neatchee

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“Ban cheaters if they find them” <= this is what anti-cheat is for, it’s not just prevention, it’s data collection to identify the cheaters who limit their cheating to just looking highly skilled

“I doubt that running into a cheater… is going to deter you from competing” <= People who compete at the level you’re talking about are the minority. Most players are non-vocal, online-only players who will bounce out just a few weeks after encountering anti-social behavior like cheating.

This is big “just fix the bug, duh” energy

If you’re this confident in how easy it is, you have the opportunity to make a fortune as the only person who can ‘just do it’ in the industry. You should get hired ASAP. I can refer you to the right people if you think you can pass the interview.

For what it’s worth, the issue isn’t the rarity; it’s the scope of impact and undermining of the integrity of the product.

For highly competitive games, even the ability for players to say “there are cheaters, I know there are, and so I think that person is one of them” is a long-term sentiment drain that is not trivial. There are internal research numbers on what exposure to a single cheater does to players’ perception of game integrity and trust in the fairness of their experience, and it’s really really bad

As someone who works in this problem space, I promise you with 100% certainty that the type and quantity of data collection being done without kernel access would be far more distasteful than what’s done with kernel access. You can take my word for that or not but I obviously can’t say any more than that

Including cheating functionality in games is already done and people hate it: it’s called pay-to-win microtransactions.

The archetypes for cheaters are such that they don’t provide ways to please the a large portion of cheaters without harming players because harm is their goal. And the other group is trying to make money by charging for services for players and then cheating to complete those services as fast as possible. There are no in-game features that can be created to mitigate these people.

The only class of cheaters that can be dealt with as a service problem are those that are cheating to a) catch up to others or b) offset a skill shortfall or c) offset a time shortfall. This makes up only a subset of an cheaters

Only some cheaters are a service problem. There are a number of different cheater archetypes and some of them do not respond to service offerings

And believe it or not, while kernel level provides a level of access that could be used for nefarious spying we actually do much MORE stuff people would find distasteful when we DON’T have kernel access, because we have to infer more without direct access to the places where cheat makers do their work

I want you to know that I literally work in this space and you are handwaving away an incredibly complex problem space that hundreds of smart people have been trying to solve for decades now and it’s only getting harder (good cheat suites use hypervisor mods and direct memory access kits these days). I would love to educate this community but I’m under NDA (in addition to not wanting to provide information that attackers can use to better understand how we approach this problem space)

I want you to know that I literally work in this space and you are handwaving away an incredibly complex problem space that hundreds of smart people have been trying to solve for decades now and it’s only getting harder (good cheat suites use hypervisor mods and direct memory access kits these days). I would love to educate this community but I’m under NDA (in addition to not wanting to provide information that attackers can use to better understand how we approach this problem space)

Cool. So tell me how to write a game engine that cannot have its memory read to determine enemy player position with precision and then automate aiming and trigger pulls in a first-person shooter

You have no idea how hard anti-cheat is or how determined attackers are because of the profit incentive.

Are you a videogame networking engineer? Because you’ve just handwaved away one of the most difficult challenges in gaming as if it were “duh that’s easy” level simple.

I can link you some GDC videos that talk about how hard this problem is if you want

ETA: Also you’ve only addressed memory modification attacks. This does not address external aimbots that read memory to determine enemy player position and then send legitimate-but-automated inputs to aim and shoot. How do you stop cheaters from doing this when they can see exactly how data is structured in memory, how values are obfuscated, etc?

Open source competitive multiplayer games would be catastrophically compromised.

I’m trying so hard not to hate this post but you have given me so many reasons to

• use of UwU in something I absolutely need to share with others

• mismatched fonts

• comic something font

• no human readable data next to the QR code

• mismatched gradient radii in the corners

Make it stop 😭

EDIT: For those who care, this comment falls into the category of “said in jest, meant in earnest”. I know it’s all on-brand and comedic, but my gut reactions are what they are 😂

Triggered? 😂 I’m just trying to help you understand why things turned out this way for you. But sure, go off, king.

it’s not Americentric to discuss American law impacting two American companies by making comparisons to other American industries.

You’re stirring the pot for no reason other than to thumb your nose at Americans

Kickstarter is a US company. Stripe is HQ’d in California. We are clearly discussing American financial regulations and payment processing.

This is a bad take IMO. I’ve literally written that phrase myself in emails at work multiple times. 🤷‍♀️

Lots of really cynical replies in here. I understand why but IMO it’s a bit unfair.

There is no question in my mind that places like Kickstarter are beholden to the rules of payment processors. Shit, even the marijuana industry is booming like gangbusters, but they still can’t accept credit or debit card payments directly (only ATM-at-POS debit) because marijuana remains illegal federally and the payment processors, who handle interstate financial transactions, flatly refuse to cross that line.

So I do believe that their relationship with Stripe was the primary source of friction and the impetus for the new rules.

And the fact is, companies are going to make mistakes sometimes with these types of things. We need to be loud when the mistakes happen, but accepting when they do the right thing in response to blowback. I’m really not sure what more KS could have done, once the rule change has already happened, to make things right. They rolled back the policies, accepted responsibility, and were transparent about why it happened. Other than “never make a mistake, ever” what more could we ask for?

This is exactly the type of apology and transparency I want to see when mistakes are made.

I don’t know what they’ll do next - hopefully start working on a different payment processor option - but I won’t be surprised if it leads to increased platform costs if Stripe is the cheapest option that meets their needs.

well, we know bison in the middle are worth approximately 75 each…

in context, I actually took it as a compliment. I already knew I was neuro-spicy, just not how bad exactly, and their comment confirmed both that I have significant challenges, and that I’m smart af, enough to compensate well even before therapy

I was told by a psychologist that my thoughts are so fast and jumbled that if I weren’t relatively smart, I’d never have been able to hold down more than a fast food asst. manager job 🙃