Valorant

[The Ugly One]

I'm talking about anti-cheat specifically, not general system security. What kind of low level device intrusion is being used to cheat in video games?

A custom PCIe device that uses unsigned firmware to spoof an NVMe drive to inject code into the game. Did you not read the thread, like, at all?

Regardless, even the questionable commercial software hardening solutions that use sandbox escapes and the like don't have root access

This is completely wrong. Most enterprise endpoint security involves kernel drivers because userspace security has gotten so thorough that attacks at the device/kernel/root of trust type level have become far more common. Windows Defender obviously has privileged access.

I'm saying it's reckless overkill for anti-cheat for a shitty arena shooter. Layered checksums, detecting function hooks, most debugger detection techniques, encrypted data and code, obfuscation like computed control flow...none of that requires elevated permissions.

Those are all userspace methods that would fail to detect the specific $6000 kernel-level cheat device you are defending

Game devs used to be among the most capable of software engineers historically

No, that'd be mainframe devs. Game devs are sub-script-kiddy tier at security. Much of the security technology we're seeing enter consumer space was hatched in mainframe space years, if not decades ago.

In one I know what I'm being offered, and I willingly chose to buy it, in the other I did not. It was forced upon me after I purchased it. This wasn't something that came with Valorant originally, it was an update pushed by Riot Games.

Requiring updated software to access their servers is in the T&Cs of basically every live service software in existence, and I'm surprised you are just now learning this.

This is an anti-consumer practice. It needs to stop.

And there we have it. You think you have the right to use hardware to cheat in online games. You just don't, and nobody's going to pass a law saying your unsigned malware device has the right to inject code into a game you licensed.

 

[Gimme Pills]

It boils down to one answer.
E-Sports.

Cheating has nothing to do with esports. People cheat in single player, coop, obscure pvp with no esport scene. And yes people cheat in esport titles and in tournanents.

This feature is false as nothing being bricked, cheaters are just assblasted and want everyone riled up. If you don't like kernel A-C then there is good option - not playing them.

I re-red feature text again, what faggot wrote it lol, "hardware failures" my ass

 

[Tablet County]

snip

I'm so glad I've never played a Riot game.

 

[Nick Gars]

Cheating has nothing to do with esports. People cheat in single player, coop, obscure pvp with no esport scene. And yes people cheat in esport titles and in tournanents.

This feature is false as nothing being bricked, cheaters are just assblasted and want everyone riled up. If you don't like kernel A-C then there is good option - not playing them.

My point is that it's the E-Sport component that has given rise to such "complex" methods of cheating. None of the multiplayer games I play have cheating that goes so far above and beyond as a several thousand dollar piece of hardware acting as an input middleman malware, because there's generally speaking no reason to go to such an extent to bypass anti-cheats or simply not get caught. The cheating exists, I agree, but it isn't so bad and uncontrollable that kernel-level anti-cheat becomes a thing. Thus far, it seems to be something you only see in games with, or trying to have, an E-Sports component.

Completely agree on the last statement though. I aint playing a game that needs that level of access to my property to make sure I'm not cheating.

 

[Psyker]

The first step of your solution was unironically "If everyone collectively shared my opinion that ranked competitive multiplayer games are bad, then the market would disappear and we wouldn't have to worry about companies needing to police games", how was anyone supposed to take you seriously?

The same way it was handled historically, with player-ran tournaments and competitive scenes. The fact that people born after 9/11 can't conceive of a competitive environment without ranked modes, matchmaking algorithms or the developer breathing down everyone's neck with behavioral codes, balance adjustments and invasive anti-cheats is depressing.

 

[22 Rimfire]

What kind of low level device intrusion is being used to cheat in video games? A lag switch? Only works when the devs are retarded enough to use P2P for multiplayer. Key injection? Macros are already available.

A custom PCIe device that spoofs an NVMe drive to inject code into the game. Did you not read the thread, like, at all?

Modern cheating methods are absurdly sophisticated, and there's a big industry making a shit ton of money from it.

