Question for people that build hacks: given how robust this open-source anti-cheat is, does building the cheat give more reward than playing the game? It seems like it would take a ton of hours to be effective..
I've built hacks to undermine recurring payment structures in games. It has very little to do with cheating, and everything to do with fighting a corporate trend that I would like to see abolished in games.
Gaming companies care far more about these kind of hacks, but frequently lump them into the "cheating" category for better optics.
There is huge money in making cheats and this one seems to operate in userspace only. Most cheats and anti-cheats these days are running in lower rings (kernel or device driver)
I believe there is also hardware cheats but I'm not sure how common those are. EDIT: See "DMA cheats" or "DMA cards"
Recent keyboard cheats (ie minimising the learning curve in seamlessly changing direction when strafing) are nothing, and not really what anyone means by hardware cheats.
What is meant are PCIe hardware devices that can use DMA to read and write data without being detected by software processes at all.
They've been around for quite a while (5+ years?), but I doubt they'll ever get mainstream adoption.
If these things get mainstream adoption their PCI IDs just get blacklisted (they do need to register with the system first), or IOMMU configuration will be yet another thing to fingerprint. IIRC, the host CPU has to allow the "evil" PCIe device access to memory, or is that just something that Thunderbolt chips implemented after malware authors used this for insta-unlocks?
So what, as soon as these things become mainstream cheating targets, anticheat vendors will force (or "strongly suggest") to hardware manufacturers that every piece of hardware has to have some sort of uncloneable TPM-style module to verify authenticity.
In this instance one of the things they do is ignore keypresses at certain times
> Razer and Wooting’s SOCD features both let players automate switching strafe directions without having to learn the skill. Normally, to switch strafe directions in a first-person shooter, you have to fully release one key before pressing the other. If both are pressed, they cancel each other, and you stand there for a moment until you release one of the keys. SOCD means you don’t need to release a key and you can rapidly tap the A or D key to counter-strafe with little to no effort. [1]
Huh. That seems like such a weird, minor advantage to attempt to ban. I expect most anyone playing FPS would pick this up naturally.
Also seems impossible to ban given the ubiquity of custom keyboards running something like QMK. Those run user code and could send a fake vendor id to the host.
> Huh. That seems like such a weird, minor advantage to attempt to ban. I expect most anyone playing FPS would pick this up naturally.
With a regular keyboard its very possible for a person to not release one key before pressing the other in a tense situation when they have less than 1 second to react. For example even a professional baseball player making millions of dollars can drop a routine fly ball.
It’s actually less sophisticated - it’s merely the choice of what key input is reported when two keys are physically in the down position, simultaneously.
“Report last key that was activated” means that rapidly switching/alternating between, say, A and D to switch movement directions is a matter of just pressing the next key instead of coordinating the lifting of the other key.
AFAIK this has existed as an autohotkey script for a long time, but it’s so simple a legitimate hardware implementation detail can be another vector, and wouldn’t fit in the “unauthorized software” definition of cheating so needed a separate callout.
Essentially the keyboards have software that will allow the user to override keypresses at inhuman speeds. This allows users to switch left/right direction extremely fast, which is very relevant in CS2 due to peeking mechanics.
Specifically, if I'm holding A (moving right) then I press D (move left), in most games in I would stop since I now have both keys down. These keyboards automatically raise the A key even if you're still holding it, allowing an immediate swap of momentum.
Not really, and valve has also banned these at the macro level.
They just allow you to set them up such that when you start strafing (ie moving) in an opposite direction by pushing an opposing key (ie you're holding down "move right" -> "d", but now start holding down "move left" -> "a") that there is no overlap between the "d" and "a" being held down, as some games (CS) punish having both down at the same time. Valves idea is that minimising the time gap as you switch directions, while never having the two keys overlap as pressed, is an important learned skill that novices should not be able to do as cleanly as pros, and have said that keyboards that support this seamless transition will be banned.
Go to aliexpress. Google cheat cards. They've proliferated pretty heavily in the last couple years.
My buddy and I were actually just discussing ring 0 anti cheat circumvention and we started researching these units. Our guess is that the hardware slightly changes every iteration with updated firmware to circumvent general heuristics like HWID.
Part of me really wants to do this, put a time bomb circuit that fries the PC after x hours of use, and leak them into the supply chain. Not going to do it, too much work, but cheaters ruined sooo many hours of my life.
I wonder if there are software dev counter-parts that would build cheats just to soft-brick cheaters PCs...
I don’t know what to say. Cool project, but I would be mortified to admit to using this. Cheating in a competitive game is just griefing with self-delusion and extra steps.
You’re also going to never be able to have a professional relationship with an athlete or gamer ever again. People who have dumped thousands of hours practicing to get good at something, and you’re proud of cheating them and people like them?
Enjoy your s3 emerald skins. I’ve reported your accounts to embark.
> People who have dumped thousands of hours practicing to get good at something, and you’re proud of cheating them and people like them?
Just as a hypothetical situation - what if one had built a similar tool on their own, or used this as a foundation but trained a new model? Does it count, or are we denying this as a personal growth and limiting it strictly to playing exactly by the book?
Alternatively... What if someone has a physical condition that limits their manual dexterity? Is it different from having a physical condition that limits their eyesight and have to wear glasses?
