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Anticheats, especially kernel-mode ones does not make the problem smaller. All they do is make it more rewarding for capable people.

You don't play a "match", you don't play "against" other players most of the time, in this context "botting" and "cheating" overlap because having your character do stuff 24/7 unattended is an evident advantage over the rest of the population, but it's not like you are hindering anyone's progress directly the vast majority of the time doing so.

How often does actual cheating happen in WoW, anywhere it matters? M+? Raiding? PvP?

False, people that have information they shouldn't have will act in detectable ways, even if they try their hardest not to.

ESP is a lot more obvious to a machine than one might think, the subtle behavior differences are obvious to a human and even more so for a model. Of course none of that can be proven, but it can increase the scrutiny of such players from player reports.

They won way more than they lost, people who left got given a free pass for ratting the remaining people out.

The scene has shifted immensely in the last few years, everyone and their grandmother has DMA now, I mean you can buy these off amazon now. Korean's are a bit stuck since most of them use gaming cafes so they've been slow adopters, but cafe shops have the benefit of using an old version of hyper-v which allows you to just use the method described above. Hyper-V cheats are the most popular for valorant.

I would argue that valorant and overwatch are pretty much on the same level based on what it feels to play. I've seen just as many visible cheaters in valorant as in overwatch. Although I will admit that I am pretty outdated myself since around mid 2025. Valorant allows you to ** around so that might be related, overwatch bans rage hackers way faster than valorant does as well.

So no, my post is pretty accurate.

The thing about gaming is that it’s not acceptable to leave 5% performance on the table whereas for other uses it usually is.

The security of PCs is still poor. Even if you had every available security feature right now it's not enough for the game to be safe. We still need to wait for PCs to catch up with the state of the art, then we have to wait 5+ years for devices to make it into the wild to have a big enough market share to make targeting them to be commercially viable.

People always freak out when I mention secure boot, and the funniest response usually are the ones who threaten to abandon Windows for macOS (which has had secure boot for more than a decade by default)

I'm not super technically knowledgeable about secure boot, but as far as I understand, you need to have a kernel signed by a trusted CA, which sucks if you want to compile your own, but is a hurdle generally managed by your distro, if you're willing to use their kernel.

But if all else fails you can always disable secure boot.

They will all cluster in very different latent spaces.

You don't automatically ban anomalies, you classify them. Once you have the data and a set of known cheaters you ask the model who else looks like the known cheaters.

Online games are in a position to collect a lot of data and to also actively probe players for more specific data such as their reactions to stimuli only cheaters should see.

But a good way of solving this in community managed multiplayer games is this: if a player is extremely good to the point where it’s destroying the fun of every other player: just kick them out.

Unfair if they weren’t cheating? Sure. But they can go play against better players elsewhere. Dominating 63 other players and ruining their day isn’t a right. You don’t need to prove beyond reasonable doubt they’re cheating if you treat this as community moderation.

This is not well done. Only the server should be able to tell what the honeypot is. The point is to spawn an entity for one or more clients which will be 100% real for them but would not matter because without cheats it has no impact on them whatsoever. When the world evolves such that an impact becomes more likely then you de-spawn it.

This will only be possible if the server makes an effort to send incomplete entity information (I believe this is common), this way the cheats cannot filter out the honeypots. The cheats will need to become very sophisticated to try and anticipate the logic the server may use in its honeypots, but the honeypot method is able to theoretically approach parity with real behavior while the cheat mitigations cannot do that with their discrimination methods (false positives will degrade cheater performance and may even leak signal as well).

For example you can use a player entity that the client hasn't seen yet (or one that exited entity broadcast/logic range for some time) as a fake player that's camping an invisible corner, then as the player approaches it you de-spawn it. A regular player will never even know it was there.

Another vector to push is netcode optimizations for anti-cheating measures. To send as little information as possible to the client, decouple the audio system from the entity information - this will allow the honeypot methods to provide alternative interpretations for the audio such as a firefights between ghosts only cheaters will react to. This will of course be very complex to implement.

