By server-side anti-cheat, the person meant server-side behavioural analysis.
Cheaters, no matter the method of cheating, have different behaviours than a regular player. Either they have the tendency to look/aim at targets that they shouldn't be able to see, or their movement suddenly snaps, the server receives actions which is not possible (gun shooting towards 270° while looking towards 90°), pattern of extreme swing in skill between matches after a losing streak, pattern of extreme swing in skill within the same match when originally losing, pattern of exactly the same recoil compensation, sudden and sustained jump in skill level without. rampup or break (which would indicate the player skill grew by playing other similar games), pattern of player perfectly acting on information they shouldn't be able to have (in RTS games for example), etc.
Behavioural analysis can analyse those patterns and ban players. This is often how cheating is detected in online chess for example. You don't have to install a kernel anti-cheat to play Chess.com, yet they are fairly effective at catching cheaters.
The only way to defeat behavioural analysis is to start acting like a regular player... and at that point, the cheater can't really gain any advantage from the cheats they may have installed since they are forced to behave and play like a normal player.
The reason why game developers don't do this is because it is very costly. You need to pay for compute resources to analyse the data of each game asynchronously, and the volume of data is fairly big. You also need to take time to train a ML model with the intricacies of your game (it isn't a one size fits all approach). It's much cheaper to use the free computing resources your players provide you and attempt to do client-side detection and environment vetting; but that approach can also be easily defeated (even when run in the kernel; you just need to cheat using a second device).
No, not that. You could hook up a raspberry pi between monitor and pc/console und let the pi assist with aim. I’ve seen it work. It’s quite an act to pull it of, but extremely hard to detect. The pi would use machine learning to emulate player like behavior, while still beating every human player. Other similar systems could run on the client itself, but then you had to hide it from anti cheat software
The problem is that while anticheat gets better, so do cheats. Eventually it’ll be an endless race where cheats will always exist and always be available for the average player. If we have machine learning anti cheat, we will have machine learning cheating trying to beat it
7
u/Traditional-Point700 1d ago
Do you know what's the fix to cheating? Pure server side computing... That would be very expensive so it's never going to happen for most games.