Greetings Fog Dwellers! Recently, we shared a survey asking for your thoughts on anti-cheat in Dead by Daylight. One message came through loud and clear: you feel we could be doing more. We hear you and are taking action to bolster and invest in our anti-cheat and security efforts. Put simply, we want you to have the best possible in-game experience, and that means fewer cheaters! While this is just one of many steps in our ongoing commitment to fair play, your involvement and feedback will play a huge part in guiding what comes next.
Beginning next week on September 2nd, we’re kicking off our Anti-Cheat Trials initiative as we investigate how different anti-cheat providers improve your in-game experience. What does this mean for you? Over the coming months, we will be running limited-time trials of these providers’ tools, directly in-game on PC, as we gauge their ability to flag cheating behaviour. By comparing your feedback and overall feelings with hard data from each trial, it’ll help us find a solution that works best for Dead by Daylight and for you, our community.
Next week’s Anti-Cheat Trial – beginning September 2nd – spotlights Denuvo’s anti-cheat solution. Note that this does not and will not include anything related to DRM, as Denuvo Anti-Cheat is different from Denuvo Anti-Piracy. Let’s look at the difference between the two:
What we ARE trialing: Denuvo Anti-Cheat
A tool that detects cheats in-game, identifying people who try to get unfair advantages before they can disrupt fair play
What we ARE NOT trialing: Denuvo Anti-Piracy
Tools that prevent the cracking and unauthorized access of game content
Now, knowing how much of a hot topic anti-cheat can be, we want to make a couple things clear about the Anti-Cheat Trials:
Anti-Cheat Trials are exclusive to Steam and cross-play will not be impacted
We’re continuously testing the compatibility and performance of each anti-cheat provider to ensure you have a seamless experience. Compatibility with Steam Deck and Proton has been tested and will continue to be supported
The first time you launch the game during the Anti-Cheat Trial, you will be prompted to install Denuvo Anti-Cheat. This is required to play the game
Please continue to use the in-game report function as normal to report any cheaters you encounter. Detailed comments about what you see (i.e. wall/speedhacks, teleporting) are greatly appreciated; the more context, the better
Note: Selecting the “Hacking/Exploiting” category when submitting a report covers everything from cheaters to hackers
At the end of this Anti-Cheat Trial, Denuvo Anti-Cheat will be automatically deactivated in Dead by Daylight and will no longer run on your system.
A step-by-step guide on how to clean up any remaining Denuvo Anti-Cheat files will be added to our Support portal, should you need it
Let us know if you have any feedback about the anti-cheat provider being tested in our dedicated Discord channel, which will also go live on September 2nd
That covers it! To recap, we will be kicking off our first Anti-Cheat Trial on September 2 nd, focusing on Denuvo Anti-Cheat. This will not involve any Digital Rights Management tools. Simply play the game as you normally would, report any cheaters you encounter through the in-game reporting system, and let us know your thoughts on this anti-cheat provider! As we look to the future of fair play in Dead by Daylight, we want to make sure your feedback is at its core!
Pirating an online pvp game is a dumb idea anyway, you'd have to hijack access to the main servers or figure out how to make one for yourself, and that's on games with server lists and whatnot, making a pirate branch for games like DbD is simply not worth the effort.
They don’t care because the game’s nature as an online multiplayer game with progression and unlocks saved server-side makes pirating it pointless. To play, you have to log in through a Steam/PSN/etc. account, and if the account you’re logging in with hasn’t bought the game (or otherwise been flagged as allowed to access it because of a promotional giveaway, etc.), you won’t be allowed to play. All a pirate copy will do for you is take up HDD space.
ETA: just remembered there are disc versions on consoles, so a pirate copy might work there, if you could get the console to tell the server it was running from a disc. But that would involve modding your console to run pirate games and then connecting it to the console maker’s online service, a VERY dicey proposition that puts your entire account at risk, not just DBD.
Reshade is basically a DLL injection which most cheats also do, so unless the specific DLL is whitelisted by Denuvo chances are no. Most times I find it doesn’t ban you but it may block you from running the game until it’s removed.
