[hypeatei]

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"

[miffe]

It's pretty common. Valve is now banning certain keyboards from CS2.

[Quarrel]

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.

They're also used in malware analysis at times.

[mschuster91]

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?

[Hikikomori]

They come with custom firmware and pretend to be other hardware like an usb controller or sound card.

[mschuster91]

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.

[Hikikomori]

They already are in many games where good undetectable cheats are 100$ monthly subscriptions. Anticheat vendors don't have enough pull to pull that off, Microsoft maybe could but most of their effort goes into protections against advesaries other than the computers owner.

[Nevermark]

Why not simply build in fast strafe direction switching into the game and level the field?

Seems like removing an opportunity for cheating is a better strategy for game design than policing cheating.

Balancing a game doesn't depending on specific challenges, just ensuring there are enough challenges.

Or as a non-avid gamer, am I missing something?

[uyzstvqs]

Funnily enough VAC (CS2 anticheat) is one of the easiest to bypass, and you can do so with certainty that you don't get detected.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

What do these keyboards do? Presumably it is something more sophisticated than a key combination macro.

[wnevets]

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]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224261/valve-counter-st...

[0cf8612b2e1e]

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.

[wnevets]

> 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.

[dvngnt_]

it's the same thing with fighting games. your controller has to be socd compliant

[blargey]

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.

[alstonite]

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.

[Quarrel]

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.

[0x1ch]

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.

[ziml77]

I hope anyone who actually buys those things to cheat in a multiplayer game gets one so poorly made that it fries their whole system.

[Workaccount2]

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...

[beeboobaa3]

You'd be distributing malware and will probably find yourself in legal trouble.

[Der_Einzige]

There's also a lot of AI cheats now, which are resistant to most detection methods: https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy

Several hundred hours of my "the finals" experience have been helped by this :)

[J_Shelby_J]

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.

[drdaeman]

> 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.

[endominus]

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.

[drdaeman]

> 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.

[ultimafan]

It's hard for me to think of many equivalents of video game cheats to professional sports in the sense that most "cheats" for professional sports that I can think of don't "play" the sport for you. A normal everyday joe can't just wake up and start taking steroids one day and place anywhere near the top in olympic or power lifting (or even anywhere near the middle class of amateur, clean competitors who have been training for a few years). Nor can he do blood doping and hope to compete against world class cyclists. Or in any way go up against and win bouts with masters of various martial arts. In one way or another those methods of cheating still require incredible amounts of effort, training, etc. to utilize. But a video game cheats like auto aim, wall hacks, radar, or the more blatant ones like infinite health, speed hacks and the like let someone with no skill or preparation just jump in and casually outcompete even the best of the best in a way that allows for little to no opportunities to outplay them. I'd say it's less like using steroids and more like showing up to a deadlift competition with an industrial crane.

To get to the point, I think this is why less people seem to care in non professional sports if some random guy who is on performance enhancers shows up to your amateur soccer match or pick up basketball game. The gap at the amateur level between a clean amateur and cheating amateur is not so large and certainly overcomable if the clean amateur has more training.

[wellthisisgreat]

> do people actually care about all this stuff in non-professional sports when played recreationally? (Just like video games.)

People absolutely care, because a cheater in a lobby will ruin the experience for a dozen or more people and ultimately waste their time, taking it away from their lives.

The cheater is doing it willingly and knowingly and with a full intent to cause harm - take away someone’s time which is really the only thing we have. Cheaters shiho absolutely be punished beyond just video games, not sure how exactly though (I wouldn’t trust state nor mob with that task for sure)

[wellthisisgreat]

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?

[dvngnt_]

you can cheat in single player games. no exceptions for multiplayer games

[drdaeman]

That's one of the important criteria, yes. But I was trying to draw the line on what is "cheating", not when it's socially or morally acceptable.

[beeboobaa3]

It's really pathetic to go out of your way to report someone's accounts like that. Go lick some more boots.

[ultimafan]

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.

[beeboobaa3]

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.

[ultimafan]

I see, thanks for clarifying. I guess my frustration with that viewpoint comes from a personal bias- I can't share any sympathy for reports of that nature after seeing many of my friends and my own hours "wasted" when budgeted free time that could have been lighthearted and relaxing turns into frustration, venting, anger etc. after getting repeatedly shut down by blatant cheaters (though one could say games are wasted time in and of themselves). That I paid for the game to play with friends and none of them are willing to play it anymore because of how ineffectual the developers were at dealing with the problem compounds that frustration.

I do agree that developers should put more effort into thinking about proper design and anticheat protections. But it's also a huge ask for smaller or more inexperienced studios when they have to waste time dealing with bad actors that could have been better spent on game development, and an excuse for antisocial cheaters to keep behaving poorly. People want to assume the best out of each other. In an ideal world, people who can't keep themselves from making their hobby that of making others miserable for pleasure would be the ones being punished instead of laying the blame on those naive enough to assume that everyone is good natured and cooperative.

[wellthisisgreat]

it’s wild you’ll put :) in this kind of confession

Despicable rather