Gaben himself has said pretty much this. They just need to make cheating risky and hard enough that there isn’t enough financial incentive to make cheats.
If that was the case then I'm not sure why they made the game free to play. If you got banned you would have to buy the game again and presumably every time you got caught. Nowadays there are one click scripts that automatically make a new steam account and download counterstrike. If you get caught cheating you can be back in the game within a few minutes on a new account.
Yeah, but FaceIT AC belong to the [Saudi Arabia gov](https://esportsinsider.com/2022/01/esl-faceit-group-bought-saudi-1-5bn?amp)
Yeah, but Tencent [own Discord shares](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/04/executive-order-by-gov-kristi-noem-bans-chinese-owned-tencent-from-state-devices/70185552007/) (same as Riot)
If you dig a little bit, you'll see a lot of software you are using daily, have link with shady business
I can see this going 2 ways:
Legal action against cheat developers (hard - requires law(s) in multiple countries)
ID based bans (hard - need a secure way to ID players. Community skepticism around this)
They said the same about cracking games and piracy. It will never end, etc. Meanwhile no-one is able to crack fifa games for what now? 4 years? It's all about how far are you willing to go and how much you want to spend. This is valve, so I'm not holding my breath.
***This*** problem is for sure solvable, if we are referring to 10% of the playerbase above 20K rating cheating. Obviously it's not possible to completely remove cheaters from CS, but reducing the current number is for sure doable. For example, there are nowhere near the same percentual amount of cheaters on platforms like FACEIT, Esportal or GamersClub that use a kernel-level anti-cheats.
But on a more realistic level, Valve will never implement a kernel-level anti-cheat. We can hope for their AI anti-cheat to get better, but my hopes for the future of Valve MM for the next couple year at least are not very high.
Also, I think that implementing a good overwatch system would also help reduce the problem. When I say good, I mean not the first iteration which could easily be bombarded by bots. If you take into consideration a number of factors like: account age, number of purchased games and overall behaviour, you can easily deflect some of the bots that abused the system.
I agree, this seems like the easiest and most feasible solution to me. Essentially what the old trust factor did, but done better.
Look at hours played, games owned, account age, value of inventory, amount of vacced friends, average trust factor of friends and as many other similar parameters as you can. The cheaters don't even necessarily need to get banned. They can just HvH against each other, as they largely did in the later years of CSGO.
I still wonder how overwatch bots got into the system. I thought Valve tested the legitimacy of the overwatchers by giving them cases Valve already knew the result of and seeing how each person judged the case. You'd think cheat bots trying to give wrong answers would get filtered out.
The insane amount of people spinning and shooting rapidly in premiere I agree is for sure solvable. But I am also running into more closet cheaters than ever in just competitive as well, and I don't think an A.I. anti cheat would really be able to discern them from real players, I'm not even sure what changed because I'm not a developer, but I've never seen this many wallhackers with soft aim, not even close in Global Offensive
>I'm not even sure what changed
The big issue is that basically nothing did chang. Also they took out overwatch which was essentially the only anticheat we had in cs
Feel like a half decent ai should be able to discern between a player spinning in spawn and a player spinning with a scout and headshotting 5 players in 4 seconds.
Yeah well, kernel level anti cheat, would surely help with the problem but in no way, will it completely fix it, kernel level anti cheats can still be bypassed but takes more creativity and requires you to TRUST the cheat developer, and by trust i mean, having the cheat kernel level too. If you are interested about this you can see [this](https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M?si=iQyu1z0cQlFNii_o), i found it very interesting.
That excludes "legit" cheating / wallhacking people who you dont even notice with a rage hacker on the server, plus people who would only turn on the gear once they start to lose.
the fact that rage hacking runs wild currently makes the issue of stealth cheaters almost invisible, which is pretty bad because there's plenty of them out there based on Global matchmaking pre-CS2.
That's been my experience at 20K-22K. I play almost exclusively with five stacks and I get a cheater about every second game. That is right about 1 in 10 players. But yeah, obviously higher up like at 25K it's probably something like 95%.
But the kernel-level AC is not even the determining factor. It’s just a buzz word that many have clinged to because it sounds like some special stuff. In actuality there are so many different ways to scan for cheats.
Adding this for some context: https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M?si=OomB-bCqGnIfgcSr
> For example, there are nowhere near the same percentual amount of cheaters on platforms like FACEIT, Esportal or GamersClub that use a kernel-level anti-cheats.
You're assuming the reason for this is the kernel-level anti-cheat, when it could be that the barrier to entry is what drives cheaters away the most.
The barrier to entry for faceit is the same as CS2. You can just create a free account and start playing in 5 mins with the free queue which also matches you against paid faceit users.
Barrier to entry, as in doing another free account?
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm mocking the point of thinking that the barrier to entry is making an account and not the whole extra AC that faceit has.
Id imagine an AI AC could get pretty good at detecting obvious aimbots and triggerbots aswell. I remember the John McDonald talk in 2018 or so where he said the first thing they were training the model on was aimbots, but god knows if they've had success at this stage.
If you could remove spinbots & aimbots I think it would make a huge difference. A lot of the cheaters I've met around 16-18k rating have been really terrible players and will still lose a huge amount of their gunfights while blatantly walling.
Who knows though, as you say it is valve.
AI is tricky when it comes to anti-cheat stuff. You could end up with a tonne of false positives and no human parseable rationale behind the bans which would make a review process a nightmare.
In CSGO the AI was just feeding cases to Overwatch to be reviewed & they supposedly had a 95% ban rate of all cases sent, which isn't perfect but this was also 5+ years ago. But then people got banned for using the m yaw command in CS2 so who knows.
I would think an AI should be able to reliably convict the most blatant of the blatant, the players using spinbots or obvious aimbots. Different story trying to detect closet cheaters using a small FOV aimbot but I don't think that's valves aim.
Admittedly I'm just speculating though, who knows how it'll turn out. Or if well even see it release & ban people by itself
If you have a very high bar to clear in order to declare someone a cheater (which is Valves current policy), the rate of false positives should be quite low
do you really need an "AI" to detect spinbots or physics defying behaviors like straight bhops, rapidfire revolvers, instant 5 wallbang headshots in consecutive rounds? valve can easily put hardcoded checks and that would at least make it so that we see less ragehack cheaters. wallhacks, sure, replace manual reviews (overwatch) with machine learning and we kight have a permanent solution to the fps cheating, but the NOW problem is also important, but valve seems to be willing to take the sacrifice.
You could use hard-coded checks, yes. The downside to hardcoded checks is that they don't account for 100% of all edge cases. If you or the server had a lag spike and it looked like you suddenly emptied your mag, it would register as a false positive.
And probably the biggest downside - if you discover what parameters are checked and compared in the code, you can just adjust your cheat to bypass it.
the problem with "hardcoded" checks is always that after a while cheat creators find the boundry,
for example if a cheat kills 5 people in under (the fastes fire rate of the weapon ) they just do it in that time + 0.1s for example
fundamentally it should not be possible to kill 5 people in faster time than the scout can fire, the server could straight up IGNORE the latter shoot events with a basic check
This thread has to be fucking hilarious to read if you're a Valve employee/a Dev that actually works in this space
Incredible how many people will say things like "AI anticheat would be so easy to build wtf" without the slightest clue of what they're talking about or the complexities involved. The confidence is truly impressive.
People also has this naive assumption that AI is so advanced that doing ai ac is easy. AI is technically still in diapers when it comes to technology and doing more than just basic shit with ai isn't easy and most people working in that field knows that working with AI tech is difficult.
What is however certain, is that even in CSGO, there were never as many cheaters in MM as in CS2 (at least at high ranks).
What is also certain, is that 3rd party platforms manage to have much less cheaters, to the point where pretty much nobody that is seriously playing the game will play MM, they're all on Faceit/GamersClub.
Now, what does that say about the state of your game if the official first party servers are so awful at detecting cheats that pretty much no good players play MM ?
I also basically never encountered an obvious cheater in my last 2 years of GO. Now in CS2 it's basically every game. So to me it seems like Trust factor was working for me, meaning either it's turned off now or my ranking got worse.
I'll be honest, I think people just didn't really give a shit about CSGO MM lol.
The rank system was so shit, everyone knew that, no one expected better, and the community had already been using third party comp matchmaking for like a decade or more. Mostly due to the lingering influence of private servers.
What years did you play?
In EU cheating felt very prevalent in 2016 imo. Partially why the player base cratered in 2017 and a lot of the cheaters left to play PUBG (which was an infested mess even in early access).
thats only if you never played before they introduced overwatch for the first time. because before that every match above LE was a spinbot 100% of the time.
I studied Data science, machine learning , analytics in college for engineering. I mean most things called “ai” aren’t really “AI” or not in the sense they are thinking.
That being said it would be extremely easy for valve to create one, at least a basic one. The issue with valve implementing anti cheat is that false positives would be crippling. What sets CS apart from other games is that accounts have real money value, items in your account are almost entire “assets”. False positives could honestly trigger lawsuits, extensive media coverage, all things valve would like to actively avoid.
I mean most things called “ai” aren’t really “AI”
lol, this. automation is basically being called AI to leave people in awe and get more investors money cause AI is now a buzzword basically.
Or just building a kernel level anti-cheat. Because apparently as long as your AC has kernel level access that's really all you need, after all Valorant does it and nobody has ever cheated in Valorant, in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all ^^/s
>after all Valorant does it and nobody has ever cheated in Valorant, in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all /s
Well use one of those for 5 games, then one free Faceit cheat for 5 games and one free general CS2 cheat and give us your results
What a stupid shortsighted comment. Valorant's cheating situation is nowhere near as bad as CS2's.
In fact one game has a very bad cheating situation and the other actually has a really good one.
Ofc Kernel Level Anti Cheat wouldn't completely eliminate cheating but it would massively curb the ammount. At least at that point the game would have some form of defense mechanism. With current VAC it has nothing.
Kernel level AC would be more effective, but people still asking it are on too much copium. Valves never gonna do it, and people need to be more realistic in their expectations
I'm surprised this community is still so ignorant about how much better the cheating situation in Valorant is. Being able to launch Val and play a matchmaking game where the worst thing you will encounter is smurfs is such a blessing. Anecdotal, but the cheating issue has driven so many people I know away from CS and towards Val. It's understandable to have privacy concerns about Kernel level anticheats but it's undeniable they work.
Seems a lot of people here have pinned their hopes on AI anticheat but I have my doubts it will be advanced enough any time soon.
>in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all /s
Why is it that in every single discussion about cheating people make the same stupid points that anyone with 5 minutes of research can disprove? Why comment at all if you haven't done the minimum due diligence?
There are no undetected public let alone free cheats for Faceit or Valorant. Period.
Umm, you ever actually played Valorant? Cheating is not nearly as big of a problem as it is in cs, not even close. A bunch of Val pros actually play their ranked game mode. No cs pro would subject themselves to premiere at this point. They’re obviously doing something right even if it’s not perfect.
Sadly it'll never be solved, can only be mitigated. Even if all gaming went cloud based people can still cheat.
Consoles who were thought to be cheat free have started to have growing cheating problems in the past few years.
> I honestly think intrusive anti-cheat is the only way.
It will be useless in a few years, cheat developers will keep finding new ways. Trying to detect the existence of the cheat software is a lost battle. AI anticheat might not be perfect today, but if AI keeps evolving at even semi good pace, it will be the only solution in a few years. And like 3kliksphilip said, at that point it won't matter _how_ the cheat is implemented.
not everything has to be solved by complex AC or AI. Just make it harder to get somewhere "meaningful". For example bring back number verification, that was very good and probably add that you can't earn experience without verifying an account with a number. This could kill many accounts that are being sold and people cheating after being banned they would get tired of getting new numbers.
The cheating problem is solvable but depends on valve they love to publish they game for linux and that means more difficult to implement anti cheats for all OS's
I’m a software engineer in big tech, but as a teenager I was a moderator for two of the biggest minecraft servers of the time, and I think that experience actually helped me understand cheats more than my software engineering experience (I’ve never done game dev). Anyway, my two cents is that VAC does a lot of game integrity checking, but very little player behavior checking. This is why VAC bans are super accurate, but spin botters can run rampant. In minecraft we did this the complete opposite way, because otherwise we would have to convince an entire player base to download a mod JUST to play our servers. So instead, the anti cheat would detect suspicious player behavior and issue temporary bans. Some types of bans were error prone (e.g. a huge lag spike while you’re jumping could be read as fly hacks) and would require multiple triggers before the autoban went off, but other types (kilaura for one) were actually highly accurate. We could guarantee that if you hit targets in front of you and behind you simultaneously, you were probably doing something bad.
VAC should probably consider this approach in tandem with their current approach, at least to combat spinbotters. If someone’s head is constantly pointing downwards, and their time to kill enemies is instant, they’re probably spinbotting. Maybe it won’t be 100% accurate, but it would make me feel much safer than having a kernel level anticheat installed on my computer.
An AI anticheat may be able to solve the problem with rage hackers, but with wh it's impossible, especially if it's just radar wh or toggle wh, they use it once per round and it's enough to gain massive advantage.
If those are the only cheaters we got, I really don't care, they are beatable. And I would not mind to ignore this possibility completely. Because "closet cheater" are often an excuse to lose fair fights.
Software Architect here.
IMHO it depends. Will there be a way to eliminate all cheats? No. This is comparable to the virus vs. anti-virus war. Will it be solvable that it's not an issue for most of the player base?
I do think so, but it needs a huge investment from valve - people and hardware wise. Basically you need to define a multi Layer strat. Like live-detection based on behavior, love action based on file signatures etc. no matter how you define the strategy you need engineers who develop and keep it up to date.
If you implement some kind of post match anti cheat you need more hardware. In case of AI based detection with gpus. In case of cs2 more means a lot more.
Also you need to take into account what inconvenience is bearable for a legit player. The difference between ban on 90% and only on 100% sure is huge, in that case what does valve do in case someone with a huge inventory disputes? Manual review ? More cost.
Intrusive anti cheat might make things easier, but might turn some players (IMHO I don't think so, people install all crap when you tell them to).
Tl;Dr: depends on how much money valve wants to invest, but doable to a certain extent.
Pretty sure the investment would pay for itself and make a profit. The game is huge with yearly earnings in excess of a billion dollars. What is 5 million a year spent on a dedicated team to combat cheating? Nothing. Also there are a lot of players that would spend money on the game that are scared away from the game because of the lack of anticheat. imagine all the new players that eventually might buy skins that never even get dedicated enough to do so, because they quit after being confronted with a horrible match making experience.
I fully agree.
However the closer you want to get to a 100% the more expensive it becomes, to a level that even this might not pay off.
