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Discussion summary

Discussion centers on anti-cheat measures in CS2, with some advocating for game design solutions and others questioning Valve's implementation. Cheating remains a significant issue, affecting gameplay fairness.

What the discussion says

  • Some believe anti-cheat should be integrated into game design.
  • Others think Valve should implement more native solutions.
  • Cheating, including wallhacks, is widespread and difficult to fully prevent.
  • Players suggest that better server-side checks could help.
  • There is skepticism about Valve's efforts and priorities.
“The best anti cheat are the one you put in the game design.”
— aucisson_masque
“Why doesn't Valve implement this natively?”
— MatheusFelipe

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  • To me, the best anti cheat are the one you put in the game design.

    There is only one 'fps' I play, it's called holdfast and is about Napoleonic warfare. Muskets are so inaccurate that having a wallhack or an aimbot would be complete nonsense.

    There are still people who cheat in other way, but it's extremely limited.

    Cheaters killed 90% of the multiplayer game to me.

    by aucisson_masque
  • Why doesn't Valve implement this natively?
    by MatheusFelipe
  • I think there’s a good possibility that they’re intentionally not fixing it, cheaters blatantly using wall hack are easy to root out and ban.
    by cedws
  • Wallhack is locked into the DNA of CS for some reason. The most common defense by far is mass denial. For the great majority of players that seems to be good enough.
    by nyeah
  • Get good
    by toilet
  • I'm fine as long as the game is somewhat evenly matched, and not fine if it's not. With or without cheating. Then whatever cheaters they can catch and shadowban, great. Smurfing is a way bigger problem anyway, cause some people treat the game like a job and will beat you more reliably than cheaters.
    by frollogaston
  • Not just CS, I don't think people realize how prevalent cheating is in any multiplayer game. The issue is compounded by the fact that many high skill ceiling games are plagued by "micro cheats" being used by players that are already fairly decent at the game even without them, making it borderline impossible for casual players to tell if what just happened to them was a fair skill gap or someone cheating.

    I don't play multiplayer games anymore for that reason. Too easy to go on an emotional tilt where you feel like you're suffering from paranoia and suspecting too many players of cheating. It's absolutely ruined competitive games for me.

    by ultimafan
  • Why hasn't valve poured a billion or two on fixing this concept and implementing it?
    by lousken
  • >Release Notes for 5/26/2015

    >– Added trace-based visibility checks to prevent networking invisible enemy players.

    https://blog.counter-strike.net/2015/05/11988

    by charcircuit
  • This is good. However, it still sends info about the players ~200ms ahead which still makes you lose.
    by szmarczak

  •     > Does it cause pop-in when peeking?
    The goal is early reveal, not exact last-millisecond reveal.
    CS2FOW predicts using movement and ping, reveals enemies slightly before exact visibility, and keeps revealed enemies visible briefly. This intentionally leaks a small near-corner window to avoid late pop-in.
    This fails to address the main point of the "pop-in" issue relevant to fog of war systems, which is that it is the victim of the peek that gets the worst pop-in effect, the peeker much less so. The aggressive peeker gets the benefit of the early-prediction from the server since they're the initiator of the movement, whereas the victim only begins to receive the information after the peeker has already gotten two network roundtrips worth of early prediction.
    by xeonmc
  • What is the reason for thinking "early, not milliseconds" would not mean "early enough for the peeked/victim too?

    Ultimately the server must decide when to "pop" players, regardless of client interpolation which can only happen after the pop. So why would the server delay the pop for one player?

    by the_gipsy
  • Interesting, could it be mitigated by the server doing its own prediction and defogging the peeker early? Or is lag prediction in CS2 not entirely client-sided.
    by webstrand
  • Why wouldn't you just send the positions to both clients in the same tick? Seems trivial to solve.
    by bakies
  • Moving away from the technical solution space - I'm curious, have their been any games (or communities) with a high entry fee/deposit (e.g. $500 USD) to join kept in escrow and lost in the event you're discovered to be cheating?

    There are plenty more questions like paying for mods/review, securing the money, paying for servers, etc.. but my basic question is if cost of entry exceeds cost of reward from cheating has ever been attempted in a game.

