This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
Why isn’t this the standard everywhere? These servers prove that server side anticheat works.
It is. All games have this kind of server side verification which denies not allowed actions. The difference is in Minecraft it comes down to “no, you cannot fly, or” no, you cannot build a pig spawner because you don’t have one in you inventory". But in Counter Strike you need to decide if one player’s 14ms headsbot is legit, while some other player’s 20ms kill was not. Or if someone was acting on information they shouldn’t have (radar and wall hacks). That’s orders of magnitudes harder.
Generally speaking, the slower a game, and the less hand eye coordination are necessary, the easier is server side cheat detection. On the other side, there’s chess…
I’ve said this before about wall hacks. The only reason they are possible is because the positions of all players are being sent to the client and then the client just doesn’t draw them to screen. It would be extremely easy to simply not send the data for players you shouldn’t be able to legitimately see.
And you are not the first person to have this idea.
Most games do that to some degree. The thing is they are working with a threshold, which means they send your client the information of a few “extra meters” - beyond your field of vision. If they didn’t, enemies would sudddnly pop into existence, instead of smoothly running around the corner. Especially in fast paced games there’s nothing more frustrating than losing to this.
But there’s more: non visual clues. If an enemy is outside your vision, but makes a noise, you cannot give that information to the client without revealing the enemies position. It’s simply not possible (again, not without risking giving completely wrong info by the time it reaches the client).
Same goes for non-player objects, which are the result of a player’s action somewhere else. If a player kicks a bucket across the map, the bucket flying through your screen makes it trivially easy to calculate the point of origin - and you know something happened there / player was there.
We’d be really really lucky if server side fog of war would be the kill-it-all solution to cheating.
I find a number of problems with the level of authoritativeness that you speak and some of the arguments you’ve made.
The core of your first argument lumped together is that a small amount of extra latency is the same thing as “impossible”. This is obviously not true as even with some relatively fast paced genres, what is acceptable varies wildly. Maybe such an argument could be used for Valorant, but not for Pubg or escape from Tarkov (games that are already known for netcode slow enough that this would not truly/notably harm the experiences of players if they were designed for this from the start).
This example is contrived, and just the type of thing where there are a number of options available.
One could simply not send the bucket, send it with a delay, the bucket could not exist (the majority of games), the buckets origin could be randomized just enough to be at the tested limit of player perception, the game could include a trace shadow by default.
For every example like this, there are options available which aren’t entrusting a black box to access all of your data with a pinky promise.
There is no kill-it-all solution, and this is a clever little re-framing of the argument by you where the new solution has to be perfect, when the status quo can just be mid.
Sure you can, for starters audio is a lot less reliable to pinpoint location than video, so the server can randomize the position somewhat and still be accurate enough. Not to mention that sound bounces off walls, so it’s not exactly wrong to give the point of origin of a sound as a wall nearby the origin or destination, and an even more advanced system could use ray tracing to calculate sound path and give you a fully accurate sound point that doesn’t reveal the source exactly.
But again if you’re not sending the bucket position until it’s in FoV that doesn’t matter at all.
It’s not the end all, but it does take are of whole categories of hacks.
Still both can be calculated back to the source of origin. It may not be enough for a wall hack to reliably point out the enemies exact position, but definitely enough for a radar or proximity hack.
Edit: Your also completely ignoring the mandatory threshold where the server absolutely needs to send you enemy information already in order to avoid enemies popping into existence. The faster the game, the bigger that threshold.
And by all means, sound (in video games) is a pretty linear thing. You can only randomize so much, until players complain that it’s not reliable.
In the games were talking about these kind of additional info or heads-up are an unfair advantage in competitive play.
The solution sounds easy, but I do believe that if it was, we would see it in at least some current games.
Well, yes, but, let me counter with this:
You can completely remove wall hacks from the equation by doing some FoV calculations in the server, this completely solves that issue, there’s no client side hack that would be able to show you enemies behind the wall because the server isn’t sending them to you.
And to the other point, if the 20ms kill is bad but the 14ms kill is good, there’s space to argue that the cheater is worse than the players so you don’t really need anti-cheat so solve that, Skill based matchmaking takes care of that for you, he would eventually be placed with people who are better than him even with hacks.
Sure, server side anti-cheat can’t capture everything, but neither can client side, but server side anti-cheat can make it so that your client side cheats are pointless, because they can’t make you better than everyone, you have to remain averageish, and if you’re consistently above average skill based matchmaking will bump you up and up until you’re going to lose even with cheats or you will be playing against other people with the same cheats as you.
Please see my other answer. Yes server side fog of war solves a lot, but not everything because it works with your FoV+some extra. On top of that there’s enemies’ sounds and objects that will make wall/radar hacks work.
Yes, skill based matchmaking would take care of the consistent not-inhuman cheater, but unfortunately the number of games getting that right can be count on two hands, I would say. It’s an interesting problem on its own for team based games.
I’ll reply to the server FoV there. Skill based matchmaking is hard to solve, but I think most games who have enough players to worry about anti-cheat to this level should have some level of skill based matchmaking in place, in my head that’s way more important than anti-cheat because even with cheaters the games are fun for everyone, and cheaters end up bubbling up into their own group.
Absolutely.
True
Because they’ve been forced to implement server-side anti-cheat because they can’t implement it into the game because they don’t control the game and mojang don’t seem interested in adding much in the way of anti-cheat to Minecraft.
These other companies actually control the games they’re running the servers for, so they can go the simple route and put kernel level anti-cheat in the game, and then call it a day. Corporations will always take the easy cheap option, even if it’s not very good.