Online games will always attract cheaters who want to get ahead without actually getting good. But getting cheaters in your game is a serious pain. I know you’ve experienced it before. Getting a teammate or opponent who exploit glitches or use third-party applications to gain an unfair advantage usually ruins an entire match. Losing to a cheater is horrible and even if they are on your side, that victory doesn’t feel good. Fortunately, developers deploy anti-cheat software in their games to catch cheaters in the act.
But if you’re anything like me, you probably wonder how these programs are catching cheaters? Let’s take a look.
Types of Anti-Cheat
First off, it’s important to realise that there are two types of anti-cheat software. These are client-side or server-side; running on the players computer or on the game server respectively. These use different methods to detect cheaters; so let’s have a closer look.
Client-Side Protection
This type of anti-cheat program will run directly on your computer or console when you’re playing. While you play, it’ll be watching for suspicious activity. But what exactly do they do?
- Signature-Based Detection: This sees the program look for a number of known cheats or cheating programs, to watch if the player is using them. It’s essentially a database of all known cheats for that game. And if a known cheat is caught, then the player will either be marked for further investigation, or get banned on the spot.
- Memory Scanning: This goes a step deeper, monitoring the RAM usage to see if anything suspicious is happening to the game’s data while its running. Cheat programs may try to alter game data in suspicious ways, so memory scanning watches for these changes.
- Behavioural Analysis: Playing the detective, this method simply analyses the player’s behaviour to see if they are exhibiting superhuman behaviours—like stupidly good accuracy, teleportation or other things which aren’t usually possible in the game. This will often catch things like aimbots or wallhacks.
Common examples of client-side anti-cheat are Easy Anti-Cheat (also known as EAC), BattlEye ACE by Tencent, and Riot Vanguard. Speaking of which; if you’re looking to get ahead in Wuthering Waves, it’s easier to buy wuthering waves account and start with the advantage instead of choosing the cheating route.
Server-Side Protection
Anti-cheat can also happen on the side of the game server. Meaning that the program won’t be running on your program, but will be watching your behaviour within and communication to the server. Here’s what it looks for:
- Abnormal Network Traffic: You’re connected to the server to play. So the anti-cheat simply monitors for irregularities in network traffic. This works because cheats can sometimes communicate with external servers to gather or change game data; so they can cause suspicious network traffic.
- Server-Side Validation: This is similar to memory scanning, but instead of monitoring what’s happening in your game, it’s monitoring what’s happening in the game server itself. This means that it’s estimating things like player location, weapon stats and other elements which cheats may seek to alter. If what’s happening doesn’t match what the program expects, it’ll be flagged up.
- Periodic Integrity Checks: As we’ve already mentioned a few times, cheats will change things including game files and system configurations. Server-side protection will check for these changes regularly, to try and catch players who use cheats—even just for a moment.
An example of this server-side approach is Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), most notably used in Counter-Strike.
Catching Cheats is a Moving Target
The fight against cheats in game is a fight against the innovations of players and the community. Players area always going to be finding exploits and loopholes to give them advantages. But to ensure that play remains fun and fair for all, anti-cheat is deployed to make fast and relatively reliable estimations of who is cheating and how exactly they are doing it.
This arms race between crafty players and the game’s developers is not going to end any time soon. But with the introduction of machine learning and AI into anti-cheat systems, they may get a whole lot better over the next few years… But then again, so might the cheats. So we’ll just have to wait and see!
