This has happened on multiple occasions with Blizzard:

- https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...

- https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350

Of course, although Blizzards initial response was to claim that the users cheated and were lying, they did eventually fix the problem the first time (although IIRC they never reversed all of the bans for the very first WoW Wine ban wave.) Now they have a bit more experience with the issue so it seems it is getting more attention.

However with EA I don’t really have utmost confidence they will pay any attention to this, so I’d guess it’s time to get loud if you want any hope of this being fixed.

Sure, but I don't see a good alternative. Cheating is a real problem and will quickly destroy your online community (see other comments in this thread). Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. It's unfortunate that it is necessary, but people are jerks.

Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems.

These are tools and approaches that we had in past games and while they are not perfect, they are better than these black box invasive anticheat solutions born from a desire to avoid giving community control to users.

>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me

Only if you provide a robust and empowered support staff to quickly unban and resolve false positives. That is, actually take responsibility, which is something game developers and major publishers seem allergic to.

This might still be the best compromise but it is terribly frustrating to be accused of cheating because of different skill levels or tactics.

I spent my entire middle school life playing Starcraft. When SC2 came out the same rush tactics I learned in SC1 worked. I was often accused of hacking simply because I had years of experience tweaking the fastest build method.

Cheaters quickly got banned from the public servers and people who stuck with the community could enjoy the private server where they knew there'd be a good group of people and usually very little toxicity.

Ranked Ladder, PUG Teams, PVP, and especially "griefing mechanics" related to losses for the loser from the stakes can all cumulatively contribute to toxicity.

First, I think these systems ignore technical realities, and design has to pay attention to real-world constraints. Blocking cheaters is insanely hard, and almost no real-time games that I know of do it at what I believe is an acceptable level.

It's a nice idea that I don't think is technically supported, in the same way that it would be a nice idea if my photorealistic MMO didn't have loading screens anywhere and loaded everything instantly. It's not good design to spend a bunch of effort hinging your game design on something that's not technically possible for you to do.

Second, I think these systems ignore player incentives. I think that global competitive ranking encourages the worst of playerbases, that skill is an arbitrary mechanism to optimize on instead of something like how close each match was, or player-reported satisfaction levels, or variety of play-styles, or any other of a dozen other metrics.

Third, caring about bots radically shrinks your design space. You can't have exploits, players have to have a "right" way to play, modding has to be more limited. It shrinks the game not only in the sense that it makes your systems more complicated -- it fundamentally shrinks what your game can do as a game, and how your game can evolve with the rest of the medium.

Finally, not only is skill not a particularly rewarding metric to optimize on when what you really want is for your players to have fun, most of the problems with automation explicitly only are a problem for competitive matchmaking. If you're optimizing for player-reported satisfaction, you probably don't care if people are botting your game, because successful bots will be optimizing for creating good matches instead of for just winning[0].

Personal plug, with my current project, Loop Thesis, LAN play is the only multiplayer. I only want people to play with friends, and I'm not trying to build some kind of community or network. That decision has simplified my architecture so much, the game is so much more modder friendly, the networking code is so much simpler, everything is nicer, and more stable, and more player friendly, because I don't have to care about bots and cheaters.

Future games that I make, even if they include global matchmaking, will not have global competitive rankings. My personal take now has become that 90% of the time these systems are a design antipattern.

It's counterproductive. I want players playing my game to have fun. I have to ban bots because they make the game not fun. The reason the bots make the game not fun is because all of my design hinges fun on giving players an optimization problem that I explicitly don't want them to solve in creative ways. The bots are solving the optimization problem too well. So getting rid of that optimization problem, getting rid of the rankings, makes so many other design/engineering problems go away. The bots aren't the problem, the optimization problem is the problem.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/810/

I've tried going back to destiny several times over the past few years. It's too clinical. The good glitches get overnight patches. The bad ones last forever. The pvp is a non-stop sweat fest of me getting killed over and over and over and over. It just stopped being fun.

I game to escape the mundane reality of my relatively poor lot in American life. As soon as I start feeling that way when playing a game it's all over. I haven't found a game since the original destiny that gives me that escape. Games like pubg, fortnite, csgo, cod, battlefield, halo, all feel the same to me. I don't like most indie games, or 3ps, and don't have the time for games like ksp, factorial, civ and can't get immersed in single player games anymore. So my options are limited. It's been good though. With virtually no games worth investing money into a PC, console, or iaps, I've broadened my social circle and learned new skills. I imagine the market is going to swing back around to cater to the coop centered gamers when they realize that middle aged families with teenaged children or older have far more disposable income than the current demographic of school aged kids and young adults.

Likewise, AFAIK, dota2 doesn't seem to suffer much from bots, and their rank system seems to work ok.

Arguably Fortnite / Overwatch / PUBG style games do suffer from aimbots, but whatever downside they bring, those games seem wildly successful. And the regional / global ranking system seems integral to their success.