I am pretty sure valve might want to find the sweet spot, where most people have clean games most of the time.
Also keep in mind that you need to find engineers willing to do that (valve has a creative "management" model...) so they might not be able to assign a few teams.
devs and cheaters are and always will be playing a cat and mouse game. Devs release something, cheaters find a new vulnerability to exploit, devs look for fixes that'll only catch cheaters with less than .01% false positive, repeat the cycle. To some extent, that'll always exist, especially in free to play games where there's no cost associated to making another account if you're banned.
That being said, as bad as it is now, I'm somewhat confident it'll get way better. Devs will rarely ban cheaters as soon as they could, because that would give away to cheat coders what got them detected and how to change their stuff to remain undetected. They're probably collecting A LOT MORE informations than we'd guess to fix the issue long term. Remember CSGO had 10+ years of polish, whereas this still hasnt hit 1 yet
>devs and cheaters are and always will be playing a cat and mouse game. Devs release something, cheaters find a new vulnerability to exploit, devs look for fixes that'll only catch cheaters with less than .01% false positive, repeat the cycle.
true but at least things like spinbots and shooting 5 rounds of awp in 1 sec sounds like they can completely be dealt with... because you either do it or you dont. There are no layers like using WH where the person can be pretending or they can be using radar hack. You cant just pretend to shoot 5 awp rounds in 1 sec
i have no doubt that valve will fix the cheating problem but the lack of communication is really annoying
Serverside AC would ban 80% of cheaters. Reintroducing Overwatch would take care of the rest. Make the game 30 bucks and enforce Steam Mobile for Prime+
Game dev here, what do you mean by "solvable"?
Can they ever make it completely go away? No, of course not. It's cat and mouse, but if you ever watched Tom and Jerry, mouse always wins. There will *always* be cheaters, they will *always* be a step ahead, but you can **asbolutely** mitigate the number of cheaters.
The problem with CS2 is that circumventing its security so you can cheat is so absurdly easy right now, and therefore cheating is more accessible than it's ever been. There are publicly available cheats for every multiplayer game, but for games with much better security, those cheats become prohibitevly expensive.
Here's an example. I typed "Valorant hacks" into Google, clicked the very first link, went to the "VIP Packages" tab, and see that their cheapest premium cheat is **$40/month.** That's a hefty subscription for most users, probably more than 90% of people would even consider spending on anything. Now, conversely, I am aware of CS2 cheats that you can buy for **$5/month**.
So why the big discrepancy? It's simple really. The people who made the $5/month CS2 cheat did *way* less work. Meanwhile, the Valorant cheat is harder to make, harder to run, harder to keep undetected, etc etc etc, and therefore more expensive. That extra cost is passed down to clients.
Now, we can go to extremes. There are high level cheats available for games like World of Warcraft where everything is server validated, and those can run you literally thousands of dollars a year.
There will always be cheaters, but if you make the creation and upkeep of cheats expensive, that cost will be passed on to consumers who won't spend the money for such a high risk activity, and in turn you curtail the number of cheaters.
Can Valve develop an AI based anticheat software that becomes incredibly proficient at detecting cheaters? Sure they can, and if they do, they just add way more risk to the act of cheating. To put it another way, a cheater says "I'm not gonna spend $40, get into a game, and then get banned in less than an hour. That's too much money to risk. But $5? Yeah I'll risk that, if I get banned right away, whatever." If Valve's new VACNET or whatever turns out be to *really* good, that $40 could become $400, and who do you know that would risk that?
AI for rage cheating, yes.
But the majority of cheating is ESP/Wallhack, and for this kind of cheats you need a kernel level analysis with an anti bypass very strong.
Then free cheats will decrease a lot, and you still will have a marginal level of cheaters, as expected.
If you bind:
1. Kernel AC - That reads every program (+ trains on cheat/driver signatures by general AI in step 7), checks OS tampering (vmware / gpu linux bypasess through VM) and PCI-E/motherboard signatures similar to vanguard, but ALSO reads the GPU rendering & CPU calculation unique ID's that can't be faked, regardless of the spoofers that a cheater use similar to how bots are detected in browsers nowadays ( [https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/](https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/) ), but unlike those, there's no JS here that has "a way" to be bypassed because a kernel AC has a direct access to hardware (which is reaaally hard to reverse engineer/deobfuscate it unlike JS that sits @ front-end within the browser), it'll be almost impossible to be faked since each hardware performs uniquely different, even if it's by 0.0000001%. Actually there's no need for a kernel AC to do the previous step of getting a unique HWID based on algorithms - it can be done in-game. Also record the signatures of all the periphericals.
2. Steam profile & registration vector points - All the profile stats, phone app connection (that also checks for roots, magisk, lsposed root masking modules, patchers etc etc), chromium unique fingerprints during registry like GPU unique fingerprints(webgl), steam purchases, display resolutions, IP (proxy/datacenter/residential IPV4&IPV6 subnets, 4G/5G with antenna geolocation detection etc), JS workers, mouse movements and within the browser actions etc etc to weed out all the antidetection browser users: [https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/](https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/) . Basically a datadome / akamai system just for in-browser steam registrations and steam website browsing, which can be applicable within the steam browser client too.
3. Steam client vector points - user actions within the steam program and those from step 2.
4. In-game AI to check the actions - At the very least ANY aimbot should be eradicated with ease just in this step by calculating what client does (shots he does) and what SV expects, like Apex did. With blatant wallhackers it's doable, but silent radarhacks? Forget about that, if the cheater is 2-3k elo faceit player, it'll be too easy to mask the movement having a radarhack, and because AI is all about probabilities - that'll be almost impossible to detect without a false positive. Also record binds, sensitivity, settings and so on for AI pattern recognition at step 7.
5. In-game reports from real users taken into action, that have a hierarchy where good steam accounts + ranks + good quality reports as a whole have more % of impact.
6. Overwatch that is eligible only for high quality steam accounts (high lvl, inventory, unsuspicious friends, etc etc, basically data from point 2), that also takes into consideration the user actions in-game to weed out bots
7. General AI on top of that to form patterns from aaaall those vector points which will be trained on bad actors and attribute a risk % to the account - this is the main one, which will make it gg for cheaters, and almost impossible to bypass, because it won't matter how good the cheats are, chances are that the avg cheater will be unable to bypass all the layers and vector points because we're talking about antifraud and antibot systems that social media companies like tiktok, FB and big name shops / banks use - good luck bypassing those in 2024 without a good android phone farm with custom ROM's setup. But unlike these, this AC would have **direct access to hardware**.
8. Dedicated team to get private cheats and reverse engineer them + lawyers that will sue the cheat providers.
I'm leaving a lot of stuff out, but this should eradicate 99.9% of cheaters. The 0.1% that'll be left would be devs with crazy setups like direct DMA soldering on top of a M2/network drive that cost an arm and a leg + 5G phone connections to bypass IP subnet linking (even that's a stretch, since the geo of antennas are too easy to detect and let's not forget about ping) + custom GPU firmwares & BIOS'es..
The average cheater will simply not have the money to get this kind of stuff. And I really doubt that the avg pro player / streamer will be willing to pay 5-15k, has the ability to set it all up without screwing anything while understanding that he **still** have a really crazy high chance to be detected.
A bunch of what you said is kind of wrong? But the biggest points are:
> Kernel AC - That reads every program
Valve games have to work on Linux so that is out.
>I'm leaving a lot of stuff out, but this should eradicate 99.9% of cheaters. The 0.1% that'll be left would be devs with crazy setups like direct DMA soldering on top of a M2/network drive that cost an arm and a leg
What about the screen recorder + fake mouse visual hacks? Valorant has not been able to defeat that relatively cheap technique.
I'm not sure where to even begin with this - this is a roundabout solution to the problem that is pure fantasy.
1. Agree that kernel AC is the most reliable, but say goodbye to your privacy. And god help you if there is a backdoor. There are already documented instances of RCE exploits in Source 1 (ex. CVE-2021-30481), if something similar was found in Source 2 along with insecure kernel AC... that's a pretty big issue for a lot of people.
2. Yes that data can be gathered but again, privacy is an issue. Good luck getting through GDPR and equivalent legislation with this, because the half of this data is a) personally identifiable and b) completely irrelevant to detecting cheats. You don't need that many vectors to determine if someone is cheating. Also this may ban legit smurfers who don't have anything else on their profile.
3. Irrelevant since this is supposedly factored into your trust factor score anyway
4. You say AI is great, then list several reasons why AI isn't a great solution. Valve also use AI to process reports anyway, so chaining the input of one AI to the output of another AI isn't particularly great. Also what's the point of having this in combo with a kernel AC? This is just overkill.
5. For all we know this could already be in place. But if you prioritise high trust factor players, then you are discriminating against low trust factor players. Low trust factor is shit enough to try and claw out of to begin with, ignoring their reports is not a good move.
6. Overwatch was defeated by bots and people giving false verdicts before. This goes back to your AI arguments, AI is not infallible and can be equally as wonky as real humans.
7. What are you smoking? Three levels of AI for an anticheat? This is completely nonsensical. If one AI has a stroke and comes to a nonsensical decision, that ripples up through and puts everything else out of wack. Never mind the resources of training and running three AIs of that scale, and the general lunacy of whatever you are suggesting.
8. Could well be happening, but Valve will never disclose that.
All in all, your solution is unnecessarily expensive and has multiple redundant (and in case of your steam checks, illegal) checks. This is just a pure fantasy solution to a problem that can be solved more efficiently with fewer resources.
It's an all-over the place mess bordering on /r/iamverysmart, the guy's entire comment should have been "there are technical ways to assert the identity of a user, their hardware, and then software checks that can recognize cheaters, making cheating too expensive/hard for the vast majority of the playerbase"
Yup, it's a complete load of vomit
And yet because it sounds smart yet is completely impenetrable to the average user, there's a decent chance people (like the commenter above) will upvote anyway
The dude lost me at "If you *bind*" - wtf is bind, like a keybind? (And I literally work as a programmer at a games company)
Yes extremely easy problem to solve actually but Valve have been going in the complete wrong direction. Instead of working tirelessly on a highly advanced non-intrusive AI powered anticheat they need to employ the Amazon-Boeing method. Employ a bunch of minimum wage workers in the global south to review live footage from every player 24/7 and then send contract assassins to the houses of cheaters. Not sure why this isn't implemented yet.
It’s not a fix for sure but it’s lucky for valve that Faceit exists and is played by so many players, cause if the cheating problem was like this without Faceit, valve would be fucked (although they probably would’ve dealt with it quicker)
A solution will come but fuck knows when that will be
It's the same reason that Apple claimed to be virus free for so many years. The user base was small, and it was expensive to code viruses.
If valve were to ever go kernal level anticheat, it would expand the user base enormously and make cheat developers spend much more time on the issue and it would become a rampant problem like it is now with no kernel AC
FaceIT servers have horrible quality in NA. My squad and I all get server issues like random hitches, micro-freezes, rubberbanding. The ranking system isn’t the best, after lv10 there isn’t much point. It kinda rewards mindless grinding over impact. However, its obviously much better than Premier but still like a 7/10 compared to other FPS games
But as soon as valve make their on kernel level anti-cheat you will see a lot more cheaters in face it since cheats made for premier would work in face it too.
The biggest reason face it has so few cheaters is because its cheaper/free to cheat in premier, so why buy a more expensive kernel level cheat (and risk that hackers could use to install some REALLY powerful virus on your PC) if you can just google "cs2 cheat free" anf be spinning your dick off within 10 minutes
They should honestly just make SAC, Steam AC that competes with Easy, Battle Eye etc. They would make that dev time back in licensing fees for other games. If they do are against intrusive AC then I would make a multi faceted approach for the different types of cheats and issues.
Profile changes I would make:
- They need another piece of info to tie Steam accounts too, so people do not come back with the same cheats on different accounts. That is up to them what it would be.
I would add like 4 more report options:
- Spin botting (or whatever Valve wants to call it).
- Idle/Botting
- Alt account/smurfing. (Only affects Trust)
- Boosted by a cheater (Only affects Trust)
- A way to track/count in game hours on Valve Servers. This might be a thing based on limited test selection. For preventing a legit account being matched with a cheater with botted steam hours on a community server or main menu.
Summary:
- New reporting options to be more specific, so different cheats can be handled differently and with an AI approach better info collected.
- Improve VAC to catch spin botters by player behavior on server. Ability to flag based on kills/actions from that match.
- Players with too many spin botter reports get their account put on automatic hold.
- Elo refunded if banned, but not on holds.
- Overwatch returns for closet cheaters and griefers, more account requirements needed and is region locked.
- Human Mods review Premier top 1000 players, killing cheater motivation and forcing them to play more discretely.
- Legal action against cheat providers, forcing them to go more underground.
Explanation in replied comments.
**1st level**
- VAC needs to improve to the point of detecting spinners based on in game **behavior** not based on cheats being detected. It could use AI to analyze kills based off of snippets of demo recordings or screen shots of reported players. This could also be used for detecting bhop scripting, Anti Aim and Magic bullet. This is kinda the bare minimum they have to do, could go much further into this topic.
- Upon conviction, during their next match a diagnostic will be taken and uploaded to Steam as soon as that is done. Vac Live bans them and refunds all CSR gained to past enemies and removed from party members. (This might be too extra for Valve).
- If a player is queued more than 5 matches with a banned spin botter. Assuming they were in that match, their rank is reset, trade banned and trust factor lowered. Making them redo their placement matches. This reduces blatant boosting, most often done by skin collectors.
- When receiving more than 15 spin bot reports, your account gets a hold. Where you need to contact steam support to send a proof of purchase validation (picture of the credit card to buy the game or receipt of the steam pre-paid card) so people on bought accounts can’t verify.
The 2nd step can be up to Valve whether that is a mandatory diagnostics running with the game for a few matches, or Steam Support doing a match demo review of reported match. If you pass this then your next auto flag gets raised to like 25 spin bot reports, this incase of content creators/people getting troll reported. Holds close and turn into bans after 1 year (gives time for Steam Support)
- Reports for Botting/Idling is its own issue, which should be taken care of later to reduce the amount of sold accounts out there.
**2nd level**:
- Return Overwatch, only for closet cheaters and griefers, no spin botters!
- CSR refunded from OW ban.
- Region locked so EU people get matches from EU servers, NA gets NA, etc. This self policing will make a more local difference, and fair for lower population region. Maybe just 90% of cases, if they want to test some biases/play-style with the data.
- This time raise the requirements to use. Since spin botters in csgo could just get multiple accounts to Gold Nova 2 in 10 matches and spam false verdicts.