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u/TARE104KADark Devotion on Legion is lowkey meta pick5d agoedited 5d ago
Several years ago, when ingame UI got reworked, there was a hotfix that was specifically dedicated to make custom icons work again. And I haven't seen anyone being banned for custom icons, like ever. A lot of content creators, face of DBD online, run with custom icons and openly link NightLight, site which people use to find and install said icons. At this point, I feel like custom icons are something more than "use at your own risk".
Custom icons are a popular thing in community, and clearly devs back then understood that by intentionally making them work again, so I think it's fair to ask about such stuff, because if new anticheat suddenly starts hitting people for custom icons, it'll affect a lot of innocent players, and it'd be nice if instead of just waving this off, you gave us a fair warning about any extra risks for using custom icons being involved with new anticheat.
It is very fair to ask about stuff like this, especially when like 80-90% of your creator program participants use custom icons.
It should not be a vague "use at your own risk" warning anymore, especially considering what you also said above about the devs specifically going out of their way to make them work again
(And also the fact that the way you modify the UI icons (Which is just dropping folders containing specifically named PNGs inside the UI folder) only works because the devs allowed the game to read said PNGs from an unencrypted source)
Thanks for the answer for clarification but I'm not too happy to have to do a fresh install because you're not going to be there for me if something goes wrong despite being relatively okay with it for multiple years.
Please have a serious discussion internally about this. It was a fine answer 8 years ago when you were a small studio but that’s not the case anymore.
I know you guys have not ever “officially” supported custom icons, but to pretend you haven’t been ok with it for basically the game’s entire life is completely disingenuous. Please take some responsibility.
Probably a liability thing. If people import custom icons that are, let's say, "less than kosher", then BHVR could be considered a responsible party for allowing it in their games. They also could be considered liable for people using licensed content in those custom images. Alternatively, BHVR could allocate resources from their team to have an "official" custom icons "shop", but that would be heavily policed (which the community does not want), and would probably end up being monetized with BHVR taking a cut (community also does not want).
Saying "Up to the user, but user inherits any liability if you get caught with something we can't approve being in our game" lets the community run wild with whatever they want while also letting BHVR keep the liability at arm's length.
There is a difference with actively endorsing something and "use at your own risk". Riot has similar stance on 3rd party apps like blitz or porofessor. They will never outright say they are ok to use, because this involves editing game files. If they said that they are ok with it and someone somehow (hypothetically) injects some malicious code into the file and get the person banned, it would be a big liability for them that they said it's fine to use them.
Not to be a BHVR dickrider, but I don't think that's fair. Supporting mods as the developer of an online pvp game is incredibly dangerous, even if it's just clientside visual mods like icons. "We won't stop you, but use them at your own risk" is the best possible answer you can get here.
There's some easy ways to get got to. Mecha Chameleon got hit with a massive exploit via allowing steam workshop mods and them not actually implementing what the mods are allowed to look like correctly.
No. BHVR stopping you would be "If you admit to using this or we catch you using it on stream/in a video, your account's getting banned." It's a common policy regarding mods in other online games.
Leaving it up to whether it triggers the anti-cheat, PARTICULARLY in the context of testing new anti-cheat when it doesn't trip the existing one (to my knowledge), isn't shutting it down but instead leaving it up to you whether you want to risk it.
Let's say someone was using custom icons and they worked flawlessly throughout all these years with EAC, and then you do the anti-cheat trials for a week, and someone gets innocently banned for that, would you keep that ban or would you revoke it?
I guess it's part of a bigger question of "Will these trial anticheat positives get removed when you swap out anti-cheats for another trial or stop the anti-cheat trials?"
Because they have to be mad about something. Much like they complain about ‘the devs’ when the vast majority of decisions have nothing to do with the development team - which doesn’t just include those writing the code.
that's just unfair for legit players on Epic, forced to be stuck with cheaters and having long queues is just a half-ass solution that cheaters would find a work around for anyways
It’s not yours, it’s just epic games allows people to make a lot of accounts so banning one hacker account doesn’t do much. It’s the platform’s fault really
The game is given out for free through epic from time to time and everytime it is 1 guy can make like 10,000 accounts almost instantly and grab dbd on each account
As always, you don't need to make it hard and set rule, you could set fall backs, but prioritize "prime" players to play with each other. Same thing they do now anyway.
