Could an add on be written to detect and auto-report cheat engine?

f047ys3v3n

So, I ran into one of those guys that has a bunch of non-keyboard, non-alt code characters in his name a few days ago in PVP. Man was his cheat engine turnt up. He was tanky as hell, had huge damage numbers on his skills, endless sustain, quick ultis, lots of dodge chance, some very high movement speed, and one hit of vigor heals him full from 25% health. He easily wiped several pretty good players and didn't even bother to LOS much though it looked like he was trying to look like he was doing that he just wasn't that good at actually getting it done. This has become pretty common though. Both the cheat engine trunt up pretty hot and the bunch of non-keyboard, non-alt code, characters in your name so that, in order to report you, people have to leave the game and search the web for the correct text to copy paste them into the report. Some of the "best" groups have more than half their players doing this. I wonder why that is?

What I was thinking, since apparently ZOS is satisfied with their CE solution that is so minimal all it does is keep your weapon / spell damage below 10k and prevent every skill cast from being an ulti, is that maybe, at least in PVP, there could be an add-on way around their intransigence and stupidity. Here is my thinking.

1) It seems as though some enemy stats must come through to your client side. You fire off a skill at an enemy and some calculation must be done that includes both his and your stats in order to determine how much damage is actually done. Things like power, pool, armor, penitration, crit percent, crit multiplier, dodge chance, must be calculated. Similarly, he hits you with a skill and this should also reveal some data.

2) I am not sure exactly what all data comes though but the incidences of full on CE min-maxers running with guilds who openly discuss settings and swap files as opposed to guys just juicing one or two things seems to be getting higher so if only part of the stats come through to your client side (regen and cost reduction for instance wouldn't) it should still be pretty easy to establish that combinations of these stats together are not possible since literally every stat has been set to the maximum amount that you could get legitimately, simultaneously. It should be pretty easy to demonstrate, for instance, that you can't have x weapon damage, y armor, and z penetration at the same time if all those stats are set to the maximum you could get if you built entirely for just that stat.

3) An add on might be able to be made that produced a pop up auto report option when you die to a player it flags for CE numbers. That report could contain the players impossible combination of stat data. That report, being auto-generated and having access to the death recap, would also allow for the easy reporting of players running the non-keyboard, non-alt code, character name cheese that has become so common amount such players.

4) A barrage of reports (just like the barrage of metiers in PVP on that one fine day) might force ZOS to actually do something about the situation since it would tie up internal resources. It would also result in streamers having particularity bad days where they would say die 5 times in a row to CE players and melt down epicly. This might make the relatively small man hour cost of writing some decent anti-CE measures seem worth it even to the dumbest of ZOS decision makers.

Do you guys think this is possible? Would you run such an add on if it existed?

Thogard

The alt characters are to prevent hate tells, not reporting.

But no there’s no addon that could detect cheat engine. CE intercepts data being sent from your client to the server and injects it’s own code. ZOS’s servers would have to detect that.

SirAndy

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Could an add on be written to detect and auto-report cheat engine?

No

AddOns only have access to the in-game LUA functions and variables, they can not access anything outside of ESO and only have limited access to things inside of ESO.

SirAndy

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

1) It seems as though some enemy stats must come through to your client side. You fire off a skill at an enemy and some calculation must be done that includes both his and your stats in order to determine how much damage is actually done. Things like power, pool, armor, penitration, crit percent, crit multiplier, dodge chance, must be calculated. Similarly, he hits you with a skill and this should also reveal some data.

No

You don't have access to those stats client side, they are not exposed.

None of those calculation *should* be done client side anyways, that's basic multiplayer programming,:
"Never trust the client"

Ohtimbar

not possible, and probably unethical even if it were.

starkerealm

Thogard wrote: »

The alt characters are to prevent hate tells, not reporting.

But no there’s no addon that could detect cheat engine. CE intercepts data being sent from your client to the server and injects it’s own code. ZOS’s servers would have to detect that.

Not exactly. Or, I should say, that's technically correct, but slightly misleading.

Cheat Engine is a memory editor utility. (Or, at least, it was a decade ago.) It accesses paged memory and directly alters the data stored there. It's not part of the network stack at all (unless someone coded new functionality into it, specifically for multiplayer use.)

Now, as @SirAndy said, it shouldn't be able to do anything in an MMO. But, ESO uses a trusted client system to shift most of its major processing requirements onto the end user. This (kinda) makes sense with console based MMOs, like ESO, The Division, Destiny, ect, but when you're on PC, it's a huge security issue.

Now, here's the tricky issue. Because CE is a local utility (meaning it's running on their system), and you don't have access to that, there is absolutely now way to determine if they're using it remotely, as another end user. If you're running the system, then you have the option of instituting sanity checks (though, even then, the results are debatable).

