[serf]

and, as evidenced by Grand Theft Auto and Counter-Strike, players continue playing with hackers.

There is even reason for (say, for example) Rockstar to leave hackers alone in GTA : they act as artificial whales to lure real players into buying in-game currency in order to keep up/seek revenge.

There are a few games I can think of off the top of my head that have a symbiotic relationship with hackers.

[gameswithgo]

The kind of hacking that happens in first person shooters has nothing to do with security failures. It is fundamentally impossible to stop aim bots. All you can do is continually play cat and mouse games to make it harder.

[happyconcepts]

Why is it fundamentally impossible to stop aimbots?

[PowerBar]

Because the player's computer needs to know where the enemy is in order to render them on the screen, create footstep sounds, calculate shadows, etc. As long as the player has ultimate (root, admin, etc) access on that computer, it will always be possible for a program running with elevated privileges to read that enemy position data from the game's memory and make the required mouse movements to point at it and left-click.

The only way to prevent this is to remove elevated access from the player's computer. This has been done with varying levels of success on consoles, but even then it's only a matter of time.

[chayleaf]

because it requires you to distinguish between a human's aim and a bot's aim, which is pretty much impossible with a good enough bot

[esrauch]

I think Steam actually primarily catches cheaters by it seeing the other running software rather than looking at the input patterns. I'm not sure whether it would detect a cheat implemented via a camera and custom mouse hardware that sends usb events you didn't do.

But I also think a lot of the hackers in both GTA and CS are cheating in ways that no regular user input could trigger, they're compromising the software at a lower level than that.

[schmorptron]

From what I know, VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) just looks for processes running on the system and detects injections into CSs memory. Then, for CS:GO specifically there's Overwatch, in which players look at other reported players' gameplay to determine whether they were cheating, and VacNET which is a machine learning system trained on the data from Overwatch to detect aimbots that way. There's a really good talk that someone from valve gave about 3 years ago[0].

The bigger problem is that even with input recognition, one of the biggest problems are wallhacks, meaning you can see other players through walls which is an advantage that's almost as large as aimbotting in tactical shooters like CS.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc

[chayleaf]

The comment above was specifically about aimbots, i.e. cheats that mimic a person. Such cheats can be hidden from the system well enough for it to not know there is a program controlling the input. I'm not saying all kinds of cheats can stay 100% undetected and functional with enough effort on the hackers' side, that's obviously false.