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This looks great, it would definitely help get an at a glance comparison between weapons! I like how the fire rate bars match the visual style of some of the progress bars we use in the client. Thanks for the suggestion.
This looks great, it would definitely help get an at a glance comparison between weapons! I like how the fire rate bars match the visual style of some of the progress bars we use in the client. Thanks for the suggestion.
That's definitely the right mindset to have and from what I've heard there's a lot of talented people on board with ya'll. Hopefully down the road you guys can get something similar to Overwatch or VACnet to tighten the mesh a bit on what people are able to get into the game.
On another note, is it possible that hack devs are taking notes from cheats developed for other Unreal based games? Any GoldSrc/Source based games have always had that issue and I've been hearing through the grapevine that there might be something to that in regards to Unreal.
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.
This question comes pretty late for the thread, but are we how far off from having a pov demo system being included into the game ?
You can never really call aimbots until you see the demo (spinbots etc being the outlier)
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.
Your fog of war system sounds really interesting in the abstract (not showing the client up to date information in order to obscure data from memory mining cheats). Have you run into any issues with it while developing it (especially regarding having to register hits from unseen opponents) and is this the first implimentation of similar tech in a competitive FPS ?
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.
Did you already consider doing what valve did with "overwatch" in csgo? Reported players have their demos sent to ranked players and a unanimous decision bans the player.
I believe they also used it as machine learning (?) And people that shared similar mechanics as cheaters were sent to overwatch
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)
Thats good and all, but is there any way you can make it a cvar/setting of some kind? I hate to be selfish but I dont really want my game less responsive because someone in a less fortunate area has 1Mbps upload. Would it be possible what csgo does and have a default that you can change to allow data to be sent per frame? Maybe make the default less upload and then set a switch to allow more info
I know you guys are busy and im sure its not a big deal if its a little less but for people at higher levels it really matters to get the most info from your pc as possible
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.
Okay, I was thinking more along the lines of abusing DMA or SMM, but sure general purpose AI works too.
Still interesting though, web security things are bugs that can be fixed. Tamper protection can't be fixed because again, it's just kinda broken by design and there'll always be a way.
Might need to check that out lol.
Yeah I chose a deliberately outlandish example because I don't want to completely rule out the possibility countermeasures for any techniques just yet :)
How is this AI not detecting blatant aimbotting? Shouldn't it be able to see 1 frame snaps left and right? What they're doing should be an easy ban from just one ace alone, none of that was humanly possible. I feel like anti-cheats are not and never will be aggressive enough.
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.
Do cheat developers use logs/other client information to see what the anti-cheat is banning for?
Is it impossible to lockdown the anti-cheat to a level the client can't see what it's doing?
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.
Do a lot of games tend to send as many packets as VALORANT is? I've had this issue over Wifi with so many games and I can never find an exact reason but this sounds exactly why it's always happened in only certain games over Wifi.
EDIT: To add, I've been playing the beta on Wifi this whole time and I've been getting lag spikes at the end of almost every round and getting a network error and it goes back to normal. Could that also be attributed to this? (150+fps, quick 300ping spike back down to 30ms)
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!
A bit of a weird question to ask, but would you happen to have any video or images showing what a wallhacker might see with the FoW system? I know there's limits to this since the less info there is about this the more secure the system.
Still, I think it would be useful to players to see the limits of what a wallhack could do, either by helping us learn how to counterplay or detect it or to simply have more confidence in the system.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
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!
Keep in mind that you will ALWAYS be playing catch up and that there are some extremely big-brain hackers/coders out there.
I don't envy your battle as it's going to last forever and it's going to be a hard one.
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.
Hey, first off keep up the great work. Second, maybe it would be better not to put out more info on the Fog of War. Less info out there, less info for people to use against you.
Thank you!
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 wonder if the server could instead tell the player to play a sound at a specific volume with some direction to avoid telling them the location? Maybe that would have issues when walking towards a sound that plays for a long time.
Either way I'm glad you guys are focusing on cheating so much
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!
We reward bug bounties for information on weaknesses in our anti-cheat technology
Interesting, never heard of a bounty for bypassing anti-cheat before. How does that work? It's a cat and mouse game you can never win. So, uh, do I get infinite free money for bypassing your anti-cheat? If I tell you how to bypass every anti-cheat in a way that's not fixable because anti-cheat is just kinda broken by design (as I'm sure you know [but others here might not] it only stops people who can't make their own, and if your AC can't trust the HW it's running on anymore, it's game over), do I get paid?
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.
Not sure how sound works in your game, but is it possible that hackers could display the locations sound comes from for footsteps to circumvent FoW?
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.
Is there anyway you guys can make exceptions to people who are on Cloud based gaming VM's like shadow-pc? I am unable to play since Vangaurd wont install on VMs. I really really want to play but this restriction is alienating a bunch of gamers like myself!
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.
If you want her abilities to be a threat rather than a kill, why are her grenades able to one shot people?
Because pushing you out of a safe position in to something like a Vandal trained on you is a deadly threat. It takes threat of death to force repositioning - you can soak a Diva arrow, but Raze is about small area, high threat position clearing
I don't know if this is related to the anti-cheat or not, but is the amount of information the game uploads going to be lowered?
I have 1 megabit upload where I live, I know people in similar positions, and they are unable to play the game with high FPS because for some reason the data the game uploads correlates with FPS. I've been having to sit at 90 otherwise I'm stuck with 300 ping spikes every 20 seconds.
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.