If you were getting data directly from that player (in a peer-to-peer setup) you might be able to configure software to examine the incoming data for anomalies, and potentially identify a cheater that way. (Though, probably not.) But, instead you're getting the data from ZOS's servers. At that point any data the cheater sent is been processed in with everything else and sent to you all at once. So, definitively identifying that something's out of line, is effectively impossible. This is before you remember that the API doesn't allow unlimited access to the game, anyway, and as a result can't tell you if a specific player is cheating.

f047ys3v3n

SirAndy wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Could an add on be written to detect and auto-report cheat engine?

No

AddOns only have access to the in-game LUA functions and variables, they can not access anything outside of ESO and only have limited access to things inside of ESO.

That is unfortunate. Is there a way to at least automate the reporting of the proliferating cheaters who use special characters so that perhaps the report could be done with a left click option on the death recap instead of having to do it manually? Right now it might as well be impossible to report such character names since nobody is going to spend 10 min every time such a player is encountered to actually do it.

starkerealm

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Could an add on be written to detect and auto-report cheat engine?

No

AddOns only have access to the in-game LUA functions and variables, they can not access anything outside of ESO and only have limited access to things inside of ESO.

That is unfortunate. Is there a way to at least automate the reporting of the proliferating cheaters who use special characters so that perhaps the report could be done with a left click option on the death recap instead of having to do it manually? Right now it might as well be impossible to report such character names since nobody is going to spend 10 min every time such a player is encountered to actually do it.

That's probably doable. However, don't expect those reports to carry much weight. Especially if you have a public addon that can report anyone from your death recap for using CE. Using a tool like that would, quite possibly, get you banned for false reporting.

Now, I know there are some cases where users are actually using CE, but at the same time, some players really are that good, and that coordinated. If you've ever interacted with PvPers who are willing to explain their builds, you can see where they can quickly get some improbable combinations of abilities stacked together.

f047ys3v3n

starkerealm wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Could an add on be written to detect and auto-report cheat engine?

No

AddOns only have access to the in-game LUA functions and variables, they can not access anything outside of ESO and only have limited access to things inside of ESO.

That is unfortunate. Is there a way to at least automate the reporting of the proliferating cheaters who use special characters so that perhaps the report could be done with a left click option on the death recap instead of having to do it manually? Right now it might as well be impossible to report such character names since nobody is going to spend 10 min every time such a player is encountered to actually do it.

That's probably doable. However, don't expect those reports to carry much weight. Especially if you have a public addon that can report anyone from your death recap for using CE. Using a tool like that would, quite possibly, get you banned for false reporting.

Now, I know there are some cases where users are actually using CE, but at the same time, some players really are that good, and that coordinated. If you've ever interacted with PvPers who are willing to explain their builds, you can see where they can quickly get some improbable combinations of abilities stacked together.

Ya, your probably right, Zos would probably see the add on users as the problem and give them the ban.

As for PVPers who have slick builds and mad skills. Ya, who would ever be able to tell who is cheating in a 1 on 1 situation or in a big X v X scrum I don't know but when you have a bunch of decent players beating on 1 who just takes it, sustains, is never CC'd or slowed, and then turns and crushes them it is really not hard to figure out.

teiselaise

Sigh, 2018, players making their own anticheat systems

Ackwalan

Thogard wrote: »

The alt characters are to prevent hate tells, not reporting.

But no there’s no addon that could detect cheat engine. CE intercepts data being sent from your client to the server and injects it’s own code. ZOS’s servers would have to detect that.

Sure it is.

DoctorESO

.

SirAndy

starkerealm wrote: »

Cheat Engine is a memory editor utility. (Or, at least, it was a decade ago.) It accesses paged memory and directly alters the data stored there. It's not part of the network stack at all

That is correct, CE (and others like it) directly alter the game memory at runtime, they don't hook into the network stack.

What most people don't know, on a PC you can write programs that have full access (read and write) to any other running process's memory.

Programs like CE use this "feature" to alter the memory of a game in realtime while the game is running ...

WrathOfInnos

SirAndy wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

1) It seems as though some enemy stats must come through to your client side. You fire off a skill at an enemy and some calculation must be done that includes both his and your stats in order to determine how much damage is actually done. Things like power, pool, armor, penitration, crit percent, crit multiplier, dodge chance, must be calculated. Similarly, he hits you with a skill and this should also reveal some data.

No

You don't have access to those stats client side, they are not exposed.

None of those calculation *should* be done client side anyways, that's basic multiplayer programming,:
"Never trust the client"

If more calculations shift from client side to server side, we will all get more lag. The game used to run much better when nearly everything was client side, but then cheaters had to go and ruin it for all of us.