The stack looks like this:

1. A DMA card (typically some flavor of FGPA) in the gaming PC. This card imitates an innocuous piece of hardware (e.g. an NVME drive) and has 'Direct Memory Access' on the system. Meaning it can read any area of the gaming PC's memory at will. - These are hundreds to thousands of dollars.
2. Firmware loaded onto that DMA card that is capable of finding the memory areas for the game you want to cheat in and grabbing the relevant information it needs to enable your cheats - This firmware is almost always a subscription service
3. A wire (typically USB) from the back of that card to a second PC. This exports the relevant memory data that the DMA card has obtained.
4. Cheat software running on a second PC - Takes the input (memory readouts) coming across from the DMA device and performs whatever actual cheating manipulations you desire. Aimbot, fire bot, wall hack, radar. All that fun stuff. It's all high-grade now too, humanizes aim in a way that's indistinguishable from genuine player inputs. Long gone are the days of naive implementations of 'it aims directly at the enemy always' that you can spot from space.
5. A USB injection/mimic device. This sits between the gaming PC's mouse and keyboard and the PC itself. It's transparent, meaning it adopts the hardware id etc of the upstream mouse/keyboard. This is where cheat inputs are fed back into the gaming PC from the cheating PC.
6. A fuser (optional), which takes video output from the cheating PC and can overlay it on the video output from the gaming PC. This provides any visual cheating outputs you might want (wall hacks etc) and since it's added on the cable that connects to the monitor, the gaming PC sees none of it.

Now, using this stack, you have an undetectable way to cheat at any game. You're not injecting any code. Absolutely no software is running on the gaming PC. No memory is manipulated. Data is invisibly read via DMA, and actions are invisibly inserted via hardware input devices. There is no video output on the gaming PC that shows anything untoward. It's invisible. You can't even make 'accidentally enable your cheat overlays while streaming' kind of user errors, so not only is it invisible, it's idiot proof too.

You might think this is schizo shit, but you'd be wrong. You can easily buy this kit online (if you're a massive fucking faggot), at places like RangerDMA (Archive). The firmware and cheat software are a little more difficult to source since their operations are more prone to being shut down and have to shuffle around a bit more. But only a tiny bit harder.

It's big business. Some of the subscription firmware operations openly provide stats on how many players are using their firmware in particular games. The numbers are not small, and the subscriptions are not cheap.

Riot's approach of actively fighting this is admirable. I wish them luck but it's probably mostly futile. Other game devs/publishers (e.g. Epic) just accept it as impossible and quietly embrace it - I could point you to many partnered streamers (e.g. 1 2 3) for Fortnite who are blatantly using DMA cheats and have been for years, and not a finger is (or will be) lifted against them.

 

[scubain]

E-Sports.
They foster an enviorment where people delusionally believe they can make a career out of PLAYING FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. When money is on the line, that is constant encouragement to take any edge you can to get that bag.

Don't get me wrong, I used to be an avid TF2 player, a game that was utterly and indescribably raped by the mindset that compels competitive team games today, and I've never been into any form of ranked competitive game like Valorant or CS2, but there is obviously a fucking ginormous market for games like these. The competitive format that people enjoy cannot co-exist with self-moderated community servers or whatever other solutions that guy mentioned, it's an entirely different game at that point. These kinds of competitive games are popular because a lot of people like them, and as dogshit as we both know they are that's not going to change through wishful thinking. If anyone's solution to this problem or any problem is "everyone should just think a different way" then it's not a solution at all.

 

[Gimme Pills]

The same way it was handled historically, with player-ran tournaments and competitive scenes. The fact that people born after 9/11 can't conceive of a competitive environment without ranked modes, matchmaking algorithms or the developer breathing down everyone's neck with behavioral codes, balance adjustments and invasive anti-cheats is depressing.

People use vibratorts to cheat in chess tournaments, people also pay 6k to install chinese cheating hardware into their pc (talk about invasive). No there is no other way.

 

[whatchamacallit]

Philip clarifies that this isn't bricking computers rather it throws a hardware fault. However, the way this tweet is worded makes it sound way worse. Especially with Philip's smug demeanor, it hasn't helped him like seen with the Trainwrecks drama.

This is how you've chosen to end your PC

Enjoy bricking, hacker child

 

[green&brown]

Gabe Newell really just wins by doing nothing. Having baseline levels of competence and not actively screwing over your customer base seems to make you a big winner in this market.

