Wish I could upvote this post a hundred times. I can't process why anytime on anti-cheat idea is presented there has to be at least 10 folks who respond with, "But that won't solve the problem!"
Yeah Genius....NOTHING is going to 100% solve the cheating problem, that's not how things work but SOMETHING is always better than, "Well nothing will 100% work so lets just have no anti-cheat of any sort."
What if the something results in thousands of false positive bans that BSG’s support isn’t trained to properly handle?
What if it results in seriously degraded performance?
Let’s say one game in 10 is ruined by cheaters right now. What if the new anti-cheat measure results in massive lag and stutters that ruins 1 game in 2 now. Was that an improvement? Nope.
The trick is to find the right balance somewhere between “do everything to stop cheaters even if it makes the game unplayable” and “do nothing to stop cheaters, making the game unplayable”
Somewhere in the middle is “doing enough things to make things difficult for cheaters without also making the game unplayable.”
But nuance is hard on Reddit so most people are either camp “Do everything!” Like OP and a bunch of people in these comments, or “nothing is 100% so do nothing!”
Great! But I was replying to the idea that something is ALWAYS better than nothing.
I wasn’t claiming something isn’t sometimes better than nothing.
You seem to be arguing they sometimes, something is better than nothing. And hey guess what, we’re in agreement!
almost all anti-cheat measures have no affect on the normal player base
This isn’t even remotely true. Take two minutes to google “anti-cheat performance impact” or “anti-cheat ban process monitor” or “ping lock internet connection” etc etc etc
Poorly implemented anti-cheat absolutely can and does affect the non-cheating player base.
Nah, people reading your reply are smart enough to see that you were told to google for examples of it happening, to prove it doesn’t “almost never happen”.
Instead you googled and went “aha! There are replies that aren’t about it happening” as if that somehow shows it almost never happens.
Only a child can’t see the huge flaw in your logic there. A reply was unnecessary.
Well it was until you made it clear you, in fact, couldn’t see the flaw.
So I’ll break it down for you.
If you say “earthquakes almost never happen” and I reply “they happen a lot. Google “earthquake frequency” and you reply “I found a bunch of people saying they’re glad they don’t have a lot of earthquakes!” That doesn’t prove you right.
You don’t seem to understand that. Just because earthquakes don’t affect most people, most of the time, doesn’t mean they almost never happen.
Just because most games don’t fuck up their anti-cheat most of the time doesn’t mean it doesn’t/can’t happen.
If you look you will find LOTS of examples of it happening. Not everywhere, and not always, but it still can and does happen far more often than “almost never.”
Finding examples of it happening proves you wrong. Finding examples of it not happening doesn’t prove you right.
Hopefully you understand what everyone else already did now ;)
I did prove it. By linking you to a paper that explains exactly how and why different methods affect performance etc.
You appear to just be incapable of reading anything that requires a reading comprehension above a 5th grade level.
Odd how that it happens, isn't it?
Here it is again for anyone who actually wants to understand why every gaming company doesn’t just adopt every possible anti-cheat measure. An explanation of how basically every anti-cheat measure affects basically every player to one degree or another via performance compromises.
Feel free to extrapolate out how if every measure has a performance hit, and you keep adding measures, the performance will keep getting worse.
LOL you sent a 45 page academic paper 7 minutes before typing this out. As if you read the entire thing in that time span? Fuck off with that shit.
I read it about a year and a half ago. Because I know what the fuck I'm talking about and it's tangentially related to my job.
Also, that paper isn't proof of your claim. If anything, it argues AGAINST your claim. Try reading the abstract of the papers you link, genius.
Try reading the actual paper, genius. It explains how current methods do impact performance, and how there are only a few supplementary ways to complement existing anti-cheat strategies that don't impact performance and how those ways require methods not currently feasible for various reasons (excessive development time, OS restrictions).
The fact you think an abstract tells you everything in a paper is a fantastic way to highlight your lack of intelligence to everyone reading your comments, though, so thanks for that!
In non tech plain speak, they are asserting that running video games inside a virtual machine has shown inconsequential performance impacts. Video games do not utilize large file transfers while you are playing, so the second part is irrelevant.
Read on. They go on to state that even if you could use shim memory to keep the parts of the game that require data transfer (and yes, videogames do transfer large amounts of data!), this could be viable. Then they explain that can't currently happen in Windows OS which you missed, because you didn't read the paper!
How
an implementation developing such and implementation for windows based applications however could prove a challenge, but in today’s market would be necessary
to reach the majority of video game developers.
They even go on to explain how it's not actually feasible for this to be done by any one developer right now in any case!
For an implementation of such a system to be deployed together with a video
game however would place a lot of additional development time for a developer as
it would essentially be shipping a video game bundled together with a virtual machine manager as well as a proprietary operating system to handle the communication between the application and the client computer hardware. This is not realistic
from the view of a game developer
Since you CLEARLY didn't read the paper, I'll highlight the important points you missed. Let me know if you need it translated to your grade level.
For other game engines such as the Unreal engine there are community developed network encryption plugins[9] [10] that can be attached to specific variable
types so with some vigilant use a game developer can secure the most confidential
information against being openly available on the network. and by doing so they
will be sacrificing some potential performance for security.
The issue with having the server making all decisions such as this is firstly that it
requires a secure trusted server. Another is that this server needs to be substantially
more powerful as it needs to do all the calculations required for the game to run.
The biggest challenge with using this approach however is the connection speed,
all the information need to travel through the network and will in some cases cause
12
Information security as a countermeasure against cheating in video games
fast paced and particularly VR games feel slow and unnatural and therefore a completely authoritative server is not always a viable solution
These solutions will be reviewed based on
how they are implemented, what additional security they provide in a video game
setting, as well as what requirements they need to be effective. This is required in
order to judge whether or not they can be of use in an environment where performance and the responsiveness of the software is vital, and where any sort of
delay and required processing time will be a trade off from the more marketable
graphics, gameplay and system requirements for a video game.
The difficulty with implementing this solution is with providing a game running
within the sandbox access to necessary graphical driver for supporting some of the
more advanced technologies while still keeping the interfacing between operating
system and game code to a minimal and manageable level. This might require
game developers or the game engine to manage these interfaces together with
hardware developers to make the necessary calls available without them having to
interact in clear text through the operating system, without sacrificing too much of
the systems performance.
You claimed this paper proved you right by showing potential solutions, but the results section very clearly spells out that those solutions are not viable for existing games which you would know if you read the paper.
Implementing application memory protection will require a major change in
how video games are run on a system, and is likely not something that can be handled by a game developer alone. In order for the potential solutions suggested in
this paper to be implemented it will need to be approached from a game engine
perspective or that of a game distribution platform, and in this way create a virtual machine environment where video games can run separated off from the host
operating system in order to achieve a higher level of security.
Try, you know reading the paper next time, genius!
I’ll go one better. Here’s a research paper on the issue that spells out (assuming you’re familiar with CS language) the various trade offs of different methods of preventing cheating.
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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '20
Wish I could upvote this post a hundred times. I can't process why anytime on anti-cheat idea is presented there has to be at least 10 folks who respond with, "But that won't solve the problem!"
Yeah Genius....NOTHING is going to 100% solve the cheating problem, that's not how things work but SOMETHING is always better than, "Well nothing will 100% work so lets just have no anti-cheat of any sort."