It wouldn't take a very complicated system to have a unique ID token per app that can't be traced to you but you only get one. Which OP addressed.

I think that’s overanalyzing where this comment is coming from.

At the level of something like spam or cheating, it’s not really a matter of opinion whether or not someone is participating in good faith. Someone who’s only ever one email address away from exploiting your platform that way really needs to be boxed out in a more permanent way.

I don't think those real identities should be public or deanonymizable from outside a given platform.

In my experience a good aimbot is impossible to tell from a normal player when you play ranked at a high competitive level, at least not with any degree of certainty that I think is worth banning people for. The cheaters you lose to at that level are the ones calling out your positions to their team because they can see you on the minimap while they aren't supposed to, things like that.

Trigger bots (shoots when it detects an enemy using CV AND you are holding some key/pedal) are much harder to detect, almost impossible if effort is taken to make the time distribution believable.

Yes the hallmarks of llm is there.

The DMA cheaters are caught when riot gets access to the vendors firmware and ban the people that are using it, not by the cheats themselves. Colorbots run on the same PC so these can be caught in various ways.

Cheating might break tournament or social rules, but it doesn't break the game. So yes.

And any online game can be "cheated" by having someone better play in your place, or abusing the ranking system, but again that is breaking a social/meta-game rule, not a game rule.

Cheats in FPS games effectively break the rules of the game (wallhacks), or do things that are entirely impossible for a human (instant-lock aimbot). Chess and Go don't have that problem.

I suppose the difference is moot when everyone imagines that they're in a tournament playing for clout, and not playing to learn strategy.

In such circles, clout can be more lucrative than money

We had a third option in the old days: Play on private servers with your community, or on public servers where the community vote-kicks cheaters. It wasn't perfect, but it did work pretty good.

Unfortunately the industry decided to leave private/player-hosted servers behind, and modern genres like battle royale require unreasonably high player counts, so we're kind of stuck.

The latter is basically how it goes with Counter-Strike 2 which doesn't have kernel level anti-cheat.

Well, maybe not "everyone" is cheating, but there's very little punishment to cheating in that game for those who do. Do it too blatantly and get reported an cordoned off into "low trust" matchmaking, or just closet cheat with total impunity.

I suppose this then drives people to third party matchmaking services like FACEIT that do use kernel level anti-cheat (which has its own separate game culture issues to replace the cheating issue).

Personally I assert that if you're already running a model to classify pixels on the screen to try to aim, passing through mouse movements from another mouse in addition isn't really a big deal.

> If that was viable, they would have started with Arduino before trying DMA attacks.

I'm not describing something theoretical. I didn't use it for cheating, but I have in fact used an RP2040 to emulate an HID mouse and tried to make it look "invisible" from the other end. I don't have code posted to GitHub, but other people do have similar examples. If you wanted to get obsessive about it, it probably wouldn't even be hard to emulate vendor-specific proprietary behaviors, like whatever custom HID reports are used for things like mouse profiles and firmware updates. It requires a bit of reverse engineering, but nothing that crazy.

You can also just do it with a normal Raspberry Pi too, if it's one that has USB OTG support. This is how a lot of those Raspberry Pi KVM solutions send inputs without needing much external hardware.

Let's say you are still not convinced, and assume that this method is doomed to be detected somehow. One last thing: you could always hack up a real USB gaming mouse and rig the sensor up to a microcontroller or FPGA. That is substantially harder and more expensive, but I'm just trying to illustrate that if people are really driven to cheat and cheating is really a big expensive industry, this can be done.

> One possibility: The Arduino added input latency cancelling out the cheating benefit.

I don't believe so, no. You don't have to stick to a specific hardware platform, but if there's one advantage that microcontrollers have over typical computers like Raspberry Pis it's latency. Even if their USB controllers are too limited or broken somehow, you can probably get away with bitbanging USB, especially on something with a nice and beefy microcontroller like the RP2350.

I believe the actual real reason why this wasn't a thing was because in the beginning for CV-based cheating, the CV part itself wasn't good enough. Now with computers having advanced a few more steps and with ML having advanced many many steps, being able to do very good classifiers in real time seems to be viable.

So really, the clock is ticking. There is no practical reason why the I/O part can't be done, so as long as the actual aimbot part works well enough. I'm willing to put my name on that.

The potential upside to pure usb cheating is much smaller than dma cheats, because it only gives you aim hacks, not wall hacks.

Hacker News has always been bad at understanding the words “mostly effective.”

An anticheat does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

A DRM solution does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

A website block does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

And so on. “There’s a workaround” != “This is therefore mostly useless.”

Otherwise, let me tell you, seat belt laws and speed limits are the most useless things ever made. The workaround is just pushing my foot down harder!

> How exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that it's useless?

They just hit a new bans-per-second record?

And for macOS the OS itself provides enough system integrity that Riot don't need a kernel anticheat on macOS.

Steam Deck users need to ask Valve to similarly improve SteamOS's system integrity to prove to game companies that it's safe for people to run their games on it without compromising their game's integrity.

Not really, no; not without getting detected and banned. There are way cheaper ways to get banned.

Yes, fast and effective moderation (it's be real nice if the blatent cheaters were banned before the game ended, as opposed to in 'waves' where they've already had plenty of time to cause problems). But that's expensive.

Allow private/player-run servers with votekick enabled.

The reputational risk involved in using their anticheat for that is pretty severe, and I can't imagine they'd make that much money by selling telemetry to advertisers compared to how much they make off Valorant itself.

At their scale it would also turn into one or more big class action lawsuits if they got caught trying it too, I expect. The lawyer fees would probably swamp any profits from selling telemetry data.

Murder is legal if it serves the powerful. Some goes with spyware.

Spyware is legal. As long as people who care about these things are a tiny minority, the law (and lawmakers) will never be compelled to change.

The best bet for those who play these games is to explore alternatives, or leave games altogether and socialize in the real world.