Forum Discussion

Re: How long will it take to eliminate the cheaters?

The manual report system for cheats is most likely quite pointless. I have a friend working as a game developer and he says the manual reports are mostly just used to catch people for verbal abuse and racism etc. The anti cheat scans your files and memory for cheats (which basically are programs running in the background) or detects unusual input patterns from the user (like recoil macros etc).

So why would even need manual reports for this? Why would they even trust random players to have an input in who gets banned or not? I mean, just imagine the ratio of false reports vs true reports!

People reports falsely because they are simply pissed or based on ONE incident, like one lucky spray from a random enemy etc. But whats even more common is when they use their own skill level as the ultimate standard for whats fair play and whats cheating. Some guy that cant get out of gold gets killed by one R99 mag by a Master-skilled player and immediately hit the report button because they think everyone who is better then them must be cheaters. I am only D3 and I get spectated by a full enemy team at least 1/4 games, and at least one of them most likely sent a false report on me.

3 Replies

E9ine_AC
Hero+
5 years ago
@Babbediboopi I am a game developer myself for over 20 years now. I can tell you they are checked for cheating players. A lot systems wait for it to tally soo many of same reports and flag it to be viewed. So it will either log aim snapping to targets or recoil etc once they reach the set number it will flag them to be reviewed.

There are tons false reports as you mention so this to me is why they see how many of said report they have in what time frame. Then they can do a monitor that places them in the players eyes seeing what they do. Like spectate but dev style. Most companies actually rely on player reports as no system on this earth in gaming industry can actually catch them or where a injection is done. It is needle in hay stack. So players need to report if they want them delt with. I have many posts my self about it and concerns. But as a dev myself i know i have to do what the systems are set up to do if i want something done. Your friend also works for a different company who most likely has different protocols. There is a fine line between hate speech logs and game play reported logs. So your friends company may not do things as say apex would who would have many more measures in place. Dont compare one company to another. =P
Babbediboopi
5 years ago
@E9ine_AC
So let me me just make sure I understand what are saying: The anti-cheat you have worked with is designed to flag certain "suspicious" players, who gets a certain number of reports, or maybe exceeds a certain reports/time ratio, for "manual" observation, i.e. having an actual human employee spectating that individual to make an subjective assessment if that person should be punished or not?
Well, that might be a viable design to catch cheaters who get abnormally many reports but other than that, it seems both expensive and time ineffective and also rather unreliable since its up to a human to judge if someone is cheating, especially considering how many matches are played every single hour around the world.
What I mean is that if the devs main goal, by any methods available, is to "flag" suspicious players for reviewing, then in-game data and statistics of a player seem to be a 100x more reliable and cost effective method than manual reports from random players. Abnormal and suspicious player data and stats like, hit accuracy, sudden changes in K/D or win rate, headshot/bodyshot ratio can be collected automatically. Whats the point of relying on manual reports?
E9ine_AC
Hero+
5 years ago
@Babbediboopi I have actually suggested they track stats such as these to help determin if worth looking into or not.