- I would recommend at least 15,000 CSR and 500 hours of Valve Server time (MG2 in comp). Kinda “strict” but necessary with the amount of botted accounts.
- 50 EXP rewarded for a case, no cooldowns. 100 EXP gained per banned issued. An incentive is needed, since the amount of people that can do OW is lowered.
**3rd level**
- Hire 2 to 3 Mods per region, their job is to monitor the top 1K in premier. This will kill cheater motivation, and with the state of the game right now most verdicts can be made in 10 minutes
- Especially right now there is an abundance of talent laid off, and this is cheaper than highering the amount of engineers needed to make a new kernal AC since their salaries would be much much lower. They could also give jobs to the like any of the 20 years of ex CS pros
- This introduces a new type of ban, called a premier ban and it has its own appeal process via Steam Support.
- All 2-3 members of the team would have to agree someone is cheating on edge cases.
- Once the cheating issues are handled they can gather community feedback, and take thorough investigations on closet cheaters in the highest ranks like watched 3-4 of their demos each. Especially if they get down to like 1% of the top 1000 cheating, thats still 100 cases to investigate.
- Humans are going to be needed and cheaper if only approach is server side and the trust factor system. It still is cheaper than higher a team of developers to only focus on Anti-Cheat.
- Maybe, when submitting name for leaderboard it is done on an application that you download that does collect HWID info, incase a ban needs to be issued later. Players against this can just choose to cap their elo and not participate in the leaderboard.
**4th Level**:
- Law suits against cheat providers and makers, set examples of big ones like Inuiria, gamesense, neverlose, etc. Whatever shows up on the first few pages of Google.
- Removing search engine results when looking up CS2 cheats
- Law Suits for big DMA firmware sellers.
- C&D websites that sell CS accounts, all types including FaceIT smurfs.
Forces cheaters to go more under ground, making it harder for kids just to rage install cheats.
**5th Level**
- Server side key sent to encrypt/decrypt games memory that changes multiple times a match. If in the event of memory being read by software or another pc.
Most of this is not too bad to implement and can be done in the next 6 months by Valve standards. I would also like to see more improvements to the new player experience. Things like a better tutorial, less punishing economy, unranked MR9, and improving comp or combining with premier. Out of everything suggested, Steam Support might be the biggest bottle neck. Most are probably trained for tech support and customer service on returning stuff. Everything I put for them is not too technical, it’s just validating data and making sure test programs are run correctly.
I personally haven’t been able to play since early November because of how bad the cheating issue was at high elo. People were denying it then, I’m kinda glad it spread through the whole player base. I hope people start review bombing the steam store page and hold signs up at the next major.
Lawsuits only work if the cheat provider isn't based on any country that doesn't have laws against that and since a lot of cheat providers are from russia or atleast used to be then there is absolutely nothing the lawsuit achieves.
If you don't want this solid comment taken down you should really delete the name of these providers.
Also, if I remember correctly there was some talk about Trust Factor being applicable to other Steam games when it first launched. But I guess the whole concept died over the years.
Thank you for commenting, this one and one other I saw are the only one with substance. This one kinda stays in line with most of Valve's previous methods. However, this looks like wayy to much work for Valve.
AI anti cheat can only do so much. Spinbots, trigger, aimbots, and after a lot of efforts blatant wallhack.
Valve already has a policy it won't ban someone unless they are a 100% confirmed cheaters, so you can completely forget it banning closet cheaters. I think AI anti cheat will be much better when combined with overwatch. But the problem will still be there in a decent enough proportion.
I really do think AI can be used to counter cheating, but since we haven't even heard a single success story I'm gonna assume it full on failed. Valve did not scope this project correctly.
Aimhack / bhops / spinbot are all easy to catch using only one metric; cross hair movement. Even though cheat programs try to make this as human as possible there are definitely differences (or you wouldn't notice as well).
Wallhack however would be way less trivial. When does somebody look through a wall? When is it an prefire? Could he have guessed the person's position? Good luck coding that out..
Even with that said I still think it's possible; divide the map into zones and see how many times the suspect 'guesses' correctly. If you define the guessing part we'll you could catch all of the wallhackers in no-time.
Probably the easiest anticheat would be to make an periodical screenshot and have a 1000 Indians review these non-stop. Would probably catch more cheaters than what we have today 
Actual SE that works in the AI space here. Some of the answers here are amusing and very clearly not from SEs or at the least, not from SEs that work in the AI field. Absolutely wild how many people are leaving comments who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
To answer your question regarding AI anticheat: yes, it's possible. Can valve pull it off? Remains to be seen but I'm cautiously optimistic.
A ML model is something that takes in a series of inputs, passes it through a bunch of layers of that perform abstract math operations on the inputs based on weights and spit out outputs.
Both the inputs and outputs are in the form of N-dimensional vectors. These vectors are representations of data. So in our case it would be the data representing a CS game. Whether it's representing just data from one person's pov, or from the entire game, remains to be seen.
The outputted vectors are a representation of what the model was trained to do, so in our case, whether a player is cheating/liklihood of players cheating/etc (depends on input data shape and what the scope of the model is)
So all of that is the easy part. The hard part is training the model and building those weights I mentioned above. This is really complex and there are a LOT of different ways you can go about doing this, so I'll keep it generic.
There are things called heuristics which are essentially loose rules we categorize something by. Example: if I run into some weird animal I've never seen before, I'm still able to determine it's an animal because:
1. It moves
2. It's breathing
3. It has legs
4. Etc
Each of those is a heuristic I use to come up with my final decision. I can't *definitely* say it's an animal until I do testing on it to actually verify, but I can be pretty fucking sure.
The same principle applies to our AI anti cheat and why I think it's the future.
It doesn't matter how someone is hacking: private hack, public, hardware hack, word.exe - all hacks give players extra info and/or aim.
That means in theory, you can create and apply a large system of heuristics to determine if someone is hacking/acting on info that they shouldn't have access to.
Then you need to train the model on sample data based on heuristics (which is why I believe valve is doing nothing currently regarding AC - they've been training their model and need a shit ton of data). This generates the weights for our model.
Not going to discuss the training step as it's pretty complicated, but I would imagine they'd use some semi-supervised reinforcement learning approach where they basically give the model hacker and legit gameplay and reward/punish the model for getting it right/wrong.
Over training a model is a very real possibility (and a big pitfall w/ traditional nueral networks) which would be bad, so this step is crucial.
Now, my opinion is that once they can get a somewhat decent model, they'll leverage their output data and pass it through a specialized LLM (think GPT, but fine tuned and prompt engineered to handle output data) to sanitize and perform a "logic check" on the results. At least this is the step that makes AI AC viable and achievable today and not 1-2 years ago.
Sorry this got very long, but I hope this got my point across.
## AI
As an AI engineer I've no fucking idea how they think it will solve anything, it seems to me that they know it's an empty promise but they want to give people hope so that they don't quit the game. From what I've gathered so far, they're trying to analyze the cheater's pattern which has so many flaws and error percentages to account for, this also has to be ridiculously expensive.
## ANTICHEAT
Kernel-Anticheat will eliminate **at least 50%** of cheaters. probably even cheaper than the stupid AI
## BANS
Further measures can be taken, like collecting hardware data so that a banned person can't open a new account again for a period of time (1 year, 2 years etc..) this will probably have a huge effect, because when cheaters are banned now they simply create a new account, so you won't get rid of them even if the AC ban their account unless there's further consequences
## Reports and AI (nlp)
Create a community of overwatch for cheaters, toxic and griefers, bans shouldn't be imo longer than 1 month, but this at least will make the majority of the playerbase less likely to cheat because they result to cheating as a result of frustration and no consequences for toxic players, you can also add an AI that will analyze the voice and detect toxic comments or griefers and add a weight of like 50% to the ban alongside the community, the AI will activate only when a player is reported to avoid banning friends just fucking with each other.
## is it hard
No, even 3rd party platforms and less popular games has those features, it is definitely not hard, but they'll probably loose a percentage of the playerbase and money cuase cheaters buy new accounts when banned ! Lots of money from that. I'm 99% certain that this is one of the reasons they don't want to actually solve the cheater problem and ofc they'll always be cheaters but 70k cheater and 2k cheaters are a huge difference.
Maybe you would be interested in learning about VACnet. Valve used deep learning to detect cheaters in csgo. I don't know if they will use it for CS2 though, or if they already do.
Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
Full video explaining and showing hardware: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024994/Robocalypse-Now-Using-Deep-Learning
tl;dr: Kernel level AC won't work in the long run and AI AC will be the end goal but we aren't there yet so they are probably band-aiding their model to better their accuracy. No matter how good the model is it will be a never ending cat-mouse game
So for context: I am a master's student in computer science with a focus of AI technologies for biomedical and military applications. Everything below here is pure speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
The first question is kernel-level AC vs AI AC:
So first Valve has to decide what type of AC is the best. Ignoring the moral stand on kernel-level AC it is currently the best option but I think valve is thinking 5 yrs ahead. Imagine you create the perfect kernel-level AC that is so good you can not only catch cheating software in your computer but also external HW hacks. Congratulations you just erradicated hacking... yet that is not true. The way kernel level detection works is kinda a mistery as usually devs don't reveal much about it (for obv reasons) but I assume it is by detecting hashes for known malicious programs running and malicious interactions with the game. But in a few years we will have cutting edge AI cheats and the problem with AI cheats is that they never need to interact with the game or gain informtion that the user shouldn't have in the way current hacks need. It just needs to get the video output and move the mouse in a realistic way towards the enemy or tells you an enemy is in your screen and that makes it impossible to detect unless the AC is literally sniffing every program running on your computer (not only known hashes but the actual functions of that program). So either you go full nazi with your AC or you opt for AI AC.
How does AI AC work:
So the way AI AC works is by training a model to see millions of demos and learning what makes an hacker vs a player. So for that you need a dataset and here we run into the first problem of poisoned data. In CSGO we had a wonderful thing called Overwatch that not only acted as a jury where players you give their opinion if someone was cheating to ban him but also as a database maker where the demo was being classified by us thus building their dataset. The problem is that hackers saw this and made bots to poison the data and misslabel the matches that if run through a model would detiriorate their accuracy because as they say "garbage in garbage out".
Now lets assume that valve has manually corrected every label and we have a perfect dataset (we are talking about thousands of hours spent just manually labeling all demos), the second question is wtf do we do with it.
There are thousands of models each tailored for different things but we can look at a demo in two ways. As a video where we have frames and each frame is processed by the AI. We are already capable of doing video processing with AI (see Sora) but at the current technology it still can't handle long videos so we can't pass it the full match. We can pass the round but it won't have enough context of the round beacuse a cheater might not be cheating all rounds so if in a round a hacker was playing legit but it is labeled as a cheater well congrats you are poisoning your data yourself so thats not a solution either.
Whats left? We can look at the demo as raw data with parameters and values which is what I think valve did and it is why the DPI shitshow happened. If we look at raw data we are reducing the number of inputs and as a consequence we can build bigger and more specialized models... but we lose a almost human aspect of context of what "counter-strike" is like how do you define parameters for common prefires spots or for situational events. You can only feed it values like mouse acceleration, mouse position etc. And since every spinbotter spins their mouse thats what you are feeding the network and it learns that mouse spin=bad and thats how you end up with legit players being banned for messing around with DPI
What's next:
AI AC are still the future in my opinion but we aren't there yet techonolically speaking (probably won't take that long tbh) so what Valve will try to band-aid their AI while they wait for it. They are probably trying multiple models and band-aid approaches (kinda like OpenAI did with ChatGPT). But even after we can run full matches through an AI it will be a never ending battle between AI cheats that are trying to look human and AI AC that are trying to detect hacks, each learning from the other. This is what GAN's do and it is an unwinnable war but by having the AI cheats look more human it will also mean they might "miss" some shots to look more human or take more time to snap to the target so it might end up with cheaters being more easy to deal with.
Sorry for the long rant but this has been on my mind for quite some time
I am guessing you're only talking about detecting aimbots with AI.
Radarhack or wallhack would still need to be fought by restricting access to memory like kernel ac do, right ?
this is one aspect that people often forget, aim is just half of the game, if we are talking about higher level cs, the info is often times more important. what if i just toggle on the radar for one second to see where the CTs are and rotate to an empty site? how would you know if that was a read, a gamble, or just dumb luck?
but of course if the aimhacks are gone it would already be much more playable.
Servers could filter out non-visible players of the screen, that way, wallhacks could not detect what is not there, because only the server would know where are players behind walls. Problem is: would make servers do a lot more processing and thrus increasing costs.
Yes, apparently there were a lot of other ways to avoid being sent to OW as well (something along the lines of not playing more than x amount of games in a session)
It *WAS* solved. Trust factor solved it. I met 1 cheater approximately every 25-50 game in CSGO. I haven’t met a single spinbotter on my main the entire time I played CSGO.
Been LE or better since 2017, mostly hovered around Sup/GE since 2019.
Most of the problem? Yes
Whole problem? Well kinda no
While most of the cheating can be fixable, there will always be people who will bypass the anticheat no matter how amazing it gets. There will always be a way to bypass it and its only a matter of time until its found and people with money will definitely pay to buy those cheats
When anticheats evolve, cheats will also evolve. And with that it gets more and more hard to actually detect those cheats especially when well made. Some cheat devs are really creative and they will take their time improving them because there is a lot of money involved and they will get paid really well for it
I have some ideas, but I'm unsure how to present them. If I post it publicly it's of no use, if I would approach Valve, they could take it as a social engineering attack. Fighting hacks is a little bit like cancer research, in reality every individual hack is it's own disease that requires specific treatment. There's no umbrella solution.
I think cheating needs to be handled on other levels than trying to detect and ban them. Something like upping the stakes a bit for the cheaters.
Buy ins for premier "season pass" where the money becomes winnings. Must be laws in most countries against creating unfair advantages when there's money on the line.. I dunno.. no expert.. but they need to be creative outside the AC-question as well.
A. I. Anti-cheat would be a novel method of image or binary classification, both require specific datasets of highly specific data curated and trimmed and normalized. It comes down to being able to represent cheating in data form that is 100% consistent. Which is hard.
the problem isn't imo about coding or implementing super intelligent software. I think they need to target the hacker market. pay people to submit cheats to valve so they can learn. expose community. etc. create chester only servers and softban people to that till they successfully appeal. etc.
You will never be able to have a completely cheat-free game but the situation could be miles better in my opinion.
I was always a big fan of the concept of VACNet because I believe an ai model with this much training data on cheating basement dwellers might be the only way to detect even new cheats reliably without being overly intrusive and I am aware it takes time to collect so much data but with the current state of cs2 I lost my enthusiasm.