Given that a large number of highly successful games do have it, I don't think your argument has much of a merit - it's surely a challenge to implement them but it seems like a worthwhile problem to solve, rather than avoid, at least if your goal includes global / regional success beyond small niche.

This is usually just a band aid and can be pretty ineffective in a game like Battlefield where there are a large number of players in a single match. Specifically, a cheater has to be really obvious for enough people to notice and actually care enough to cast a vote.

But that's why I mention giving server control to users; they can experiment with their own alternative anti cheat and moderation solutions.

Some by butt-hurt snowflakes that can't handle better players but most by explicit trolls trying to cause mayhem, spam and hopefully getting someone kicked for fun. At some point the voting gets either ignored or disabled outright.

Previously (e.g. CS 1.x) you could have a loose federation of privately-run servers, with a certain amount of darwinian-selection for good or bad communities.

However once GameCo starts selling exclusive skins and weapons and XP-boosters and things, they can't allow the possibility of rogue servers just unlocking everything, so everything was brought together under a corporate-hosting-only umbrella. This also destroyed the capacity to leverage volunteer admins, unless the company invested in a mechanism for "you pay we host" servers.

It costs money to hire, train, and oversee said staff. Game companies don't want to spend that money.

In constant dollars the retail price of top-end games is basically flat, or even lower now.

Most aaa titles have significant dlc that hardly expands the game. Gtav is an exception, and that's only because stupid/rich people whale on shark cards. Also repeat purchases from banned players.

Cod is now $120/yr. Without and iaps. If you don't buy the dlc you'll have a hard timemaking friends and playing pvp.

Most games are like that now. Looking at title prices is a flawed metric. A good metric total cost of all iaps. If there are unlimited purchases available then you can be sure that the game has been crippled to coerce vulnerable players into spending irrational amounts. This trend is unethical and everyone involved in allowing this to continue is no better than the sacklers.

Also, it’s frequently the case that DLC today has development and maintenance costs that the base retail package simply doesn’t.

I have less of a problem with buying a game and its season pass for $120 than I do when I buy a game and season pass for $120 to find thousands of dollars in iaps required to get everything. This trend is disgusting and I for one have written off all companies with even a single product engaging in this. This includes Blizzard, rockstar, Microsoft's label, bungie, Activision, ea, etc. To earn my purchases they'll need to ditch all the unethical iaps and find an ethical and sustainable business model. Though I'd rather see them go bankrupt and firesale all their ip to indie studios.

If you can't accept the costs of central servers, don't make them an essential part of your business model.

If you want to see a game where that effort fails, one needs not look further than Mordhau. It's an incredibly awful community where players will initiate votekicks simply for getting killed, and cause players to get kicked/banned because the community finds overabusing the feature to be funny.

...lol, that's nothing, expect people getting kicked for having a feminine voice.

How would that work in case of MMORPG with open world ? One clan would votekick competing clan? Any group votekick whoever they want? Or in case of FPS games lets vote to kick player X because he is just too good (killing us all) so he is cheating for sure?

> Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems.

Dosen't apply for most MMO games.

Checks and balances. It's a political problem at that point. MUDs had sometimes very traditional political institutions for bans/player behavior issues, and the same can directly apply to MMOs: "councils of multiple clans", for instance. You can already think of most corporations running MMOs as "BFDLs" (benevolent dictators for life) and there's good reason to ask them to add juries/trials for a more open democratic process to bans, as one common political solution to dictatorship. The same obviously goes the other direction that if players want more involvement in bans/kicks, they need structures like juries/trials to keep things transparent and to bubble up such issues as appropriate.

You can't always solve political problems with technical solutions, but more importantly sometimes technical problems have good political solutions.

>> Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems.

> Dosen't apply for most MMO games.

Arguably it should. At the very least for long term archival, MMO games should feel more pressure to provide server software access to players to host their own servers. There's also a lot of interesting history associated with MMOs that had open servers (many MUDs), or reverse engineered server shards (things like various Ultima Online player-created shards). Even if most players would prefer a "canon" experience in BFDL hosted shards, that isn't necessarily a strong reason to avoid offering players a choice to host their own servers. Arguably most good MMOs hosting your own server cluster is a great amount of effort and would be A) self-limiting (only certain groups of players would have the combo of resources/interests/skills), and B) at least somewhat useful to the game owner themselves as a form of CI/CD test (if other people can reproduce your Production environment you are more resilient against possible mistakes/failures in your Production environment).

Political solutions can clearly fail, and that becomes another reason to allow players to run their own servers as it is an "out" in the case of a political solution failing (a different sort of resiliency to the technical sort).

MUDs also have tales of successes. Times when political alliances defeated griefers and the community was stronger for it. Partly because of the relative ease of spinning up MUDs there are so many stories and experiments out there to choose from / learn from. MUDs were an early laboratory for what became MMOs in so many ways, and it will always be easier to reproduce studies done in that sort of a laboratory setting, including the failures. In science often the failures are the greatest learning experiences leading to the most interesting hypotheses.

