banned? It's all about getting ahead in a competitive environment. Games are just as 'real' as the real world to the people who play them. Cheats can be on the continuum of a really fast PC and a quality mouse - taken too far. They are even the kind of thing that happens when two nations are at war - no holds barred. Famous Tour de France riders, I don't think cheated only for the money. It was also for the glory.

Why would people take performance enhancing drugs, why would you drink coffee, why would people use AI to do coding assignments even when it's banned? It's all about getting ahead in a competitive environment. Games are just as 'real' as the real world to the people who play them.

>I just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point?

Vindication. The average cheat buyer is someone who gets beat down in the game, and feels personally slighted. This is also why avoiding detection is more important than just worrying about bans. The whole point of modern cheating is to be subtle enough to pass yourself off as a top player, with all the social/financial perks that entails, not to run around in god mode griefing people.

Agreed. To be more precise: I think the solution is small, community-run servers. This allows large, consistent groups of players to play together regularly with a much higher percentage of admins who can handle cheaters manually.

I also maintain that human judgement, can still catch things anti-cheat software is yet incapable of. Example: it doesn't matter how well hidden your aimbot is, I still notice cheaters when their accuracy is wildly out of proportion with their strategic understanding of the game.

I play fortnite and marvel rivals with my family. We have lots of fun. I think this genre of game is fantastic if you play with people you know on voice comms. "Solo queuing" in these types of games is not fun for me at all, so I get what you are saying, but they are popular for a reason!

All things considered, the younger generations would likely consider this to be, excuse the language, a "boomer take".

Disregarding that the most popular game genres today are exactly the things you are saying need to be annihilated is wild to even consider. Some (well most) people enjoy it, some (less) people don't.

It's going to become cloud only

I have an even more foolproof system. Never play online competitive games.

That is where I am in online chess. But every so often I get a message from chess.com that I was refunded some rating points because my opponent from a couple of weeks ago violated the fair play standards. I honestly don’t think about it much. Some of those games I played poorly enough that I deserved to loose either way, but at the end of the day I played much more fair games that this one particular game doesn’t really bother me.

It's a hobby project I decided to share. I won’t deny it’s problematic. I understand both sides of the argument, but if I was going to make it for fun anyway, why not publish it?

Posting it publicly on GitHub is the main reason I got invited to job interviews this spring. I'm a third-year student with no prior IT experience, and now I have a great summer job lined up.

And for the record—I enjoy playing legit. I don’t cheat.

"Pariah"? Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment? Okay, they will do this quietly. Then what?

Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge. Many people are doing this for fun and I don't see any problem with this. Cheating is another question, though.

Because that would be a simple solution to all societies ills, and it's obvious the world does not work this way. And unless you're suggest banning all anonymous communication under an alias you quickly see ideas like this don't work.

You mean half of all AI products?

The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used…

It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.

Please edit swipes out of comments. It's fine to state why you disagree with or dislike a post, but please keep within the HN guidelines, particularly to be kind and to avoid snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The title of the article is "why you didn’t notice your teammate was cheating"

Then you have the answer here:

> Cheats have escaped the host PC

> [...]

> Colorbots are quite hard to detect. You can essentially just plug in a capture card to your PC and pass the images to another PC that the cheat runs on.

If the article is low effort I would say that your comment is not great either because you seems frustrated to not have more information and just blame the author for not writing more about the subject.

it read to me like the introduction to the main post, except minus the actual main post part