[HN Gopher] AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was c...
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AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating
Author : duckling23
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-04-03 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (niila.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (niila.fi)
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| [flagged]
| asddubs wrote:
| it read to me like the introduction to the main post, except
| minus the actual main post part
| kreco wrote:
| 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.
| tomhow wrote:
| 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
| fracus wrote:
| There must be some statistical method or honeypot method to
| reliably detect cheaters. Like present the players with a bot
| who's purpose is to be un-hitt-able unless the player is
| cheating. I don't know, there has to be a way. Cheaters are
| disease in online gaming. I know that sensible people won't want
| to sacrifice their anonymity to provide ID to play a video game
| but if it is in the competitive scene and they are playing for
| money, surely it isn't a stretch to ask for ID and thus ultimate
| accountability.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yep, the cheat engine designers get thousands and thousands
| of test cases. If the designer screws up _your_ account gets
| banned, but quite often they can detect what did it.
|
| Now, good cheat detection won't ban you immediately, it will
| allow you to build up a novel of sins and then ban so it's
| difficult to determine what action provoked it. Unfortunately
| that does mean those people are on the servers for some
| amount of time.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > theres always some difference between valid and invalid
| target
|
| This information does not necessarily need to be made
| available to the client. Latency compensation can treat the
| phantom just like the real deal and the server can silently
| no-op any related commands (while recording your naughty
| behavior).
| amalcon wrote:
| 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.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Haha, I cheat at Worlde all the time, losers!
| ultimafan wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| reaperman wrote:
| The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to
| performance KPI's. Automation has "tells" - little things
| they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably
| discriminating those signals is a hard problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That seems... like, fine, right? Who cares? Most games do
| skill-based matchmaking anyway, so if players are using
| cheats to play at higher but still human skill levels,
| they'll just get boosted up to higher ranks.
|
| The main issue, I guess, is they'll have lopsided aiming
| proficiency (due to the boost) vs game knowledge. But that's
| basically a crapshoot anyway in mass-market "competitive"
| gaming.
| efilife wrote:
| Whose purpose. Who's means _who is_
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| ultimafan wrote:
| Sadly from my anecdotal observations it seems all too often that
| people do in fact realize their teammates are cheating, whether
| it's queued randoms or a group of friends where one guy is
| cheating and the rest are "clean" but benefitting from out of
| game info over voice comms. But then they refuse to do anything
| about it. I imagine it's because they get the high of an easy win
| without the guilt or shame of using "real" cheats since they're
| not the ones who paid for / installed them.
| nathants wrote:
| this is why solos are better, you can't blame your teammates.
|
| handcam anticheat when?
|
| kernel anticheat is necessary but not sufficient.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| nathants wrote:
| solos doesn't solve cheating, but it removes the team
| dynamics and social meta games that team modes bring. like
| wondering whether your teammates are cheating, or failing to
| compete because you can't find a good team.
|
| obviously cheating is cool. we all love to code, to build,
| and to hack. there should be a place to cheat, even in pvp
| games.
|
| there should be a league with open cheating. cheaters need a
| place to game too!
|
| there should be a league with moderate anticheat, like what
| you see in games today. it kind of works, and stops all but
| the most motivated cheaters.
|
| there should be a league where cheating is impossible. where
| one doesn't have to doubt, ever, whether they died to a
| cheater or a god. this is where kernel level anticheat is not
| enough, and solos only should be required.
|
| cheating is about validating inputs and outputs. valid screen
| displaying into human eyes. valid output out of human hands
| to mouse and keyboard.
|
| if we take a step back, this is very achievable. it's not
| like doping in the olympics, we don't need bloodwork. we just
| need a little more information than we get from anticheats
| today.
| izzydata wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the person you are replying to is talking
| about single player games.
| nathants wrote:
| > I only cheat in offline games for the most part
| twic wrote:
| I have a pretty foolproof system for evading cheaters. Just be so
| bad that any cheater will be far above me in the rankings. gg ez.
| izzydata wrote:
| I have an even more foolproof system. Never play online
| competitive games.
| runarberg wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| We can only cross our fingers and hope that the rise of
| unblockable cheats annihilates the market for the subgenre of
| competitive online games that team you up with randos and/or pit
| you against randos. What a cesspit.
| Vilian wrote:
| It's going to become cloud only
| gcommer wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > To be more precise: I think the solution is small,
| community-run servers.
|
| That was the normal way to do things. Essentially all modern
| games go out of their way to prevent you from doing this.
| gcommer wrote:
| Yep, and that's what I stick to today. I just worry how
| much longer until the remaining games that support this die
| out...
| bangaladore wrote:
| 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.
| montecarl wrote:
| 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!
| thesuitonym wrote:
| 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?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >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.
| kreco wrote:
| 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.
| notfed wrote:
| For a single player game, that might be a good explanation.
|
| For a multiplayer game, though, it's not hard at all to see
| what's happening. If a cheater cheats and gets away with it,
| then they rationally should expect to receive social
| reputational credit, which I want to believe is something
| that instinctively makes most of us feel good, us being
| social creatures.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _$5-500 monthly payments just to bypass a decent anti-
| cheat...Cheaters must reflash their BIOS, wipe their PCs,
| reinstall Windows, and create a new account to play again...every
| few weeks_
|
| This is fun? If it's eSports for $$ I understand the incentive,
| otherwise pretending to be good, all the while likely having not
| a twinge of irony hit you as you 'git gud the opposition... It's
| a mindset I don't understand.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Everyone's the good guy in their own mind.
| aruametello wrote:
| > 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)
| mpolichette wrote:
| I'd also consider that, for these people, getting away with
| the cheating _is the game_ for them. What they're cheating at
| might be less important.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| creddit wrote:
| My meta-comment is that it's a really sad state of affairs that
| we don't as a society have an immune system that makes it so that
| an individual who posts openly about creating software whose sole
| (and even if not "sole" then certainly intended) purpose is to
| enable others to deceive and cheat their way to "success" is made
| a pariah.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
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