Dealing with Multiplayer Hackers - Telegrams for Die Shrink

I will say that a system that is based on users voting to ban someone can be flawed. I use to play Halo PC religiously “the original, not the MCC” in my teenage years up to my early twenties, and had to quit playing because I would get banned within minutes from any server I tried to play on unless I purposefully wiffed kills due to accusations of cheating. I even beat an aim botter by a small margin in one on one gunfights due to the weird lag the original Halo had in which you had to lead your shots based on ping, and apparently being able to do it better than whatever bot the guy was using. I have never cheated in an online game in my life aside from Diablo 2 open battle net, but that was the Wild West where it was basically expected to cheat. I think AI may give us some hope, but the problem is AI that cheats is also going to improve. I don’t think we will ever have a 100% cheater free experience online.

Have you ever heard of the Cronos Zen? It's a device allows you to hook up any controller to your gaming platform of choice. Which also allows you to download scripts for the major fps games for faster aim assist and hair triggers. Another thing worth mentioning about the device it's undetectable and will only show up as connected device like another controller. Lastly there is a 3 month waiting list for the item so it looks like it's a popular item.

Will Arc Xe-HPG include a software stack for Machine Learning and how it will compare the performance of the hardware compared to NVIDIA (in the machine learning field)

Valko Milev

Hey Thunderdunk and Nip-slip, I've been getting aimbotted since counter-strike: source. My first memory of so was probably around 2005, playing a round of CS-source on the Chateau map. An opponent managed to head-shot my entire team in one round, despite the fact I didn't even see where he was shooting us from. For a few rounds I thought "man, some people are on an entire other level of skill", not realizing I was dealing with my first of many experiences with PC game hackers. I want to know why game developers still haven't implemented a player based accusation tool, something like being able to hit tab, right click on a user in the player list, and choose an option that says something like 'this dick is cheating.' When enough additional users, lets say 7-8 also accuse that user, the hacker gets removed from the server, with their account temporarily locked for further investigation. I understand this could be abused, however there is no algorithm like human observation, and the need for players to collectively accuse the hacker would avoid the booting of a player that is simply skilled at a game. I don't know, all I know is something needs to be done, PC game hacking is so bad it's making me consider just connecting a keyboard and mouse to a console, knowing that my chances of dealing with a console hacker are at least less then on PC. Anyways, love the show, I joined Patron just so I could support the channel. Alright, enough ass kissing, stay greasy out there.

Deep dish learning pizza

I wonder if they could create an anti-cheat based on user statistics. Let us say someone is hitting 95% of their shots and is averaging 35 kills a game, they would get banned. Then the company could go and white list accounts that are legit through an appeal process. The appeal process could be a few clips of kills by the account that an employee would review. It would suck for the top 1% of players but they would only have to get banned and white-listed once. Maybe a combination of this with a standard anti-cheat might be helpful. I know it is far from perfect but seems better than some current anti-cheats at the moment.

Many games now have ever more complex skill trees and some of ubisoft’s games such as Valhalla have a micro-transaction that can be purchased early on to boost the speed of the players progression. This aid to griding games and progression is becoming more prevalent in the market. Do you expect the rise of cheating mechanics will see a growth to combat this ever more monetisation trend in the games industry?

Alex

Are you sure you guys don’t suck at the game? /s

Benjamin Cannon

I remember dedicated servers that were community maintained usually were cheater free and if one was to show up they were always quickly taken care of by kickban. I wonder if you or any of your game dev contacts (or your upcoming guest) has any I sights into decision behind not implementing dedicated servers. Battlefield is a big one that hugely suffered from cheaters AND lack of dedicated servers and they seem to finally be correcting course with the upcoming 2042. Not exactly a question but hope you have something to share about this anyway. Cheers!

dj5k

My only experience in hacking was in real-time strategy games when you suddenly had unlimited funds (money hacks) in a single player, but this was more than 20 years ago when I was at the age of 16-18. However soon after that I realized that the game stopped being a fun so It just ruined my experience. Thats why I think cheating is mostly a thing of teenagers trying to proove somebody how good they are especially now in FPS shooters where everybody is comparing their K/D ratio. I dont think they are doing it for fun, they know it will ruin the experience, but they are doing it for beeing better in statistics. Nowadays I am playing only Warzone and YES we are encountering cheaters, but their number is much lower and uncomparable when I played PUBG. In that game you have been unable to kill anybody because you got headshot across half the map sooner than you grabed a weapon, thats how bad it was.

Hey Major Tom and Lieutenant Dan! My only experience of hacking where it was overt and easily recognisable was playing CoD MW2 multiplayer on PS3. This was a few years ago and the game was a few CoDs old by that point but still was the best at the time, in my opinion. It was the only game I played at the time too and entering a match where a hacker could just spin around, firing randomly through walls and headshot you just caused me to stop playing. These days, I play the latest Modern Warfare online as my post work cool down (until BF2042 comes out anyway). I get accused of hacking as, during lockdown, I became very well practised getting headshots with pistols, through doing all the challenges. This upsets me as I'm actually good at a game for once but some mistake me and my skill for a pathetic, child, hacking because they can't play for shit. Sure, successfully hacking a game is an achievement in itself, but it ruins the match for everyone else. Sometimes I think hackers have Joker syndrome ...they just want to watch the world burn...

Go-Kart

Hackers have basically turned me off from online gaming anywhere where I can't run my own dedicated server for friends only. Most recently playing Red Dead Redemption 2 online where players can just spawn explosions on your head repeatedly and make the game unplayable. Griefing is what inspired me to learn how to run my own game servers after first experiencing it fully in Minecraft. I definitely see how it could be fun for an hour or so to go around killing people in game using hacks but what do you think motivates people to keep it up and make online play so unbearable?

Hello Tom and Dan, Anti-cheat software either seems to be ineffective or causes controversy. Denuvo acquired the spotlight for running at the kernel level of your device, and some antiviruses flagged it as a trojan. There were also reports that Denuvo reduced performance, which no gamer wants. Rockstar tried to quarantine hackers to servers for 'bad' players, but this didn't stop cheating with GTA Online. Based on the amount of copies GTA 5 sells I wonder if the hackers just re-buy the game with a new Steam/Xbox/Playstation account. Anyway, do you have a preferred anti-cheat solution? Hope you have a good day!

Endless Logins

The first time I encountered hacking in an online game was playing StarCraft back in the early 2000s. Some hacks were benign, you could change the font of your username and chat text looked in game. The one that took me by surprise was called "stack hack" and it allowed you to toggle the fog of war to stack building on top of one another. For example, what might appear as a single defense structure might actually be 10 on top of eachother, or you could build structures so tight to make in inpenetrable wall. This exploit in the game engine was actually used all the time in custom maps and made for a lot of fun in tower defense type games. I am guilty of stack hacking. My motivation was mostly curiosity, as a kid I had no idea how these tools worked and it was kind of magic to me. I didn't do it to get a competitive advantage but I admit it was fun taking other players by surprise, especially my friends.

shredbird

Two rather separate things: How do you think the disappearance of dedicated servers has influenced hacking/cheating in games? Do you think a level of transparency like League of Legends has where anyone can view a replay of any player might be able to reduce hacking in FPS games like Warzone and Battlefield? When I encounter hackers or see a high degree of hackers in streams of a game I often just get put off from playing the game altogether, this happened for me particularly in R6 Siege, how do you find yourself responding when you find a high degree of hacking in a game?

qhfreddy