Comment by himata4113
13 hours ago
I'll simplify for everyone: They don't. Although I do appreciate the author delving into this beyond surface level analysis.
Modern cheats use hypervisors or just compromise hyper-v and because hyper-v protects itself so it automatically protects your cheat.
Another option that is becoming super popular is bios patching, most motherboards will never support boot guard and direct bios flashing will always be an option since the chipset fuse only protects against flashing from the chipset.
DMA is probably the most popular by far with fusers. However, the cost of good ones has been increasing due to vanguard fighting the common methods which is bleeding into other anticheats (some EAC versions and ricochet).
These are not assumptions, every time anticheats go up a level so do the cheats. In the end the weakest link will be exploited and it doesn't matter how sophisticated your anticheat is.
What does make cheat developers afraid is AI, primarily in overwatch. It's quite literally impossible to cheat anymore (in a way that disturbs normal players for more than a few games) and they only have a usermode anticheat! They heavily rely on spoofing detection and gameplay analysis including community reports. Instead of detecting cheats, they detect cheaters themselves and then clamp down on them by capturing as much information about their system as possible (all from usermode!!!).
Of course you could argue that you could just take advantage that they have to go through usermode to capture all this information and just sit in the kernel, but hardware attestation is making this increasily more difficult.
The future is usermode anticheats and gameplay analysis, drop kernel mode anticheats.
No secure boot doesn't work if you patch SMM in bios, you run before TPM attestation happens.
> Another option that is becoming super popular is bios patching
I wouldn’t call BIOS patching “super popular”. That sounds like an admission that anti-cheat is working because running cheats now requires a lot of effort. Now that cheats are becoming more involved to run, it’s becoming less common to cheat.
When cheats were as simple as downloading a program and you were off to cheating, the barrier to entry was a lot lower. It didn’t require reboots or jumping through hoops. Anyone could do it and didn’t even have to invest much time into it.
Now that cheats are no longer an easy thing to do, a lot of would-be cheaters are getting turned off of the idea before they get far enough to cheat in a real game.
> Of course you could argue that you could just take advantage that they have to go through usermode to capture all this information and just sit in the kernel, but hardware attestation is making this increasily more difficult.
Didn’t the first half of your post just argue that these measures can be defeated and therefore you can’t rely on them?
Cheating is so addictive that it doesn't matter if it's more difficult to cheat. I have peronsally interacted with people that just want to spin-bot.
Anticheats, especially kernel-mode ones does not make the problem smaller. All they do is make it more rewarding for capable people.
Having gamed on and off over the years, I don’t think the average cheater is actually a highly motivated super genius who derives reward from patching their BIOS or installing PCIe DMA cards to an entire second computer built for the purpose of cheating.
The average cheater is (or was) basically a troll. They delighted in the act of ruining other people’s games, not installing the cheat. The harder you make it for them to get to that point, the less enjoyment they get.
The people you describe who are in it for the thrill of breaking through are not the ones playing 6 hours every night because the game itself is not the thrill. It’s the exploration of the hardware and software. They might get cheats set up, but once it’s working they get bored with the game and move on to another technical challenge.
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Can you tell me more? I'm curious about motivations.
* I use easy cheats for single player games - for example, infinite jumps in cyberpunk 2077 are just huge amounts of fun :)
* I have zero desire for cheating in multilayer games. Not some high morality righteous horse, just, what's the point? I have fun even when I lose, and having something else play for you takes away from visceral fun that I get.
* I could understand, even if not agree, people who cheat for profit. That's the basis of all crime everywhere.
* I do not understand people who cheat in multilayer games not-for-profit. It feel you need to have both a) some sort of anti social / non social tendency, and b) dopamine rushes along pathways I don't.
I'd be genuinely curious to hear about your acquaintances who cheat in multilayer for no profit and why they do it :-)
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I'm playing WoW and I've heard lots of compains about Blizzard banning innocent players. Just recently there was a wave of complains that they banned players who spent a lot of time farming one dungeon (like 10+ hours per day).
I, myself, got two accounts banned and I was innocent. I managed to make it through support and got them unbanned but I'm fairly certain that many players didn't, because they seem to employ AI in their support.
So I'm a bit skeptical about that kind of behavioural bans. You risk banning a lot of dedicated players who happened to play differently from the majority and that tend to bring bad reputation. For example I no longer purchase yearly subscription, because I'm afraid of sudden ban and losing lots of unspent subscription time.
I think you are right on every point, but I think it's worth noting that WoW is kind of a different beast.
You don't play a "match", you don't play "against" other players most of the time, in this context "botting" and "cheating" overlap because having your character do stuff 24/7 unattended is an evident advantage over the rest of the population, but it's not like you are hindering anyone's progress directly the vast majority of the time doing so.
How often does actual cheating happen in WoW, anywhere it matters? M+? Raiding? PvP?
