I have found over the last 5 years that it is impossible for me to take online multiplayer gaming serious in any capacity anymore. Cheating has become so rampant and so ubiquitous that I have no confidence in any online gaming match to be cheater free. If people are cheating then what am I even playing for? It's only fun for me when I know there is some semblance of integrity between the players, but nobody else seems to care. I don't even particularly care about being good or winning. You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game.<p>I also have no trust in any sort of gaming related records of feats of ability. I've been deeply involved with gaming communities in the past where people would show off their world records. I would question such scores only to be flamed and then years later it is discovered they were cheating after all.<p>Really my only point is that I despise cheaters and any game that isn't single player or only between friends may as well not exist for me anymore.
> 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.<p>Any speculation as to how this worked on a lower level ?
This suddenly reminded me of how I was “cheating”.<p>Before the game starts each of the ten players gets to pick a distinct hero for themselves out of a pool of about 120 choices. This is over 10^20 distinct combinations! Each hero has some unique capabilities that combo with allies or counter enemy heroes.<p>I tried to train a “hero recommender” based on tens of millions of games.<p>It turned out that this is obscenely difficult because even the best AI training algorithms struggle with such highly noisy labels. A good hero combo might shift win rates by some positive percentage but have a single sample data point, which is a loss because of one stupid kid in the team throwing the game.<p>You also can’t naively simplify the problem into 2-hero or 3-hero combinations because this misses the “total team composition” metrics.<p>I found some research papers that were just a few months old at the time which covered this corner of the AI training space. Their conclusion were: “We don’t know either but it’s an interesting problem!”
Does anyone remember when Warcraft 3 was in beta and got leaked? Pirates created an emulated Battle.net that could work with the beta assets and had matchmaking, ladder, etc. working.<p>Hundreds of thousands played. Blizzard released patches in beta that would, for example, spawn infernals to attack your town hall if it detected you were on the emulated server. This reminds me of that. Blizzard lost their battle, by the way, and people pirated WC3 all the way until release.
> 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.<p>I wonder how many non-cheating users of some obscure AV solution that scans memory they banned.
<p><pre><code> Meanwhile, Riot Games issued a warning to League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics players earlier this year that new cheats could be developed after source code for both games and the legacy anti-cheating software they use was stolen in a data breach.
</code></pre>
As a past fan of League of Legends and Riot, this is a very typical response from them. Zero effort; meaningless notices. After years of playing, I quit permanently after reviewing my games and finding I was the only one not cheating in about 10 games in a row (that means I encountered about 90 cheaters in a row). This was <i>before</i> the code leak. God help the remaining legitimate community now. It's so obvious that Riot sees people as an obstacle to their money.<p>Seeing this news for Dota 2 warms me up inside. I don't play Dota 2 because I don't want to allocate the time to it, but it seems like they truly care about their community, at least to a much greater degree. Very happy news.
The average Dota 2 player count over the last 30 days was around 396,000[1] so am I correct in understanding that <i>at least</i> 10% of all Dota 2 players were cheating in some way?<p><a href="https://steamcharts.com/app/570" rel="nofollow">https://steamcharts.com/app/570</a>
Imagine a multi-player first person shooter game. There are complaints that some players are cheating to win matches. Many of these complaints include a common description in the experience: the alleged cheaters seem to "know" where the other players are, even when not within direct line of sight.<p>In this hypothetical game, there is a feature where, in specific circumstance, one player can in fact see on a map where the enemy players are located. Maybe this feature occurs when enemies are within a specific distance and shooting a weapon. Or maybe it occurs for a limited time when somebody on one team activates a drone and then that team can see the positions of everyone on the enemy team.<p>Regardless, there exists some function called "DisplayPlayersEnemy" that provides this feature. It's only supposed to be running in specific circumstances and otherwise is not active.<p>Unless, of course, some players figured out how to always have Function "DisplayPlayersEnemy" constantly running. This gives those players an obvious advantage.<p>So the developers decide to quietly release an update to the game to test this theory.<p>They create an alternative function called "DisplayEnemyPlayers". It does the same thing as the older "DisplayPlayersEnemy". And all the processes that had previously initiated the old function now initiate the new function instead. So the game continues to function just the same as it did before.<p>The developers keep the old function in the game, even though there's no longer any legitimate way to initiate it. It will still do all the things it did before, so if the function is initiated, it will seem to work as it did before. Except that the developers added a process to that function to identify when and by whom the function was initiated.<p>The developers release the update and then wait.<p>From the players' perspectives nothing has changed. Except that the cheaters are now about to fall into a trap. Some players did in fact modify their game with additional code that caused the old function to initiate when it wasn't supposed to. Since the old function is still in the game, their modifications have continued to work. Many of the cheaters did not notice that the old function had been modified and that a new function had been added. So these cheaters did not know to update their modifications to use the new function.<p>But since there's no legitimate way for the old function to initiate after the update, and since the old function now reports data to the developer, the developer knows who modified their game to cheat.
Only way cheating will ever end if players have to risk losing a meaningful percentage of their real world wealth — and even then you would have accounts that get stolen for the sole purpose of being a throw away account to cheat with.
Could you just match-up players to similarly skilled opponents?<p>I'm not a player, but I assume people access Dota using the same account each time they play? Their win/loss record should produce a decent "skill" ranking. Those that are cheating will un/naturally do better, and eventually they'll just be playing each other.<p>It would be sort of like a shadow-banning. They still get to play, but real people don't have to come in contact with them.<p>Who cares if the cheaters play other cheaters? Perhaps it's a drain on the company resources? But if they're paying participants, does it matter?
I wonder how they developed this honeypot in such a way that the magic page or region of memory was known to have been accessed by a cheat and not by, for example, an antivirus daemon.
Nice move and it’s better that they’re open about it so that any wannabe cheaters might consider it. On the other hand, what is stopping cheaters from creating new accounts and trying to read data from the client with a new exploit or other means?
I remember this... "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" and I feel like a lot of people want to be good so they cheat... they want to not be seen as bad, or a drag on their team.<p>But yeah... DotA, and League of Legends... some of the most toxic games out there. No community to speak of, just a bunch of sweaty try-hards who probably don't get out around humans enough since they're too busy playing these games.<p>It's rough.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU</a>
>If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota.<p>This is weird wording, Dota client stores data inside my RAM, on my hard drive, am I free to read what I want from my own hardware? They send me network packages and i send them back, so am I free to sniff my own traffic and examine it? How do they even detect this? I mean, if they exposed the data which leads to unfair advantage, it's their fault
> This software was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage.<p>I'm curious what this information was - does the Dota 2 client have access to all the game state including players hidden from view?
If only Battlefield did the same.
Or force hard regional blocks between servers, blanket ban China. Release Cheaterfield for them, different kind of entertainment definition in that market.
I played a lot of this game (WD for the win) a while back but gave up on it years ago.<p>Cheating was only a secondary problem to the toxic community. It went all the way up to the casters.
there was a convar in the game for 6+ years that let you see particles in the fog of war; 99% of cheats forced this convar on. source lets you request CVars from the client and the value, so they simply did that. it has nothing to do with reading memory, but rather writing memory to allow you to see particles
I do not understand the appeal of cheating in MP games. What is the point of being invincible in a FPS or unlimited gold in something else etc? It takes all the effort and skill out of it. It's like it's a buncha 12yos who cant stand "to lose".
TIL that Dota had over 40k people still playing.<p>ZING!<p>But seriously, I haven't played it in years and years...mostly because of the cheating and the toxicity of it's players.