alt Hacker NewsThere is a solution to cheating, but it's not clear how hard it would be to implement.
Cheaters are by definition anomalies, they operate with information regular players do not have. And when they use aimbots they have skills other players don't have.
If you log every single action a player takes server-side and apply machine learning methods it should be possible to identify these anomalies. Anomaly detection is a subfield of machine learning.
It will ultimately prove to be the solution, because only the most clever of cheaters will be able to blend in while still looking like great players. And only the most competently made aimbots will be able to appear like great player skills. In either of those cases the cheating isn't a problem because the victims themselves will never be sure.
There is also another method that the server can employ: Players can be actively probed with game world entities designed for them to react to only if they have cheats. Every such event would add probability weight onto the cheaters. Ultimately, the game world isn't delivered to the client in full so if done well the cheats will not be able to filter. For example: as a potential cheater enters entity broadcast range of a fake entity camping in an invisible corner that only appears to them, their reaction to it is evaluated (mouse movements, strategy shift, etc). Then when it disappears another evaluation can take place (cheats would likely offer mitigations for this part). Over time, cheaters will stand out from the noise, most will likely out themselves very quickly.
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I've been advocating for a statistical honeypot model for a while now. This is a much more robust anti cheat measure than even streaming/LAN gaming provides. If someone figures out a way to obtain access to information they shouldn't have on a regular basis, they will be eventually be found with these techniques. It doesn't matter the exact mechanism of cheating. This even catches the "undetectable" screen scraping mouse robot AI wizard stuff. Any amount of signal integrated over enough time can provide damning evidence.
> With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.
> Cheaters are by definition anomalies
So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…
When you have enough randomly distributed variables, by the law of big numbers some of them will be anomalous by pure chance. You can't just look at any statistical anomaly and declare it must mean something without investigating further.
In science, looking at a huge number of variables and trying to find one or two statistically significant variables so you can publish a paper is called p hacking. This is why there are so many dubious and often even contradictory "health condition linked to X" articles.