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poohty_t's avatar
poohty_t
5 years ago

No matter how good the next BF looks, you need to really nail anti-cheat

Look right now there is only speculation and no one knows if it will be crossplay with pc, so that part of the discussion I'm leaving out. Really people cheat on consoles just as much as PC. That sa...
discussion
Rev0verDrive's avatar
Rev0verDrive
5 years ago
@poohty_t
EA/DICE do invest a lot of time and money into anti-cheat. Yet, there isn't a silver bullet fix all. Anti-Cheat is a 24/7 process of detection, refactor, patch. The cheat developers will always be 10 steps ahead of the anti-cheat devs.

Cheats work by modifying/reading local client data. EA/DICE, nor even Microsoft (Windows OS) can prevent that with current tech. All you need to understand on this issue is DKOM. Look it up. If you can write an application that uses DKOM efficiently you can go undetected. If DICE cannot detect a cheat it cannot ban for cheat usage.

PubG's report system is heavily flawed. AND you don't send a video clip with your report. The Server records a Demo of the match entirety. Your report denotes the player ID and in some cases a demo time reference. PubG's dev team download the match demo and review it. These demos are not video. They are Game Data that's used to 99.999% accurately replicate all player actions, inputs in engine. This is also what PubG's replay and death cam are. Death cams are n seconds of data stored in memory (RAM). Replays are data buffered in memory then written to disk.

Also note that reporting in game can result in players being "temp banned". All it takes is a few players (3-4) in a match to falsely report a player for this to happen. This is why it's flawed.

Shadow Banning Won't Work in Battlefield.
BF typically has a server browser which lets players choose which server they play on. If shadow banned you won't be able to join preferred servers, thus you'd know your shadow banned. It would only work on quick match type setups.
cso7777's avatar
cso7777
Seasoned Ace
5 years ago

@Rev0verDriveEA has spoken about developing a new in-house anti-cheat, this was perhaps a year ago. They even "hired" a former cheat-programmer.

We can hope this will be an improvement to the existing FF-system and introduced with BF6 (Apex Legends could perhaps benefit from it as well).

I play a lot of BF4 and while there are probably still some undetected wall-hacking, but obvious hackers are almost non-existent, due to many RSP-servers having active admins.

But active admins on public servers are probably not a viable solution for EA (financially)...

  • OskooI_007's avatar
    OskooI_007
    Seasoned Ace
    5 years ago

    I'm switching from PC to PS5 and disabling crossplay. I have zero faith in PC anti-cheat, especially EA's.

    I played BF1 this Friday and reported around 20 cheaters. Some of them I reported months ago.

    But I keep filing reports...

  • Rev0verDrive's avatar
    Rev0verDrive
    5 years ago
    @cso7777
    Everybody is doing some level of in-house anti-cheat. They are typically no better than enterprise level applications. Look at PubG. They have 3 Anti-cheats running. BattlEye, EasyAC, and one other I can't remember the name of off hand. They also have in-game reporting, and there's PubG shield ( https://discord.com/channels/207018395139309569/747756393041231873). Game is lit with cheats and they are constantly banning.

    Cheating is an industry wide issue. No game is untouched by it.

    The best anyone could do is implement server-side anti-cheat. Validate input and action before executing it. ESP/Wallhacking will always be an issue. Nothing you can do about that really. There was a cheat last year that was offloading player positions and displaying them on other devices. Simply reading these positions from memory.
    • cso7777's avatar
      cso7777
      Seasoned Ace
      5 years ago

      @Rev0verDriveI don't think EA will do better than other AC-products, but any improvements to FF is welcome.

      Unless MS does something within the OS itself (running games in VMs etc), it will probably be very hard to remove cheating.

      One big problem is that everybody "hates" MS, and if they did something drastic, then it will give a lot of problems with all kinds of applications (Afterburner etc etc).

      Antivirus-like solutions are the only way at the moment and this will always be a race of detecting the latest cheat-software. But perhaps normal anti-virus-products (Defender, BitDefender etc) should begin detecting cheat-software, at least they have a lot of experience in detecting (unwanted) software.

      • OskooI_007's avatar
        OskooI_007
        Seasoned Ace
        5 years ago

        Well this is interesting. Emails in the Epic Games v. Apple case reveal that Sony requires game developers to have an option to turn off cross-play on PlayStation.

        TheVerge.com wrote:

        Sony also stipulates in the policy that publishers can’t transfer virtual currency to or from PlayStation, and that there must be a setting to disable all cross-platform interactions.

        https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417560/sony-ps4-cross-play-confidential-documents-epic-games-agreements

        Guess this explains why PlayStation games have the option to disable cross-play, but Xbox games don't. Definitely getting BF6 on PS5 now.

  • Pimp_SWE's avatar
    Pimp_SWE
    Rising Traveler
    5 years ago

    So even with a hired cheater they were not able to detect a reported cheater with 144/0 KD using MG?

    • Rev0verDrive's avatar
      Rev0verDrive
      5 years ago
      @Pimp_SWE You need to detect the method of cheating in code on the players PC. That requires a significant amount of access to said PC.

      Dude could be using DKOM which if done right isn't detectable without OS Ring 0 kernel access privilege's.
      • cso7777's avatar
        cso7777
        Seasoned Ace
        5 years ago

        @Rev0verDriveThe problem is that people are willing to let cheat-software run at any possible privilege.

        Unless MS can make the games memory and network-communication private to the game (hidden from the OS), cheat software will always be possible. This is not an easy task as making memory unreadable for other processes, brings a lot of possibilities for running really bad spyware/virus-products as well.

        Whitelisting programs could be an option, but this would involve having MS to whitelist games/programs (there are a lot of legitimate software on windows, programs, drivers etc etc) and OS-whitelisting could probably get 'hacked' as well (cheaters will do anything possible).

        The real solutions in using some kind of VM-technology, but this again brings a lot of issues (performance being one of them).

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