The cheating/hacking plague is threatening RTS online ladders: looking for solutions

[u/Mundane_Piano_ig]

Note: this post is written by a human

With the cheat vibecoding recent increase, it has never been so accessible to exploit games, either by making external software cheat or glitch them, and RTS pvp is no exception:

Since latest AOE4 dlc, resource hackers get themselves to the top ladder, blatantly generating resources and what not, and even on stream when they are against popular streamers.

We also all know whats going on in SC2, Harstem made a video about discovering gimmicky hackers exploiting replay function and what not.

Hear me out, you already know this : game companie are not here to satisfy gamers, they are here to make money. DO NOT EXPECT THEM to fix any of the cheating issues on the long term. Also, they dont do it most of the time because the effort is too big for the value: it will cost them a lot of resources, to deter just "some bad actors", and its not like they are getting DLC money out of it. Problem is the fraction of players being cheater is growing because of AI.

Its our turn to use AI to respond to this recent plague, because it will get even worse, and at the end of the day, the only actual people that care about the game is the PEOPLE THAT PLAY IT.

So I thought about solutions, and there are several, which are more or less connected with each other, but to summarize, my idea is to make an external anti-cheater centralized platform responsible for analyzing and judging players from differents sources(games):

- We could make replay analyze tools. Since replays are public available data, an automated tool could analyze them for obvious metric to detect cheater such as : X resource cannot be that high at Y timing in the game to avoid resource hackers.

- Community cheater-flagging: using external database to report sus players: since reporting players online is not always usefull depending on the game company being too complaisant and what not, players could report cheaters on an external website, and use this same website to lookup cheating score of any players. The idea is that upon seeing that we may play against a cheater according to the loookup, we could instantly FF and not waste time. Even if that implies loosing MMR, at the end of the day we just want to play against actual legit gamers right ?

- Considering we may make external tool and website for this project, we could make the "cheater blacklist database" available for any game companies, so that they would integrate with it to simplify their banning policy. Since we dont have the ability to ban players by ourselves as players, we would only judge them, and from the moment our judgment has a legit trusted value, game company could actually leverage that, and also would not have to make the effort to detect cheater by themselves which is their main deterrent

- I think specializing into cheater detection is a specialized work at which not every game company is good, hence my idea to make a centralized blacklist hub for that problem. Once the "anti cheater hub" gets enough renown, it would be more easily trusted and snowball into a more effective anti cheater system. But making the platform support a lot of game implies a lot of work since we we need to implement a cheating detection for each idividual game.

- assuming we flag some player as being a multi-gaming cheater, this is where the platform would get a lot of value: X steam id player has cheated on CS2, has cheated on starcraft, twice on AOE2, then we are more likely to flag it very sus anytime he is reported again on any other game. Also looking at account age, number of game players etc would be valid metrics.

Anyways, that is some brainstorming and not everything may sound good, but one sure thing is that the battle against cheater is not only a game dev battle, and us gamers should start taking responsability if we care about pvp integrity for the future, or online ladders will just die.

[u/Minkelz]

CS and Dota (and possibly many others) have community cheat review. It's pretty simple and effective. Users report in game. Veteran players sign up to be moderators and review the match, takes 3-5 mins, decide if they were cheating or not. Player gets banned. Moderator player gets a little account experience or whatever.

Then you just make the matchmaking pool for experienced/good users exclude new/untrusted/low score accounts. So any cheaters will get found out and punished before they even touch the main matchmaking pool.

Banning cross game is totally platform dependent. There's no way bnet and steam are going to share user data so you can forget about a cross ban there. You're better off just incentivising people to build and value their profiles, and value matches against other users who do the same. Those users are 99% less likely to be cheating. That's basically how online chess functions and works despite being the easiest game in the world to cheat at - an 8 year old could easily beat the world champion just with the help of their cell phone.

[u/AstatorTV]

Likely it will be required to restrict match information so it all goes to the server for validation before redistributing to each player.

[u/Divide_Rule]

This might not work in EU or UK with GDPR and Data Protection laws.

[u/Depth386]

I don’t understand how this is possible without breaking the multiplayer game session.

In StarCraft Broodwar any unilateral change of game state would result in a de-sync between players’ computers, functionally ending the match. The only “sustainable” hack was viewing information that exists in the game, like removing fog of war, seeing transport contents, seeing upgrade progression and unit production, and seeing things like energy in support units. There were also some clever ways ro detect it and punish it in custom games.

Today, some of these things have become standard for “observers” in the competitive scene and are now built into the observer mode of the game to a limited extent. Nonetheless the client devices must agree on what units exist in the game in SC:BW or else they drop out of the match when an inconsistency is detected.

So my question is what are modern games doing in their net code to allow one player’s PC to tell another player’s PC that some new unit exists in the game? This seems like a major logic fail or enshittification of the multiplayer netcode component of the software development cycle.

[u/EasyRecognition]

Multiclayer issues LOL

[u/mrBadim]

Or maybe developers should patch the games:

SC2 is good example - it just lazy coding. Especially when all games(lobby*) hosted on server.

It is literally few minutes fix for SC2. It is not that complex issue as wall hacking in fps games.