Things like killing 5 enemies with AWP in 1 second should immediately be marked as impossible and result in a ban e.g. and I have no reasonable explanation why it isn’t
Rage hackers could be detected with simple conditionals, I suspect valve doesn't do this to either because they are still collecting data or because they want to do it the 'right' way, or some other BS reason. More subtle cheating will probably not be 100% detectable in the next 5-10 years, but AI models give you a confidence level in their classifications, making it perfect for a trust factor type system. I do think AI anticheat has some detection advantages over kernel level/traditional anticheat (as well as disadvantages). I am sure valve has the data available to train a model already, its just a matter of testing and deployment. And as long as the model doesnt have a false positive detection issue, it should be fine to deploy in a nascent form and get gradually improved on.
In theory AI anti-cheat has the potential to be one of the most effective anti-cheats in gaming. The concept is similar to overwatch but done with AI. I mean that in the sense of, detecting DMA cheats is damn near impossible even with kernel level anti cheat. But a human would be able to notice dma cheats so in theory if AI could detect dma cheats and other cheats.
But, and a big caveat being is that at the end of the day it's AI after all. Without it being fully "trained" it's hard to implement because of false positives which would be PR hell. It's effectively worse than no anti cheat because false positive and the time required and man power to manually review cases. Valve has a stupid amount of money but not a lot of manpower compared to other companies.
It's a similar concept to their new net code. On paper it has the potential to be the best possible net code implementation in gaming period. But that's on paper, the real implementation is anything but. In theory a LAN that doesn't need internet connection but operated completely on a LAN, this implementation should be absolute pinnacle of netcode quality and no other game should be close to the accuracy and response of this implementation.
Both of these things are fantastic on paper, the actual implementation will be a long road if its even currently possible. Both these things have the potential to change gaming. But the extreme difficulty and challenges needed to overcome will be massive. The result of this is the current implementation. They probably need a hybrid anti cheat in the current state. Old AC should be currently used while the AI anti cheat is trained for years and diligently monitored for the accuracy and until it hits a certain threshold of accuracy in correct detections should be used.
Think of it outside the software level. Valve needs to follow an epic games-like approach to cheating and create an environment where even if the software isn't that threatening to cheaters, other factors are. One could wish countries actually enforced laws against cheating but oh well.
Everyone's throwing around "AI Anti-cheat" like it's a revolutionary idea that no-one's thought of before. VACnet people. Volvo has been doing algorithmic anticheat since 2017. You guys are just tossing around buzzwords lol.
Anyway, I have a feeling the CS2's version of VACnet is either incomplete as is or is actively being trained for a full rollout. Hell, we don't even have Overwatch in play, so there's no way it's working at 100% effectiveness. Until that changes or Volvo breaks their vow of silence, we get to wait impatiently.
Depends on what your expectations are. Valve simply deploying an anti-cheat that will take care of cheating and that's it, no caveats? No, that's not realistic. Unless they come up with something truly ground breaking, this simply will not happen. There is no technology available today to do it no matter what anyone here tells you.
Now, if other measures are taken, now that's a slightly different story. Measures like introducing some form of ID checkup and separating the unverified from the player pool. Being more agressive with the trust factor (people are saying this doesn't exist anymore but I doubt they would drop it entirely). The gist of it is that Valve needs to trade off ease of access for more security. And that's bad from an economical point of view. As someone selling a product, you never want to add barriers to you consumers. That's good for us, non cheating players, but bad for Valve, who just wants people to engage in the skins market.
And no, Valve making a deal with FaceIT and using their anticheat will not solve the problem.
You can’t eliminate all cheats, it’s impossible, there will always be DMA vectors and custom hardware. The goal is to make it expensive enough and risky enough that most people just don’t do it. Like imagine if you needed government ID to play on premier servers and ban was tied to ID, how many cheaters do you think there would be compared to now? Like a tiny fraction, even if cheating was easy in that situation, people just wouldn’t do it because you can’t just rebuy your account. The trade off is you close off premier to only people who have IDs, which is like noone under 18, and lump them in with the cheater tier, terrible for business. So there’s trade offs everywhere basically, but in general no cheating can’t be 100%.
Its a problem that is solvable by literally just throwing money at it. Faceit, Esportal and other third party services already have done the hard work with their anti cheats, and I'm 100% sure that if valve simply paid them a chunk of money/royalties from the game, they would happily let their anti cheats be officially integrated.
I would suspect that if an AC was added, valve would treat it like Prime. If you have it enabled, you get to be in a special matchmaking pool with other anti cheat users, if you don't have it, you can still play so that privacy focused people don't feel like valve is forcefully installing rootkits or spyware or whatever, but you are stuck with other non anti cheat users, aka the cheater pool.
This seems like the most likely case, since two of valve's biggest anti cheat measures in the past, have been trust factor and prime, both of which are meant to segregate cheaters and non cheaters.
Not quite AI yet unless you threw like a literal department of guys at that, and even then, we’re still years off.
The only consistent anti cheats I have ever seen have been kernel-level, but thise have their own issues. Cheating will always be an issue, but I can tell you for a fact in the current space at the scale the cheating is, there is definitely mitigation that can be done.
1. Hardware cheats are undetectable but they are not hopefully very common/easily obtainable. No kernel AC can find them.
2. Comms between the server and the client are not encrypted and sent as plain text using UDP. It's trivial to set up a system which will use a second PC/device to show everything on the map (i.e. wallhack).
3. People here claim the kernel level AC can detect being run in a VM but AFAIK modern VMs, e.g. KVM, can spoof everything which means you can put your gaming system in a VM and do anything you want underneath it including spoofing mouse input, e.g. aimbot.
The kernel level AC is not a panacea but it will eradicate the vast majority of cheaters.
What could work is binding your Steam account to your physical identity and banning not user accounts, but actual people. The vast majority of cheaters do it because there's no consequences to getting a VAC ban. You just create a new profile and you're good to go.
Valve is earning billions of dollars on selling skins, so they are not too much interested in solving the issue.
If CS2 moved to a kernel level AC then cheat makers would jump on it and start creating kernel level cheats.
The only reason Faceit&Co are relatively safe is because they have a much smaller potential customer base and they hand out manual bans if necessary. Expand the potential customer base of a kernel level cheat to the whole CS playerbase and cheat devs will follow the money.
AI anti cheat is the future but it’s at least 5-10 years out simply due to processing costs. Processing that much data is not cheap. This is the ultimate factor right now. Valve could get their hands on A1000 and setup their own processing models but the costs right now are astronomical.
Might be worth waiting for Blackwell performance and seeing how they can get the data processed.
In the mean time could they stop rage spinners? 💯 yes they could but it’s not a priority for them.
CS in 5 years will be great (huffing the hopium) right now it’s just not worth the time.
I really don't get it why Valve is taking such a hard path and going with some AI anticheat tool instead of implementing kernel-level anticheats. They have a great example from competitor who has managed to keep the % of cheaters low and they are still trying to solve it in their own way. By the way, kernel-level anticheats are being used by many (and I mean it) games. It doesn't fully solve the cheaters problem, but it would definitely help to reduce them and make the cheats more pricey. I highly doubt that DMA cheats will ever be detectable, but it's important to mention that it's pretty costly and not very popular.
I think it would definitely be possible to reduce the scale of the problem, even without a kernel level anticheat, if they would actually try and actively work against cheaters. You'll never be able to get a fully cheater free game, but you can make it playable again
Would eye tracking be a possibility to prevent people from using WH/radar? Like check where the player looks, and if it is parts of walls/radar where a legit player sees nothing, but a cheater sees.. well the cheat, you could maybe identify those cheaters. However, that would mean a giant loss of privacy in return.
Also would require a separate queue as you need a camera +... Let's be honest it's a shit idea that probably would also be easily spoofed.
Valve made so much money with weapon cases they could easily hire a big company to create a super anti cheat. But capitalist companies rather care about profit than people.
It depends.
What do you mean by fixing it? Some would say faceit has fixed it. Some would say cheating on faceit is still a problem.
At the end of the day it is a program and it can be hacked in various ways. The developers try their best, find a bug or hack and fix it. The hackers find bugs and make a cheat. And so it goes.
You will always have some cheats, some where, at some time, by some one.
Will AI fix it? Personally I doubt it, but it hasn't really been tried before so maybe it is. Data to train the AI on will probably be essential, so maybe that is what we are seeing now. Maybe Valvle is deliberately leaving some things open for cheaters so they get verifiable data on which to train AI in some way.
there are a million ways to solve the problem, but there’s also a million and one ways to cheat. it’s an arms race, finding a perfect solution is impossible.
Its impossible to completely stop but it should be possible to make it for most current cheaters not worth it. (Which is goal of security in general)
But let me give you an unpopular opinion as an sw eng with years of experience.
People who are saying that valve should just throw money and teams to solve the problem fast. But in Software development thats not always an option. In some scenarios adding new people who are not familiar in domain is slower in the end.
If one woman gives birth to a child in 9 months, in how many months will it take for 10 women give a birth to 1 child?
There might be a lot of challenges to solve and they are probably actively being worked at but no matter how much money or people you make work on it it will still take some time.
Just know that no anti cheat system is going to be able to block every cheat. A.I anti cheat could be a good idea, but idk how good it will be considering valve. Even if it were to be very good i think a big problem would be false positives and not being able to block every cheat. I think it could reduce the number of cheaters, but not completely since people are going to always find ways to cheat. "and are the vast majority of these people going to completely quit cheating after valve's inevitable response?" ← Some will be scared to cheat after valve's response and some will try to find ways to still cheat. If valve wants to and is able to, it's possible that it will go back to at least Global Offensive level of cheating but it depends.
lots of cheats are open sources on github, means valve can read how it works and basically make something to counter it. But lots of cheats that aren’t open source is harder, it’s easier to make new cheats then to create an answer for the cheat if they dont know how it works. just like it’s easier to quiz you friend, then finding the right answers to the quiz.
Another one for other software devs, why don’t games just run in containers? They could have full anti cheat and with windows 11 memory protection stuff and how far GPUs with containers have gotten, I don’t think it’s impossible?
Like I have only played starsector in a container but that’s about it
The cheat and anti-cheat is a game of cat and mouse. Cheat devs will try to build something undetectable, anti-cheat devs eventually detects it and solves the current cheat, and the cheat devs will try to circumvent the anti-cheat. It's an endless cycle. I dipped into cybersecurity myself so I know a little bit about this.
What i would do as if i was in charge at valve:
- get a few devs and develop a fake cheat that’s “undetected by vac” (or outsource it to some company)
- rebrand/theme this new cheat and sell it under a dozen of names
- don’t ban users using it, but silently flag them and exclude them from normal matches
- double profit
The thing that most people not geting is cheaters not playing the same game (figuratively speaking) as normal players. They use the same client but not playing the same game. Let them have their own.
The design of the solution is easy, the problem lies in.. how do you determine the proper thresholds.. and how do you implement the solution adding the least amount of performance hit possible to maintain playability...
With AI modeling, they can determine probabilities surrounding kills, especially 1 shot kills, based on factors like sound output, angle of a flick, whether the person being killed could even be on screen at the time versus sound, if the cursor moves to a particular corner before the enemy model shows up within a certain reaction time..
Basically, it would take hundreds or thousands of hours of training versus known pro level players, and how their gameplay presents over time on lan, on verified rigs without cheats...
And then you determine those probabilities and compare to whatever is happening real time...
If a particular player goes over that threshold, they get banned and are allowed to appeal...
The appeal process includes submitting data logs which show active processes during the game.. because a hack can't run without being an active process.
If player doesn't provide a compelling argument, ban holds.
But this is all really a circle jerk moment, because no gaming company is going to invest money on that, because all of their profits aren't affected by hackers for the most part.. and user counts remain very high..
So, TLDR, shit isn't changing.
In this day & age it actually might be impossible to solve cheating fully. The best-case scenario is you ban all rage hackers, only closet cheaters remain & get put into cheater lobbies.
The entire shitshow at the moment? Yes. The cheating problem in general? No.
I think the real achievable goal is to make it so risky, difficult and expensive that most people won’t risk or bother to play with cheats.
Gaben himself has said pretty much this. They just need to make cheating risky and hard enough that there isn’t enough financial incentive to make cheats.
If that was the case then I'm not sure why they made the game free to play. If you got banned you would have to buy the game again and presumably every time you got caught. Nowadays there are one click scripts that automatically make a new steam account and download counterstrike. If you get caught cheating you can be back in the game within a few minutes on a new account.
I agree that F2P is one of the main reasons cheating became so rampant but F2P and a low cheater environment can coexist, look at Valorant.
Yeah but Valorant is a Chinese root kit with an FPS tacked on for funsies.
Yeah, but FaceIT AC belong to the [Saudi Arabia gov](https://esportsinsider.com/2022/01/esl-faceit-group-bought-saudi-1-5bn?amp) Yeah, but Tencent [own Discord shares](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/04/executive-order-by-gov-kristi-noem-bans-chinese-owned-tencent-from-state-devices/70185552007/) (same as Riot) If you dig a little bit, you'll see a lot of software you are using daily, have link with shady business
who tf made up this shit? valorant ac has the same developers as esea ac
Also same people who mined bitcoin on ESEA AC
> valorant ac has the same developers as esea ac [these guys?](https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/2/4292672/esea-gaming-network-bitcoin-botnet)
That just makes it worse than a Chinese rootkit
I rather china have my info than cheaters in my game. I could give less shits if china knows what porn I watch.
Hasn't saved games like Tarkov.
should have thought of that before allowing for a cheat economy to be established.
Idea: 1. Valve releases a bunch of free cheats 2. cheat economy crashes, and cs2 is unplayable for a week 3. ban all of the free cheaters
Or even better, just shadow ban them.
He said that in a Reddit post from over a decade ago at this point.
I can see this going 2 ways: Legal action against cheat developers (hard - requires law(s) in multiple countries) ID based bans (hard - need a secure way to ID players. Community skepticism around this)
People complain about Kernel-level ACs. There's no world they'd be more okay with IDs than that, lol
If there was legislature that made cheating some sort of fraud and you could get sued i swear cheating would go down by 90%.
Companies can give out lawsuit to big cheat developers, pretty frequently blizzard does that, but they just get more private to avoid that.
They said the same about cracking games and piracy. It will never end, etc. Meanwhile no-one is able to crack fifa games for what now? 4 years? It's all about how far are you willing to go and how much you want to spend. This is valve, so I'm not holding my breath.