SirAndy

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

No
You don't have access to those stats client side, they are not exposed.
None of those calculation *should* be done client side anyways, that's basic multiplayer programming,:
"Never trust the client"

If more calculations shift from client side to server side, we will all get more lag. The game used to run much better when nearly everything was client side, but then cheaters had to go and ruin it for all of us.

True, but that only means that the server side of ESO is poorly implemented.

I've worked on client/server systems, both game related and enterprise related, and it is absolutely possible to do this right with minimal server side latency.

The systems i worked on were consistently in the sub < 10ms range for processing client packets, the best implementation had an average of 5ms of server side processing time.

f047ys3v3n

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

1) It seems as though some enemy stats must come through to your client side. You fire off a skill at an enemy and some calculation must be done that includes both his and your stats in order to determine how much damage is actually done. Things like power, pool, armor, penitration, crit percent, crit multiplier, dodge chance, must be calculated. Similarly, he hits you with a skill and this should also reveal some data.

No

You don't have access to those stats client side, they are not exposed.

None of those calculation *should* be done client side anyways, that's basic multiplayer programming,:
"Never trust the client"

If more calculations shift from client side to server side, we will all get more lag. The game used to run much better when nearly everything was client side, but then cheaters had to go and ruin it for all of us.

I really think that all the anti-cheat stuff has just been terrible implementation. ZOS threw it together in a panic one weekend when a few PVPers who had been complaining to ZOS for a long time about the prevalence of CE had enough of being ignored, downloaded it, and decided to go out in a blaze that ZOS could not ignore anymore (you know, the "cheaters" ZOS didn't let back.) What should have happened with the CE implementation is that a very few full, comprehensive, character stat snapshots (maybe 1 in 10k seconds) should have been randomly chosen to be tested very thoroughly server side with an auto-ban issued to the account if they came up wrong. What seems to have happened, from what I can gather, is that every calculation each variable is checked, alone, and in a vacuum, to make sure it is actually within some loose range of possibility. So, although you can't have 10k weapon damage without being caught, you can have the maximum of every variable possible that you could get if you built for just that variable all at the same time. The result of this is that you get both performance penalties from the vast number of checks being performed without really bringing cheaters anywhere near competitive with a non-cheater.

After another almost 2 years now with basically no noticeable changes and, unsurprisingly, vast numbers of players turning to CE to stay competitive, I think ZOS is happy with the solution. It does manage to prevent meteors from falling constantly from the sky and people from doing vMA in 20 min. It gives them plausible deniability and I think that is all they wanted. You can't really even tell if somebody is running CE if they are in a group or you are only one on one with them because, in a group, they just look like a glass cannon if they are hitting you or a tank if you are hitting them and solo they might just be a lot better or, in my case, be basically running a dueling build to your general purpose one. You can only really tell when you are X v 1 ing them with some players who's skill and builds you know and they do things that are obviously not possible when it comes to the combination of resistances, resources, movement speed, and damage output.

It is really amazing what can be done under the limitations of ZOS loose cheat engine checks as you can essentially stack cheat engine effectiveness by using ground speed to gain better LOS, dodge change to simply avoid many hits, straight up resistances to limit the ones you take, and resource and block cost reductions to make sure you can further mitigate things. I have seen folks that are not even that good at doing the LOS thing wreck fairly large groups without much difficulty and very small groups of players with only a few in them who are both good and cheating turn whole campaigns. On the other side of things, in PVE, I think that the prevalence has just lead to some unrealistic dps check scaling in order to combat the mechanics breaking effect that inflated DPS's have. In this case, ZOS just seems happy enough to chase what people are actually doing without asking too many questions about how.

Having seen CE users fight each other on equal ground I am actually starting to feel like maybe ZOS has created an Nascar situation here where "If you ain't cheating you ain't trying." Perhaps they owe it to cheaters now to warn them of changes if they do decide to implement resolvable cheat measures since refraining from cheating has been uncompetitive for so long. That is all pretty messed up and also pretty unprecedented in the MMO industry. Most MMO's put stopping cheating at priority one. The thing I see that ZOS puts at priority one is to not name cheaters. Naming them will definitely get you a ban whereas cheating seems pretty unlikely to land you there.

Baertram

No, addons are not able to do so.
If you thik someone is cheating write a report to ZOs.There are addons helping you, like:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1842-EZReport.html

Trinity_Is_My_Name

Yes, you can use the addon "Bot Scanner 2000" to easily report the player. It doesn't detect cheats but it will fill out the report for you so you don't have to figure out what the weird name of the character is.

VaranisArano

Thogard wrote: »

The alt characters are to prevent hate tells, not reporting.

Why not both?