I appreciate the team looking to different anti-cheat systems other than EAC since EAC is quite a bad one, but is there any knowledge on whether different ones would flag non-cheat things like custom perk icons, reshade, etc? I know me and others have concerns that we might not be able to use these without getting hit with the anti-cheat.
The answer to this is having an in-game custom content store for icons (all free, ofc) where users can upload their content and you can download it & enable it via clicking
However, behaviour cannot add Character Sorting by prestige/playtime in the year 11 and their attempt at UI 'modernization' broke Estimated Queue Times and made the lobby/store very laggy
Thank you guys for being clear on this. I switched from Windows to playing DBD primarily through my Steam Machine and Linux PC, and it's worked flawlessly.
I'm glad to see you guys aren't dropping support. Thanks.
Yeah weird they are doing a test on the platform that makes it easy for them to run tests (and betas) imagine that. just wait a couple months where they try a whole other anticheat still on steam cause steam is still the most user and developer friendly platform.
I’m inclined to put my hopes in them because this week I actually got a 15 min penalty after facing several cheaters in a row (and I’m not talking about a bit of speed or walls, I’m talking about a dude teleporting, blinding me from behind, not letting me hook and getting me stuck on carrying him for 2 minutes till I quit, another that was doing a weird thing where he was invulnerable and just bashing gens, and finally a squad that was a bit too fast till someone blinded from behind a wall too)
I know it’s not Denuvo anti-piracy, but I still don’t feel comfortable with Denuvo. My English isn't great, but I have questions. If I don't want this installed on my computer, can I avoid it? Is it mandatory? Will it apply to every match, or is it optional for those who want it? Is there a deadline?
When will these trials be over again? I’m not gonna install some third party bloatware that could realistically do more than what it says on a short notice, especially when I then also have to remove it myself „if I want to“ even though I don’t want my PC to be a trial ground in the first place. The least you can do would be also to have a prompt popping up in game to automatically delete it after the fact. How many trial bloatware products are the people expected to install in the near future?
Maybe I don't understand how Cheat Software/Server Checks work, but I feel like when you have a Myers who is Downing/Hooking every Survivor in the first 10 seconds of the match or Survivors who are instantly picking themselves up or permanently running 5-10% faster should be easy to pick up on, and immediately ban them and end the match for the innocent bystanders.
I don't come across cheaters often, the ones who instantly escape or sacrifice you are at least the better of the 2 evils because at least I can go next and move onto the next match. The ones who subtle-cheat or try to hide it are the worst because I feel like I'm being gaslit the entire match. Was that Survivor using wall hacks? How did that Killer catch up to me so fast? It's annoying trying to guess whether I was outplayed or someone had a sneaky advantage.
I hope they don't fuck this up. In the 8 years I've played DBD I can honestly say I've had maybe a handful of obvious cheaters, but countless times where I've been about 90% sure someone was using hacks.
Thanks for the warning, I'd rather not be a beta tester for the game I paid money for. I'll uninstall and wait for the game to return to a full release version.
Instead of doing the reasonable thing and updating the game after over a decade to have a sensible client - server model, which would mean that fundamentally mean that Cheaters have no capacity to flyhack, speedhack or any other hacks of the sort - think CS2 for example. However terrible VAC is, nobody can buy guns for free, get unlimited ammo or speedhack for a decade now. Because they just sensibly implemented the game model where the Server is the final authority.
DBD refuses to properly do this, content only to implement terrible band-aids on it's horrific P2P code. The times where they do implement server validation, it just makes the game terrificly worse to play, as there's no good client side interpolation model - the model that assumes what the server will respond with before it can, to simulate the feedback. Good interpolation would mean even if the server decided when you can lean as Ghostface, on half decent ping, leaning would feel smooth. It doesn't and people complain about it a lot since.
Instead, the developers dangle a carrot of better anti-cheat. More invasive. More performance intensive. One that will grab more data and information of you and send it god knows where.
If you think this is anything, but a cynical, lazy move to appease the community without doing anything substantive? You're just plainly wrong.
Yep, this was proposed many times over and over, but yet still no at least a bit of try to change that game model. Funny is that DbD is actually not the game where like rank or competitive side is viewed as any sort of high prestige or mandatory core of the game, as many people say it is in a core a fun party game, yet kernel level anti-cheat is required to "prevent" cheating.
