by jchw | 2025-06-30 15:14:38+00:00
Oh no, it's definitely not "fixable", it's hard enough to define cheating precisely less fix it.

Like there's obvious cheating. Playing online chess games using an engine to tell you every move is cheating, and thankfully if you really don't know what you are doing, you are likely to get caught.

Then there's less obvious cheating. It's pretty easy to cheat in speedrunning by passing off a carefully constructed "TAS" run as a regular speedrun; though just like with chess it's going to be obvious if you don't know what you are doing, but it's pretty hard to inspect in detail so you might get away with it as long as nobody pays too much attention.

Then there's things that may or may not be cheating in the first place. A good example is key binds in Source Engine games, like null-cancelling movement configurations. The game allows it and keybinds are not traditionally treated as cheating, so is it? (I think they may have changed this in newer games/updates but I'm behind on the times.) Or custom controllers for Super Smash Bros Melee. Merely emulating degraded analog sticks in a way that is advantageous is generally not considered to be cheating, but e.g. warping the stick movement depending on an internal state machine to make certain things easier to do is usually considered too far. I can think of many examples. "Calcing" and charting in PangYa is a nice obscure one.

But I do say this: If you took one aspect of cheating, like aimbots, you could attack it surgically. You could detect the current state-of-the-art, do your best to make it hard for aimbot developers to figure out how you're detecting them, ban players and make it hard for them to get new accounts. The problem is that this is not easy or cheap. People just want to throw some money at the problem and have it go away, they want something like Easy Anti-Cheat.

I think though that eventually, it might all just be futile. It depends. If machine learning continues to progress, eventually it will be pretty hard to distinguish human and machine inputs no matter how hard you try to. It's already not very easy looking at "state of the art" technology from 2022. I linked this elsewhere but it has a nice chart of people mostly failing to detect their ML-based aimbot:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07060

I guess I'm just disappointed in these lazy approaches because they wind up being so vapidly anti-consumer. I know that they accept the temporary nature of these fixes since they don't really intend on these games running forever (which is also a sort of problem, though not related since obviously they really can't worry about and invest in anti-cheat forever) so they just need something that works for now. But it seems like no bridge is too far, and now we're nearly all the way to "you need to install this rootkit and enable secure boot and use Windows 11 and have TPM2" or whatever else.

edit: I really wish Hacker News pushed downvoters to leave a reply... If whoever did that comes across this post again I'm actually genuinely interested in hearing about whatever you disagreed with strongly enough in this post. Unfortunately I said so much that I can only guess what and that's a bummer because I bet it would be interesting.