>MMO games

They're a different beast entirely. But in the case of battlefield, you have a capped playercount that is orders of magnitude smaller than an MMO, and much more manageable.

Teammates will kick you out for stealing kills from them. Teammates will leave bots on even if they are flagrant bots if they are helping the team. Enemies will kick you out if you are too good.

>Teammates will kick you out for stealing kills from them

Then you find another server that has fostered a better community. Or even start your own.

Even if the ratio of absolute mean-spirited jerks to decent players was 10:1, that's more than enough well intentioned players to foster good server communities. But I suspect the actual number is closer to a reversed amount.

Obviously MMOs would be a different beast, but the type of cheating you're trying to defeat - the threat model - is often different than wallhacking autoaimers.

As a small, real and not at all outlier example I was asked once if the game's backend servers could establish a persistent mutual TLS connection to authentication servers so game clients wouldn't need to implement oauth / oidc, in which they'd request whatever data they wanted in essence.

Multiplayer games are only a continuation of this philosophy. For quite a few games, the 'multiplayer' aspect is created by simply replicating identical game state across all clients, meaning clients end up with a ton of information the player shouldn't be able to see being beamed to their computer.

most game UIs are literally flash, or embedded chrome instances that dynamically load their content from user input or straight from the web, often over unencrypted connections. These browsers also often have direct sandbox bypasses to the game engine.

Making games is hard. Making games secure is something games companies don't want to invest in, and they've largely just eaten the risk with bolt-on anticheat software. Games companies are in a similar but slightly worse position than the financial industries where, due to historically not valuing security talent they can't and don't acquire it, instead opting for whatever off-the-shelf solutions, mitigations and contractors they can use to help stem the bleeding with the exception of less than a handful of household name shops.

It is possible, depending on the game to take good steps to make games harder to cheat at. Dota 2, for example took steps (in their rather favourable context) to thwart cheating by not sending information to the player on objects they should not be able to see (though mistakes are made in this on a regular basis). For any other industry, such a filter would be the standard way to implement the server-client relationship but this is not a priority in game development as it stands.

There's simply no other non-security software one downloads to their computer that comes with a heavy and intrusive rootkit that attempts to try to see if you're messing with it, because no other industry as wealthy or influential as gaming considers security an afterthought.

What’s most surprising is that the vast majority of gamers aren’t outraged by this at all, despite repeated demonstrations of untrustworthiness by anticheat companies.

https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA

Also games don't need to manufacture an excuse to log your actions. That's already done for analytics. No conspiracy required.

And if the matchmaking is really good, then all the cheaters just end up playing with themselves, and there's even less impact on the general community. I could even see people ending up in separate "augmented" tiers, and then you don't even have to feel bad for being lower ranked. In fact, you could end up with bragging rights if you end up in the augmented tier because you look like an aim bot (I've played with players that were almost indistinguishable from aim bots).

Then instead you have a FPS with multiple weapons and it takes several seconds to switch between them. One has a high rate of fire but is useless against players with armor, another is the opposite. Cheaters don't know if the opponent is wearing armor (or what kind) because the server doesn't tell them that until they're in the same room, by which point it's too late.

Make certain weapons better against certain defenses, so it's a matter of predicting what your opponent will do and being ready for it. Make the humans do the things that humans are still better at, instead of trying to prevent a computer from beating them at things computers are better at.

Many of the very popular games now require good aim. Some people spend countless hundreds/thousands of hours just practicing their aim and muscle memory. It's part of the fun for them. CS:GO is a notable example.

The problem isn't really that it's impossible to ban such cheating. ESEA do it pretty well in CS:GO - their anti-cheat is practically a RAT.

It's that banning cheaters and making a bulletproof anticheat has two issues:

1) To do it properly you need to basically code a RAT, which has some privacy issues. If Valve do it, it could hurt activity, platform support, and be controversial. ESEA have done it since day one, but their player base is much smaller and more competitive. ESEA is also limited to Windows.

2) It's not profitable. That's the honest truth. They ban obvious public cheats and the cheaters will buy another account and come back, probably use another cheat again, get banned again, repeat. Some games don't have awful cheat protection because the company can't make a good one, they have awful cheat protection because it's not profitable to alienate all the cheaters in the game away from the platform (and their many purchases per person; legitimate players only buy once).

probably family friendly.

should make it.

There can still be strategy in it without leaving any easy way to cheat.

war thunder does it and it works well enough. it still has other problems, like p2w vehicles, but the system is solid

Transparent walls, for example, can be done via the graphics driver (or by replacing your graphics driver).

Pre-rendering the scenes on the server and then sending those is just not really possible today due to latency -- even google can't get it right with Stadia so far.

But, if the game engine/server just crunched the line-of-sight numbers and didn't even send location data for rendering enemies that were out of LOS, then that would work and while it is heavier than doing nothing, it isn't really that heavy.

That wouldn't stop an aimbot, but it would prevent some classes of exploits.