I'm trying to draw a line. Or challenge the status quo where the existing line is drawn.
What if someone did not have the physical strength to become a champion cyclist/baseball player, but found a medicinal way to overcome their limitations and achieve peak performance in their field? We've already come to a decisive conclusion on this; steroids are banned in most sporting competitions. Just as cheats are in online games. Just because someone does not have the pure physical ability to compete at the highest level does not give them leeway to cheat.
> We've already come to a decisive conclusion on this
Have we, really?
In the professional sports there's WADA and similar agencies, that, obviously, have to push this idea really hard (and make everyone believe that everyone else thinks so, because this is how you do it in modern times). But that's because that's what's literally keeping them afloat. But they're already struggling, trying to figure out what to do those gender-to-chemicals mismatches. And as sciences and societies evolve, I suspect it's only going to get more interesting, and I have this hunch that this status quo has cracks in its foundation and will likely shatter in the future.
They also have to make sure that athletes are safe enough and don't just wreck themselves - which makes things a quite bit different. Unless we count risks of issues in some people with predisposition to toxicity, that is associated with cheat use /s (no love for those folks).
But back to the "have we" question - do people actually care about all this stuff in non-professional sports when played recreationally? (Just like video games.) I really doubt so. People just try to balance around it, fixing the matchmaking rather than players.
But - you certainly have a point - I would suggest to exclude professional scene entirely and narrow the scope strictly to recreational gaming. Pro sports and e-sports are more controversial.
Video game cheats are nothing like sports cheats / steroids
A non-roided pro can still sometimes somehow beat a roided pro.
With videogames there is zero chance you can actually beat a cheater. Maybe you can score a lucky point / frag against him/her once in 100 instances, but actually beat him?
Imagine idk Mike Tyson in his prime comes up against an underdog and the underdog can teleport or has a perfect reaction time of a standard auto-aim cheat?
Not him, but why? Cheaters in multiplayer games seek a gain for themselves at the expense of everyone else playing. They provide no benefit to a community and it's not something anyone should be even remotely proud of, even if they put a significant amount of intellectual effort into doing so.
A few years ago, I used to play EFT with friends after work and putting my kids to bed quite frequently. For a group of friends living quite far apart it was one of our favorite gaming experiences as a group. But our feeling on it soured as the game was slowly but surely taken over by large amounts of cheaters in every single match we played. The developers weren't able to deal with it at all and eventually we all quit playing. There's nothing that takes the wind of your sails in gaming like sitting down to unwind for the hour or two a week of free time with your friends and just being completely unable to enjoy that time because a significant portion of the lobby is made up of selfish cheaters. I can remain friends with someone who cheats in a multiplayer game but I never play with them after finding out they did so. I don't hesitate to report accounts. There's no benefit to you as a player keeping them around unless you're somehow making money off cheat sales.
My disdain primarily comes from going out of your way to snitch on someone, regardless of why.
But in general I'm not upset with cheaters anyway. People are always going to push boundaries. It's a fact of life.
I also believe that most cheats, at least the more invasive ones, are only possible because the game was poorly designed, without cheating in mind. Instead most game companies seem to just slap a commercial anticheat product on top and hope for the best.
> does building the cheat give more reward than playing the game?
Absolutely! At least for the kind of people who like cracking games. Think of it as a puzzle game.
Being able to play the game as a cheater is like getting the final weapon in a game where it requires completing the most challenging part. You have fun for a bit, destroying everything in your path, that's your reward, but you quickly lose interest as you have nothing interesting left to do.
Just like any software, game cheats are build once, sell as many times as you can. If a game is popular, this can be a very lucrative business. The fact that game developers will play the cat and mouse game with you to block you out only adds to this fact, as so long as you can keep up, you can get repeat customers.
Now I want to read an article about the economics of selling game hacks. I just assumed they weren't really worth the investment to build since the number of people that want to cheat seems low.
After typing that I realize this is like coming to understand just how many people are on steroids to get a physique they want. It's like nah no one takes steroids except EVERY HUGE PERSON you've ever seen, barring the extremely rare genetic outliers.
Would recommend this podcast from Darknet Diaries. [1] Not quite an article, but there is a transcript if you'd prefer to read. Includes interview with the people actually selling these hacks, and it is fascinating
yes- I have been out of the "game" for a while, but, the economics are strong. Used to sell bots that could automate tasks to get gold in various games (WoW and Runescape as examples) and we had customers that would buy 100s of licenses monthly and had factories that they'd use to farm and then sell the gold on eBay, etc.
I don't get how pwning noobs is gratifying at all. It's just griefing and for a normal sane person there's no fun in seeing other people suffer. It's like wrestling with toddlers.
Proper "cheating" is not about wreaking havoc. Although there are plenty of weird people who do weird things - but cheats are not a problem, they just enable those weirdos to do weird things.
It's just automation, all about offloading work to a machine - a principle that the whole human civilization is built upon. And developing an aid that actually helps you to improve is - surely - a personally gratifying experience. If someone has difficulties doing something the "intended" way, but can think of and implement an alternative approach to achieve the same effect - that's just humans being humans, it's as fair as life can be.
Gaming companies care far more about these kind of hacks, but frequently lump them into the "cheating" category for better optics.