So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not enjoying playing those games anymore, although they are great games by itself. But the amount of occurrences being killed or playing against cheaters is at a height, where I don’t see the point anymore.
- Why I think Valve is the only company able to something against cheaters?
Because they have the tools with VAC already aiming to prevent cheaters. Valve has got the resources to actually invest into something more profound which could be used for any game where anti-cheat protection needs to be implemented. And lastly Valve is the company which is interested in furthering the ability to gaming on Linux, the anti-cheat solution needs to work on both operating systems. Only Valve has the motivation and means to achieve that with their knowledge and resources. What do you guys think about the topic? Is the fight against cheaters hopeless? Do you think some other entity should provide anti-cheat protection, why? I skimmed over “anti cheat in linux kernel” posts in the net, but I have very little knowledge about the topic, what is your stance on it?
Edited: Mixed EAC with VAC. EAC seems to be part of Epic Company. Both of these tools seem unable to prevent cheating like mentioned above.
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I have run into maybe 3 people that I legitimately think were cheating, in 6+ years of CS:GO, and now CS2.
Where the hell are you running into this many cheaters?
On the flipside of this, I’ve been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you’re wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it’s easier to say “cheater” than “i’ve been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I’ve become predictable”
It’s basically luck of the draw with trust factor and region
I regularly run into cheaters who I watch the demo afterwards and they just sit there aim locked onto someone and tracking them through the wall for 10s before blasting them without ever seeing them, or react to things they can’t see (e.g. suddenly flick to a corner someone is walking up to in a panic wo seeing or hearing a thing). Basically every other game has someone suspicious if not blatantly cheating from the start. If was bad in CSGO and it’s 10x worse in CS2
I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.
I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.
Apparently East coast is just a FFA. Ive played in EU and West Coast servers with friends and they’re definitely better about cheaters
What is your playtime? Mine is pretty low on CS2 but the biggest critics on the game online are the amount of cheaters.
In CS:GO I have/had ~1600 hours. In CS2 only about 120 so far.
Most cheaters are good at hiding it.
I’m usually ranked either 3rd or 4th in FFA deathmatch matches, so if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not pushing the non-cheaters down, what is the point of cheating? And if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not actually even winning, how are they causing so much grief?
Maybe it’s a bigger issue in Ranked/ competitive, but if you’re not actually on an esports team I just don’t get caring about rankings and playing ranked (is it just for the ranked season profile badge? I did that one year to get to Gold Nova 3, and then never bothered again).
Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.
It’s cat and mouse when it comes to banning, even with hwid signatures the cheaters are able to use sophisticated spoofing techniques. Also there are side effects like legitimate players buying second hand pcs that have been banned.
EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.
Most anti-cheat software can’t do much on the client side. Really all it can do is look around at it’s environment where it’s allowed to look and see what’s going on.
Most Cheat Software will run on a higher privilege level than the game; whether that’s as an “Administrative” user or as “root” or “SYSTEM” in a context where it’s running as an important driver.
In any case, the only thing the Anti-Cheat can reliably do on the client side is watch. If it’s cleverly designed enough, it will simply log snippets of events and ship them off for later analysis on a server side system. This will probably be a different server than the one you’re playing on, and it won’t be sending that data until after the match has ended properly.
Sometimes it might not even send data unless the AC server asks it to do so; which it might frequently do as a part of it’s authorization granting routine. Even when it has the data there may not be immediate processing.
Others have also mentioned that visible action may be delayed for random time periods as well; in order to prevent players from catching on to what behaviors they need to avoid to get caught, or to prevent cheats from getting more sophisticated before deeper analysis could reveal a way to patch the flaw or check to ensure cheating isn’t happening.
Since cheat software can often be privileged, it also has the luxury of lying to the server. So clever ways to ensure that a lying client will be caught will probably be implemented and responses checked to ensure they fit within some reasonable bounds of sanity.
Valve works differently than other companies. Internally everyone works on what they want when they want. You can literally wheel your desk to a new location if you decide to want to work with another team. Because of this though it creates an odd dynamic that isn’t always going to work out best for the developers or the consumers.
This is why it feels extremely random whenever valve releases something new. You would think they would just release banger after banger of hot AAA titles. But it’s more complicated than that unfortunately. This is also reflected in things like fixing cheats in team fortress 2 etc etc.
This video will answer a lot of your questions
Valve uses EAC? The fuck? What’s with VAC?
Besides that, EAC works without issues on Linux.
Oh did I mix up those two? I was actually referring to VAC, need to check who is responsible for EAC.
Edit: Apparently its Epic, I will correct the beginning post.
Only Valve has the motivation and means…
I think they have the means but not the motivation. I can think of only 2 reasons why the state of anti-cheat is the way it is:
- They don’t want to spend money to fix it
- They don’t want to ban paying customers
I doubt that, I mean show me a proper working anti cheat which isn’t deeply rooted into the system as this Valorant bullshit? Don’t even know how good that one is actually working. I just think there should be more focus from players and general attention that cheaters are bad for sales, because people don’t want to spend money on games where cheaters are free to prevail.
I also think with CS2 Valve has a big motivating factor to make this classic one which is cheater free. Also why aren’t third party games able to use VAC?
I really like the community driven moderation of playerbase is a good suggestion. For games like Hunt: Showdown and any other game with just lobbies, its not working though.
There is no problem involving valve games that can’t be solved by not playing valve games. Seriously, I quit a long time ago and my mental health has soared from not being around those borderline neo-nazi gamers all the time. Fuck valve for harboring fascists within their platform.