Most of cheating is botting. When bots farm dungeons or other activities, earn gold and then that gold is being sold at black markets for dollars to other players.
That's indirectly hindering other players progression, because it causes deflation (so you can't earn as much gold selling your ores); because it causes inflation (more circulating gold, yes, these are contradictory); because it denies other player farm (if bot gathered ore, other player have to search for another vein) and so on; also illegal gold selling increases expectations (other players bought super good gear, why don't you do that) and causes burn-out (because farming gold fairly is much more hard, than just buying it).
But mainly it just makes players angry, because they can see these bots moving in a predetermined route and stealing resources from their noses. I'm not really sure if bots are that bad in the grand scheme of things, but living players certainly don't like to compete with automatons.
There were also cheaters who used instant cast interruptions at arenas, but it seems that competitive PvP is not that popular nowadays so I'm not sure how it's wide spread.
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I agree that it's a problem, having a strong support system for remediating false bans is very important.
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Everything you described increases the cost of attack (creating a cheat), and as a result, not everyone can afford it, which means anti-cheats work. They don't have to be a panacea. Gameplay analysis will only help against blatant cheaters, but will miss players with simple ESP.
It's almost the same as saying "you don't need a password on your phone" or something like that.
> but will miss players with simple ESP.
False, people that have information they shouldn't have will act in detectable ways, even if they try their hardest not to.
Economics work out, harder to make means that it's more profitable to do so. DMA crackdown has actually lead into innovation which has drove the prices down for "normal" DMA hardware what used to be thousands is now $120, excessive spoofing detection has driven down the cost of bios level spoofing and as a result the creation of bios level DMA backdoors - no additional hardware required.
ESP is a lot more obvious to a machine than one might think, the subtle behavior differences are obvious to a human and even more so for a model. Of course none of that can be proven, but it can increase the scrutiny of such players from player reports.
The number of people willing to spend $120 and hook up a hardware device compared to downloading and running an executable is significantly less. That’s kind of the point of it!
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>It's quite literally impossible to cheat anymore (in a way that disturbs normal players for more than a few games)
AKA the way that is easiest to detect, and the easiest way to claim that the game doesn't have cheaters. Behavioral analysis doesn't work with closet cheaters, and they corrupt the community and damage the game in much subtler ways. There's nothing worse than to know that the player you've competed with all this time had a slight advantage from the start.
In CS2, the game renders your enemies even though you can't see them (within some close range). The draw calls are theoretically interceptable (either on the software/firmware or other hardware level). Detecting this is essentially impossible because the game trusts that the GPU will render correctly.
if you cheated with wallhacks, post-game analysis can detect it.
And it is possible to silently put you into a cheating game match maker, so that you only ever match with other cheaters. This, to me, is prob. the better outcome than outright banning (which means the cheater just comes back with a new account). Silently moving them to a cheater queue is a good way to slow them down, as well as isolate them.
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Overwatch has made the decision that closest cheaters are not a problem and have actually protected a cheater in contenders, although they were forced to leave the competitive scene. None of it ever became public.
How do you know if none of it went public?
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Don't forget that ActiBlizz are also pretty much the only ones regularly taking legal action against pay2cheat developers, see Bossland/EngineOwning.
I saw engine owning lawsuit verdict as the biggest loss for the companies. They proved that you can continue running a cheat provider service out in the open.
They won way more than they lost, people who left got given a free pass for ratting the remaining people out.
Taking a probabilistic approach to ban people… so if enough people start cheating it's fine?
Kernel AC is currently the best way to protect against cheats by far, the game with the strongest protection is Valorant and it works very well. OW2 is lightyears behind Valorant.
Not sure what your point is. Most of your post is inaccurate, DMA cheats represent the minority of cheats because they're very expensive and you need a second computer.
elitepvpers - it's public. DMA cheats have grown and are the primary way people cheat in games these days it makes around 5m/month [retail] just from one of the providers that I know in the scene this includes selling the hardware, the bypass and the cheats (not under the same umbrella for obvious reasons).
The scene has shifted immensely in the last few years, everyone and their grandmother has DMA now, I mean you can buy these off amazon now. Korean's are a bit stuck since most of them use gaming cafes so they've been slow adopters, but cafe shops have the benefit of using an old version of hyper-v which allows you to just use the method described above. Hyper-V cheats are the most popular for valorant.
I would argue that valorant and overwatch are pretty much on the same level based on what it feels to play. I've seen just as many visible cheaters in valorant as in overwatch. Although I will admit that I am pretty outdated myself since around mid 2025. Valorant allows you to ** around so that might be related, overwatch bans rage hackers way faster than valorant does as well.
So no, my post is pretty accurate.
OW2 is very different from CS and Valorant, OW does not suffer from cheat the same way because it's not a pure aim based game game with hitscan as the main thing. The vast majority of classes don't benefits from cheat like other fps do.
I did main support and tank at master level in OW and beside esp there is 0 benefit of cheating.
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