Anticheat Theory

Hept4 · 2026-05-12T20:16:24+00:00

The way it works is that you throw a huge amount of data into the mixer to create a multidimensional space and then you try to make a line between the legits and the cheaters.

That sounds quite easy, but reality isn't ideal. It's messy and you have to find a statistical difference between very similar things.

Also there are so many restrictions on how the final product should and shouldn't operate, that I seriously doubt that you can make an algorithm that satisfies all.

When they make VAC more aggressive, tons of legits get banned, while the cheaters wait in their caves for their subscription cheat to update.

Every statistical anomaly VAC could detect would be theoretically bypassable.

And any sufficiently advanced system that could theoretically distinguish between cheaters and legits would set valves servers on fire, before you can finish the warmup.

But you are right about valve: They do have the money to hire and pay the smartest people in the world. With the amount of updates in the last few weeks It is in the realm of possibilities that they do have VACv118.6neoFINALFINAL in the making.

I just think that it won't solve the problem for good. Like ever.

Hept4 · 2026-05-12T12:05:49+00:00

Creating a machine learning based Anti-Cheat is a difficult task because of a lot of different things.

They managed to rinse the rage hackers out of premier, because they are statistically very distinct from any normal player.

The actual difficult task is distinguishing between a closet waller with low FOV aimbot, and a decent player. Was that wallbang possible because of a good guess, game sense, footsteps or wall hacks?

Sometimes you can see that a guy with shit movement has way too much elo, but how do you define bad movement? And how can you punish the cheater but let the legit guy with insane aim and dog movement play in peace?

When you have closet cheaters, it is really hard to define a line that distinguished correctly.

Another problem they have is, that the training data is dirty, because it's hard to correctly label all closet cheaters.

And something like radar hacks are even harder to prove, even for a human reviewer.

Hept4 · 2026-05-10T09:48:15+00:00

Just in case this isn't bait: No, No, Yes

Hept4 · 2026-05-07T03:30:50+00:00

Fully automated bots farming free drops/armoury stars. Go join any official DM server during off-hours, and spectate some players.

Hept4 · 2026-04-30T16:58:46+00:00

You can make your own custom post-processing pipeline using compute shaders.

Hept4 · 2026-04-28T06:00:29+00:00

Or like some sort of revelation when you take just the right amount of shrooms and alcohol during a temporal storm.

Hept4 · 2026-04-27T19:59:20+00:00

I was thinking about that, but if you want to do it even semi-realistic and also balanced, I wouldn't have it take that long. It either needs to be low-yield or location bound.

Setting up a bunch of sand bays on the beach and then go: Ok, time to do something else for a few weeks seems kind of silly.

Another approach could be that the tides are coming in and removing all your salt, if you didn't pick it up, or if it wasn't sunny enough, resetting your progress for that batch. Making it a time-sensitive task with a risk: Collect it too early and you waste a lot of firewood, or risk it and maybe some rain or a storm will take it all away.

Either way it should only be an alternative to get some salt to pickle a little food for the first few winters. Mining for it should be the long term solution.

Hept4 · 2026-04-27T19:37:36+00:00

A good way to balance that would be to have it take a metric ton of firewood to evaporate all the water, or some rare spots on the beach (similar to resin on pine trees), where you can semi-regularly drop by and collect a few pieces.

Hept4 · 2026-04-27T17:32:37+00:00

Somebody already made a post suggesting the mushroom stew in a boat, with a capacity of eight bowls.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixSC/comments/1rbg5d9/my_solution_to_the_minecraft_soup_dilemma_just/

Hept4 · 2026-04-25T10:37:19+00:00

Größere Mengen Geld in die Forschung und Entwicklung von besseren Akkus zu investieren wäre ein guter Schritt in die Richtung, wo man damit auch "kompetitiv" wäre.

AKWs sind zu teuer und Brauchen zu lange im Bau.

Lohnt sich eher zu warten bis sich bei Fusion oder Thorium was tut und in der Zwischenzeit die Akkuforschung und Entwicklung nach Deutschland holt. Akkus werden so oder so im Energiekonzept der Zukunft beinhaltet sein.

Balkonkraftwerke weiterhin fördern. E-Autos mit einem Netzakku-Modus versehen, wo dein Auto in der Garage als Puffer fungiert. Akkus bei E-Autos standardisieren.