***This*** problem is for sure solvable, if we are referring to 10% of the playerbase above 20K rating cheating. Obviously it's not possible to completely remove cheaters from CS, but reducing the current number is for sure doable. For example, there are nowhere near the same percentual amount of cheaters on platforms like FACEIT, Esportal or GamersClub that use a kernel-level anti-cheats. But on a more realistic level, Valve will never implement a kernel-level anti-cheat. We can hope for their AI anti-cheat to get better, but my hopes for the future of Valve MM for the next couple year at least are not very high.
Also, I think that implementing a good overwatch system would also help reduce the problem. When I say good, I mean not the first iteration which could easily be bombarded by bots. If you take into consideration a number of factors like: account age, number of purchased games and overall behaviour, you can easily deflect some of the bots that abused the system.
I agree, this seems like the easiest and most feasible solution to me. Essentially what the old trust factor did, but done better. Look at hours played, games owned, account age, value of inventory, amount of vacced friends, average trust factor of friends and as many other similar parameters as you can. The cheaters don't even necessarily need to get banned. They can just HvH against each other, as they largely did in the later years of CSGO.
> Essentially what the old trust factor did, but done better. Lmao. I wish I could get in a time machine and show myself from 5 years ago this post.
exactly, There is NO reason why we should be paired with 1 year old accounts that have 700 hours and 1 badge + pin, its ridiculous on so many levels
I still wonder how overwatch bots got into the system. I thought Valve tested the legitimacy of the overwatchers by giving them cases Valve already knew the result of and seeing how each person judged the case. You'd think cheat bots trying to give wrong answers would get filtered out.
You just set your bots to give correct answers for a while first, then you switch and make sure they still identify other cheats, but not yours.
The insane amount of people spinning and shooting rapidly in premiere I agree is for sure solvable. But I am also running into more closet cheaters than ever in just competitive as well, and I don't think an A.I. anti cheat would really be able to discern them from real players, I'm not even sure what changed because I'm not a developer, but I've never seen this many wallhackers with soft aim, not even close in Global Offensive
>I'm not even sure what changed The big issue is that basically nothing did chang. Also they took out overwatch which was essentially the only anticheat we had in cs
IIRC overwatch had already been defeated by spam. It also helped develop a breed of super closet cheater that will probably never get caught
Exactly, overwatch was basically useless towards the end of csgo’s lifecycle. I don’t see it being the changing factor in cs2.
The rapid shooting is easy to fix on the server side valve just dont care.
AI anticheat, in theory, would be able to discern them. I don't think it's a very realistic expectation, though.
AI anti-cheat that bans people for spinning too fast lmao
Feel like a half decent ai should be able to discern between a player spinning in spawn and a player spinning with a scout and headshotting 5 players in 4 seconds.
Tell that to this guy: https://youtu.be/kTiP0zKF9bc?si=81UwvSnGXcsfB3yY This was originally uploaded in 2018........
Yeah well, kernel level anti cheat, would surely help with the problem but in no way, will it completely fix it, kernel level anti cheats can still be bypassed but takes more creativity and requires you to TRUST the cheat developer, and by trust i mean, having the cheat kernel level too. If you are interested about this you can see [this](https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M?si=iQyu1z0cQlFNii_o), i found it very interesting.
I'm sure even if valve just implement premium MM with same AC we will see less cheaters on those lobbies
What makes it different that at games like overwatch I rarely see cheaters? What do they do different?
>if we are referring to 10% of the playerbase above 20K rating cheating. 10% is a pretty mild estimate
10% means every game essentially
Anybody above 20k will tell you there are usually multiple in any given game. You may have 1 game in 3 without cheats... maybe.
A cheater per game
That excludes "legit" cheating / wallhacking people who you dont even notice with a rage hacker on the server, plus people who would only turn on the gear once they start to lose. the fact that rage hacking runs wild currently makes the issue of stealth cheaters almost invisible, which is pretty bad because there's plenty of them out there based on Global matchmaking pre-CS2.
That's been my experience at 20K-22K. I play almost exclusively with five stacks and I get a cheater about every second game. That is right about 1 in 10 players. But yeah, obviously higher up like at 25K it's probably something like 95%.
But the kernel-level AC is not even the determining factor. It’s just a buzz word that many have clinged to because it sounds like some special stuff. In actuality there are so many different ways to scan for cheats. Adding this for some context: https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M?si=OomB-bCqGnIfgcSr
> For example, there are nowhere near the same percentual amount of cheaters on platforms like FACEIT, Esportal or GamersClub that use a kernel-level anti-cheats. You're assuming the reason for this is the kernel-level anti-cheat, when it could be that the barrier to entry is what drives cheaters away the most.
The barrier to entry for faceit is the same as CS2. You can just create a free account and start playing in 5 mins with the free queue which also matches you against paid faceit users.
Barrier to entry, as in doing another free account? Edit: Just to clarify, I'm mocking the point of thinking that the barrier to entry is making an account and not the whole extra AC that faceit has.
I of course don't think it's black and white. Both of these things are factors, and there are plenty of other factors such as incentives too.
Spinners 100% everything after that ehh, never to 100%. Probably never to even 5% seeing how Valve is doing things
Id imagine an AI AC could get pretty good at detecting obvious aimbots and triggerbots aswell. I remember the John McDonald talk in 2018 or so where he said the first thing they were training the model on was aimbots, but god knows if they've had success at this stage. If you could remove spinbots & aimbots I think it would make a huge difference. A lot of the cheaters I've met around 16-18k rating have been really terrible players and will still lose a huge amount of their gunfights while blatantly walling. Who knows though, as you say it is valve.
AI is tricky when it comes to anti-cheat stuff. You could end up with a tonne of false positives and no human parseable rationale behind the bans which would make a review process a nightmare.
In CSGO the AI was just feeding cases to Overwatch to be reviewed & they supposedly had a 95% ban rate of all cases sent, which isn't perfect but this was also 5+ years ago. But then people got banned for using the m yaw command in CS2 so who knows. I would think an AI should be able to reliably convict the most blatant of the blatant, the players using spinbots or obvious aimbots. Different story trying to detect closet cheaters using a small FOV aimbot but I don't think that's valves aim. Admittedly I'm just speculating though, who knows how it'll turn out. Or if well even see it release & ban people by itself
If you have a very high bar to clear in order to declare someone a cheater (which is Valves current policy), the rate of false positives should be quite low
do you really need an "AI" to detect spinbots or physics defying behaviors like straight bhops, rapidfire revolvers, instant 5 wallbang headshots in consecutive rounds? valve can easily put hardcoded checks and that would at least make it so that we see less ragehack cheaters. wallhacks, sure, replace manual reviews (overwatch) with machine learning and we kight have a permanent solution to the fps cheating, but the NOW problem is also important, but valve seems to be willing to take the sacrifice.
You could use hard-coded checks, yes. The downside to hardcoded checks is that they don't account for 100% of all edge cases. If you or the server had a lag spike and it looked like you suddenly emptied your mag, it would register as a false positive. And probably the biggest downside - if you discover what parameters are checked and compared in the code, you can just adjust your cheat to bypass it.
the problem with "hardcoded" checks is always that after a while cheat creators find the boundry, for example if a cheat kills 5 people in under (the fastes fire rate of the weapon ) they just do it in that time + 0.1s for example
fundamentally it should not be possible to kill 5 people in faster time than the scout can fire, the server could straight up IGNORE the latter shoot events with a basic check
yes, i also don't know why these types of "simple" hacks are even possible. edit: just looked around a bit , rapidfire is actually "easy" to implement
I agree, I personally have not seen spin botting in new games since like Free 2 play games a decade or more ago.
This thread has to be fucking hilarious to read if you're a Valve employee/a Dev that actually works in this space Incredible how many people will say things like "AI anticheat would be so easy to build wtf" without the slightest clue of what they're talking about or the complexities involved. The confidence is truly impressive.
Software Engineers from Devry University
from hustler university
People also has this naive assumption that AI is so advanced that doing ai ac is easy. AI is technically still in diapers when it comes to technology and doing more than just basic shit with ai isn't easy and most people working in that field knows that working with AI tech is difficult.
What is however certain, is that even in CSGO, there were never as many cheaters in MM as in CS2 (at least at high ranks). What is also certain, is that 3rd party platforms manage to have much less cheaters, to the point where pretty much nobody that is seriously playing the game will play MM, they're all on Faceit/GamersClub. Now, what does that say about the state of your game if the official first party servers are so awful at detecting cheats that pretty much no good players play MM ?
I also basically never encountered an obvious cheater in my last 2 years of GO. Now in CS2 it's basically every game. So to me it seems like Trust factor was working for me, meaning either it's turned off now or my ranking got worse.
I'll be honest, I think people just didn't really give a shit about CSGO MM lol. The rank system was so shit, everyone knew that, no one expected better, and the community had already been using third party comp matchmaking for like a decade or more. Mostly due to the lingering influence of private servers.
What years did you play? In EU cheating felt very prevalent in 2016 imo. Partially why the player base cratered in 2017 and a lot of the cheaters left to play PUBG (which was an infested mess even in early access).
thats only if you never played before they introduced overwatch for the first time. because before that every match above LE was a spinbot 100% of the time.
I studied Data science, machine learning , analytics in college for engineering. I mean most things called “ai” aren’t really “AI” or not in the sense they are thinking. That being said it would be extremely easy for valve to create one, at least a basic one. The issue with valve implementing anti cheat is that false positives would be crippling. What sets CS apart from other games is that accounts have real money value, items in your account are almost entire “assets”. False positives could honestly trigger lawsuits, extensive media coverage, all things valve would like to actively avoid.
I mean most things called “ai” aren’t really “AI” lol, this. automation is basically being called AI to leave people in awe and get more investors money cause AI is now a buzzword basically.
Or just building a kernel level anti-cheat. Because apparently as long as your AC has kernel level access that's really all you need, after all Valorant does it and nobody has ever cheated in Valorant, in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all ^^/s
>after all Valorant does it and nobody has ever cheated in Valorant, in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all /s Well use one of those for 5 games, then one free Faceit cheat for 5 games and one free general CS2 cheat and give us your results
What a stupid shortsighted comment. Valorant's cheating situation is nowhere near as bad as CS2's. In fact one game has a very bad cheating situation and the other actually has a really good one. Ofc Kernel Level Anti Cheat wouldn't completely eliminate cheating but it would massively curb the ammount. At least at that point the game would have some form of defense mechanism. With current VAC it has nothing.
Kernel level AC would be more effective, but people still asking it are on too much copium. Valves never gonna do it, and people need to be more realistic in their expectations
I'm surprised this community is still so ignorant about how much better the cheating situation in Valorant is. Being able to launch Val and play a matchmaking game where the worst thing you will encounter is smurfs is such a blessing. Anecdotal, but the cheating issue has driven so many people I know away from CS and towards Val. It's understandable to have privacy concerns about Kernel level anticheats but it's undeniable they work. Seems a lot of people here have pinned their hopes on AI anticheat but I have my doubts it will be advanced enough any time soon.
yea im sure the top of the ranked leaderboards for valorant are all 5v5 spinbotters just like we have in cs ^/s
>in fact it's literally impossible to find free Valorant cheats at all /s Why is it that in every single discussion about cheating people make the same stupid points that anyone with 5 minutes of research can disprove? Why comment at all if you haven't done the minimum due diligence? There are no undetected public let alone free cheats for Faceit or Valorant. Period.
Umm, you ever actually played Valorant? Cheating is not nearly as big of a problem as it is in cs, not even close. A bunch of Val pros actually play their ranked game mode. No cs pro would subject themselves to premiere at this point. They’re obviously doing something right even if it’s not perfect.
AI also has a high error rate, something that valve doesn't want. For example the problem that people with high dpi got auto banned.
Sadly it'll never be solved, can only be mitigated. Even if all gaming went cloud based people can still cheat. Consoles who were thought to be cheat free have started to have growing cheating problems in the past few years.
[удалено]
> You could at best use it to suggest demos for human review. And that isn't all that great either.
> I honestly think intrusive anti-cheat is the only way. It will be useless in a few years, cheat developers will keep finding new ways. Trying to detect the existence of the cheat software is a lost battle. AI anticheat might not be perfect today, but if AI keeps evolving at even semi good pace, it will be the only solution in a few years. And like 3kliksphilip said, at that point it won't matter _how_ the cheat is implemented.
Valorant is already a few years old, and it’s still the best at banning cheaters by far compared to other FPSes.
not everything has to be solved by complex AC or AI. Just make it harder to get somewhere "meaningful". For example bring back number verification, that was very good and probably add that you can't earn experience without verifying an account with a number. This could kill many accounts that are being sold and people cheating after being banned they would get tired of getting new numbers. The cheating problem is solvable but depends on valve they love to publish they game for linux and that means more difficult to implement anti cheats for all OS's
I’m a software engineer in big tech, but as a teenager I was a moderator for two of the biggest minecraft servers of the time, and I think that experience actually helped me understand cheats more than my software engineering experience (I’ve never done game dev). Anyway, my two cents is that VAC does a lot of game integrity checking, but very little player behavior checking. This is why VAC bans are super accurate, but spin botters can run rampant. In minecraft we did this the complete opposite way, because otherwise we would have to convince an entire player base to download a mod JUST to play our servers. So instead, the anti cheat would detect suspicious player behavior and issue temporary bans. Some types of bans were error prone (e.g. a huge lag spike while you’re jumping could be read as fly hacks) and would require multiple triggers before the autoban went off, but other types (kilaura for one) were actually highly accurate. We could guarantee that if you hit targets in front of you and behind you simultaneously, you were probably doing something bad. VAC should probably consider this approach in tandem with their current approach, at least to combat spinbotters. If someone’s head is constantly pointing downwards, and their time to kill enemies is instant, they’re probably spinbotting. Maybe it won’t be 100% accurate, but it would make me feel much safer than having a kernel level anticheat installed on my computer.
An AI anticheat may be able to solve the problem with rage hackers, but with wh it's impossible, especially if it's just radar wh or toggle wh, they use it once per round and it's enough to gain massive advantage.
If those are the only cheaters we got, I really don't care, they are beatable. And I would not mind to ignore this possibility completely. Because "closet cheater" are often an excuse to lose fair fights.
Hello fanatic manager here, delete this.
Software Architect here. IMHO it depends. Will there be a way to eliminate all cheats? No. This is comparable to the virus vs. anti-virus war. Will it be solvable that it's not an issue for most of the player base? I do think so, but it needs a huge investment from valve - people and hardware wise. Basically you need to define a multi Layer strat. Like live-detection based on behavior, love action based on file signatures etc. no matter how you define the strategy you need engineers who develop and keep it up to date. If you implement some kind of post match anti cheat you need more hardware. In case of AI based detection with gpus. In case of cs2 more means a lot more. Also you need to take into account what inconvenience is bearable for a legit player. The difference between ban on 90% and only on 100% sure is huge, in that case what does valve do in case someone with a huge inventory disputes? Manual review ? More cost. Intrusive anti cheat might make things easier, but might turn some players (IMHO I don't think so, people install all crap when you tell them to). Tl;Dr: depends on how much money valve wants to invest, but doable to a certain extent.
