Clamping down on video game cheats

Who are the Cheat Police? And how effective is the anti-cheat software they use for cleaning up the lawless terrain of online video games? Dan Cooper investigates.

by Dan Cooper |
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Clamping down on videogame cheats   The Cheat Police: how effective is anti-cheat software at cleaning up online videogames   Words: Dan Cooper   —-   Magic bullets that defy all laws of physics. Foes sniped from seemingly impossible angles. Headshots land endlessly with unerring accuracy. Sounds like the recipe for a wonderfully fantastical action movie, right? Wrong. It’s actually the depressing reality that most PC gamers face when they head online. We’re talking about cheating in online competitive video games, a plague that has taken root in almost every online shooter out there.    The nature of online matchmaking means that even a small percentage of cheaters can have a disproportionately negative impact upon a game’s online community. According to Valve, the software developer and owners of gaming platform Steam, just 7% of players cheating within a given game’s community will affect around 50% of matches. Statistically speaking, that stacks up a fair amount of misery for clean players who don’t appreciate having to constantly square off against the online equivalent of John Wick after three bowls of Shredded Wheat.     If you’re looking for an example of just how much cheating can tip the scales of an encounter, look no further than this Call of Duty: Warzone stream, where a cheating player ignores the supposedly lethal effects of being riddled with bullets and then being set ablaze. In mere moments, the cheater absorbs more punishment than Rocky Balboa endured throughout a decades-long career of being routinely pulverised by a murderers’ row of hulking 1980s hard men.       Tweet to embed: https://twitter.com/NesGunz/status/1382950490099490825?s=20    Naturally, game developers have engineered various measures to counteract online cheating, aware of the detrimental effect that it can have on their player base. However, as with any system that is designed to be reactive to player behaviour, there are of course flaws. The biggest problem is that for the most part, cheating has to first occur for it to be spotted and dealt with. Different developers have pursued separate paths to deal with cheating, including the expansion of anti-cheating software, but the implantation of such systems come with their own problems.     Off duty?   The publisher that has faced the fiercest criticism for its inept execution of anti-cheating software is Activision, for the game Call Of Duty: Warzone. As a free-to-play FPS shooter with global branding and cross-play features to boot, Warzone represents a perfect storm for cheating to bleed into all platforms. Even console gaming, which is normally protected against such dastardly exploitation (although on consoles, the cross-play feature can be turned off to keep rogue PC cheaters from despoiling the console utopia). Also, the popularity of the Call Of Duty brand gives it a huge player base, while its free-to-play model means it’s relatively easy for cheats to return to the game, even when banned.    Whilst Activision has officially stated it does use anti-cheating software to police Warzone, it took the company almost a year from the point that the game launched (and amid a tidal wave of player criticism) to even admit that this was the case. Furthermore, by not using popular third-party anti-cheating software such as EasyAntiCheat or BattlEye, little is known about Activision’s in-house proprietary system. That said, its effectiveness is clearly questionable, as is evidenced by the publisher relying heavily on other non-software anti-cheating measures, such as in-game reporting and two-factor authentication to catch cheaters, rather than through a software-based solution.    Given that Activision seems to have employed droves of human beings to handle the bulk of its anti-cheat measures, speculation as to whether Warzone’s anti-cheating software even exists continues to be debated by frustrated players.    However, for developers who have been far more transparent about the measures they use to catch cheaters, there are issues too. The past year has seen a spate of online titles having to withdraw or make significant alterations to their anti-cheat software because of performance issues or other troubling concerns. One of the biggest issues is false positives where clean players have to endure temporary bans. Titles like Rainbow Six Siege coming under fire from players for employing an anti-cheat system that in the past has punished clean players for unwittingly sharing a lobby or a game with players who are cheating.     Battling   There are several factors here that have to be considered. Firstly, there’s little onus on BattlEye, the third-party anti-cheating software used by Rainbow Six Siege, to determine the difference between real cheaters and clean players who have been mistakenly banned. After all, the more ‘cheating’ players BattlEye detects, the more successful it appears, which in turn encourages publishers like Ubisoft to continue using its anti-cheat technology.    Ubisoft, however, does have a vested interest in ensuring temporary bans are fair so as not to unduly frustrate the clean players in their community. However, although the publisher confirmed in February that it’s now doing more to investigate and overturn false positives, it too has employed a human team to oversee this process which slows things down considerably,    Much like the movie Minority Report, the perfect anti-cheating software would be able to root out cheaters before they’ve even ruined somebody’s game. Like a digital Tom Cruise barging into an unsuspecting perp’s residence and arresting them for a crime they haven’t yet committed, pre-emptive anti-cheating software has the potential to be mind-bogglingly effective. After all, it’s not like the ruffians who create cheating software are suddenly going to experience a moral epiphany. In fact, many of them are registered, tax-paying companies with annual turnovers that top $1m, meaning they too have financial incentives to continue developing cheating software, plus the resources to invest in constantly refining their products to escape detection.     