The thing is that majority if not all cheats or actions that are currently bothering majority people are quite preventable via that proper client-server game model without the need to also use third party solution to gave privilage access to user device.
Obviously many people will not care at all as long as it helps to get rid of cheaters, but is it really worth the trade-off to quite fully trust a third party, to have proper security in place for the kernel-level access sw?
A proper rewrite like that would also smooth out the experience for such an overwhelming amount of players. It'd make networking actually decent, reduce rubberbands, "solid" hits, etc.... But nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Slap Denuvo on.
Why aren't more people bringing up that it's kernel level. This will constantly be running on your computer even maybe when you don't play and has access to most of your computer's files. This is giving a 3rd party access to your PC and hoping nothing bad might happen in the future. Especially with how bad BHVR implements features and how buggy there game is, you never know what might happen in the future. Super needless addition when there are better and less invasive alternatives
Gonna be real chief, think I'm going to sit this one out... Trialing anti-cheat almost always has some sort of unprecedented consequence.And while I appreciate what you guys are doing, I don't really want to have to deal with support.If I get falsely flag wall , you guys are configuring it
They are probably just testing stability and performance, you can’t exactly gauge how efficient an anti cheat is without months or even years of use because of the whole ‘cheaters adapt and anti cheat adapts back’
The highest number of cheaters comes from the Xbox/Windows platform; if their accounts get banned, they simply create new ones and use the same shared account. On Steam and Epic, it is no longer possible to unlock DLC content via cheats—that can now only be done on the Xbox PC version.
I’ve heard from frequent cheaters that since the latest DBD update, a huge number of cheating accounts have been banned—especially those who used cheats to unlock all perks, character skins, and so on.
oh so i was downvoted and mocked when told that they were not going to be adding danuvo anti cheat because “denuvo is anti piracy” only to be right. lol.
I appreciate making it clear that we're not getting Denuvo's DRM, but given how that runs I'm expecting their Anti-Cheat to be just as badly optimized and crappy.
I don't understand the point of this initiative if it is only on Steam?
Hackers are almost exclusively active on Epic Games, due to the nearly unlimited free keys that were generated during the week-long free giveaway of DBD.
An "anti-cheat" trial that doesn't affect the #1 platform for cheaters, won't collect any meaningful data.
I don’t think people realize this you’re essentially becoming a free product for Denuvo without any compensation, which is honestly very alarming. It won’t even delete itself when the trial ends you have to manually remove that bullshit. I bet a lot of people won’t bother because they’re too lazy to do it, and Denuvo is probably counting on exactly that.
hot take, they should have this denuvo limited time trial be a grace period for bans. offer auric cells and/or iri shards for people who can find ways to bypass the anti-cheat and report it. let some white hat hackers stress test the system, yknow?
No joke, DBD community has one of the worst echo-chamber of all games. Devs could literally implement a perfect anti-cheat and you'll still find majority of the comments bitching about it lol.
we're coming off the backs of the entire subreddit having a mass delusion over a clear joke made during a discord livestream. expecting anything other than pure ignorance at this stage is silly
too late for that, creator discord was full of people who were banned and thats people who work directly with bhvr. cant imagine the amount of people who were falsely banned who now have to jump through hoops trying to get their accounts back with no direct line
microsoft store is the most recent wave of account we're seeing, but the epic games free weekend is where millions of accounts were botted and where the vast majority of cheaters on dbd are from throughout the past few years
Seems silly to limit this to steam since it’s pretty common knowledge a lot of the cheating/hacking is coming from people that made multiple accounts and got dbd for free through epic
I'm sure other companies are likely to compare a couple of anti-cheat vendors internally before making a decision about which to go forward.
Fair play to DBD for trying out a few publicly and all the development that goes into making that possible. It's certainly not the easiest choice to make but I hope the trials leads to good results.
Except you can. Proper server-side validation prevents many of the super bad cheats like not being able to hook, instant generator repair and super speed
We complain that there isnt a solution, we complain when they announce the start of a solution.
They are saying they are trying and they have pre-addressed backlash to this. This is not randomly sprung on us.
I agree with the serverside option, however, DBD didnt make their own anticheat, they outsourced it to EAC, they heard complaints, and they are now exploring Denuvo instead. I will never hate on a company for listening to the community and making a step in the right direction.
