[2020] Cheater banned

To follow up on a lot of the comments I'm seeing (sorry there're too many people to respond to individually right now)

1. Yeah it's disappointing that the first cheats appeared so quickly. Ruined my day.

2. Cheaters gonna cheat but we're in this fight for the long haul so even if cheaters find a hole we'll be around to plug it.

3. No magic bullets to stop hacks but we're doing a bunch of things to keep them out of your games. If you hear of one (a magic bullet) let me know, I'm listening :)

4. Fog of War is working! Enemies that are not in line of sight or just around a corner from the player don't have up to date positions. Your hack can draw them on the screen anyway but you're just showing obsolete info. More info about Fog of War coming out next week hopefully.

5. You are all the best judges of how we're doing, so let me (us) know if you're not happy with the state of the game so we know that we have to improve.

We think it'll be hard to circumvent but if we see people getting around it it we will put some more effort into improving it.

Please report suspected cheaters, it's a good way to get information to us to investigate and also helps us understand what everyone is experiencing in game.

If you weren't cheating the most common cause of an anti-cheat system error is a connection problem or a server problem on our end. If it happens frequently please submit a support ticket so we can figure out what's happening.

Sorry to hear that! We're trying to get people into the beta as fast as possible but we want to make sure we don't over do it and crash the servers for everyone.

Hopefully you get a drop soon. Also, make sure you're not grinding streams to get drops, the extra view time helps but really not so much that it's worth burning yourself out watching. Feel free to take a break and do something else, you're still eligible for drops even if you're not watching at the second we do the sweep.

We are reviewing players on a case by case basis. We use reports as leads for manual investigation right now.

Demo recording is a feature that we're planning but don't have up and running just yet but we have other information we're using during our investigations.

During closed beta we are doing account banning (we think this is ok right now because beta access isn't automatic).

We're using this time (and these bans) to improve our hardware id system so that by launch it should be ready for widespread use. The real world is the best teacher, so this beta period is very useful for making improvements!

After that many games you should be matched against players of similar skill, maybe you're better than you give yourself credit for?

There are other factors that go into matchmaking (like if you're in a party or your ping to our servers). We also expect things to improve as there are more people to play against.

Definitely considered it and I bet it'll be annoying for cheaters (I love the invisible mining node story from WoW) but it's a lot of work so we haven't implemented anything like this yet.

It's already in scope! I'm looking at some reports right now. If the documentation hasn't been updated we'll update it soon.

It is easier to take down cheats that we're familiar with. I'm happy for you to DM me with any cheats you think I should see.

This will be fixed later today I hope!

thanks for the report, we're investigating

It looks like in this video the cheat is drawing the last known player locations on the screen, but you can see that they're wrong/obsolete until just before they come around the corner.

One way to tell is in a lot of the clips the enemy wallhack symbols teleport just before the engagement. This is because that's when the server had decided that the player needs that location information.

The fog of war system is dramatically reducing the effectiveness of the ESP here but as you can see there are still possible improvements we could make.

I've got a big article about how this system is built that I hope to release next week that goes into some more details.

Oh sure, while I'm a little disappointed, I've never really expected the security work to be foolproof. The work over the last few years has really just set the stage for all the hard work that's to come. I hope that all this preparation will situate us well to respond to cheats going forwards.

I'm not really the brains of the outfit, I'm just the member of the team that's happy to talk to everyone. While I built some cool things (it's why I keep going on about Fog of War) the rest of the team are the real brains trust.

There're plenty of people both inside Riot and in the hacker community that are smarter than me but that's ok, working with (and against) really smart people is how I push my limits, learn things and just generally grow :)

Thanks for the kind words, I'll keep at it!

Yes! We reward bug bounties for information on weaknesses in our anti-cheat technology as well as game bugs that can lead to exploits.

Yes! We've got a bug bounty program on hackerone, it's entering its 7th year I think, for a little while at the beginning I was one of its admins. We accept reports on anti-cheat topics as well as more traditional application security reports.

Yes, definitely! Riot Vanguard is very similar to ESEA's anti-cheat in some ways, one of the anti-cheat devs from ESEA works at Riot on Vanguard now.

This is a tough one because one of the functions of the enemy outlines is to make the enemies easier to distinguish against the environment.

I'm talking to game designers and our art team about possibilities here, maybe we can figure out something that's good for humans and bad for pixel bots.

Support tickets are great for bugs because the support agents know how to route the reports to the right developers. Other than that I know that devs are reading the bug megathread so that's another decent spot!

Edit: I'm pretty sure we've received other reports of this map bug, I heard someone mention it today so if I'm not confused we're working on a fix at the moment.

Yeah, having anti-tamper technology is important but it's definitely not all we're doing!

I'm hoping to get the bans as close to the detection as possible, even terminating a match if a player in it is detected. Sometimes there will be a delay because the cheater will be detected by some offline processing but I believe that where possible cheaters should be removed quickly.

It's a balancing act though because each ban gives cheat developers more information about what is detected and what is not, that's one reason that banwaves are a thing. Sometimes a banwave makes sense to try for maximum disruption of a cheat developer's operation.

We'll probably use both strategies but I'm going to advocate for immediate bans as much as possible because I want to remove cheaters from the environment before they damage any more matches.

Well said!

I wouldn't say that it's fine exactly but I don't think the measure of success is whether or not there can be cheats, instead it's what impact cheats are having on the game as a whole.

We're working on it! It's not anti-cheat related though, it's because of how our netcode works.

What's happening is that the game is sending a packet every frame (sometimes more) to try and maximize game responsiveness. However, if your frame rate gets high enough the amount of packets can overwhelm your router (or your upstream bandwidth).