Trust   Whilst other games such as Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG and the aforementioned Rainbow Six Siege have taken a harder line in retrospective punishment – enacting full hardware bans on cheating players – not all have taken that path. Valve, developer of Counter Strike: Global Offensive has elected to walk the aforementioned Tom Cruise path, instead imposing sanctions on players before they even cheat. Valve’s own proprietary anti-cheat software, known as VAC, employs a trust system where the company uses all of the available data it has on players during matchmaking to place fair players with other fair players. Likewise, those likely to cheat in matches are matched with other players of questionable integrity. Presumably creating some sort of FPS purgatory where despite being shot, nobody can ever die, and games stretch out into a hellish eternity.     Despite Valve using a wealth of player data – including how many accounts players have and how many of those accounts are banned for cheating – the trust system still isn’t perfect. It doesn’t actually reduce the number of players cheating, rather grouping all of the cheaters together so they can’t affect the clean games. Plus, newer players to the game without an established history can be grouped harshly, and no matter what Valve says, some cheaters will slip the net. That said, as a working solution, the Valve trust system is both novel and pleasingly ironic, ridding cheaters of their unfair advantage and giving them a bitter taste of their own medicine as they face off against other players who can do to them what they would do to others.    But does it work?   It’s difficult to say whether this is all a more effective approach than the mass hardware bans implemented by other game developers. After all, those bans, whilst often not a terminal solution for getting rid of hardened cheaters, can prove at least to be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for rogue players as they have to spoof their hard drives or reinstall Windows to circumnavigate the effects of said ban. Whilst Valve’s trust system may appear to be less punitive, it does however, seem to be a system that largely removes dirty players from clean games, surely the ultimate goal for any online competitive shooter.      One particular advantage of Valve’s trust system, and indeed VAC, is that the performance trade-off for using it is minimal when compared to some of the previously mentioned third party operators out there. This is because anti-cheat software from developers such as BattlEye, PunkBuster and EasyAntiCheat operate at the kernel level when installed on your computer. Even some first party proprietary anti-cheat software does this too, including Riot’s Vanguard system, used chiefly in their popular 5v5 hero shooter, Valorant.    The concern with anti-cheat software that operates at such a level centres on the potentially problematic levels of access that you’re granting the developer. By scanning for cheating software at kernel level, these programs have access to each user’s system information, personal information provided during signup and so on. Not only that, but were some unscrupulous hacker types able to expose a security vulnerability in kernel level software like Vanguard, it could be misused to much more malicious effect: kernel-level software has by far the greatest sphere of influence over a computer’s functions.   It’s worth noting that this isn’t a necessary compromise either. Both Valve’s VAC and Blizzard’s Warden are proprietary anti-cheat tools that are just as effective without being kernel-based. Riot, the developer of Valiant, was eventually forced to reconfigure Vanguard as its ‘always-on’ nature resulted in players voicing concerns about the software’s access to key computing functions, even when the game itself wasn’t running.   Troubles   Both client-side and server-side anti-cheat software have their own limitations. Client-side anti-cheat software such as Vanguard is to a large extent limited by the fluctuating visibility of cheat programs running on a player’s PC, even when running at kernel level. Often, cheat coding installed onto a player’s PC will have a greater number of permissions than the scanning software, making scanning for such cheats exceedingly difficult.    When cheat codes have been identified and blacklisted by the developer, these can be easier to find and sanction, but when businesses with huge turnovers make profit from constantly tweaking cheat codes to make them invisible one more, it becomes a never-ending war of attrition that game publishers simply cannot win.    On the other side of things, there are newer developments like server-side anti-cheating software such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive’s trust system. However, when using player data to determine whether cheating has occurred, it can be very difficult to use machine learning to ascertain definitively whether a player is a cheat, or has just enjoyed a particularly excellent game. False positives are a natural problem with this approach, with clean players sometimes receiving temporary bans and no real recourse for appeal.    Imperfect   Neither solution is perfect then, it seems, especially for poor Linux players who often find anti-cheat software branding them as cheats, simply because of the open nature of that particular operating system.    Much like the troll, that other seemingly ubiquitous online killjoy, the cheater is here to stay, it seems. The real question isn’t whether cheating in online competitive shooters will ever be quashed entirely… it’s whether we can afford to live with passes for a solution.  

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