P2P Anticheat without kernel-level silliness is actually pretty easy.

[VoodooMike]

Preventing relevant cheating in a P2P hosted multiplayer game is not as hard as developers seem to imagine it is. It doesn't require unreliable kernel-level anticheating systems to keep the players fairly honest and to prevent people from ruining the game for everyone else.

The typical format for a P2P hosted game is that one player's machine becomes the hosting machine, and the other players connect directly to that player. The issue with preventing cheating then becomes the fact that everything that is happening in the game is happening on a machine that player controls, and which can be manipulated in ways the game developers cannot control. This leads to some developers thinking the only solution is intrusive 3rd party anti-cheat products that end-users despise.

Its not, and the alternative is not even difficult. Lets consider Helldivers 2 specific mechanics for examples.

First, if a player is using some form of cheat, who will know about it? The other players - or more specifically, their copies of the game. Every player's game has to keep track of the other players and aspects of their game state, so having them track a couple of variables like how many clips they have left, how many bullets they've fired from their clip, when they last used a given strategem, etc... is trivial if it isn't already being done. Every player gets notified of these things in order to display the other player's actions in the game.

Have each player in a mission's game watch for abnormalities - if a player just reloaded with a 15th clip, or fired off a 500kg bomb for the 5th time in a minute, or if they scoot across the map at 5x the expected speed, increase a counter and if it happens too often, flag them as cheating and communicate this to the rest of the players in the mission. If their game agrees, dump the cheating player from the mission. That works just fine... unless the cheater happens to be the host.

If they are the host, then have the non-cheaters migrate to one of the other players machines as the host. I don't know if Helldivers 2 has that capability (its part of Warframe, which works similarly) and if not, then have their games report it to the main server and give them the option to leave without penalty or stay.

Second, for resources - as the stickied post mentions, in helldivers 1 they had problems with people finishing missions with 9999 of various resources, and I've seen it happen in Helldivers 2 as well. This is sloppy coding - at the start of a mission the game knows the maximum possible samples of each type, supercredits, and medals a helldiver could get during the mission because the location of each resource is already part of the map. The same is true of the number of objectives, sub-objectives, nests, and so on, so the total possible credits and XP are already known as well.

If, at the end of the mission, they report that they've earned more of any resource than existed in the mission you just don't accept that report and give them nothing. The central servers don't even need to record those maximum values! You can create a simple object that contains all those values, digitally sign it, and hand it to each player at the start of the mission and simply require that they hand it back as part of their mission completion report. The digital signature prevents tampering, and you can check the values in that object against what they report having earned

That's it. That's all there is to it. It doesn't use any more server resources, and it handles all the relevant cheating problems that face this kind of game, and no kernel-level system needs be used.

What it won't stop is single player cheating, or potentially multiplayer cheating by a group of collaborating people, though even in the second case it would be difficult since each player would need to manipulate the values for their teammates in memory, not just their own. In those cases, however, the cheaters won't be able to earn any more rewards than they could have without cheating.

It keeps monetization safe (they can't earn more important currencies than the game intended), and it gradually weeds out the multiplayer cheaters as well as making it tough for cheaters to play multiplayer (if they're not the host they'll end up kicked). In terms of mission numbers, cheaters will not progress any faster than normal players. Best of all, things like nProtect can be shown the door.

[★ ace ★]

oh, glad to see steam level 0's are still so informative...

[VoodooMike]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

oh, glad to see steam level 0's are still so informative... :cupup:

That'd be a very witty ad hominem if only Steam didn't display 0 for all private profiles regardless of what the account's actual level is. I'm surprised you weren't aware of that.

My sincerest apologies if I threatened your much-beloved nProtect. I just don't see any need for it in these sorts of products but do feel it's a good idea to offer alternatives rather than just boo its use.

[★ ace ★]

No it just doesn't seem like you played the game much, if you have a problem with cheaters then host your own matches.

[Alphakerky]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

No it just doesn't seem like you played the game much, if you have a problem with cheaters then host your own matches. :cupup:

Seeing you come to other posts to complain about game time other than mine remains to be sad. depressing, even. I at least have activities away from screens, but you? You make your pathetic attempts at pissing people off on the steam forums. Go do something away from the screen, something that accomplishes more than this revolting attempt at mockery.

[★ ace ★]

Originally posted by Alphakerky:

Seeing you come to other posts to complain about game time other than mine remains to be sad. depressing, even. I at least have activities away from screens, but you? You make your pathetic attempts at pissing people off on the steam forums. Go do something away from the screen, something that accomplishes more than this revolting attempt at mockery.