The workaround for now is just what you suggest (turning the FPS limiter on) but in an upcoming patch we'll have a fix that reduces the number of packets sent so that we don't accidentally crush routers.

Sorry for the inconvenience! If we find a way to support cloud gaming services without weakening our anti-cheat protections we're definitely open to supporting them. We don't have any plans for this right now though.

Yeah, the need to play sounds for enemies even if you can't see them does weaken the Fog of War system, especially if a sound visualizing hack is used.

It's similar to web security bounties, reports are eligible for a reward if they lead to a change in the software to address the reported flaw.

So for example if a researcher reports a way to defeat the mechanism that ensures that the game client executable hasn't been modified and in response we make a change to fix the attack (by improving the mechanism) they'd be eligible for a reward.

On the other hand if a researcher created a general purpose AI that could play the game impossibly well by using a keyboard and mouse that report is unlikely to be eligible for a reward since there's no improvements we can make.

Though this would be the least of their (and our) worries as the tac shooter robot uprising would soon begin likely destroying human civilization.

I experimented with this a little bit and it was harder than I thought.

The problem I ran into is that how the sound is "rendered" depends a lot on the exact location and not just the attenuation due to distance. There are factors like occlusion and special effects like reverb that get applied based on position. Even the sound asset itself can vary based on exact location (imagine footsteps on grass versus footsteps on wood).

I concluded that it'd be possible to get it mostly working but the effort wasn't worth it. You'd end up with a mostly correct sound (probably a noticeable difference to what was originally intended) but a hacker could still guess a location from it with reasonable accuracy by taking the direction and volume of the sound.

Maybe someone cleverer than me will figure out a solution, if so I'd be happy to hear it!

Thanks for the kind words!

One of the reasons I like talking about Fog of War is that it's one of the rare anti-cheat systems where knowing how it works doesn't make it less useful. We often don't share details of our security measures in fear of helping out cheaters but this is an area where I think being transparent is helpful.

I agree!

It's going to take a lot of time and effort to keep cheaters under control but I think it's necessary if we want to create a competitive shooter that lasts.

I've written an article about the Fog of War system, hopefully it'll come out next week. It includes a gameplay clip that shows a wallhack both before and after Fog of War. Hopefully that'll be helpful!

It's not too unusual for a game to send one packet per frame though often there's a cap. VALORANT ends up sending a lot because frame rates are high and we're trying to make the game as responsive as possible.

Round end in VALORANT is a time where a lot of cleanup is happening, a lot of objects are being created and destroyed and that makes for longer frame times and more packets. It's not too surprising that you can get a ping spike at the start of the round. Hopefully we can improve this in the future!

We try to make our anti-cheat systems hard to analyze for cheat developers but there are some limits because at the end of the day the client is running on the cheat deverloper's computer.

Currently our aimbot detection AI is a research project that is used to inform analyst investigations. Once we're more confident in its results we hope to let it ban players unsupervised but due to the error prone / probabilistic nature of AI we think that it'll primarily be an analyst investigation tool for a while yet.

Yeah I chose a deliberately outlandish example because I don't want to completely rule out the possibility countermeasures for any techniques just yet :)

Definitely!

The current plan is to reduce packet rate by not sending packets that have little to no new information in them. For example right now in VALORANT if you don't move the mouse on a frame we still send a packet. These packets don't actually help responsiveness so we can skip them to improve the experience at no cost.

If we do end up reducing packet rate in a way that could impact responsiveness I think we would want to make it an opt-in setting (like a fps cap setting for packets). Currently you can kind of get that effect from the fps cap but maybe in the future we can make fps and packet rate independently configurable.

Yes! I'd like to have an Overwatch system one day, I think it'll need to wait until after we build a general purpose replay system.

When building our aimbot detection AI research project we definitely were paying attention to how VACnet works. John McDonald from Valve talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc (it's a good watch if you're interested in this kind of thing)

I've got a big article coming out next week about the development of the Fog of War system and some of the problems we ran into. Keep an eye out for it :)

I wouldn't say the Fog of War system is completely unique but I think VALORANT's implementation is more comprehensive than other game's implementations. There are also a lot of games that don't do anything like this either.

A full replay/demo system is on our roadmap and we've been experimenting with some prototypes of it but I don't have an ETA.

Working with Unreal Engine does mean that cheat developers can use some of their experience reverse engineering other UE4 games to help them develop cheats faster. I don't think it will be a huge advantage for them in the long run but it does give them a head start.

Sort of, we're happy to hear about stuff like this. However, we only pay rewards if we're able to make an improvement to the security of the game in response to the information provided.

Don't worry we won't ban accounts for things that happen when you're not playing Valorant

We can probably make something like this work if it becomes necessary (since we use ping to find the right servers for player to play on).

We're happy to receive information about cheat sites or cheating players via support ticket (https://support.riotgames.com) or for technical vulnerabilities via our bug bounty program at hackerone (or [email protected])

Yeah, I'd like to build a system like this one day. It'll have to wait until we have our replay/demo system up and running.

a support ticket is a good place!

We will start notifying players that the people they reported were banned soon, probably next patch (though the first version will have some limitations like only showing the notification if you're online when the ban happens).

I'd be very surprised if most of your games had cheaters, if you send me your account name I'll review some of your games to see if I can find some cheaters to ban.

Every day I personally review the players who have been reported the most. I ban any cheaters I find that haven't been automatically banned and flag any undetected cheats for follow up by our analysts so we can automatically ban for it in the future.

I can't review every player that was reported but I usually get through a few dozen while drinking my morning coffee.

I'm looking into it, thanks

sure thing /u/hornytwat12