Oh, I know. It's perfect for anti-cheat though: it doesn't fix the problem, it slightly increases the cost/entry barrier, and it's a pain in the ass for consumers. It's just like all of the other current anti-cheat technology!
Oh no, it's definitely not "fixable", it's hard enough to define cheating precisely less fix it.
Like there's obvious cheating. Playing online chess games using an engine to tell you every move is cheating, and thankfully if you really don't know what you are doing, you are likely to get caught.
Then there's less obvious cheating. It's pretty easy to cheat in speedrunning by passing off a carefully constructed "TAS" run as a regular speedrun; though just like with chess it's going to be obvious if you don't know what you are doing, but it's pretty hard to inspect in detail so you might get away with it as long as nobody pays too much attention.
Then there's things that may or may not be cheating in the first place. A good example is key binds in Source Engine games, like null-cancelling movement configurations. The game allows it and keybinds are not traditionally treated as cheating, so is it? (I think they may have changed this in newer games/updates but I'm behind on the times.) Or custom controllers for Super Smash Bros Melee. Merely emulating degraded analog sticks in a way that is advantageous is generally not considered to be cheating, but e.g. warping the stick movement depending on an internal state machine to make certain things easier to do is usually considered too far. I can think of many examples. "Calcing" and charting in PangYa is a nice obscure one.
But I do say this: If you took one aspect of cheating, like aimbots, you could attack it surgically. You could detect the current state-of-the-art, do your best to make it hard for aimbot developers to figure out how you're detecting them, ban players and make it hard for them to get new accounts. The problem is that this is not easy or cheap. People just want to throw some money at the problem and have it go away, they want something like Easy Anti-Cheat.
I think though that eventually, it might all just be futile. It depends. If machine learning continues to progress, eventually it will be pretty hard to distinguish human and machine inputs no matter how hard you try to. It's already not very easy looking at "state of the art" technology from 2022. I linked this elsewhere but it has a nice chart of people mostly failing to detect their ML-based aimbot:
I guess I'm just disappointed in these lazy approaches because they wind up being so vapidly anti-consumer. I know that they accept the temporary nature of these fixes since they don't really intend on these games running forever (which is also a sort of problem, though not related since obviously they really can't worry about and invest in anti-cheat forever) so they just need something that works for now. But it seems like no bridge is too far, and now we're nearly all the way to "you need to install this rootkit and enable secure boot and use Windows 11 and have TPM2" or whatever else.
edit: I really wish Hacker News pushed downvoters to leave a reply... If whoever did that comes across this post again I'm actually genuinely interested in hearing about whatever you disagreed with strongly enough in this post. Unfortunately I said so much that I can only guess what and that's a bummer because I bet it would be interesting.
For the record, I did not downvote (and I do think there are valid reasons to downvote without saying anything, even if I appreciate that it is frustrating sometimes from the other side).
I think there's merit to recognizing how loose the concept of cheating can be, it's much akin to the concept of vulnerabilities.
That said, a very very very large part of cheating in videogames revolves around these points:
- ensuring the inputs are not altered: not shaped, not injected into, not filtered, not replaced
- ensuring the inputs are issued by a human
- ensuring that the inputs issued by said human are made in response to the output of the game being processed by said human
- ensuring the that these happen at roughly the same time, and in real time
- ensuring that the identity of the human in question is unique among the playerbase (to prevent veterans sockpuppeting as newbies, as well as multiboxing, and many other forms of abuse)
- [several more I probably forget]
And I'd go as far as to say that even individually these are impossible to actually solve, let alone combined. The equivalent problems for machine-to-machine communication are already hard enough, but making one of the participants a human really twists the knife. It's also essentially the analog hole problem.
Ultimately, I'd say it's all about trying to ensure a level playing field and trying to make sure nobody has an unfair advantage, and "unfair advantage" is always somewhat subjective. In real world sports, it often manifests in hard-to-interpret rules like F1's new-ish rules around moving under breaking. In "eSports" it manifests in many ways, like debate over what hardware and software is cheating.
> and I do think there are valid reasons to downvote without saying anything
I think people should be generally encouraged to reply. There's some comments where it's obvious why someone would disagree or take offense, but lately I've noticed that even comments that seem incredibly benign often get grayed out at least briefly. This is confusing and hard for observers to make sense of, less the poster themselves. With everything left implied, it's not even clear if people even agree on why they don't agree with the post.
Stack Overflow encourages people to explain themselves probably for the same basic reason. HN on the other hand asks commenters to not discuss votes. I do generally agree (in fact I wouldn't even really want people to start comments with "I'm down voting because...") but damnit, sometimes you just want to know why.
And of course, sometimes the reason why is someone mistapped on their mobile phone, or something like that, so you'll never know.