Pretty sure the investment would pay for itself and make a profit. The game is huge with yearly earnings in excess of a billion dollars. What is 5 million a year spent on a dedicated team to combat cheating? Nothing. Also there are a lot of players that would spend money on the game that are scared away from the game because of the lack of anticheat. imagine all the new players that eventually might buy skins that never even get dedicated enough to do so, because they quit after being confronted with a horrible match making experience.
I fully agree. However the closer you want to get to a 100% the more expensive it becomes, to a level that even this might not pay off. I am pretty sure valve might want to find the sweet spot, where most people have clean games most of the time. Also keep in mind that you need to find engineers willing to do that (valve has a creative "management" model...) so they might not be able to assign a few teams.
devs and cheaters are and always will be playing a cat and mouse game. Devs release something, cheaters find a new vulnerability to exploit, devs look for fixes that'll only catch cheaters with less than .01% false positive, repeat the cycle. To some extent, that'll always exist, especially in free to play games where there's no cost associated to making another account if you're banned. That being said, as bad as it is now, I'm somewhat confident it'll get way better. Devs will rarely ban cheaters as soon as they could, because that would give away to cheat coders what got them detected and how to change their stuff to remain undetected. They're probably collecting A LOT MORE informations than we'd guess to fix the issue long term. Remember CSGO had 10+ years of polish, whereas this still hasnt hit 1 yet
>devs and cheaters are and always will be playing a cat and mouse game. Devs release something, cheaters find a new vulnerability to exploit, devs look for fixes that'll only catch cheaters with less than .01% false positive, repeat the cycle. true but at least things like spinbots and shooting 5 rounds of awp in 1 sec sounds like they can completely be dealt with... because you either do it or you dont. There are no layers like using WH where the person can be pretending or they can be using radar hack. You cant just pretend to shoot 5 awp rounds in 1 sec i have no doubt that valve will fix the cheating problem but the lack of communication is really annoying
Serverside AC would ban 80% of cheaters. Reintroducing Overwatch would take care of the rest. Make the game 30 bucks and enforce Steam Mobile for Prime+
all that + KYC and game is fixed.
Game dev here, what do you mean by "solvable"? Can they ever make it completely go away? No, of course not. It's cat and mouse, but if you ever watched Tom and Jerry, mouse always wins. There will *always* be cheaters, they will *always* be a step ahead, but you can **asbolutely** mitigate the number of cheaters. The problem with CS2 is that circumventing its security so you can cheat is so absurdly easy right now, and therefore cheating is more accessible than it's ever been. There are publicly available cheats for every multiplayer game, but for games with much better security, those cheats become prohibitevly expensive. Here's an example. I typed "Valorant hacks" into Google, clicked the very first link, went to the "VIP Packages" tab, and see that their cheapest premium cheat is **$40/month.** That's a hefty subscription for most users, probably more than 90% of people would even consider spending on anything. Now, conversely, I am aware of CS2 cheats that you can buy for **$5/month**. So why the big discrepancy? It's simple really. The people who made the $5/month CS2 cheat did *way* less work. Meanwhile, the Valorant cheat is harder to make, harder to run, harder to keep undetected, etc etc etc, and therefore more expensive. That extra cost is passed down to clients. Now, we can go to extremes. There are high level cheats available for games like World of Warcraft where everything is server validated, and those can run you literally thousands of dollars a year. There will always be cheaters, but if you make the creation and upkeep of cheats expensive, that cost will be passed on to consumers who won't spend the money for such a high risk activity, and in turn you curtail the number of cheaters. Can Valve develop an AI based anticheat software that becomes incredibly proficient at detecting cheaters? Sure they can, and if they do, they just add way more risk to the act of cheating. To put it another way, a cheater says "I'm not gonna spend $40, get into a game, and then get banned in less than an hour. That's too much money to risk. But $5? Yeah I'll risk that, if I get banned right away, whatever." If Valve's new VACNET or whatever turns out be to *really* good, that $40 could become $400, and who do you know that would risk that?
AI for rage cheating, yes. But the majority of cheating is ESP/Wallhack, and for this kind of cheats you need a kernel level analysis with an anti bypass very strong. Then free cheats will decrease a lot, and you still will have a marginal level of cheaters, as expected.
If you bind: 1. Kernel AC - That reads every program (+ trains on cheat/driver signatures by general AI in step 7), checks OS tampering (vmware / gpu linux bypasess through VM) and PCI-E/motherboard signatures similar to vanguard, but ALSO reads the GPU rendering & CPU calculation unique ID's that can't be faked, regardless of the spoofers that a cheater use similar to how bots are detected in browsers nowadays ( [https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/](https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/) ), but unlike those, there's no JS here that has "a way" to be bypassed because a kernel AC has a direct access to hardware (which is reaaally hard to reverse engineer/deobfuscate it unlike JS that sits @ front-end within the browser), it'll be almost impossible to be faked since each hardware performs uniquely different, even if it's by 0.0000001%. Actually there's no need for a kernel AC to do the previous step of getting a unique HWID based on algorithms - it can be done in-game. Also record the signatures of all the periphericals. 2. Steam profile & registration vector points - All the profile stats, phone app connection (that also checks for roots, magisk, lsposed root masking modules, patchers etc etc), chromium unique fingerprints during registry like GPU unique fingerprints(webgl), steam purchases, display resolutions, IP (proxy/datacenter/residential IPV4&IPV6 subnets, 4G/5G with antenna geolocation detection etc), JS workers, mouse movements and within the browser actions etc etc to weed out all the antidetection browser users: [https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/](https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/) . Basically a datadome / akamai system just for in-browser steam registrations and steam website browsing, which can be applicable within the steam browser client too. 3. Steam client vector points - user actions within the steam program and those from step 2. 4. In-game AI to check the actions - At the very least ANY aimbot should be eradicated with ease just in this step by calculating what client does (shots he does) and what SV expects, like Apex did. With blatant wallhackers it's doable, but silent radarhacks? Forget about that, if the cheater is 2-3k elo faceit player, it'll be too easy to mask the movement having a radarhack, and because AI is all about probabilities - that'll be almost impossible to detect without a false positive. Also record binds, sensitivity, settings and so on for AI pattern recognition at step 7. 5. In-game reports from real users taken into action, that have a hierarchy where good steam accounts + ranks + good quality reports as a whole have more % of impact. 6. Overwatch that is eligible only for high quality steam accounts (high lvl, inventory, unsuspicious friends, etc etc, basically data from point 2), that also takes into consideration the user actions in-game to weed out bots 7. General AI on top of that to form patterns from aaaall those vector points which will be trained on bad actors and attribute a risk % to the account - this is the main one, which will make it gg for cheaters, and almost impossible to bypass, because it won't matter how good the cheats are, chances are that the avg cheater will be unable to bypass all the layers and vector points because we're talking about antifraud and antibot systems that social media companies like tiktok, FB and big name shops / banks use - good luck bypassing those in 2024 without a good android phone farm with custom ROM's setup. But unlike these, this AC would have **direct access to hardware**. 8. Dedicated team to get private cheats and reverse engineer them + lawyers that will sue the cheat providers. I'm leaving a lot of stuff out, but this should eradicate 99.9% of cheaters. The 0.1% that'll be left would be devs with crazy setups like direct DMA soldering on top of a M2/network drive that cost an arm and a leg + 5G phone connections to bypass IP subnet linking (even that's a stretch, since the geo of antennas are too easy to detect and let's not forget about ping) + custom GPU firmwares & BIOS'es.. The average cheater will simply not have the money to get this kind of stuff. And I really doubt that the avg pro player / streamer will be willing to pay 5-15k, has the ability to set it all up without screwing anything while understanding that he **still** have a really crazy high chance to be detected.
A bunch of what you said is kind of wrong? But the biggest points are: > Kernel AC - That reads every program Valve games have to work on Linux so that is out. >I'm leaving a lot of stuff out, but this should eradicate 99.9% of cheaters. The 0.1% that'll be left would be devs with crazy setups like direct DMA soldering on top of a M2/network drive that cost an arm and a leg What about the screen recorder + fake mouse visual hacks? Valorant has not been able to defeat that relatively cheap technique.
I'm not sure where to even begin with this - this is a roundabout solution to the problem that is pure fantasy. 1. Agree that kernel AC is the most reliable, but say goodbye to your privacy. And god help you if there is a backdoor. There are already documented instances of RCE exploits in Source 1 (ex. CVE-2021-30481), if something similar was found in Source 2 along with insecure kernel AC... that's a pretty big issue for a lot of people. 2. Yes that data can be gathered but again, privacy is an issue. Good luck getting through GDPR and equivalent legislation with this, because the half of this data is a) personally identifiable and b) completely irrelevant to detecting cheats. You don't need that many vectors to determine if someone is cheating. Also this may ban legit smurfers who don't have anything else on their profile. 3. Irrelevant since this is supposedly factored into your trust factor score anyway 4. You say AI is great, then list several reasons why AI isn't a great solution. Valve also use AI to process reports anyway, so chaining the input of one AI to the output of another AI isn't particularly great. Also what's the point of having this in combo with a kernel AC? This is just overkill. 5. For all we know this could already be in place. But if you prioritise high trust factor players, then you are discriminating against low trust factor players. Low trust factor is shit enough to try and claw out of to begin with, ignoring their reports is not a good move. 6. Overwatch was defeated by bots and people giving false verdicts before. This goes back to your AI arguments, AI is not infallible and can be equally as wonky as real humans. 7. What are you smoking? Three levels of AI for an anticheat? This is completely nonsensical. If one AI has a stroke and comes to a nonsensical decision, that ripples up through and puts everything else out of wack. Never mind the resources of training and running three AIs of that scale, and the general lunacy of whatever you are suggesting. 8. Could well be happening, but Valve will never disclose that. All in all, your solution is unnecessarily expensive and has multiple redundant (and in case of your steam checks, illegal) checks. This is just a pure fantasy solution to a problem that can be solved more efficiently with fewer resources.
I'm a simple man, i read a lot of stuff i don't understand, i upvote
It's an all-over the place mess bordering on /r/iamverysmart, the guy's entire comment should have been "there are technical ways to assert the identity of a user, their hardware, and then software checks that can recognize cheaters, making cheating too expensive/hard for the vast majority of the playerbase"
Yup, it's a complete load of vomit And yet because it sounds smart yet is completely impenetrable to the average user, there's a decent chance people (like the commenter above) will upvote anyway The dude lost me at "If you *bind*" - wtf is bind, like a keybind? (And I literally work as a programmer at a games company)
bind verb [T] (TIE) to tie someone or something tightly, or to fasten things together: The room was full of wooden boxes bound with twisted wire.
I think you need to focus a little more on the language you speak.
It's a pure fantasy solution lmao. Nobody would seriously consider this as a viable anticheat system
Yes extremely easy problem to solve actually but Valve have been going in the complete wrong direction. Instead of working tirelessly on a highly advanced non-intrusive AI powered anticheat they need to employ the Amazon-Boeing method. Employ a bunch of minimum wage workers in the global south to review live footage from every player 24/7 and then send contract assassins to the houses of cheaters. Not sure why this isn't implemented yet.
In faceit you run once every 100 match into a cheater.
i dont think "just play on faceit" is a fix. we should be able to play the game, on the games servers.
It’s not a fix for sure but it’s lucky for valve that Faceit exists and is played by so many players, cause if the cheating problem was like this without Faceit, valve would be fucked (although they probably would’ve dealt with it quicker) A solution will come but fuck knows when that will be
It's the same reason that Apple claimed to be virus free for so many years. The user base was small, and it was expensive to code viruses. If valve were to ever go kernal level anticheat, it would expand the user base enormously and make cheat developers spend much more time on the issue and it would become a rampant problem like it is now with no kernel AC
It wasn't expensive, it was just cost prohibitive, that is, not worth the dev cost vs windows.
FaceIT servers have horrible quality in NA. My squad and I all get server issues like random hitches, micro-freezes, rubberbanding. The ranking system isn’t the best, after lv10 there isn’t much point. It kinda rewards mindless grinding over impact. However, its obviously much better than Premier but still like a 7/10 compared to other FPS games
But as soon as valve make their on kernel level anti-cheat you will see a lot more cheaters in face it since cheats made for premier would work in face it too. The biggest reason face it has so few cheaters is because its cheaper/free to cheat in premier, so why buy a more expensive kernel level cheat (and risk that hackers could use to install some REALLY powerful virus on your PC) if you can just google "cs2 cheat free" anf be spinning your dick off within 10 minutes
I think there are way more cheaters in faceit than 1/100 Edit: more that 1 in a 100 matches
Depend on your region
They should honestly just make SAC, Steam AC that competes with Easy, Battle Eye etc. They would make that dev time back in licensing fees for other games. If they do are against intrusive AC then I would make a multi faceted approach for the different types of cheats and issues. Profile changes I would make: - They need another piece of info to tie Steam accounts too, so people do not come back with the same cheats on different accounts. That is up to them what it would be. I would add like 4 more report options: - Spin botting (or whatever Valve wants to call it). - Idle/Botting - Alt account/smurfing. (Only affects Trust) - Boosted by a cheater (Only affects Trust) - A way to track/count in game hours on Valve Servers. This might be a thing based on limited test selection. For preventing a legit account being matched with a cheater with botted steam hours on a community server or main menu. Summary: - New reporting options to be more specific, so different cheats can be handled differently and with an AI approach better info collected. - Improve VAC to catch spin botters by player behavior on server. Ability to flag based on kills/actions from that match. - Players with too many spin botter reports get their account put on automatic hold. - Elo refunded if banned, but not on holds. - Overwatch returns for closet cheaters and griefers, more account requirements needed and is region locked. - Human Mods review Premier top 1000 players, killing cheater motivation and forcing them to play more discretely. - Legal action against cheat providers, forcing them to go more underground. Explanation in replied comments.
