As many of us are aware I'm sure, cheating (at least in CS:GO) has become a much bigger issue as time has gone along. It's become incredibly easy to buy a new account on the cheap, inject and go. Some of these accounts have hundreds of hours and have been cheating for months, yet no VAC or overwatch ban.
That being said, we have few options at the moment to combat cheaters in our community servers;
- SMAC - Quite effective against basic/poorly coded cheats but outdated, ineffective against most modern cheats (in fact, many have anti-smac features), not to mention the whole DMCA issue disallowing its distribution. I personally have made small modifications to it to make it more effective, yet there are still numerous cheats that bypass SMAC easily.
- VAC - Kind of a joke as of late, if players are detected, generally bans are dished out after the damage has been done.
- Manual review - Active admins are helpful, however is not possible 100% of the time.
I run a small community, with fairly popular servers. Daily we get 3-4 SMAC bans on average (with a slightly modified SMAC, mainly hard value tweaks), and generally 1-2 duplicate accounts of previously banned cheaters (thx SourceSleuth, but that even isn't very effective vs users with dynamic IP's or VPN's). The sad part is that I only run 2 servers that are even remotely competitive, the majority are movement-based servers (surf, bhop, etc).
Obviously there is only so much you can do with server-sided anticheats, but there definitely can be improvements made. Outside of what SMAC already does, there needs to be:
- Strafe hack detection
- Spread variation detection (for consistent/perfect sprays)
- Aim assist detection (vectoring, etc)
- Silent aim detection (with no hard set minimum angles)
- Trace detection (for players who lock/snap onto other players through or not through walls, without actually triggering player death or even hurt)
- Improved bhop cheat detection
- Anti-airstuck (it's still possible in csgo, even tho valve "fixed" it like 6-8 months ago)
- Blocking spectator viewing information (it's possible for cheaters to see who is spectating them so they can toggle off when getting spectated by an admin)
- ??? More
That being said, is there any interest in creating a collaboration to come up with a newer, more effective anticheat for SM?