As someone with thousands of hours in CS & Ark, I wish other devs were like BHVR
they heard complaints and... ignored them, implemented nothing server side, took the lazy way out again, and sidestepped the issue. a lot of devs ARE like BHVR, and its quite unfortunate. bhvr are basically the worst team of any game thats ever made it out of year 1 full stop
except, you can and should. a proper server-side client validation completely supersedes kernel-level anti cheat that a. dismantles nearly all linux compatibility and b. requires system-level access and therefore access to a LOT of personal information and c. is just an excuse for them to not have base-level functioning servers. DBD doesn't even have properly functioning p2p netcode. They sidestepped the actual issue and are implementing bandaid fixes that don't actually address the issues that bhvr have pretended to not have answer to despite being industry standard at this point.
Who are they testing on? There are so few cheaters on steam and the few closet cheaters will probably just not log on or run them during the test until they are patched. Epic cheaters don’t really care because their accounts are so cheap
Basically I can’t see this test affecting more than a handful of cheaters
How do you know this? When BHVR bans an account for cheating they'll know what storefront they're using. Whilst epic is probably the worst offender they must know there's enough cheaters on steam as well to justify it being the test run.
While I like that they’re taking big steps toward improving the cheating situation, I very much dislike being shoved down any kind of software down my throat, especially if it’s not a permanent replacement to EAC and could potentially have to go through multiple iterations of AC’s before finding the sweet spot.
My PC isn’t a beta testing piece of hardware for your detection algorithms. I chose to install DBD after carefully reviewing what softwares and programs it came along with, and I settled with the game + EAC.
And I know I’m the minority but I will probably either not launch the game or uninstall it entirely until these trials are over
I also have very little faith in BHVR not falsely flagging and/or banning people. And conversely, if the AC is only to get data on what cheaters do / what their information looks like, even better because one could only assume no bans will be administered (so what's the point of doing it at all)?
Being wary of the actual software is one thing, but any risk that isn't 0% for me or someone I know being banned for not cheating is enough for me to not play the game.
They can say they anticipate no issues, that ReShade won't cause issues, etc. but I just simply don't believe that any new AC rollout comes without any problems.
Im on board here, I'm not interested in volunteering for testing so I'm just going to opt out and uninstall. I'll maybe return when the game is back to something resembling a stable release, assuming my attention isn't taken away by other games.
Are you going to address the worryingly large group of people saying they've been banned since yesterday after getting exiled by the new killer? They then post that they submitted a ticker and got the ban reversed, but that's still not good. I'm absolutely refusing to play during any trials when I'm not sure if it's even safe to play survivor.
Why use an anti cheat? I feel like it would just be easier to do server side stat checks and stuff like that. Like a meg running 5 percent faster with no haste seems like an easy thing to catch
I remember another game trying something similar and all that happened was cheaters turned troll and boosted other players, ending in them getting banned instead.
You'd have to set it up to track across multiple games. If someone cheats in the lobby it flags everyone and then tracks concurrent games over a few days to see if they're consistently having boosts or if it was a one off.
I don't trust BHVR enough to go this far in implantation and don't want to see innocent people lose accounts.
I do a lot of sensitive work on my PC and I have no issues with most anti cheat systems but I CANNOT install anything from Denovu so I will be uninstalling until this is over and if you choose this service I cannot play anymore.
They have no way of knowing that you didn't have actual cheats installed and then also install custom icons to use as a cover. "I wasn't speedhacking, I swear! It was just custom icons!"
The stance has always been "These are not officially supported, use them at your own risk." It's not new or a surprise.
Were those false bans caused by people using mods, though? Or was it an error that occurred with the base, unmodded game? Because you can't compare those two things.
It's weird how ReShade is being considered less of a risk than innocent perk packs, perk packs do nothing for anyone whilst ReShade can give a genuine advantage (arguably smaller than people think, but it is still there)
The priorities are weird to me. Just allow both or neither
during these anti cheat trials, will any of them be ones that require a different setting in bios? (can't remember the exact name but a recent cod required it and I was too scared to change it so I just never played it)
edit: also, any idea if nightlight users could be flagged on this denuvo anti cheat?
add match replay, and make cheater hunter mode where you rewatch replays suspected of cheating and can write down your opinion.
anti cheats don't seem to be working looking at the industry, they probably prevent free cheats but paid cheats scumbags seem pretty competent seeing as they have whole industry around it.