Of course, people would then gyrate back and forth across zone/room thresholds as a way of protecting themselves, which seems obnoxious, but also seems like a very easy behavior for the server to detect and punish.

Ah, but Stadia (and Playstation Now, and Geforce Now) are trying to solve a different problem: moving all the compute to the cloud, so that the game console can be wimpy (or of a different/incompatible architecture, in PSNow's case.)

If you remove that requirement—or rather, impose the requirement that the client hardware must be just as powerful as if it were running a full game—then you can do something clever by splitting the game not into "renderer on the server, frame buffer on the client" but rather into "game and projection matrix on the server; display-list renderer on the client."

In other words, the server (or per-client server-side agent) would be responsible for doing all the evaluation of local physics (e.g. soft-body dynamics, constraint-resolution during rigging, etc.), lighting calculation, and all the other stuff that currently requires the client to "know stuff" about the world; and then it'd output to the client, on each tick, just a display-list—a bunch of loaded-model references, their positions in space and the positions of their rigged limbs, and the reflected-light amount on each of their polys; any temporary particles that exist for that frame, and their positions; etc. This would all be culled down to a virtual viewport.

The job of the client would then just be to receive this display-list, each frame, and draw it. It would also perhaps be responsible for doing client-side visual lerps between server ticks. (Probably each rigged limb would be annotated with linear+angular velocity properties.)

In other words, this would be a recapitulation of the X11 protocol, but where the primitives are 3D objects rather than 2D ones. (It'd kind of look like the protocol between games and OS display drivers, but at the same time higher-level in some ways and lower-level in others.)

This would be highly bandwidth-efficient (and jitter-tolerant!) compared to what Stadia is doing. You'd probably be able to play a decent game through this on 3G, even. But you'd need a computer that could do the final rendering passes.

And even then it wouldn't stop cheating. Bots would just look for triangles drawn with enemy uniform textures (very easy if you have the display lists) and aim at them.

I think you missed the "viewport culling" step in the above description. The server would only be sending the client enough information to draw what's going to be on the client's screen (since that's the only information that's naturally left after that step of the rendering pipeline!) So, on any frame where another player is obscured by a wall, data about that player wouldn't be in the display-list sent to the client, any more than it would be in the image Stadia sends.

This is ignoring things like player shadows which are rendered separately and need polygons which are not in the visible fulcrum.

Also we are both ignoring audio. Sounds like gunshots come from a specific place in the world.

Well, yes, but I'd categorize that as "acts indistinguishable from theoretically-optimal human performance", rather than cheating per se. Or would you ban The Flash for cheating?

> This is ignoring things like player shadows which are rendered separately and need polygons which are not in the visible fulcrum.

No, not really; a shadow mesh is generated on the server, as part of the lighting step. The client then receives the shadow mesh, potentially disconnected from whatever's casting the shadow if the thing casting the shadow was culled. Just like what happens inside your GPU.

> Sounds like gunshots come from a specific place in the world.

In a paradigm like this, audio-cue triggers would essentially be "scripted particles" in the scene. If you can't see them, they're not rendered, so you can't hear them, either.

I'm not trying to describe something here that's a lossless approximation of how the game would work if run locally. I'm describing something with real effects on gameplay balance, but potentially good ones.

Mind you, I'm less picturing FPS games as the best use of this, and more picturing RTS games. Take the "fog of war" of a game like Starcraft, and implement it server-side, such that it's not the client not-rendering unexplored stuff, but the server.

It’s a bit more difficult for other forms of cheating (like duping, wallhacking, etc) but still plenty doable — just create sets of rules to asynchronously sanity check every Nth player action against. No it won’t be free, but you’d likely make back the costs with happy players staying subscribed.

Users will forever have the ability (and the right) to inspect the memory on their own machine.

I guess it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, where players think they're a lot better than they really are, so they can't imagine how someone can be _that_ much better than them.

IDK if it's still the same these days, but in BF2, 8 people in a squad all working together and doing their role within the squad could easily roll over 32 randoms on the other team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

Consoles. I dropped PC in favor of Xbox/ps and won’t go back. Just NEVER having to deal with cheaters or people that buy more expensive hardware and/or drastically lower their settings for an advantage is well worth the lower visual fidelity.

I’ll take consoles because I can sit down and ENJOY the game.

It's too profitable to not be an inevitability.

bots for wow now run on a different machine to that of the game client, process the game's visual output and send inputs to the game client in the same way a human would

the only way you can detect this is heuristically

On the other hand, maphackers totally counter risk-taking players who play secretive strategies like DT rush, DT drop, high-tech rushes, players who love big drops, hidden bases...players like that would get slaughtered by map hackers.

So, if you l2p, you'd be able to beat them with superior skills. Can't say the same for shooters, though, those games are ruined by hackers.

This is really depressing. I can't imagine working on an anti-cheat moderation team would be a pleasant job.