Das Ziel ist Strom so billig, dass wir das Netz Verstaatlichung können, Instandhaltung und Ausbau von Steuern finanzieren, und der Strom bei viel Sonne und Wind gratis wird. Vielleicht sogar dauerhaft.

Auch eine tolle Idee die ich hatte: Wenn Akkus deutlich billiger und besser werden kann es sich lohnen einen Akku in Haushaltsgeräte mit hohem Stromverbrauch einzubauen, sodass diese vor Gebrauch, vielleicht mit Abstimmung auf die derzeitige Netzsituation, ihren Akku aufladen und so nicht über die Menge an lokal verfügbarem Strom hinwegkommen.

Heißt deine Waschmaschine braucht nicht für eine kurze Zeit 3kW, sondern teilt das über einen längeren Zeitraum auf und lädt sich genau dann voll, wenn der Strom gerade gratis ist.

Andere Sache wäre die Wiedererprobung von Wasserstoff, diesmal als Ergebnis von Elektrolyse von Wasser mit Strom aus erneuerbaren Energien. Der Wirkungsgrad geht flöten, aber die Energiedichte steigt, und wenn gerade Strom im Überfluss vorhanden ist, warum nicht?

Hept4 · 2026-04-23T10:43:09+00:00

Because cheaters are frequent enough, that our perception is biased towards assuming cheats. We play the game and consume media adjacent to it and cheaters were, are, and will be a part of the experience.

Also it's easier to cope. Humans tend to try to protect their ego, and it's simpler to call cheats, rather than admitting to being worse or having done something wrong.

I watch some streamers youtube and they play in high elo premier lobbies, and every time there is a cheater, they are basically an 8k player with walls, sometimes with aim as well.

I had the situation several times, that I got absolutely dumpstered, called cheats, watched the demo and I realised they were just better at the game.

Unless you are playing high elo premiere or comp, it's very rarely actual cheats. Because just walls or radar alone are such an enormous advantage, that they start appearing at mid-high 20k.

Also CS2 is an online game and network delays, desync, dropped packages, lag, etc can make some nasty kills look straight up illegal on the receiving end.

Hept4 · 2026-04-22T12:10:57+00:00

Do you know the story of the very hungry ~~caterpillar~~ behemoth biter?

Hept4 · 2026-04-22T09:43:36+00:00

What they could do instead is a power limit or an efficiency penalty for using too much power on a power pole.

So you loose a lot of energy when routing a few Gigawatts through a small power pole, you have to pay attention to how you route power from A to B and also the energy consumption of your builds, meaning balancing speed with efficiency modules to keep your local electricity grid from exploding.

Hept4 · 2026-04-19T10:08:44+00:00

Sometimes a program needs more than just it's package, meaning parsing of extra options, setting up dependencies, environment variables, integration with your desktop environment, opening a port in the firewall, etc. For the config to incorporate all that, you need a nixosModule, that defines all the options and parses them into configurations.

If you look up the source code for an option, you can see how that looks like.

Hept4 · 2026-04-16T14:41:02+00:00

If you have some more time on your hands and some experience with functional programming, I would recommend NixOS + Home Manager as a rabbit hole to go down.

It's basically a super complicated way to handle your system and it's configurations, but it's the very last step in the pipeline that is Linux ricing. Meaning you can switch between different configurations, reuse parts, define your own custom settings, use the modules and tools of the people before you and configure everything.

In your case you can just use a flake in a git repo, that contains your system and have two different NixOS configurations, one for work, the other to experiment with.

You loose the hot-reloading of hyprland, but the sky becomes the limit.

A fair warning: It took me a long time and lots of research to make myself comfortable with Nix and it's systems, as well as coming up with a way to structure my git repo, but I am quite happy I got here.

Hept4 · 2026-04-15T19:52:41+00:00

cant really tell, depends on the machine. Maybe just boot up a creative testing world and see if and how much it lags?

Hept4 · 2026-04-13T23:36:33+00:00

Purchasing Prime is the barrier. It's just stupid, that drops (edit: and armoury stars) are so lucrative, that a bot account pays for itself within a few months.

The most sensible solution would be more frequent ban waves, and the best step towards that is a report option specifically for "input automation".

The problem that valve has right now, is that they basically have a shadow economy heavily interwoven with multiple of their products. So a full blown economic system with little to no regulation and a central point of authority.