Regardless, my decision to only play decades old vidya and mildly-to-very obscure indie games saves me yet again.

 

[Anime Waifu NFT collector]

This is an anti-consumer practice. It needs to stop.

I think this is the crux of the argument you people are making, due to ideology and not understanding what happened, you think that this is some corporate overreach that will negatively affect consumers because it will damage their hardware,

That is not what happened nor what is gonna happen, what happened is that a company requires you to install anti-cheat software, the anti-cheat software detected a DMA hardware used specifically for cheating, the software lets Windows know about it and Windows blocks the cheating hardware from doing it's thing, which then makes it unusable for cheating (not permanently, you can't cheat on riot games but you can cheat in other games after reinstalling the OS, reflashing the firmware, etc.). This is not gonna "brick" your webcam under any situation, nor is it gonna destroy your other hardware permanently, your webcam doesn't bypass your operating system security, your webcam is not pretending to be another type of hardware like the DMA hardware used for cheating, etc.

Again, if you only read the headline you will think what happened is terrible, if you actually understand what's going on you will stop being outraged, the problem is that you people are enjoying an unearned sense of moral superiority by thinking you are figthing the good figth against the evil and powerful corporations.

This is not what's happening at all, and I'll repeat that the majority of you people don't understand what's happening because in every page of this thread there is at least one person that thinks Riot is destroying people's hardware, and those posts get all the agree ratings, so rather than being an isolated opinion the misunderstanding is shared by many.

 

[scubain]

The same way it was handled historically, with player-ran tournaments and competitive scenes. The fact that people born after 9/11 can't conceive of a competitive environment without ranked modes, matchmaking algorithms or the developer breathing down everyone's neck with behavioral codes, balance adjustments and invasive anti-cheats is depressing.

"Let's just do things how they were 30 years ago!" cool story bro, but it's not 1999 anymore, no one's throwing LAN parties in their basement. What you're not understanding is that people genuinely enjoy this format of game, it's not being forced on anyone, they could just not play the game. These games are designed to be exclusively competitive, they're designed around centralized developer control and rulesets. People like seeing their rank go up and they like climbing a global leaderboard, but the only thing that gives those rankings meaning is the knowledge that (generally speaking) every person on the game is on a level playing field. Like I mentioned, I don't play competitive games, they're all dogshit, but what we have today is an evolution of what you're reminiscing about. Gaming, and especially competitive gaming, have grown exponentially in the past two decades, and the landscape has entirely shifted. "People should just like what I like" is not an actual solution.

 

[whatchamacallit]

-snip-

It's retarded inane goybabble like this that really helps you understand the Jewish mindset. How can anyone read this and not think the goyim are actual cattle?

 

[nonespecified]

I was all about the torches and pitchforks ,but this just f*cks up the cheat device itself? I mean sure, they can't boot windows until they uninstall the cheat device but fuck, I'm not even mad about that.

 

[Smithfield Ham]

The people actually defending this shit were probably PirateSoftware fans until he banned them from the Discord.

You strike me as the exact kind of suckers who get angry that Apple has to use USB-C instead of a proprietary format. Or that StopKillingGames is "too vague" and will magically destroy independent gaming by forcing people not to sell bricks advertised as games.

 

[Indrick Boreale]

Requiring updated software to access their servers is in the T&Cs of basically every live service software in existence, and I'm surprised you are just now learning this.

I'd appreciate my position not being misrepresented. The fact that the T&Cs of live software allows for companies to push any updates they desire does not mean they should push something that could potentially damage any hardware I own. The slippery slope to which this leads has been debated here at length, and I need not repeat that point. It's this specific update right now, it can lead to another update that decides it doesn't like me stating X or Y things on chat, and that is left exclusively to company criteria to decide.

The result of punishing cheaters in online games can be achieved in plenty of other ways, such as account or IP bans, and no live service company exists that does not have people specifically in charge of doing this.

And there we have it. You think you have the right to use hardware to cheat in online games. You just don't, and nobody's going to pass a law saying your unsigned malware device has the right to inject code into a game you licensed.