Detailed discussion of how cheats and anti-cheats work is somewhat lacking as all the experts on either side of the issue would prefer to keep their secrets. These days an anti-cheat team that's serious about their job will lurk cheat forums and even try to poach talent there.

Or, stop buying games that are essentially rootkits...

Seems EA is doing —like a lot of very lazy anti-cheats— balls-simple stack inspection. They determine whether people are cheating by looking for known signed drivers, known hardware, known bad processes and input drivers. It's cheap and scales well but it's brainless. They have to know about a hack to detect it in the future. Version checks are constantly slackened off because legitimate updates come out all the time.

Battlefield is seeing Wine and the drivers Wine reports (which are a mix of real and fake) and baulking out. It's to be expected from such plastic anti-cheat software. Many games do this.

There are better options.

CSGO's overwatch allows the community to self-moderate by replaying a player's gameplay. They literally record the player's input and rebuild what the player could see in the reviewer's client. Reviewer determines whether or not their gameplay was possible. It sounds hardcore but it's simple, and adds no latency because it's done after-the-fact. Makes it super-simple to detect most wall-hacks and aim helpers.

So why isn't it everywhere? Logging data costs money. And EA, for all their moneybags are cheapskates.

And you could automate this. You could do a server-side render to determine whether or not a user is tracking players that are not physically visible to the player, or tracking impossibly tight hitboxes, or is triggering massive killcounts far too regularly (ie exploiting a bug). But that's more money.

But I'd expect a better response shouting into the wind than asking EA to be better. They're a trash company.

CS:GO is usually in the top 3 of most popular games on steam. Last time I checked, it was number 1. I would be surprised if Battlefield V has a quarter of the amount of players (across all platforms) versus CS:GO (which is just on PC).

I am not trying to make excuses for EA (Which has been nothing but a trash fire of a company for the last few years), but how could they justify putting those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?

Doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing has atrocious effects on the community. Just read some of the other threads in this post. Seasoned players who wait weeks for flagrant cheaters to be removed. It kills a game quickly.

Maybe that's actually what EA wants.

It also doesn’t launch on Linux for the same reason. Is at least a touch more user friendly than getting bans I guess.

That's literally wrong, the gameplay you see in OW is not based on recorded inputs of the player's client. You are watching a demo recorded by the server, which does not match the PoV of the player precisely. The demos are also 32 tick, which makes it hard to tell if the aiming of the player is legit [1], unless they are very blatant about it. Due to interpolation and lag compensation the PoV that the player saw is not what you see in the server's demo. If you record the player's PoV using screen capture and compare it to the demo recorded by the server, there are subtle and sometimes relevant differences.

tl;dr OW is only there to catch obvious cheaters.

[1] Because the server runs at 64 tick, but the demo is only 32, the crosshair snaps every time a shot is taken. The aim of everyone looks way snappier and suspicious in a 32 tick demo compared to their PoV.

To be honest, other than having better communication on the issue, I'm not sure how I'd handle this one differently than EA...

Some information in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

The shocking part is that we've compiled a list[1][2] of 380+ cheaters with video proofs and we've transmitted this list to some DICE community managers and employees. For a few months they checked this list from time to time and banned the offending people but they stopped looking at it entirely since around summer. We've tried to get in touch with other people but without any success.

The whole community is outraged by the apparent lack of care given to the cheating issues, and the fact that they seem to ignore all the reports made by the players through the platform Origin.

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtT...

[2] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX...

https://www.eltoro.com/how-long-does-an-ip-address-stay-atta...

It seems a typical location has the same ip address for around 7 months and can indeed have the same address for far longer if your service isn't interrupted, you don't change or reboot networking hardware, and you don't try to connect to the game from your laptop at your friends house.

My current ISP in the UK and my previous one in France are changing IPs every few weeks or so in practice, or when the box is rebooted, or when the connection is lost for a while between the box and the ISP.

The game server would prevent many (most?) players by whitelisting IPs, but I bet they couldn't care less about blocking players or they wouldn't require whitelisting in the first place.

For something with the user population of a community game server you could also allow the full subnet and probably never run into a user collision.

I haven't been this excited to play an old game in quite a while.

The only way to play the game is on a server with admins in the game 100% of the time, or at least votebans.

Thats intentional.

Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban.

That cat and mouse game has moved well beyond a simple "omg why can't ea ban this obv hack"

[1] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks

[2] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks#509

And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game, yes cheating sucks but I can assure you there are people actively working on that problem at DICE.

Other EA games use other anticheat tools for example Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat[2], which is much more efficient to track and ban cheaters.

> And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game

The Firestorm mode has so few players now (I estimate 3-10 games running in parallel in the world depending on the time) that it has a huge negative impact on the game. You only need 1 cheater in a game to ruin it for everyone else.

[1] https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti...

[2] https://www.easy.ac/en-us/

> Sure we defunded it, but look how crappy it is! Nobody uses it! Guess we don't need it.

There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. This should always be acted on quickly to reassure legitimate players and scare cheaters off.