What does this have to do with the current topic? each of my post are related to the topic, I'm not worrying about your activity, so mind your own business and stay on topic...

[VoodooMike]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

No it just doesn't seem like you played the game much, if you have a problem with cheaters then host your own matches. :cupup:

I get that you didn't actually read my post and all, but even if you skimmed the early part of it you'd see that my issue is NOT the cheaters, but the anti-cheat system that is being used on Helldivers 2, which is not needed to keep the game safe from excessive cheating, or the sort of cheating that the developers might be particularly concerned with (the stuff that interferes with their mtx or seasonal rankings, or whatever they might opt for).

Not only is the current system heavy-handed, but it doesn't actually do a good job of preventing cheating.

Hosting your own missions doesn't eliminate the potential issues associated with cheaters, it just lets you more easily kick them out of the mission - assuming you focus on watching for it rather than focusing all your time and attention on achieving mission goals. If you're lucky you can weed them out before their cheating causes any particular problems in the mission for everyone.

If you mean "play solo or only with friends" then sure, that's a good solution for almost any game that has cheaters in it, but that doesn't get rid of nProtect. If they'd give us the option to opt out of nProtect but only be able to play solo or with friends, I'd happily take that.

[★ ace ★]

okay so you already know how to resolve the issue, nice

[Alphakerky]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

Originally posted by Alphakerky:

Seeing you come to other posts to complain about game time other than mine remains to be sad. depressing, even. I at least have activities away from screens, but you? You make your pathetic attempts at pissing people off on the steam forums. Go do something away from the screen, something that accomplishes more than this revolting attempt at mockery.

What does this have to do with the current topic? each of my post are related to the topic, I'm not worrying about your activity, so mind your own business and stay on topic... :cupup:

Less about the topic, more so trying to get you to go do literally anything but contibute little, if anything, to these forums. If you made your own dicussion topic, which I'm sure you did somewhere, what did you even talk about? How everyone talking about how bad the anticheat is are clowns?

[★ ace ★]

we should try staying on topic

[VoodooMike]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

okay so you already know how to resolve the issue, nice :cupup:

I'll just assume that english isn't your first language or that you have a severe allergy either to reading or thinking. The only way to "resolve the issue" in this case is to not play Helldivers 2 at all, since there is no option to play it without its 3rd party kernel-level anticheat system.

<insert overused thumbs up emoticon of your choice here>

[Alphakerky]

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

we should try staying on topic :cupup:

Go do something useful, then. You provide little substance in these conversations beyond being the one person most people ignore because of your incessant gawking.

[Kleo ツ]

Originally posted by VoodooMike:

Originally posted by ★ ace ★:

okay so you already know how to resolve the issue, nice :cupup:

I'll just assume that english isn't your first language or that you have a severe allergy either to reading or thinking. The only way to "resolve the issue" in this case is to not play Helldivers 2 at all, since there is no option to play it without its 3rd party kernel-level anticheat system.

<insert overused thumbs up emoticon of your choice here>

Don't engage with them Mike, they're currently trying to bury other threads most likely for Arrowhead/Sony by necroing others. They've already been allowed to evade bans, something isn't right with this user.

[Alphakerky]

Originally posted by Kleo ツ:

Originally posted by VoodooMike:

I'll just assume that english isn't your first language or that you have a severe allergy either to reading or thinking. The only way to "resolve the issue" in this case is to not play Helldivers 2 at all, since there is no option to play it without its 3rd party kernel-level anticheat system.

<insert overused thumbs up emoticon of your choice here>

Don't engage with them Mike, they're currently trying to bury other threads most likely for Arrowhead/Sony by necroing others. They've already been allowed to evade bans, something isn't right with this user.

With this information, I now know that Ace is another person who simply doesn’t listen to any logic or reason. I will be disengaging further contact with them.

Edit: friendlier language, because I intend no hostility, despite telling Ace to go touch grass.

[★ ace ★]

take care, you were given a response, if that offends you then you can block me.

[Kleo ツ]

Originally posted by Alphakerky:

Originally posted by Kleo ツ:

Don't engage with them Mike, they're currently trying to bury other threads most likely for Arrowhead/Sony by necroing others. They've already been allowed to evade bans, something isn't right with this user.

With this information, I now know that Ace is another person who simply doesn’t listen to any logic or reason. I will be disengaging further conflict with them.

No man, look at the entire game discussion. They're blatantly mass necroing and moderation isn't doing anything. We've quite literally caught them evading and moderation doesn't want to deal with them.

It's not a matter of whether they're logical or reasonable at this stage, it's actual spam that's killing the board.