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by temporarrry0923 1715 days ago
VACnet catches the spinbotters and aimbotters! Actually really good at it too; everyone who did that now just cheats less hard.

The biggest problem was: It didn't auto ban, just sent to overwatch (players watch a past game and vote for cheater or not, fully anonymized). This resulted in a massive clog when some guys I knew generated around 10k free steam accounts (with $3.5 of proxies), began queueing a few dozen at a time, rage cheating. A hell of a lot of games can be botted with free accounts and a beefy (server IIRC) rig; I think he told me he had about 100 accounts running normally in 10 separate Competitive games all against his own bots(rendering at 2x2 resolution so it ran okay, with cheats injected). They all got sent to overwatch but because so many games were being put through overwatch, the queue got overloaded.

This is called Vertigo boosting, because the bots all queued for Vertigo, an unpopular map, to increase odds that only their own bots would be in the game (and, coincidentally, minimize collateral damage to legitimate players). (though it's normally to rank up accounts, not to spam ow queue)

Hi eso :p

3 comments

This is how we end up with kernel level drivers rather than more measured approaches.
For sure in other games, yeah. Newell is opposed to kernel anti cheats, though, so probably not in CSGO. But other games now look at CSGO and make kernel AC's a selling point (literally Valorant's selling point), so yeah.
I think time will prove that Gaben made the correct decision by focusing Valve’s efforts on AI anti-cheat rather than following this kernel anti-cheat trend. It might be the only hope for a viable anti-cheat in the future if hardware based cheating becomes more commonplace.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

Besides that, Riot is already losing the cat and mouse game with cheating in Valorant despite their kernel anti-cheat. There are publicly available cheats which have been undetected for months. Hardware ID spoofers are commonplace as well so cheaters are able to make new accounts and go back to cheating if and when they get banned. Even if kernel anti-cheats worked perfectly, they still wouldn’t be able to detect newer hardware based cheats which run entirely on a second PC leaving nothing for a kernel level anti-cheat to detect.

>Even if kernel anti-cheats worked perfectly, they still wouldn’t be able to detect newer hardware based cheats which run entirely on a second PC leaving nothing for a kernel level anti-cheat to detect.

If it got to this point, to continue your metaphor, the mouse is nearly extinct. The point is not to eradicate cheating, it's to stop the bleeding. Valorant cheats don't even have to do this btw (really only necessary for incredibly extreme cases, see lohousedev and sparkles' video)

Do you know how easy it would be to stop 90% of cheating, at least for a few weeks, in CSGO? It's so easy I figured it out by dumping cvars with a server plugin when I was 14. There is zero way for a legitimate player to have certain cvars set, only a cheat would; yet, cheating is still a massive problem in CSGO.

VACnet has been actually really good, so I agree that that's a better avenue. In addition I am still against kernel AC's (speaking as a legit player, not as an ex-cheater). But the cat-and-mouse game is effectively over if 95% of the mice die.

Valorant's cheating is NOWHERE NEAR csgo. Someone I know on Valorant's AC team actually said they're ramping up (vaguely) so fingers crossed?

yea but anyone who plays competitive you use kernel level anti cheat for CSGO...
Only with external third parties like Faceit/ESEA. Not normal matchmaking
As if it's hard to detect spinbotters. The problem at high level play has always been and always will be wallhacking/ESP. The fact that you can easily write a separate program that overlays this information, which only needs to read from memory, means that this problem is never going away. Playing any FPS outside of a LAN is a waste of time because of this.
>as if it's hard to detect spinbotters

Valve couldn't figure it out for years and years.

Subtle cheats are absolutely a problem, but far less of a problem for the average new non-prime or fresh trust-factor player than a rage botter

Couldn't figure it out or didn't figure it out? Valve has been notorious for neglecting the development of VAC and letting cheaters run rampant in Counter-Strike for over two decades. As we speak, there are probably public cheats in existence that won't be banned for at least another two years.
>Couldn't figure it out or didn't figure it out?

I've reported bugs to the VAC email and they were patched a few weeks later, so maybe they do try? I really can't think of a reason WHY they neglect VAC willingly..

>As we speak, there are probably public cheats in existence that won't be banned for at least another two years.

Yep, I used to help maintain a free one on github, the traffic was in the tens of thousands. Been UD for 2+ years (and it's a fork of another, which was UD for 2+). All because we use Java and VAC never started scanning the JVM.

How cant a server detect someone spinning a hundred times per second? Surely valve didnt even try
Did you report this person? They ruin the game for everyone else.
Absolutely nothing would happen. I actually did report a few of the accounts just to see what happened and to this day no ban