The greatest complexity in the honeypot methods will no doubt be how to ensure no impact on regular players.

Matching based on skill works only as long as you have an abundance of players you can do that based on. When you have to account for geography, time of day, momentary availability, and skill level, you realize that you have fractured certain players far too much that it’s not fun for them anymore. Keep in mint that “cheaters” are also looking for matches that would maximize their cheats. Maybe it’s 8PM Pacific Time with tons of players there, but it’s 3 AM somewhere else with much limited number of players. Spoof your ping and location to be there and have fun sniping every player in the map. Sign up for new accounts on every play, who cares. Your fun as a cheater is to watch others lose their shit. You’re not building a character with history and reputation. You are heat sniping others while they are not realizing it. It may sound limited in scope and not worth the effort for you, but it’s millions of people out there tht ruin the game for everyone.

Almost every game I know of lets players “watch their kill cam”, and cheaters have adapted. The snipped people have a bias to vote the sniper was cheating, and the snipers have a bias to vote otherwise. Lean one way or the other, and it’s another post on /r/gaming of how your game sucks.

In a 5v5 shooter this ruins 9 people’s game along the way, times however many games this takes. Enough people do this and the game is ruined

> or let players watch their killams and tag their deaths

Players are notoriously bad at this stuff. Valve tried it with “overwatch” and it didn’t work at all.

Forgetting about anti cheat for a minute though, may hamming for different behaviours is a super interesting topic in itself. It’s very topical right now [0] and a fairly divisive topic. Most games with a ranked mode already do this - there’s a hidden MMR for unranked modes that is match made on, and players self select into “serious” or “non serious” queues. It works remarkably well - if you ever read people saying that Quick Play is unplayable it proves that the separate queues are doing a good job of keeping the two groups separate!

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/arc-raide...

Yes, its prize pool is order of magnitude higher than either of Olympics sports or Chess.

I grew up with star trek and star wars wondering what a “I’ll transfer 20 units to you” meant. Bitcoin was an eye opener in the idea of “maybe this is possible” to me. But it shortly became true to me that it’s not the case. There is no way still for random agents to prove they are not malicious. It’s easier in a network within the confines of Bitcoin network. But maybe I’m not smart enough to come up with a more generalized concept. After all, I was one of the people who read the initial bitcoin white paper on HN and didn’t understand it back then and dismissed it.

I have always wondered why more companies don't do trust based anti cheat management. Many cheats are obvious from anyone in the game, you see people jumping around like crazy, or a character will be able to shoot through walls, or something else that impossible for a non-cheater to do.

Each opponent in the game is getting the information from the cheating player's game that has it doing something impossible. I know it isn't as simple as having the game report another player automatically, because cheaters could report legitimate players... but what if each game reported cheaters, and then you wait for a pattern... if the same player is reported in every game, including against brand new players, then we would know the were a cheater.

Unless cheaters got to be a large percentage of the player population, they shouldn't be able to rig it.

And even that's the (relatively) straightforward part. The hard part is doing this without injuring the kernel enough that the only sensible solution for the security conscious is a separate PC for gaming.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/01/20/elon-musk-...

I play fps competitively and valorant is by far the most least cheater fps game on the market

> The general simplistic answer from those who never had to design such a game or a system of “do everything on the server” is laughably bad.

What “Netflix did” was having dead-simple static file serving appliance for ISPs to host with their Netflix auth on top. In their early days, Netflix had one of the simplest “auth” stories because they didn’t care.

There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.

point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.

Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.

I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.

This is the exact sort of nonsense situation I want to prevent. We should own the computers, and the corporations should be forced to simply suck it up and deal with it. Cheating? It doesn't matter. Literal non-issue compared to the loss of our power and freedom.

It's just sad watching people sacrifice it all for video games. We were the owners of the machine but we gave it all up to play games. This is just hilarious, in a sad way.

Remote attestation is the ultimate surrender. It's not really your machine anymore. You don't have the keys to the machine. Even if you did, nobody would trust attestations made by those keys anyway. They would only trust Google's keys, Apple's keys. You? You need not apply.