Cheaters know there are different ways to get banned. When one gets caught rage-hacking (abusing cheats in a flagrant manner, without any effort to conceal their cheating) and they return to warn the hive, all it does is discourage other cheaters from rage-hacking. Very few cheaters will do something that they know will get them banned quickly

So they used in game mechanics that abused how the bots are known to operate; where certain dialog boxes pop and how they move and react to threats; to force the bot to join a group, accept being teleported, and then they sacrificed another of the groups score to drag down the bots score.

the current comment thread includes the cynic but likely true claim that blizzard would ban these players for harassment before banning the bot for cheating/breaking eula

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/ej3l10/because_...

And if the net result of that strategy is that it catches many fewer cheaters? That wouldn't make much sense, and the community, far from being reassured, would be more frustrated because they would encounter many more instances of cheating that occurred because players were able to deduce the loop holes.

You have to balance "catch the most cheaters" vs. "catch cheating immediately". Especially when it may take many instances of suspicious behavior to make a confident decision to ban.

Yes.

Google it. All the major companies do hax bans in wave patterns. Valve, blizzard etc

>There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating.

Agreed. Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted anything???

Then, respectfully... what did you think you were responding to? That's pretty much entirely what the OP & thread are about :-)

The part I was quoting. OP wrote multiple paragraphs.

I mean we can argue about whether "the state of anticheat on this game is absolutely horrific" refers to automated or reports but given article I was pretty certain the section I quote was automated. Anticheat is generally not understood to mean manual reports as best as I can tell. Its the well anticheat software

Besides the Linux bans are probably not user reports Driven..

The OP you responded to was talking about that. That's the context of the conversation. Of the cheaters not getting banned; of those bans not happening in waves.

>The shocking part is that we've compiled a list[1][2] of 380+ cheaters with video proofs and we've transmitted this list to some DICE community managers and employees

1. Person A talks about submitting videos of hackers and being ignored. 2. Person B says that "detected hacks" are acted on in waves as part of arms race with hackers, says nothing of "user-submitted", instead generalizes about "detected hacks". 3. Person C gets uppity about companies ignoring hacks, irrespective of the potentially-valid reason as mentioned by person B. 4. Person B insists that the bans happens in waves. Says he wasn't talking about "user-submitted" stuff as he was talking in generalities. 5. Person D jumps in says "thread is absolutely about user-submitted stuff".

I paraphrased and generalized too for a bit of dramatic effect, but the thread is definitely broken and if someone stares at it for a bit, they would probably see how it went bad and that probably no one is technically wrong.

6. Person E jumps in with meta-commentary about the discussion that led to this point.

The problem with this strategy is that it virtually guarantees that cheaters will get to have multiple months of fun before they get banned.

Discouraging someone from doing a destructive behavior requires preventing it when it happens. You need consistent, immediate enforcement. If you get banned the same day you start cheating, then that's a discouragement. If you're guaranteed a few months of fun on an alt account, then that's an encouragement.

I could see waiting to ban a wave of people if you also release an update that addresses the exploit being used. But I don't know that I have ever seen that be the case. The hacks that existed before the ban wave are often equally effective if not the same exact cheats as the ones being used after the ban wave. The author updates a bit of detection bypass code, and they are done.

So if it's intentional, it's not a very effective methodology in my experience.

It isn’t. An anticheat that bans months late is as good as no anticheat at all.

You don't know.

Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.

Wish this was more common. Seems to work well in all the games I've played with this feature.

Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be sneaky about it. You will see their view port instantly change, they never miss a shot, their cross hair always stays on a player model even behind wall, ...

Most people recognized the difference between a cheater and a good player fairly easily. It is even more blatant in a game like TF2 were most shots are actual projectile and not hitscan which mean that most cheater use a specific class/load out that is compatible with a basic aimbot.

Another way to see it is with cosmetics. Most cheater use throwaway account, they don't want their account with valuable items getting banned, so they only rock the basic cosmetics.

All of these combined make it so that I never saw an actual good player getting kicked. I don't know if Battlefield V has similar system, but making player care more about their account actually provide a good filter for this kinds of situations.

This could very well be a case of selection bias. I think there is a significant portion of cheaters who just want to get a leg up, rather than ragehack and pwn everyone.

When I was 13 trying to play CS, for example, I used a multihack with crappy 'humanizing' aimbot and wall/esp hacks. I could still barely get a kill, but it changed my gameplay experience from "run across them map, instantly die, wait for next round" to something a little more fun. I actually feel like it improved my gameplay because I could learn what to expect from other players, what routes and timings were common, faster than I could through regular play. Of course, now I would just watch demos / pro play to get the same value.

Thankfully, the number of cheaters (in US) is low enough that I can requeue if things get out of hand. Hopefully it stays that way.

This goes out the window when there are tangible rewards for winning a match, both getting killed, etc.

A really good player can find a server where they can compete at their skill level instead of repeatedly noob-stomping others. A new player can find a server with other low skill players where they can compete at their skill level without being a dead weight.

