[2020] About the new Anticheat solution...

We’ll be showing Equ8 all of this stuff as we have in the past when somebody brings something like this to our attention. I will update this post with what I learn. We will obviously drop Equ8 if it’s not up to the task. False positives are obviously concerning. The level of inspection that you mention, although not great, it seems to me like it could be the same in all other anticheat solutions with any degree of effectiveness, but I don’t want to speculate and we’ll look into that too. Feel free to correct me if you have inspected different anticheats and have more information in the privacy area. TL;DR: We are gonna look into this and change anticheat vendor if necessary.

I’ll share the full rationale for going with Equ8 at the risk of being a bit too open. With the technical information I extracted from the vendors we talked to, I expect it to be a bit lighter on performance than other competitors and just as good in terms of detection. This is just an educated guess, but usually you can know enough about a product just asking about how they solved specific issues. Admittedly, this is not the proper way to do things, ideally you’d have someone spend a week or two integrating every solution and doing objective testing, then you choose the one that performs the best. We usually more pressing issues to address with our limited resources, and I’ll explain below why there’s not a lot of pressure on us to get it exactly right at this moment.

The main reason, though, is that I thought we’d get better support, as they are in Sweden and are a new player and they need to prove themselves. Obviously a gamble, but since we have a lot of ideas in the area of anti-cheating we’ll have some feature requests occasionally that a bigger player is more likely to ignore. I can chat with Equ8’s lead programmer or CEO anytime I need to. We are also more likely to be able to influence how their product matures. Things tend to crystallize with middleware vendors after they get a lot of clients using their product and then as a client you start getting the answer “well, you are our only client who thinks this is an issue” with increasing frequency. In the meetings we’ve had so far they have been very receptive to technical feedback, which is very appreciated and useful.

Also we would like to encourage competition, just from a selfish point of view, so that this whole segment becomes more economical and effective. We are after all, going to be doing more esports games in the future and cheating will always be one of our main concerns. This may sound like vapid marketing bullsh*t but I actually believe that we can be of significant help putting them on the map and that in turn this will be good for us eventually.

Now, since our contract would allow us to discontinue the service without penalty and these modern anti-cheat solutions are so easy to switch between, I thought it was worth giving it a try.

If Equ8 turns out to be a terrible mistake, switching to another solution like EAC would be very simple. To simplify the integration process, there’s usually just a hook on startup, a hook to identify new players to their platform with an anonymized id, a hook for when a player connects to a game and a hook when a player leaves the game. Their platform does the rest. This is a toy API by game library standards, as integrating any kind of middleware is usually way more complex. By what I’ve heard from these vendors, it usually takes studios a day or two to integrate these modern “lightweight” anti-cheat systems into games (I would put EAC on this same category which is why I mention it, it’s probably what we’d try next if Equ8 turns out to be bad), and looking at the simple API, I would agree that it shouldn’t take more than that. This is why I’m personally not too concerned and I’m comfortable with moving forward with Equ8 with the information I’ve had until now (at least before your post) and provided they clarify these concerns satisfactorily.

As I said, I’ll update with Equ8’s explanations about the info provided in the original post and comments. Also, if the community appears to not be on board with the thought process at display here, that we are being too brazen and that we should play things safer, we may just have to discontinue our relationship with Equ8 right away. We have spent a lot of time and effort in this project and we are not going to take any risks at ruining the experience on launch or alienating the community over a choice of vendor that is very easy to rectify. Also I’d like to reassure people that the idea is not to launch with Equ8 regardless and then find out if it sucks, we’ll be doing extensive testing with hundreds of players before we sign it because first impressions are very important (Equ8 have been very chill at letting us trial their solution for as long as we need to), but even after release at any time we think a different system can perform better for us, we’ll switch. Right now I believe that due to better support and access to their core team we’ll be able to make Equ8 into something better for us. Hopefully as we grow we’ll also have more resources to research and test middleware more exhaustively.

Any other bad experiences that anybody has with Equ8 in any new launches we would really like to know, you can dm Raven on discord (he’s an admin on our server) and he’ll classify the info and pass it along. I’ll also ask Raven to do a casual survey of some people in the TABG community, he’ll hit you up. And although we didn’t have time to objectively test integrated performance against other solutions, the invasiveness aspect is something that we should be able to test running different games with different anti-cheat solutions through a resource monitor.

Cheers.