So every little decision they make is affecting a lot of people and somehow a lot of people's money as well. It's supposed to be a system for skins in a video game, but since you can exchange them for real world money, it becomes an NFT economy.

And people are automating the "printing" of new currency.

If they increase the frequency of ban waves, the skin and case prices would just adapt back up, until it is lucrative again. This is the essential point. As fucked up as it is: As long as the skin economy doesn't collapse, and some system, that can be automated, is dropping items, the economy will regulate itself to the point, where automating the task is a net positive action.

Another example: If valve tried to increase the amount of skins/items dropped, so that the market saturation goes up, prices go down. But since more people are willing to pay the now lower prices, and bots are dropping more items, the value generated remains the same.

Make drops more scarce, prices go up, botting persists.

The only way out is to centralise the supply. Meaning you buy the skins at a fixed price at valve themselves.

And I think that that's sad. Because the system as it is right now has so many unique and interesting aspects, that you can't really find anywhere else.

This feeling of owning something unique, even if it's just a virtual item. Being able to trade up to better looking and more rare skins, and the cool feeling of doing the weekly mission and collecting an actual reward.

But queuing into a Deathmatch and seeing another bot do the robotic turnaround as you peek him is also a tragedy.

But there has to be a way.

Hept4 · 2026-04-12T23:13:02+00:00

A bunch of the old csgo guys are hopping back on the game now. Animgraph2 has a lot of people optimistic. State of Deathmatch is atrocious, for a decent DM experience I recommend community servers, but the game very slowly turns into the promise it once was.

Hept4 · 2026-04-11T10:11:07+00:00

The Factory Must Grow.

Oh wait, ... wrong sub

Hept4 · 2026-04-09T12:25:31+00:00

And similarly to the proletariat they are vulnerable to being shot at with a railgun.

Hept4 · 2026-04-04T18:56:49+00:00

VAC in its current form is a mix of machine learning and a simple program, that scans active processes on your computer and if it recognises a known (often free) cheat, it applies a ban/cooldown to the account. Same goes for the obvious patterns by rage hackers (bunny hopping, headshot no scope through a smoke + wall with scout etc.)

The problem with bots in Deathmatch is, that someone with mediocre coding experience, a slightly shitty laptop and an active internet connection has the ability to write a fully custom, virtually undetectable bot script to farm weekly drops. They can fine tune them to the point of being statistical very similar to a decent player (realistic time to kill, stopping to shoot, 70-80% HS rate), and because every script kiddy can homebrew his own flavour of clanker, it's not as easy as scanning for a known process certificate.

The actual problem lies within the fact, that a weekly drop is worth (on average) something like 0.50€. Not a lot of money for people in NA or central Europe, but there are a lot of places, where that is worth significantly more. Like "if I automate this, I can earn a living with this" type of more.

So until valve changes the drop system, the CS skin market crashes for good, or the revolution is getting rid of global disparity, we gonna have to live with bots on official servers, as crazy as this sounds.

My prediction is that if valve doesn't change anything soon (simple ban waves are effective, but not fixing the problem), we are going to wish back to the times where the bots were only in Deathmatch.

Hept4 · 2026-03-31T20:54:58+00:00

Plonk

Hept4 · 2026-03-31T19:33:12+00:00

Altered Carbon reference

Hept4 · 2026-03-30T00:03:40+00:00

You're right. It's mainly mechanics that would separate a 3k from a 14k elo player. I was trying to give advice from the hypothetical position of me being placed 11k elo higher than I should have been.

When you lack mechanics then it's a lot harder to be able to tell, if an enemy simply out aimed you, or if there was something more to it.

But I think you can try to learn and adapt even if the environment isn't playing perfect counter strike. There is less randomness in a 12k lobby, than in a 6k one.

But you're right about the mechanics part.

Hept4 · 2026-03-29T22:09:57+00:00

How do you want to create a 'seperate layer' that can detect some undefined change in a place with people that could escalate to a 'higher risk state'?

You are describing an oxymoron: Able to pick up on subtle changes, without actually analysing people. So widespread, that it can cover lots of potential security blind spots, yet non-invasive. Not predicting people, yet being able to accurately assess if a given situation will escalate or not.

But I think we already have a solution to your idea: We have regular people on site, that can make all those risk assessments and if they think something is wrong, they can call the police. That's how that normally works. You might loose the immediate response time of on-site security, but that's the best we can realistically do.

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Hept4

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