    Apparently buying a new copy of a $10-20 game isn't enough to keep people away from cheats. Less so when there is prize money on the line or skins (e.g. CS2) worth $100k.

    by Xeoncross
  • Csgo became free at some point, and I remember the amount of smurfing increasing a lot then. Have rarely noticed cheaters, but smurfs are just as bad if not worse. They do at least require new accounts to waste some time playing deathmatch to be eligible for competitive.
    by frollogaston
  • >e.g. $500 USD

    I've seen private cheats for games with less-than-terrible anticheats charge that monthly, if not weekly. You're underestimating how much people are willing to pay to play with cheats, and overestimating how much regular people are willing to pay to play against players without them.

    by lachiflippi
  • I wonder if it could spawn "ghost players" in places no player could be to detect reaction
    by dabber21
  • There was research on this published by Activision [1]. Spawning fake enemies behind the users back, inside walls, etc.

    The players who react to fake enemies self-identify as cheaters.

    [1]: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/hallucinations

    by skimdesk
  • Honeypot & statistics are a much more interesting avenue of anti-cheat to me. The most egregious cheaters tend to get banned the most quickly with these techniques (e.g. a 200-1 K/D ratio = a lot of samples per unit time).

    When it comes to cheating in video games, I subscribe more to the Dune philosophy than the LOTR philosophy. The ends (experience) definitely justify the means. Making sure that all cheaters are punished ~equally regardless of the effect of their infractions is fantastic in principle, but I'd rather if we could simply remove the ones that are obviously & openly ruining the experience.

    False positives suck, but there is no reason to pander to the .01% performers if you are trying to keep a multiplayer game community alive. Esports has demonstrated this is a terrible approach. We had community servers that would ban people simply for being too good before all the matchmaking stuff started up. The anti-cheat was vibes based and arguably superior to anything going on today. It wasn't "fair", but it was generally a much better experience as a player.

    by bob1029
  • I wonder how often wall hacks are actually used in high-level competitive play by cheaters vs ESP. ESP seems like the better route to avoid manual review flagging suspicious activity. Audible cues (which this currently does not mitigate, and I'm not sure it can) are things that can genuinely separate players by skill and you'd think someone running such a cheat just has very good hearing.

    >CS2FOW uses static baked map geometry. Dynamic occluders such as doors, breakables, props, smokes, particles, and projectiles are intentionally out of scope for now.

    Market window on Mirage just became more powerful on these servers :)

    Very cool project nonetheless.

    by landr0id
  • I didn't know what ESP was; from some googling, it appears to notify you when someone is aiming at you?
    by aidenn0
  • This has been done before in both 1.6 as well as Source. I helped with some of these implementations back in the late-2000s when I was playing professionally and I even tried to kickstart an anti-cheat hardware solution about a decade ago[1].. spent way too much time working on some of these problems. The main issue with occlusion was slightly increased latency, visual jitter because of interpolation (especially around corners), and a few other more technical problems[2]. It's good enough for public servers, but not tenable in serious competition.

    Cheating has always been a problem in FPSs, and it likely won't go away. That's why premier competitions have always been on LAN.

    [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...

    [2] Hard to fully obfuscate audio sources, hard to obfuscate hitboxes since you still need them for collision checking (e.g. if a grenade bounces off an enemy player behind a wall—the server does not do all physics for all clients), and this is on top of the engine itself sometimes requiring actual entities, so you're stuck with these dummy entities in memory, and so on.

    by dvt
  • Valve also implemented this on CS:GO back in 2015 [0], and enabled by default in competitive servers, so I would consider it absolutely tenable (FACEIT, the platform used by competitive variants, had their own hand-rolled SMAC implementation, before using the 1st party solution, albei,t that solution was buggy). Why Valve didn't port this over to CS2, I will never know.

    [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/35zwwy/opt...

    by shaokind
  • Except when the professionals are doing the cheating. LAN won’t save you. Word.exe
    by reactordev
  • i remember you man, sad ur project didn't get much support, you're david titarenco if i'm not mistaken
    by ikda
  • my first thought was to have lots of hidden players running around that only you can see. The grenade thing kinda ruins it.
    by 6510
  • > Cheating has always been a problem in FPSs, and it likely won't go away. That's why premier competitions have always been on LAN.

    And even then I heard of aimbots included in the gamer mouse that would 'infect'the computer when it's wired in.

    by aucisson_masque
  • Why on earth don't the producers of the game implement this? It sounds trivial to do?
    by davedx
  • I wonder why similar methods haven't been employed in MMO servers to help curb botting/cheating there. The impact of jitter and loss of smoothness in a tab-target game like WoW would be minimal (even in PvP), because it's always had a noticable level of artifacts like rubberbanding.
    by cosmic_cheese