Even in the best case scenario where AAA game companies spend a bunch of $$$ on their own machine learning algorithms to detect cheaters, I think we’ve all seen enough headlines about Facebook and Amazon using similar tech to know that there will be a significant number of false positives. Meaning that every time you’re doing well in a game you’ll have maybe a 0.1 - 1% chance of being kicked by the anti cheat algorithm.
I don't think that's likely for the simple reason that running constant heuristics for everyone would be cost prohibitive. I think the detection would be more of a long-term approach of randomly auditing the combat windows of people who end up in the top whatever fraction (say a third or quarter) for gives like frame-perfect snapping and other unnatural movements, then flagging accounts that trip those conditions for further auditing, and then deciding on some threshold at which point it gets put in for human review.
Or at least that's how to do black-box heuristic detection correctly, but knowing how fucked the major publishers are if this setup becomes popular they'll instead do something like collaborate with hardware manufacturers to require "premium verified" peripherals that do something like create secure encrypted channels between the device and game, forcing people to buy new hardware at a premium if they want to play online.
That makes sense, you could probably catch the vast majority of cheaters that way for an acceptable price. I think that you might be right about verified hardware, if this hack catches on I wouldn’t be shocked if the publishers respond by having next gen FPS titles reject generic controllers and require expensive verified TM hardware
I think that you might be right about verified hardware, if this hack catches on I wouldn’t be shocked if the publishers respond by having next gen FPS titles reject generic controllers and require expensive verified TM hardware
The worst part is that I sat thinking about this and played out the resulting arms race in my head this morning, thinking about how that could be implemented to begin with (in the simplest and most flawed way possible, of course: security through obscurity with basic encryption on top of some proprietary obfuscation stuff), how that would be immediately leaked and reverse engineered to make emulators, and so on until you get to draconian measures like unique device IDs that have to be registered and that get locked to unique system signatures, with the game and server verifying that you're the only user with that device ID and that your system is the one the device is registered to in order to stop emulators from being able to spoof.
Overall an utterly pointless fight that will overall be bad for devs and bad for consumers but very good for a Denuvo-esque company providing these solutions and for the peripheral companies that get to massively mark up any piece of hardware that's "Game Approved and Verified" or whatever they want to call it. Maybe there'll even be competing, incompatible standards with notoriously jealous companies like Sony trying to make their own in-house solution that will only work with their own peripherals and then requiring them even on PC ports, hell fuckers like Sony would probably make it a standard feature even for their singleplayer games if they figure they could get away with it.
I don't think that's likely for the simple reason that running constant heuristics for everyone would be cost prohibitive. I think the detection would be more of a long-term approach of randomly auditing the combat windows of people who end up in the top whatever fraction (say a third or quarter) for gives like frame-perfect snapping and other unnatural movements, then flagging accounts that trip those conditions for further auditing, and then deciding on some threshold at which point it gets put in for human review.
Or at least that's how to do black-box heuristic detection correctly, but knowing how fucked the major publishers are if this setup becomes popular they'll instead do something like collaborate with hardware manufacturers to require "premium verified" peripherals that do something like create secure encrypted channels between the device and game, forcing people to buy new hardware at a premium if they want to play online.
That makes sense, you could probably catch the vast majority of cheaters that way for an acceptable price. I think that you might be right about verified hardware, if this hack catches on I wouldn’t be shocked if the publishers respond by having next gen FPS titles reject generic controllers and require expensive verified TM hardware
The worst part is that I sat thinking about this and played out the resulting arms race in my head this morning, thinking about how that could be implemented to begin with (in the simplest and most flawed way possible, of course: security through obscurity with basic encryption on top of some proprietary obfuscation stuff), how that would be immediately leaked and reverse engineered to make emulators, and so on until you get to draconian measures like unique device IDs that have to be registered and that get locked to unique system signatures, with the game and server verifying that you're the only user with that device ID and that your system is the one the device is registered to in order to stop emulators from being able to spoof.
Overall an utterly pointless fight that will overall be bad for devs and bad for consumers but very good for a Denuvo-esque company providing these solutions and for the peripheral companies that get to massively mark up any piece of hardware that's "Game Approved and Verified" or whatever they want to call it. Maybe there'll even be competing, incompatible standards with notoriously jealous companies like Sony trying to make their own in-house solution that will only work with their own peripherals and then requiring them even on PC ports, hell fuckers like Sony would probably make it a standard feature even for their singleplayer games if they figure they could get away with it.
On the capture side, point camera at monitor. Less accurate, I suppose.