I have the right to use hardware in whatever way I please. If that conflicts with the TOS of a live service software, they're well within their right to impede it, so long as nothing in my hardware/software gets touched without my consent.

you think that this is some corporate overreach that will negatively affect consumers because it will damage their hardware,

That is not what happened nor what is gonna happen, what happened is that a company requires you to install anti-cheat software, the anti-cheat software detected a DMA hardware used specifically for cheating, the software lets Windows know about it and Windows blocks the cheating hardware from doing it's thing, which then makes it unusable for cheating (not permanently, you can't cheat on riot games but you can cheat in other games after reinstalling the OS, reflashing the firmware, etc.).

I reiterate:

This is an anti-consumer practice. It needs to stop.

This is not gonna "brick" your webcam under any situation, nor is it gonna destroy your other hardware permanently, your webcam doesn't bypass your operating system security, your webcam is not pretending to be another type of hardware like the DMA hardware used for cheating, etc.

The point is not whether it will, but whether it has the potential to, and it very clearly does. Plenty of other methods exist to achieve the result Riot Games wants without resorting to measures that could potentially compromise anyone's hardware, and the fact that Riot Games is resorting to doing this is something that simply cannot be allowed.

 

[A shitty ass clover]

I couldn't care less what they do to retards that spend thousands of dollars just to fucking cheat, but at the same time. why the fuck should i basically install a rootkit because retard over here wants to hit grandmasters with his fancy hardware, fuck all of them.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Even if it has a 100% success rate and has never damaged any hardware incorrectly yet, anyone at the company who is so inclined could modify this maliciously. As an avid RuneScape addict, I'm very well-acquainted with rogue employees abusing internal company tools for personal gain or just spiteful grudge BS.

And that's not even getting into malicious actors from outside of Riot compromising the anti-cheat service.

I would be more concerned about incompetency than maliciousness. The number of times a game update (any game, not just Riot properties) was pushed and had unintended results has got to be immeasurable at this point. Some pajeet fucking things up and causing wider range problems is more worrisome than some rogue retard with a vendetta causing problems. If only because the former is far more likely to happen.

 

[the rat]

That still is no excuse for Valorant, or any game, forcing anything that could potentially brick my computer.

Curious as to why you think he is for software that bricks your computer when what he seems to be saying is that the Valorant anti-cheat (while it is shit software) is doing the right thing by asking Windows to check what the fuck is going on with the spoofed device. It's not bricking your hardware, if it was then it'd be permanently unusable regardless of how many times you reinstall :^). I figure it's marking it to tell itself "hey I recognise this hardware and I know it's harmful so I don't want to ever load you" any time it detects it.

You really don't want hardware doing spook shit with memory, that can lead to a boat load of security and instability problems. Also in this instance Windows would be making the final judgement call on whether or not to actually prevent loading this so if you really want something to blame, blame Windows.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

This is not what's happening at all, and I'll repeat that the majority of you people don't understand what's happening because in every page of this thread there is at least one person that thinks Riot is destroying people's hardware, and those posts get all the agree ratings, so rather than being an isolated opinion the misunderstanding is shared by many.

I think the major issue here is that the fucking game journos have latched onto this story with very particular wording. for reasons unknowable - probably because they're farming clicks, or they're just fucking stupid - gaming sites are deliberately mischaracterizing the story. "Riot Bans Hardware Cheaters, Disrupts Cheating Hardware, Taunts Them On Twitter" is a good story, but won't draw nearly as many panicked hate reposts as "RIOT'S EVIL R0 ANTICHEAT CAN BRICK YOUR PC NOW". the latter is perfect rage bait, and everyone is fucking taking it. it was my initial reaction upon reading the headline as well, as I myself am an anti-cheat hater. Riot is a shit company, Valorant is a shit game, Riot's ridiculous mandatory spyware suite is galling and offensive, of course people want to believe Riot's evil anti-cheat is doing evil shit and causing a scandal. also, @0 0's wording in the highlight is not doing this thread any favors.

It's retarded inane goybabble like this that really helps you understand the Jewish mindset. How can anyone read this and not think the goyim are actual cattle?

2025 regdates making a strong argument for closing registration again