Can AI Anti Cheat save FPS gaming?
A possible future advantage, without the need of kernel access
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Cheating has been part of gaming for as long as we can remember, however, what was once used to help you beat a rather difficult single-player level eventually turned into a tool to gain an advantage over other online players. Cheating in gaming is a huge money-making industry and the constant “cat and mouse” chase between game/ anti-cheat developers and cheat devs has never looked like slowing down. Well, what if AI could help?
AI is already used to some degree with current anti-cheats. You might remember (probably not) Valve ran a presentation at GDC 2018 about using Deep Learning to combat cheaters. The cheating problem was big back then and, unfortunately, still is. Valve introduced a system around trust factor many years ago and while it deals with a small percentage of cheaters, it wasn’t enough to stop the rot. Third-party applications such as Faceit which already have better AC systems than the likes of VAC are also considering introducing ID verification to accounts in the hope to combat cheating and smurfing.
It sounds like a strong idea and will no doubt have some impact on the problem, however, many will no doubt have an issue linking their personal information directly to a free-to-play game.
What AI cheating looks like and the future of AC
AI cheating uses a live stream of your game and works as a go-between your system and the game. The cheats can not only read the screen and send that data back but can also aim at the enemy for you, essentially rendering controls useless. Sounds fun right?
To keep things simple let’s think of cheating in two ways – subtle cheats and what is known as “rage cheats”. The definition is in the name but guess which one the spinboters are? To the human eye subtle cheats just look like decent aim and this is because of clever smoothing techniques that make the process look natural. These are the greatest issue in the FPS scene because if they beat the AC and you can’t visibly see someone cheating then what can we do?
This is where AI could potentially help, a trained AI AC could potentially detect the difference. In theory, an AI could be used to detect everything and not just look at suspicious mouse movements or running applications. If an AI analyzes player behavior could this help remove cheating altogether? Well, some think so.
The company Anybrain is already in pursuit of this rather too-good-to-be-true-sounding scenario, with its mission to “Make online games more fun and competitive by building solutions that make them unbreakable and fair, because we all start at the same level.” Anybrain is the AI anti-cheat that detects everything and is already starting to roll out with some big games.
The AI is constantly learning, looking at player behaviors, and identifying non-human actions. Apparently, this technology may be able to detect someone cheating in just 5 minutes but how will it do this? Well, the idea behind this to work is biometric profiles, your very own gaming signature, and a unique profile based on how you play every game. This would mean that if you cheated in the past under a completely different alias and credentials, you could eventually be caught through this biometric identity.
“Most current anti-cheat solutions are focused on what’s installed on the computer rather than how players interact with it. Therefore, catching cheaters in video games is a game of cat and mouse with the industry constantly pursuing persistent and creative hackers. Our player behaviour based approach provides a non-invasive and proactive solution to cheating in online games.”
Anybrain
An AI Anti Cheat sounds great but what there are concerns? Well, some believe that it may not be that revolutionary and could produce some false positives. The plus side is that the advantage would shift in favor of the good guys as AI follows the code/script it is trained on, meaning it does not have unpredictable behavior like a human. This basically means that AI can easily detect other AI patterns, potentially giving AC the upper hand.
