You should definitely be gathering and analyzing many data points. Pinpointing wall hackers in a shooter is more challenging but is extremely viable. It’s not difficult to spot and ban a 3600 apm player. The Starcraft 2 AI is exceedingly cool but would never survive in the wild. Blizzard’s proprietary Warden software performs similar functionality and seems to be effective. Punkbuster attempts this but it does not appear to work well. I have heard tales of games doing this only for the cheating tools to detect the check and turn themselves off for a frame.Īnti-virus like process detection is another option. It’s possible to retrieve the final frame buffer and analyze it for illegitimate additions. Breaking meshes into smaller pieces with random jitter could help hide them but there are both logistical and performance issues to consider. Run-time dynamic modification may help but high poly player models will always stand out. Hackers are of course exceptionally fast at updating their tools and can do so faster than devs. If the tool relies on vertex count then modifying the data could break the tool.

Game data can be modified to break cheating tools.

There are however a variety of strategies that can help. That such cheats continue to exist for games such as Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Team Fortress 2 should indicate the complexity of the situation. So how can developers prevent this sort of cheating? Unfortunately it’s not easy and there are no silver bullets.

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