Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastradius
Most of the bots in this community aren't very advanced and aren't especially good at concealing themselves. Especially if you compare the applications here to your regular FPS in which each application has to defeat something along the lines of PunkBuster. The inherent problem of that community is the fact that an account isn't worth all that much, but that isn't the case in a MMO. If you keep banning accounts related to cheating, the cheaters will move on. It doesn't require a lot of investments on the company; it just requires hiring a single hacker to release basic detection routines to the community. It doesn't matter if it is easily defeated, because each routine will invoke a ban wave. A single hacker payrole is about ~1600-1800 euro a month, which is nothing for a company of this size.
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Definitely, most bots in
any community aren't very advanced, but most game companies also aren't very aggressive about catching cheaters (so the bar isn't very high).
If you have a truly dedicated bot writer then all of those issues are theoretically circumventable, which is the crux of my argument. There are countless layers of protection which can be applied to a bot in order to reduce its signature on the gameco's radar; some of those solutions are definitely not simple, particularly as you approach the kernel level. Similarly, there are just as many things the game company can do to detect cheaters.
Game companies also have to deal with false positives. People use accessibility software, a wide range of input devices, OS virtualization, etc. If a game company bans people for using SendInput or kbd_event then it may ban people who're using virtual/on-screen keyboards for whatever reason. I know... they might not care, the point is more that there are challenges beyond simply
thinking someone is cheating. If you can detect a SPECIFIC cheat running on their system then there is no question. If you just receive input from the user which doesn't have the outright appearance of being legitimate but can't really define the source, then you have a different problem to deal with. Companies are happy to ban cheaters, but banning cheat-free customers along with them would spoil a reputation pretty quickly among the clean community. There are also other potential gotchas for the gameco like game performance issues as a result of all the different methods of detection.
Again, I agree the gamecos could be very effective if they wanted to, but it really still boils down the the arms race analogy.
