"Police bust 'world's biggest' video-game-cheat operation"

I miss the ban hammer but in a world where most of the big online games are free to play they can just keep creating new accounts with disposable email addresses and there are some things you just can't patch. Most of the cheats now involve things like using modified drivers. They aren't some program called iCheat.exe running in the background.
They are modified mouse drivers, altered video drivers, cheats of this nature aren't something that can be patched out there is no flaw in the game they are exploiting, they are exploiting a memory leak that the modified drivers intentionally create at the hardware API level. So unless you are wanting developers to start releasing kernel-level anti-cheat that is actively scanning everything in the system and video memory, as well as the IO, generated from all USB peripheral devices in painful detail all in real-time. You need to come at it from a different angle, and while using the police is heavy-handed there isn't really a software fix for it that would be remotely acceptable to actually implement.
Yeah you really can't stop all cheating with client side cheat detection. All the blanket anti-cheat software can do is stop the less sophisticated cheats. And it does stop a ton of cheating so it's still helpful. But there's always ways around it.

You could use a second PC (or a specialized hardware cheat device) that has a video input and usb output that generates mouse and keyboard input for the PC, or even for controller input for consoles. This is what some cheat programs basically do but with software instead.
Then you can smooth out, randomize, or even add intentional inaccuracies to the generated movement to make it more humanlike and pretty much impossible to tell it's bot input.
The only way to detect cheats this advanced are to have server side game specific anti-cheat detection and it has to be very sophisticated. And it's much, much harder to detect than it is to create.

You can't simply "hire better programmers" and completely eradicate cheating.
 
If someone is cheating then that usually means they're exploiting something in the game.
That has some assumptions, imagine online chess it is easy to see how cheating would be nearly impossible to detect.

You can have an AI that analyses what is going on the screen and generate for you some mouse movement to help your auto-aim that can be really hard to prevent and has nothing to do with the game but HDMI drivers not being fully locked down and so on or if a game is streamed in any way or have multiple players, one can use that information in a way that is not really a bug you can fix in the game.

Now you call it a taxpayer waste, but depending on how much tax revenues that gaming industry if for your city-country, etc.... and how much they think they lose because of players directing their money toward non good tax payers shaddy company or quitting the games, it could be a tax revenues on the long run (I imagine that why they would do it).
 
Now you call it a taxpayer waste, but depending on how much tax revenues that gaming industry if for your city-country, etc.... and how much they think they lose because of players directing their money toward non good tax payers shaddy company or quitting the games, it could be a tax revenues on the long run (I imagine that why they would do it).

"Tax revenues" going directly to local politicians, prosecutors, and police.
 
"Tax revenues" going directly to local politicians, prosecutors, and police.
I am not sure what you mean by that, if their roads and municipal water supply some of the tax revenues goes into good & services.
 
I'm 100% serious - I favor public executions for (multiplayer) game cheaters.

Every player they cheated is tracked down and assembled.

Every player has a green button and a red button: Forgiveness or punishment.

Choices are completely anonymous.

If everyone who was cheated pushes the green button, the cheater goes free.

If any player chooses the push the red button, then the punishment is delivered.
Wasnt this a in a show or movie? Like a social score or something. Oh yeah orville
 
I just never understood cheating. If you use a hack, you didn't really win. Worse than losing fairly.
Exactly. For me, "winning" at video games equates to having fun and improving through my own skill (regardless of whether I get the most kills/points or not). Same goes for life in general.

Also, what sort of absolute loser needs his/her ego stroked by faking a win.
 
Exactly. For me, "winning" at video games equates to having fun and improving through my own skill (regardless of whether I get the most kills/points or not). Same goes for life in general.

Also, what sort of absolute loser needs his/her ego stroked by faking a win.
I totally agree but I also know the kind of people that cheat and they aren't interested in improving themselves. Some people need a win to feed their ego, whether or not they earned it. Look at pay to win micro-transactions where some games do give you an edge that other players don't have, which makes it easier to win. Game developers know the market they have and exploit it one way or another. They provide the cheats for a fee while denying those that don't pay for it. This is how I see this operation. Tencent isn't doing this because they're against cheating. They're going this because they don't want competition against their micro-transactions.
 
I totally agree but I also know the kind of people that cheat and they aren't interested in improving themselves. Some people need a win to feed their ego, whether or not they earned it. Look at pay to win micro-transactions where some games do give you an edge that other players don't have, which makes it easier to win. Game developers know the market they have and exploit it one way or another. They provide the cheats for a fee while denying those that don't pay for it. This is how I see this operation. Tencent isn't doing this because they're against cheating. They're going this because they don't want competition against their micro-transactions.
There may be some games like that but I'd say the majority aren't competing with Tencent or another developer's 'pay to win' model. Also this is is sort of apples and oranges because to my knowledge no major developer allows players to purchase wall hacks, aimbots, speed hacks, etc.

And I'm sorry you know some scumbags that are so pathetic they have to purchase cheats to feed their ego.
 
I totally agree but I also know the kind of people that cheat and they aren't interested in improving themselves. Some people need a win to feed their ego, whether or not they earned it. Look at pay to win micro-transactions where some games do give you an edge that other players don't have, which makes it easier to win. Game developers know the market they have and exploit it one way or another. They provide the cheats for a fee while denying those that don't pay for it. This is how I see this operation. Tencent isn't doing this because they're against cheating. They're going this because they don't want competition against their micro-transactions.
Protecting their ecosystem is without a doubt the motivation here, but I think it's just as much about stopping a (relative) few bad apples driving away customers than it is microtransactions. A few cheaters can effectively ruin the structural equilibrium of a game system.

Root of the issue remains the rather pathetic moral-psycho deficiency a lot of people have to stroke their egos through cheating, much like during the subprime frenzy, many mortgage borrowers were essentially cheating (and/or refusing to do 6th-grade math) to stroke theirs.

Wanting to excel i.e. win is fine and healthy. Wanting to win through cheating ruins the game for everyone (including the cheater). And yes, I'm fully recognizant that I sound like a high school football coach.
 
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