There may be valid cases for these "vote to kick" features, but they do get blatantly abused as well. I don't think they're a good replacement for more intelligent matchmaking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

This was abused by players in Rainbow 6 Siege imo, though I don't think it would be useful if it were implemented the same way in BF5. Siege plays similar to a search-and-destroy gamemode where you only get one life, and once you die, you spectate your team (and can watch cameras for them and call out). Iirc, only teammates can kick a player, so you would often get the least skilled person kicked as opposed to a cheater (unless the cheater was the last person alive and obviously cheating). This system wouldn't be useful in BF/COD style games because of the respawning ability. But the opposite way where the enemy team can vote to kick someone out of your team also is ripe for abuse. Imo, there is no easy and fair solution that bypasses existing centralized anticheat mechanisms because you generally can't tell if your teammates are cheating as you're not often spectating them, and letting the enemy team have the sole voice to kick someone isn't going to work.

The best thing about these systems was servers would build communities that would self-admin and deal with the drama, for instance Tactical Gamers TF2 servers were my favorite place to play by far.

I don't consider vote kicking to be some fantastic anti-cheat mechanism and the developers still need to provide a lot of support in that area but it definitely helps bridge the gap between reporting cheats and the cheat vectors being closed (if they ever are).

edit: I've only done this on PC games. No idea how well this works in the console community.

Is it?

I'm playing a lot of both too and hacking seems largely in control. Some games have them sure but it's not common enough to be disruptive

Then again I spent a fair bit of time on unofficial cod4 servers so my idea of widespread hax is different lol

http://ea117.com/access gets 20 players/night at 7PM..

It plays the "desert combat" mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE.

It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu...

Using VPN detection techniques on TGE has really helped a great deal without having to jump all the way to white listing.

The players banned are using Lutris, a third party game launcher which is likely against the TOS. I most certainly it don’t agree with EA, but there’s more color than flat out Linux bans.

EDIT: it also looks like they’re using dkvs, the vulkan gl implementation which allows users to swap shaders which would obviously constitute cheating. Probably they caught some cheaters using dkvs, added it to the list of disallowed software without fully understanding what it was and now it’s flagging a lot of false positives.

I gave up gaming on a PC in 2013 and decided to get a PS3 instead. I did this because I got fed up with the constant upgrades (OS, drivers, game patches, etc..) that sometimes required me to spend a few hours of maintenance to play games. The only game I owned in that PS3 system was BF3! I played BF3 in the PC up until the level 70s so you probably have an idea how much fed up I felt to give up.

I feel like BF3 is the peak of the franchise. It was executed nicely in the PC as well as other console platforms. I was afraid the graphics quality would dip too much in the PS3 comparing to the PC but realize the decline is justified giving the fact that I don't have to constantly upgrade sht.

BF4 on the PS4 was a-okay. BF1 is just meh. BF5 is an abomination. Having played BF since 1942 in the early 2000s I am not a BF novice. But, BF5 is the worst of all.

Then, I switched to Modern Warfare 2019. Sure, the maps are smaller with 6v6 multiplayer. But, comparing to BF5 I don't have to wait 5 minutes in the lobby to play a game. And when I want to leave the game, it doesn't take another 5 minutes. The most important thing is with MW2019, I feel fun playing with my limited time available for gaming. With BF5 I feel like fing work and not playing game.

Games are also more and more expensive to develop so you kind of need to add MTX to the AAA games to cover the costs, especially when BFV didn’t have any DLCs. It is not 2000’s anympre.

> Some gamers calculated that it would take six years of playing two hours a day to unlock all the features in Battlefront II without handing over any real money. Paying for everything, meanwhile, would cost over $2,000.

https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-ii-s...

What a nightmare. I have huge cleanliness issues with my machines. I don't even like using anything that needs an installer to run, and tend to run things I don't totally understand and trust in VMs. I don't think I could do this.

This year I'm celebrating 20 years of being Game Free, after almost flunking out of college freshmen year due to an addictive spell of Ultima Online.

Sometimes I happen across videos of what games look like today, totally blows my mind, and I get the urge to indulge a little bit. Then I read stories like this and feel completely elated.

I'm pretty sure the anti-cheat is just a library/module/etc. that's installed with the game. I can't imagine that it's a completely separate program that you install (unless it happens to be the game launcher).

They often run when the game is inactive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_p...

It's hard to extrapolate from 10 posts by a few people who claim they weren't cheating all the way to "permanently banning Linux players".

https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent

So players are actually motivated to play at a mediocre/average level instead of trying to get better, because then they could stick out of the crowd and get punished/hassled.

What a wonderful thing to incentivize ... facepalm

[1]: Despite being a very popular franchise and BF5 being a very popular theme (WW2) the game was received negatively from its very first trailer, in part due to a sudden focus on cosmetics and shirking of historical accuracy.

[2]: Vitriol over the trailer lead to twitter drama where the executives among other things told players not to buy the game if they didn't like it.