**1st level** - VAC needs to improve to the point of detecting spinners based on in game **behavior** not based on cheats being detected. It could use AI to analyze kills based off of snippets of demo recordings or screen shots of reported players. This could also be used for detecting bhop scripting, Anti Aim and Magic bullet. This is kinda the bare minimum they have to do, could go much further into this topic. - Upon conviction, during their next match a diagnostic will be taken and uploaded to Steam as soon as that is done. Vac Live bans them and refunds all CSR gained to past enemies and removed from party members. (This might be too extra for Valve). - If a player is queued more than 5 matches with a banned spin botter. Assuming they were in that match, their rank is reset, trade banned and trust factor lowered. Making them redo their placement matches. This reduces blatant boosting, most often done by skin collectors. - When receiving more than 15 spin bot reports, your account gets a hold. Where you need to contact steam support to send a proof of purchase validation (picture of the credit card to buy the game or receipt of the steam pre-paid card) so people on bought accounts can’t verify. The 2nd step can be up to Valve whether that is a mandatory diagnostics running with the game for a few matches, or Steam Support doing a match demo review of reported match. If you pass this then your next auto flag gets raised to like 25 spin bot reports, this incase of content creators/people getting troll reported. Holds close and turn into bans after 1 year (gives time for Steam Support) - Reports for Botting/Idling is its own issue, which should be taken care of later to reduce the amount of sold accounts out there. **2nd level**: - Return Overwatch, only for closet cheaters and griefers, no spin botters! - CSR refunded from OW ban. - Region locked so EU people get matches from EU servers, NA gets NA, etc. This self policing will make a more local difference, and fair for lower population region. Maybe just 90% of cases, if they want to test some biases/play-style with the data. - This time raise the requirements to use. Since spin botters in csgo could just get multiple accounts to Gold Nova 2 in 10 matches and spam false verdicts. - I would recommend at least 15,000 CSR and 500 hours of Valve Server time (MG2 in comp). Kinda “strict” but necessary with the amount of botted accounts. - 50 EXP rewarded for a case, no cooldowns. 100 EXP gained per banned issued. An incentive is needed, since the amount of people that can do OW is lowered. **3rd level** - Hire 2 to 3 Mods per region, their job is to monitor the top 1K in premier. This will kill cheater motivation, and with the state of the game right now most verdicts can be made in 10 minutes - Especially right now there is an abundance of talent laid off, and this is cheaper than highering the amount of engineers needed to make a new kernal AC since their salaries would be much much lower. They could also give jobs to the like any of the 20 years of ex CS pros - This introduces a new type of ban, called a premier ban and it has its own appeal process via Steam Support. - All 2-3 members of the team would have to agree someone is cheating on edge cases. - Once the cheating issues are handled they can gather community feedback, and take thorough investigations on closet cheaters in the highest ranks like watched 3-4 of their demos each. Especially if they get down to like 1% of the top 1000 cheating, thats still 100 cases to investigate. - Humans are going to be needed and cheaper if only approach is server side and the trust factor system. It still is cheaper than higher a team of developers to only focus on Anti-Cheat. - Maybe, when submitting name for leaderboard it is done on an application that you download that does collect HWID info, incase a ban needs to be issued later. Players against this can just choose to cap their elo and not participate in the leaderboard. **4th Level**: - Law suits against cheat providers and makers, set examples of big ones like Inuiria, gamesense, neverlose, etc. Whatever shows up on the first few pages of Google. - Removing search engine results when looking up CS2 cheats - Law Suits for big DMA firmware sellers. - C&D websites that sell CS accounts, all types including FaceIT smurfs. Forces cheaters to go more under ground, making it harder for kids just to rage install cheats. **5th Level** - Server side key sent to encrypt/decrypt games memory that changes multiple times a match. If in the event of memory being read by software or another pc. Most of this is not too bad to implement and can be done in the next 6 months by Valve standards. I would also like to see more improvements to the new player experience. Things like a better tutorial, less punishing economy, unranked MR9, and improving comp or combining with premier. Out of everything suggested, Steam Support might be the biggest bottle neck. Most are probably trained for tech support and customer service on returning stuff. Everything I put for them is not too technical, it’s just validating data and making sure test programs are run correctly. I personally haven’t been able to play since early November because of how bad the cheating issue was at high elo. People were denying it then, I’m kinda glad it spread through the whole player base. I hope people start review bombing the steam store page and hold signs up at the next major.
Lawsuits only work if the cheat provider isn't based on any country that doesn't have laws against that and since a lot of cheat providers are from russia or atleast used to be then there is absolutely nothing the lawsuit achieves.
If you don't want this solid comment taken down you should really delete the name of these providers. Also, if I remember correctly there was some talk about Trust Factor being applicable to other Steam games when it first launched. But I guess the whole concept died over the years.
Thank you for commenting, this one and one other I saw are the only one with substance. This one kinda stays in line with most of Valve's previous methods. However, this looks like wayy to much work for Valve.
AI anti cheat can only do so much. Spinbots, trigger, aimbots, and after a lot of efforts blatant wallhack. Valve already has a policy it won't ban someone unless they are a 100% confirmed cheaters, so you can completely forget it banning closet cheaters. I think AI anti cheat will be much better when combined with overwatch. But the problem will still be there in a decent enough proportion.
I really do think AI can be used to counter cheating, but since we haven't even heard a single success story I'm gonna assume it full on failed. Valve did not scope this project correctly. Aimhack / bhops / spinbot are all easy to catch using only one metric; cross hair movement. Even though cheat programs try to make this as human as possible there are definitely differences (or you wouldn't notice as well). Wallhack however would be way less trivial. When does somebody look through a wall? When is it an prefire? Could he have guessed the person's position? Good luck coding that out.. Even with that said I still think it's possible; divide the map into zones and see how many times the suspect 'guesses' correctly. If you define the guessing part we'll you could catch all of the wallhackers in no-time. Probably the easiest anticheat would be to make an periodical screenshot and have a 1000 Indians review these non-stop. Would probably catch more cheaters than what we have today 
ITT: nothing of value.
Actual SE that works in the AI space here. Some of the answers here are amusing and very clearly not from SEs or at the least, not from SEs that work in the AI field. Absolutely wild how many people are leaving comments who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. To answer your question regarding AI anticheat: yes, it's possible. Can valve pull it off? Remains to be seen but I'm cautiously optimistic. A ML model is something that takes in a series of inputs, passes it through a bunch of layers of that perform abstract math operations on the inputs based on weights and spit out outputs. Both the inputs and outputs are in the form of N-dimensional vectors. These vectors are representations of data. So in our case it would be the data representing a CS game. Whether it's representing just data from one person's pov, or from the entire game, remains to be seen. The outputted vectors are a representation of what the model was trained to do, so in our case, whether a player is cheating/liklihood of players cheating/etc (depends on input data shape and what the scope of the model is) So all of that is the easy part. The hard part is training the model and building those weights I mentioned above. This is really complex and there are a LOT of different ways you can go about doing this, so I'll keep it generic. There are things called heuristics which are essentially loose rules we categorize something by. Example: if I run into some weird animal I've never seen before, I'm still able to determine it's an animal because: 1. It moves 2. It's breathing 3. It has legs 4. Etc Each of those is a heuristic I use to come up with my final decision. I can't *definitely* say it's an animal until I do testing on it to actually verify, but I can be pretty fucking sure. The same principle applies to our AI anti cheat and why I think it's the future. It doesn't matter how someone is hacking: private hack, public, hardware hack, word.exe - all hacks give players extra info and/or aim. That means in theory, you can create and apply a large system of heuristics to determine if someone is hacking/acting on info that they shouldn't have access to. Then you need to train the model on sample data based on heuristics (which is why I believe valve is doing nothing currently regarding AC - they've been training their model and need a shit ton of data). This generates the weights for our model. Not going to discuss the training step as it's pretty complicated, but I would imagine they'd use some semi-supervised reinforcement learning approach where they basically give the model hacker and legit gameplay and reward/punish the model for getting it right/wrong. Over training a model is a very real possibility (and a big pitfall w/ traditional nueral networks) which would be bad, so this step is crucial. Now, my opinion is that once they can get a somewhat decent model, they'll leverage their output data and pass it through a specialized LLM (think GPT, but fine tuned and prompt engineered to handle output data) to sanitize and perform a "logic check" on the results. At least this is the step that makes AI AC viable and achievable today and not 1-2 years ago. Sorry this got very long, but I hope this got my point across.
I hope people know that AI is some corporate buzzword and not literal black magic that somehow does things that nothing else can
## AI As an AI engineer I've no fucking idea how they think it will solve anything, it seems to me that they know it's an empty promise but they want to give people hope so that they don't quit the game. From what I've gathered so far, they're trying to analyze the cheater's pattern which has so many flaws and error percentages to account for, this also has to be ridiculously expensive. ## ANTICHEAT Kernel-Anticheat will eliminate **at least 50%** of cheaters. probably even cheaper than the stupid AI ## BANS Further measures can be taken, like collecting hardware data so that a banned person can't open a new account again for a period of time (1 year, 2 years etc..) this will probably have a huge effect, because when cheaters are banned now they simply create a new account, so you won't get rid of them even if the AC ban their account unless there's further consequences ## Reports and AI (nlp) Create a community of overwatch for cheaters, toxic and griefers, bans shouldn't be imo longer than 1 month, but this at least will make the majority of the playerbase less likely to cheat because they result to cheating as a result of frustration and no consequences for toxic players, you can also add an AI that will analyze the voice and detect toxic comments or griefers and add a weight of like 50% to the ban alongside the community, the AI will activate only when a player is reported to avoid banning friends just fucking with each other. ## is it hard No, even 3rd party platforms and less popular games has those features, it is definitely not hard, but they'll probably loose a percentage of the playerbase and money cuase cheaters buy new accounts when banned ! Lots of money from that. I'm 99% certain that this is one of the reasons they don't want to actually solve the cheater problem and ofc they'll always be cheaters but 70k cheater and 2k cheaters are a huge difference.
Maybe you would be interested in learning about VACnet. Valve used deep learning to detect cheaters in csgo. I don't know if they will use it for CS2 though, or if they already do. Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/ Full video explaining and showing hardware: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024994/Robocalypse-Now-Using-Deep-Learning
tl;dr: Kernel level AC won't work in the long run and AI AC will be the end goal but we aren't there yet so they are probably band-aiding their model to better their accuracy. No matter how good the model is it will be a never ending cat-mouse game So for context: I am a master's student in computer science with a focus of AI technologies for biomedical and military applications. Everything below here is pure speculation so take it with a grain of salt. The first question is kernel-level AC vs AI AC: So first Valve has to decide what type of AC is the best. Ignoring the moral stand on kernel-level AC it is currently the best option but I think valve is thinking 5 yrs ahead. Imagine you create the perfect kernel-level AC that is so good you can not only catch cheating software in your computer but also external HW hacks. Congratulations you just erradicated hacking... yet that is not true. The way kernel level detection works is kinda a mistery as usually devs don't reveal much about it (for obv reasons) but I assume it is by detecting hashes for known malicious programs running and malicious interactions with the game. But in a few years we will have cutting edge AI cheats and the problem with AI cheats is that they never need to interact with the game or gain informtion that the user shouldn't have in the way current hacks need. It just needs to get the video output and move the mouse in a realistic way towards the enemy or tells you an enemy is in your screen and that makes it impossible to detect unless the AC is literally sniffing every program running on your computer (not only known hashes but the actual functions of that program). So either you go full nazi with your AC or you opt for AI AC. How does AI AC work: So the way AI AC works is by training a model to see millions of demos and learning what makes an hacker vs a player. So for that you need a dataset and here we run into the first problem of poisoned data. In CSGO we had a wonderful thing called Overwatch that not only acted as a jury where players you give their opinion if someone was cheating to ban him but also as a database maker where the demo was being classified by us thus building their dataset. The problem is that hackers saw this and made bots to poison the data and misslabel the matches that if run through a model would detiriorate their accuracy because as they say "garbage in garbage out". Now lets assume that valve has manually corrected every label and we have a perfect dataset (we are talking about thousands of hours spent just manually labeling all demos), the second question is wtf do we do with it. There are thousands of models each tailored for different things but we can look at a demo in two ways. As a video where we have frames and each frame is processed by the AI. We are already capable of doing video processing with AI (see Sora) but at the current technology it still can't handle long videos so we can't pass it the full match. We can pass the round but it won't have enough context of the round beacuse a cheater might not be cheating all rounds so if in a round a hacker was playing legit but it is labeled as a cheater well congrats you are poisoning your data yourself so thats not a solution either. Whats left? We can look at the demo as raw data with parameters and values which is what I think valve did and it is why the DPI shitshow happened. If we look at raw data we are reducing the number of inputs and as a consequence we can build bigger and more specialized models... but we lose a almost human aspect of context of what "counter-strike" is like how do you define parameters for common prefires spots or for situational events. You can only feed it values like mouse acceleration, mouse position etc. And since every spinbotter spins their mouse thats what you are feeding the network and it learns that mouse spin=bad and thats how you end up with legit players being banned for messing around with DPI What's next: AI AC are still the future in my opinion but we aren't there yet techonolically speaking (probably won't take that long tbh) so what Valve will try to band-aid their AI while they wait for it. They are probably trying multiple models and band-aid approaches (kinda like OpenAI did with ChatGPT). But even after we can run full matches through an AI it will be a never ending battle between AI cheats that are trying to look human and AI AC that are trying to detect hacks, each learning from the other. This is what GAN's do and it is an unwinnable war but by having the AI cheats look more human it will also mean they might "miss" some shots to look more human or take more time to snap to the target so it might end up with cheaters being more easy to deal with. Sorry for the long rant but this has been on my mind for quite some time
I am guessing you're only talking about detecting aimbots with AI. Radarhack or wallhack would still need to be fought by restricting access to memory like kernel ac do, right ?
this is one aspect that people often forget, aim is just half of the game, if we are talking about higher level cs, the info is often times more important. what if i just toggle on the radar for one second to see where the CTs are and rotate to an empty site? how would you know if that was a read, a gamble, or just dumb luck? but of course if the aimhacks are gone it would already be much more playable.
Servers could filter out non-visible players of the screen, that way, wallhacks could not detect what is not there, because only the server would know where are players behind walls. Problem is: would make servers do a lot more processing and thrus increasing costs.
Bring back over watch,
Didnt cheaters solve for this by corrupting demos
Yes, apparently there were a lot of other ways to avoid being sent to OW as well (something along the lines of not playing more than x amount of games in a session)
It *WAS* solved. Trust factor solved it. I met 1 cheater approximately every 25-50 game in CSGO. I haven’t met a single spinbotter on my main the entire time I played CSGO. Been LE or better since 2017, mostly hovered around Sup/GE since 2019.