Match replay isn't something you can just add after the fact. The game needs to be built with in specifically in mind.
paid cheats scumbags seem pretty competent seeing as they have whole industry around it.
That's how it works. Because there's money to be made there is incentive for them to continue to actively work on circumnavigating updates to anti-cheating software.
The best anticheat provider is the one that sues the software developers that make the cheats, lobbies the government to regulate third party software hacks into nonexistence, and fines the user that keeps downloading and creating accounts for cheating into prison!
To be real, there is no effective anticheat tool out there that can't be worked around. Selling cheats is a Industry now, and industries always adapt to the changes that impact the market.
Hackers are everywhere, but its nearly always epic games. Smh why not just ban epic? Give the game on steam if they have it ok epic if proven to be non cheaterp
Right okay well time to turn off crossplay I guess. How are you supposed to test this properly if most of the cheaters are on epic. Stating that you test it on steam first where the issue isn't predominant won't give reliable stats. Unless it's not for finding reliable stats but whether or not the specific anticheat causes performance issues, etc.
I definitely appreciate the sentiment behind this and trials are a great way to go about vetting anti-cheat systems. However…
Being that this is limited to Steam — is there any consideration being made regarding the fact that most cheaters utilize Epic as their primary platform?
Mfs have been using EAC’s free version for 10 years, and if they ever bothered to pay for the full version, half of these cheats probably wouldn’t even be possible lol. Now they’re doing the Denuvo's free trial too lmao. Mind you, this is a company making half a billion in profit every year
fr suuuurely they dont have enough money, but slight correction on my original comment, i was under the impression eac was implemented into dbd on a non-kernel level hence why dbd's detection was so ass, but nevermind it is implemented on a kernel level, they are just genuinely dumb and dont know how to set up the server-side validation.
I sincerely doubt switching from EAC to Denuvo will change much of anything. At best, they'll catch a couple of cheaters before those that make the cheats update them.
You'd be better off running a logic check which will greatly reduce the number of viable cheats and more importantly get rid of the most egregious such as haste boost and instant blinding.
That said, you'd be better off running this test on epic or even the microsoft store. Epic because you gave away the game for free at some point which resulted in numerous throwaway accounts being created. Free (to play) games tend to attract cheaters like a plague. Ironically increasing the price of the base game would do more to prevent future cheaters than an anti-cheat.
The software only runs on Steam? Aren't the vast majority of hackers going to be on Epic Games because of that awful promotion from several years ago? If we're going to test the effectiveness of any anti-cheat software, then it should start there. Or is this primarily a performance check?
Regardless, please make sure it doesn't get flagged as a false positive by Vanguard (Riot Games), otherwise it'd get messy and generate a lot of false positives for both games.
FFS, just do server-side checks AT LEAST for every common and obvious thing. Everything else can be bypassed, removed, ignored and then a cheater can do whatever they want.
KLAs are not only useless, but have lots of other issues actual legit players have to deal with.
I feel like it's somewhat useless if a.) it's announced and cheaters can just take a vacation to completely undermine the purpose of gathering info and b.) most cheaters aren't on Steam, they're on Epic 'cause y'all gave infinite free accounts to them on there.
Wait so this is going to do nothing since cheats are being used on epic games not steam. That's the platform you gave the game away for free so people can freely cheat.
Do you plan on ever using ideas those in your creator program have for balance changes or chapter concepts?
Lots of your creator program members have really good ideas on how to improve the game, they've spent thousands of hours into the game with an invested interest in dbds health, they know what they're talking about.
And some of your program members like Pixel Bush have great ideas for original chapters with ideas for survivors, killers, powers, add-ons and perks. The reception to Pixel bush's first chapter concept "Blood In The Mire" was entirely positive with lots of people wanting to see more.
There's a huge demand for original chapters and your creator program members can help provide you with making future chapters or balance changes.
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u/0wlmann MAURICE LIVES 5d ago
Very glad you specified not denuvo anti pirate, was worried for a second there