[3]: The development team defined a release schedule of drip feeding content over the next few years for free, instead of paid DLC. This sounds great to the user until you realize funding for future content will be predicated on launch success.

[4]: BF5 announced Firestorm, a battle-royale game mode which would be embedded inside the BF5 game. This would be the first BR mode in the series and would have the largest map ever made for a battlefield game. This mode and map would be developed by an additional studio and not eat into the development time of the original game

[5]: The game flopped at launch, EA was already having a horrific Q3 that year. The game launched with a large number of bugs, server crashes, and very few initial multiplayer maps.

[6]: Immediately after launch there was a large number of game balancing issues which the community and the game developers disagreed as to its cause. Eventually they got it right a few months later.

[7]: 5 months after launch Firestorm (the BR mode) released. It was a pretty interesting experience but guffawed in several key categories for a Battle-royale game, including horrific user interfaces and looting systems.

[8]: In order to fix issues with the initial launch of firestorm, Dice diverts resources from the main development team to work on the BR game mode.

[9]: Firestorm begins to lose player count, leading to very long queue times for players trying to play a game.

[10]: The rate of post-launch content (especially new maps) was slower than any battlefield game ever.

[11]: Unsolicited, the game developers rebalance many key weapons leading to the same large game balancing issues which has been "fixed" a year ago

[12]: Cheating issues, huge thematic settings of WW2 left out of the game, a near dead Firestorm mode, and now we can have a thread like this

-------

My final take away is that this game could have been a 10/10 but was a 5/10 and a sign that publishers like EA really suck the life out of every product line they touch.

But if you cheat in a video game and ruin the experience for potentially millions of paying customers? You might, MAYBE, get banned in a few months as part of a ban wave, but not after making thousands of dollars.

Replacing shaders is what people use to do shady things like wallhacks, outlining moving enemies, or providing targeting data for aimbots.

It's usually not that difficult to hook the DirectX binding calls to bind an additional G-buffer, because games tend to do render to multiple G-buffer targets already for things like post-processing reflections, depth of field or motion blur. Then you patch the shaders to write the info you want/need to your new G-buffer. The game will continue to work with its (unmodified) G-buffers while you can work with your (invisible to the game) private buffer. In a gist, that's how you invisibly collect aimbot hitboxes using DXVK.

The last step then would be to smoothly nudge the player's aim onto your detected hitbox. Depending on how you do that, it may or may not be detect-able, not even to onlookers.

So the only real protection is to block the data collection in the first place, which means you need to block any kind of virtualization and any kind of 3rd party graphics API drivers, such as home-compiled DXVK binaries.

you could even do aimbot by finding the client's input packets and replacing them.

i suppose if the game's connection was encrypted or something you would still need to access the client PC's memory

Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.

Then Linux would be a better gaming platform than Windows. In many ways it is already better.

Once again, I'm no expert but I think that's at least helpful.

Consoles generally ban by HW I believe.

There is a huge and lucrative economy around cheat development that encourages a fair amount of paranoia from game developers.

That would excuse incorrectly banning players. It does not excuse upholding the ban:

> After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account.

I guess I'm reinstating my EA boycott, after all the progress and good will that they earned.

The last page has links to more in-depth info.

I don’t think this kind of anticheat is a good idea to begin with but if you want to use it, it means that when you detect a shady stack you have to assume a user is a potential cheater.

What EA should do is just reverse the bans if players want to run them on Windows, or refund the games (Origin credit) for those that aren’t interested if they can’t run on Linux.

I suspect that a lot of cheaters use Linux as a cover up. In fact, if I wanted to cheat, I would do exactly that. Not only the more open nature of Linux makes it harder to detect cheats but it also gives me a reason to complain.

So I'm sure there are false positives for Linux gamers (it has happened), but I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority were actual cheaters.

And BTW, why play Battlefield V on Linux? Maybe I am wrong but from a technical perspective, it is a lot of hassle just to avoid running Windows, and performance is likely to be worse. And from a philosophical perspective, Battlefield V and EA are not exactly in line with the ideals of free software, so if that's your reason for not using Windows, why are you giving your money to EA?

Performance on Linux is often as good as or better than windows. Linux as an OS is just plain faster, so that's fighting with whatever performance penalty is introduced by translation layers like wine/dxvk. These days it's usually not much hassle to run things on linux... certainly less than rebooting for a commonly used item.

But works only if all the gaming is centralized. We loose the beauty of self-host games which is how some of the games survived more than decade.

EA could have a few employees do this work but also let such employees appoint long-standing, well known community members have a limited set of powers to act upon the most blatant offenders in real time. Similar to how IRC had network and channel OPs

There's also the issue of scale. Back in the day, online communities were much smaller. There were fewer online gamers, and network latency often restricted the range of a community geographically.

The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.

Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi-window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.

Depending on PulseAudio is fine now. The amount of people not running PA is negligible. If you don't want to do that, use an intermediary API like SDL or PortAudio.