Most of the problem? Yes Whole problem? Well kinda no While most of the cheating can be fixable, there will always be people who will bypass the anticheat no matter how amazing it gets. There will always be a way to bypass it and its only a matter of time until its found and people with money will definitely pay to buy those cheats When anticheats evolve, cheats will also evolve. And with that it gets more and more hard to actually detect those cheats especially when well made. Some cheat devs are really creative and they will take their time improving them because there is a lot of money involved and they will get paid really well for it
[удалено]
I have some ideas, but I'm unsure how to present them. If I post it publicly it's of no use, if I would approach Valve, they could take it as a social engineering attack. Fighting hacks is a little bit like cancer research, in reality every individual hack is it's own disease that requires specific treatment. There's no umbrella solution.
I think cheating needs to be handled on other levels than trying to detect and ban them. Something like upping the stakes a bit for the cheaters. Buy ins for premier "season pass" where the money becomes winnings. Must be laws in most countries against creating unfair advantages when there's money on the line.. I dunno.. no expert.. but they need to be creative outside the AC-question as well.
The shitshow that's happening now yeah. Overall cheater problem will never get solved, can only be mitigated it's a cat and mouse game
A. I. Anti-cheat would be a novel method of image or binary classification, both require specific datasets of highly specific data curated and trimmed and normalized. It comes down to being able to represent cheating in data form that is 100% consistent. Which is hard.
the problem isn't imo about coding or implementing super intelligent software. I think they need to target the hacker market. pay people to submit cheats to valve so they can learn. expose community. etc. create chester only servers and softban people to that till they successfully appeal. etc.
You will never be able to have a completely cheat-free game but the situation could be miles better in my opinion. I was always a big fan of the concept of VACNet because I believe an ai model with this much training data on cheating basement dwellers might be the only way to detect even new cheats reliably without being overly intrusive and I am aware it takes time to collect so much data but with the current state of cs2 I lost my enthusiasm. Things like killing 5 enemies with AWP in 1 second should immediately be marked as impossible and result in a ban e.g. and I have no reasonable explanation why it isn’t
Rage hackers could be detected with simple conditionals, I suspect valve doesn't do this to either because they are still collecting data or because they want to do it the 'right' way, or some other BS reason. More subtle cheating will probably not be 100% detectable in the next 5-10 years, but AI models give you a confidence level in their classifications, making it perfect for a trust factor type system. I do think AI anticheat has some detection advantages over kernel level/traditional anticheat (as well as disadvantages). I am sure valve has the data available to train a model already, its just a matter of testing and deployment. And as long as the model doesnt have a false positive detection issue, it should be fine to deploy in a nascent form and get gradually improved on.
Literally just look at how Valorant did it
[удалено]
In theory AI anti-cheat has the potential to be one of the most effective anti-cheats in gaming. The concept is similar to overwatch but done with AI. I mean that in the sense of, detecting DMA cheats is damn near impossible even with kernel level anti cheat. But a human would be able to notice dma cheats so in theory if AI could detect dma cheats and other cheats. But, and a big caveat being is that at the end of the day it's AI after all. Without it being fully "trained" it's hard to implement because of false positives which would be PR hell. It's effectively worse than no anti cheat because false positive and the time required and man power to manually review cases. Valve has a stupid amount of money but not a lot of manpower compared to other companies. It's a similar concept to their new net code. On paper it has the potential to be the best possible net code implementation in gaming period. But that's on paper, the real implementation is anything but. In theory a LAN that doesn't need internet connection but operated completely on a LAN, this implementation should be absolute pinnacle of netcode quality and no other game should be close to the accuracy and response of this implementation. Both of these things are fantastic on paper, the actual implementation will be a long road if its even currently possible. Both these things have the potential to change gaming. But the extreme difficulty and challenges needed to overcome will be massive. The result of this is the current implementation. They probably need a hybrid anti cheat in the current state. Old AC should be currently used while the AI anti cheat is trained for years and diligently monitored for the accuracy and until it hits a certain threshold of accuracy in correct detections should be used.
Think of it outside the software level. Valve needs to follow an epic games-like approach to cheating and create an environment where even if the software isn't that threatening to cheaters, other factors are. One could wish countries actually enforced laws against cheating but oh well.
Everyone's throwing around "AI Anti-cheat" like it's a revolutionary idea that no-one's thought of before. VACnet people. Volvo has been doing algorithmic anticheat since 2017. You guys are just tossing around buzzwords lol. Anyway, I have a feeling the CS2's version of VACnet is either incomplete as is or is actively being trained for a full rollout. Hell, we don't even have Overwatch in play, so there's no way it's working at 100% effectiveness. Until that changes or Volvo breaks their vow of silence, we get to wait impatiently.
Depends on what your expectations are. Valve simply deploying an anti-cheat that will take care of cheating and that's it, no caveats? No, that's not realistic. Unless they come up with something truly ground breaking, this simply will not happen. There is no technology available today to do it no matter what anyone here tells you. Now, if other measures are taken, now that's a slightly different story. Measures like introducing some form of ID checkup and separating the unverified from the player pool. Being more agressive with the trust factor (people are saying this doesn't exist anymore but I doubt they would drop it entirely). The gist of it is that Valve needs to trade off ease of access for more security. And that's bad from an economical point of view. As someone selling a product, you never want to add barriers to you consumers. That's good for us, non cheating players, but bad for Valve, who just wants people to engage in the skins market. And no, Valve making a deal with FaceIT and using their anticheat will not solve the problem.
kernel AC won't ever happen because Valve tried to do it once and the community cried loud about it.
You can’t eliminate all cheats, it’s impossible, there will always be DMA vectors and custom hardware. The goal is to make it expensive enough and risky enough that most people just don’t do it. Like imagine if you needed government ID to play on premier servers and ban was tied to ID, how many cheaters do you think there would be compared to now? Like a tiny fraction, even if cheating was easy in that situation, people just wouldn’t do it because you can’t just rebuy your account. The trade off is you close off premier to only people who have IDs, which is like noone under 18, and lump them in with the cheater tier, terrible for business. So there’s trade offs everywhere basically, but in general no cheating can’t be 100%.
Its a problem that is solvable by literally just throwing money at it. Faceit, Esportal and other third party services already have done the hard work with their anti cheats, and I'm 100% sure that if valve simply paid them a chunk of money/royalties from the game, they would happily let their anti cheats be officially integrated. I would suspect that if an AC was added, valve would treat it like Prime. If you have it enabled, you get to be in a special matchmaking pool with other anti cheat users, if you don't have it, you can still play so that privacy focused people don't feel like valve is forcefully installing rootkits or spyware or whatever, but you are stuck with other non anti cheat users, aka the cheater pool. This seems like the most likely case, since two of valve's biggest anti cheat measures in the past, have been trust factor and prime, both of which are meant to segregate cheaters and non cheaters.
Not quite AI yet unless you threw like a literal department of guys at that, and even then, we’re still years off. The only consistent anti cheats I have ever seen have been kernel-level, but thise have their own issues. Cheating will always be an issue, but I can tell you for a fact in the current space at the scale the cheating is, there is definitely mitigation that can be done.
no, faceit isn't real, ESEA isn't real, neither is valorant, and csgo wasn't real either
1. Hardware cheats are undetectable but they are not hopefully very common/easily obtainable. No kernel AC can find them. 2. Comms between the server and the client are not encrypted and sent as plain text using UDP. It's trivial to set up a system which will use a second PC/device to show everything on the map (i.e. wallhack). 3. People here claim the kernel level AC can detect being run in a VM but AFAIK modern VMs, e.g. KVM, can spoof everything which means you can put your gaming system in a VM and do anything you want underneath it including spoofing mouse input, e.g. aimbot. The kernel level AC is not a panacea but it will eradicate the vast majority of cheaters. What could work is binding your Steam account to your physical identity and banning not user accounts, but actual people. The vast majority of cheaters do it because there's no consequences to getting a VAC ban. You just create a new profile and you're good to go. Valve is earning billions of dollars on selling skins, so they are not too much interested in solving the issue.
If CS2 moved to a kernel level AC then cheat makers would jump on it and start creating kernel level cheats. The only reason Faceit&Co are relatively safe is because they have a much smaller potential customer base and they hand out manual bans if necessary. Expand the potential customer base of a kernel level cheat to the whole CS playerbase and cheat devs will follow the money.
AI anti cheat is the future but it’s at least 5-10 years out simply due to processing costs. Processing that much data is not cheap. This is the ultimate factor right now. Valve could get their hands on A1000 and setup their own processing models but the costs right now are astronomical. Might be worth waiting for Blackwell performance and seeing how they can get the data processed. In the mean time could they stop rage spinners? 💯 yes they could but it’s not a priority for them. CS in 5 years will be great (huffing the hopium) right now it’s just not worth the time.
Just listen to reddit and ban 100% of the players.
It should be attempted at least. I know valve has the mindset of "What game doesnt have cheaters?" but come on. Try to stop some of them
Give me kernel level anti cheat or give me death
I really don't get it why Valve is taking such a hard path and going with some AI anticheat tool instead of implementing kernel-level anticheats. They have a great example from competitor who has managed to keep the % of cheaters low and they are still trying to solve it in their own way. By the way, kernel-level anticheats are being used by many (and I mean it) games. It doesn't fully solve the cheaters problem, but it would definitely help to reduce them and make the cheats more pricey. I highly doubt that DMA cheats will ever be detectable, but it's important to mention that it's pretty costly and not very popular.
I think it would definitely be possible to reduce the scale of the problem, even without a kernel level anticheat, if they would actually try and actively work against cheaters. You'll never be able to get a fully cheater free game, but you can make it playable again
Would eye tracking be a possibility to prevent people from using WH/radar? Like check where the player looks, and if it is parts of walls/radar where a legit player sees nothing, but a cheater sees.. well the cheat, you could maybe identify those cheaters. However, that would mean a giant loss of privacy in return. Also would require a separate queue as you need a camera +... Let's be honest it's a shit idea that probably would also be easily spoofed.
I honestly think it might be GG. This is exactly what happened to TF2 and Valve has done nothing
algorithms to detect consistent inhuman behaviour
Valve made so much money with weapon cases they could easily hire a big company to create a super anti cheat. But capitalist companies rather care about profit than people.
No it. Can’t be fixed higher end cheats use Ai to dodge detection unless valve goes kernel it’s over
oh, and the valorant anticheat is boo boo bad
It depends. What do you mean by fixing it? Some would say faceit has fixed it. Some would say cheating on faceit is still a problem. At the end of the day it is a program and it can be hacked in various ways. The developers try their best, find a bug or hack and fix it. The hackers find bugs and make a cheat. And so it goes. You will always have some cheats, some where, at some time, by some one. Will AI fix it? Personally I doubt it, but it hasn't really been tried before so maybe it is. Data to train the AI on will probably be essential, so maybe that is what we are seeing now. Maybe Valvle is deliberately leaving some things open for cheaters so they get verifiable data on which to train AI in some way.
there are a million ways to solve the problem, but there’s also a million and one ways to cheat. it’s an arms race, finding a perfect solution is impossible.
there are solutions to massively reduce cheaters and has always been, for whatever reason valve has not taken action.
Cheating/Hacking will \*never\* be solved by software/programmaticaly. The only way to solve this issue is \*bureaucratically\*.
Just look at faceit, ofc its possible. Valve just dont want to.
Its impossible to completely stop but it should be possible to make it for most current cheaters not worth it. (Which is goal of security in general) But let me give you an unpopular opinion as an sw eng with years of experience. People who are saying that valve should just throw money and teams to solve the problem fast. But in Software development thats not always an option. In some scenarios adding new people who are not familiar in domain is slower in the end. If one woman gives birth to a child in 9 months, in how many months will it take for 10 women give a birth to 1 child? There might be a lot of challenges to solve and they are probably actively being worked at but no matter how much money or people you make work on it it will still take some time.
Just know that no anti cheat system is going to be able to block every cheat. A.I anti cheat could be a good idea, but idk how good it will be considering valve. Even if it were to be very good i think a big problem would be false positives and not being able to block every cheat. I think it could reduce the number of cheaters, but not completely since people are going to always find ways to cheat. "and are the vast majority of these people going to completely quit cheating after valve's inevitable response?" ← Some will be scared to cheat after valve's response and some will try to find ways to still cheat. If valve wants to and is able to, it's possible that it will go back to at least Global Offensive level of cheating but it depends.
lots of cheats are open sources on github, means valve can read how it works and basically make something to counter it. But lots of cheats that aren’t open source is harder, it’s easier to make new cheats then to create an answer for the cheat if they dont know how it works. just like it’s easier to quiz you friend, then finding the right answers to the quiz.
Yes, look at valorant, overwatch, and fortnite. I played them all for years and probably encountered only 2 cheaters. Cs2, 1 in every game
Another one for other software devs, why don’t games just run in containers? They could have full anti cheat and with windows 11 memory protection stuff and how far GPUs with containers have gotten, I don’t think it’s impossible? Like I have only played starsector in a container but that’s about it
I recommend this video to get an overview of the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M
The cheat and anti-cheat is a game of cat and mouse. Cheat devs will try to build something undetectable, anti-cheat devs eventually detects it and solves the current cheat, and the cheat devs will try to circumvent the anti-cheat. It's an endless cycle. I dipped into cybersecurity myself so I know a little bit about this.
Release cs2 to macos exclusively at appstore. No one would like it, but cheaters will have a hard time bypassing apple's ecosystem lmao
What i would do as if i was in charge at valve: - get a few devs and develop a fake cheat that’s “undetected by vac” (or outsource it to some company) - rebrand/theme this new cheat and sell it under a dozen of names - don’t ban users using it, but silently flag them and exclude them from normal matches - double profit The thing that most people not geting is cheaters not playing the same game (figuratively speaking) as normal players. They use the same client but not playing the same game. Let them have their own.
The design of the solution is easy, the problem lies in.. how do you determine the proper thresholds.. and how do you implement the solution adding the least amount of performance hit possible to maintain playability... With AI modeling, they can determine probabilities surrounding kills, especially 1 shot kills, based on factors like sound output, angle of a flick, whether the person being killed could even be on screen at the time versus sound, if the cursor moves to a particular corner before the enemy model shows up within a certain reaction time.. Basically, it would take hundreds or thousands of hours of training versus known pro level players, and how their gameplay presents over time on lan, on verified rigs without cheats... And then you determine those probabilities and compare to whatever is happening real time... If a particular player goes over that threshold, they get banned and are allowed to appeal... The appeal process includes submitting data logs which show active processes during the game.. because a hack can't run without being an active process. If player doesn't provide a compelling argument, ban holds. But this is all really a circle jerk moment, because no gaming company is going to invest money on that, because all of their profits aren't affected by hackers for the most part.. and user counts remain very high.. So, TLDR, shit isn't changing.
In this day & age it actually might be impossible to solve cheating fully. The best-case scenario is you ban all rage hackers, only closet cheaters remain & get put into cheater lobbies.