Vanguard Hits New 'bans-Per-Second' Record
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Vanguard, Valorant's anti-cheat system, has hit a new 'bans-per-second' record, sparking discussion on the effectiveness of anti-cheat measures and the prevalence of cheating in gaming.
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What a great message to send to your fans. "We know we installed Ring 0 anticheat on your PC and banned Linux/Steam Deck players, but look at how useless it is!"
Spyware is legal. As long as people who care about these things are a tiny minority, the law (and lawmakers) will never be compelled to change.
The best bet for those who play these games is to explore alternatives, or leave games altogether and socialize in the real world.
At their scale it would also turn into one or more big class action lawsuits if they got caught trying it too, I expect. The lawyer fees would probably swamp any profits from selling telemetry data.
Thanks.
I don’t think Riot is losing sleep over denying access to the 4 people who want to play Valorant on a Steam Deck.
Steam Deck users need to ask Valve to similarly improve SteamOS's system integrity to prove to game companies that it's safe for people to run their games on it without compromising their game's integrity.
They just hit a new bans-per-second record?
An anticheat does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.
A DRM solution does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.
A website block does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.
And so on. “There’s a workaround” != “This is therefore mostly useless.”
Otherwise, let me tell you, seat belt laws and speed limits are the most useless things ever made. The workaround is just pushing my foot down harder!
For years, gamers have been told install xyz rootkit for your safety, enable xyz option in your BIOS, get a TPM, install the latest versions of windows, it's all for your security to make your experience better and cheat-free with state-of-the-art technology! across like 3 or 4 different vendors, and the outcome has been the same ever since the beginning: cheaters find ways to skirt basic restrictions, because companies don't _want_ to actually put an end to cheating. Especially more so for companies like valve that get cheaters constantly re-buying their games or "premium" status, not sure if this exists in the valorant realm
Just end the "gary's pool cleaning" problem once and for all rather than continue to play stupid games just on the off 0.00001% chance Gary's business (incorporated last week) decided to branch out to software. Let Gary come appeal to Riot directly and let them manually analyze whatever they need BEFOREHAND.
They're focusing on DETECTION rather than PREVENTION.
Or, have everyone literally cheat with reckless abandon… and the game is unplayable.
Unfortunately the industry decided to leave private/player-hosted servers behind, and modern genres like battle royale require unreasonably high player counts, so we're kind of stuck.
Well, maybe not "everyone" is cheating, but there's very little punishment to cheating in that game for those who do. Do it too blatantly and get reported an cordoned off into "low trust" matchmaking, or just closet cheat with total impunity.
I suppose this then drives people to third party matchmaking services like FACEIT that do use kernel level anti-cheat (which has its own separate game culture issues to replace the cheating issue).
If it uses a 2nd input device, that's just obvious.
If it properly mixes its input into your main device, there will still be hints.
A real mouse has a limited range of motion. It can't keep moving left or right indefinitely.
Real players don't immediately gravitate towards the geometric center of the head of every enemy.
Real players don't try to move the mouse to shoot at enemies on the loading screen.
Real players have coordinated or stereotyped mouse and keyboard movements. They don't react instantly with the mouse but after a delay on the keyboard, for instance.
I’ve had a Brazilian friend say it was largely due to culture but I’ve got to imagine with all the data companies have, there’s been more rigorous studies.
My personal theory is that people just have more “real life” friends they are trying to impress; combined with Valorant being popular due to the ludicrous amount of import taxation.
I know this isn't the lowest hanging fruit but for literally a few USD you could get the necessary hardware (i.e. any microcontroller, like a Raspberry Pi Pico) to emulate an input device with perfect fidelity. What do you do when a device pops up that has the same VID/PID as a real physical mouse and looks identical from the perspective of the HID reports? This is not theoretical FWIW.
I think the gameplan for anti-cheat developers is to just pretend they can't hear this, and to keep ramping up the amount of end-user surveillance for as long as possible. Good luck guys, looking forward to when the cheaters discover Arduino.
edit: Also, while I'm here saying unpopular things, this smarmy blog post gets a lot wrong about cheaters, probably on purpose just to piss them off. For example, something you'll notice with many cheating scandals is that routinely, extremely skilled players choose to cheat to try to get more of an edge, and they're better at it than unskilled players most of the time, too. I think the real reason why most cheaters suck is because the distribution of cheaters is probably mostly because most players suck and some portion of players are prone to cheating. If you need any evidence that cheating can easily become widespread at higher skill levels, check any speedrunning community with a sufficiently bad cheating problem, like Trackmania.
One possibility: The Arduino added input latency cancelling out the cheating benefit.
In the end, what matters to the cheater is being able to win, so if a pixelbot will do the trick and be less detectable, it's probably worth more rather than less. I believe it's just a matter of time before the pieces come together. (Of course, it has to actually be effective in order to really be worth more, but I think that's largely a function of how good the actual aimbot portion can be, and I really think with how good and fast ML has gotten you could really do a lot better these days.)
I'm not describing something theoretical. I didn't use it for cheating, but I have in fact used an RP2040 to emulate an HID mouse and tried to make it look "invisible" from the other end. I don't have code posted to GitHub, but other people do have similar examples. If you wanted to get obsessive about it, it probably wouldn't even be hard to emulate vendor-specific proprietary behaviors, like whatever custom HID reports are used for things like mouse profiles and firmware updates. It requires a bit of reverse engineering, but nothing that crazy.
You can also just do it with a normal Raspberry Pi too, if it's one that has USB OTG support. This is how a lot of those Raspberry Pi KVM solutions send inputs without needing much external hardware.
Let's say you are still not convinced, and assume that this method is doomed to be detected somehow. One last thing: you could always hack up a real USB gaming mouse and rig the sensor up to a microcontroller or FPGA. That is substantially harder and more expensive, but I'm just trying to illustrate that if people are really driven to cheat and cheating is really a big expensive industry, this can be done.
> One possibility: The Arduino added input latency cancelling out the cheating benefit.
I don't believe so, no. You don't have to stick to a specific hardware platform, but if there's one advantage that microcontrollers have over typical computers like Raspberry Pis it's latency. Even if their USB controllers are too limited or broken somehow, you can probably get away with bitbanging USB, especially on something with a nice and beefy microcontroller like the RP2350.
I believe the actual real reason why this wasn't a thing was because in the beginning for CV-based cheating, the CV part itself wasn't good enough. Now with computers having advanced a few more steps and with ML having advanced many many steps, being able to do very good classifiers in real time seems to be viable.
So really, the clock is ticking. There is no practical reason why the I/O part can't be done, so as long as the actual aimbot part works well enough. I'm willing to put my name on that.
Most people lazy for this
I detest "real name" policies and believe pseudonymous/anonymous discourse is helpful, perhaps even vital. But I am starting to believe that tying accounts to a "soul" or more expensive to forge identity is going to be the only way we get out of the Commentdämmerung we have today on social media. Whether it's posting invective, hateful diatribes on a platform or cheating in online games, it has to be more expensive than an email address to participate, but somehow also effectively free for most average people.
Maybe that takes the form of Worldcoin, or maybe some clever zk-snark proof of uniqueness-without-disclosing-identity from state or national ID programs, I don't know. But the current situation of a minority of people making vast swathes of the internet unpleasant is really quite untenable.
Of course the second hard part is figuring out how to do that without fully giving into the people who would want to spy on us all.
At the level of something like spam or cheating, it’s not really a matter of opinion whether or not someone is participating in good faith. Someone who’s only ever one email address away from exploiting your platform that way really needs to be boxed out in a more permanent way.
I would seriously consider paying to be part of a nice walled garden, somewhere that had tight controls over advertising, spam, anonymous trolls, etc. I obviously can't have anything like the Internet I grew up with (in the late 80s, early 90s), that ship has sailed, but I would pay actual money if someone could offer me an online experience that absolutely did not have scams, spam, incessant advertising, etc.
The biggest headache is probably the difficulty in maintaining communication with people who choose other gardens to join. Though perhaps that's more a problem if you want to communicate with people who want to stay outside the gardens and use only the 'free' Internet.
What about criminal charges (e.g., CFAA)?
https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-duty-cheat-maker-ordere...
This is flippant, but incorrect in a general sense. Those who cheat are often near the top of their chosen game, and are looking for that edge to be "the best".
I have started to consider that games should be inherently cheat-resistant, not protected by anti-cheats.
Chess and Go are less affected by cheats by their design. It's not nearly as frustrating to lose to a cheater when they're working with the same information you are, and when they perform actions that a human could reasonably perform.
I find that rulesets enforced by nature or by the design of the system are, to me, more interesting than rulesets enforced by agreement and punishment, even if the "agreement" is not to hack the game. It forces more creativity and makes games offer more relevant experiences instead of copying the same formula.
As for identity systems etc. to permaban cheaters, I think that if it takes increasingly strict levels of monitoring and crackdown and reliance on "trusted authorities" to keep these beloved games playable, it might be better to move on and find new games. Few (if any) individual games or genres of games matter enough to warrant this attention.
Are you sure you don't want to reconsider this position?
And any online game can be "cheated" by having someone better play in your place, or abusing the ranking system, but again that is breaking a social/meta-game rule, not a game rule.
Cheats in FPS games effectively break the rules of the game (wallhacks), or do things that are entirely impossible for a human (instant-lock aimbot). Chess and Go don't have that problem.
I suppose the difference is moot when everyone imagines that they're in a tournament playing for clout, and not playing to learn strategy.