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As fun as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive can be, you will occasionally run into cheaters and while progress can seem slow at times, Valve does work to fight back against them. Unfortunately, hard-coded cheat detection often leads to an arms race with cheat developers, leading to a constant cycle of new cheats and ban waves. To combat this, it looks like Valve is turning to AI to run its cheat detection in the future.
Speaking on Reddit this week, Valve explained why it does not use auto-detection for certain cheats in CS:GO and put forward the idea of using machine learning to detect cheats instead. However, this approach would not be without its own unique problems. Using machine learning to analyse every CS:GO match from every player's perspective would take a huge amount of server power.
“So some bad news: any hard-coded detection of spin-botting leads to an arms race with cheat developers – if they can find the edges of the heuristic you're using to detect the cheat, the problem comes back. Instead, you'd want to take a machine-learning approach, training (and continuously retraining) a classifier that can detect the differences between cheaters and normal/highly-skilled players.”
“The process of parsing, training, and classifying player data places serious demands on hardware, which means you want a machine other than the server doing the work. And because you don’t know ahead of time who might be using this kind of cheat, you’d have to monitor matches as they take place, from all ten players’ perspectives. There are over a million CS:GO matches played every day, so to avoid falling behind you’d need a system capable of parsing and processing every demo of every match from every player’s perspective, which currently means you’d need a datacenter capable of powering thousands of cpu cores.”
While it might be difficult to put together a data centre powerful enough for this task, Valve is not shying away from it: “The good news is that we’ve started this work. An early version of the system has already been deployed and is submitting cases to Overwatch. Since the results have been promising, we’re going to continue this work and expand the system over time.”
KitGuru Says: CS:GO does have its share of cheaters but I think the issue can be blown out of proportion at times. Without a killcam system in competitive mode, it can be easy to call foul play if you don't understand or get to see how things played out from the other player's perspective. Still, hopefully this new machine learning system Valve is putting into place can help clean things up a bit.
Having the AI submit what it thinks to be cheaters to Overwatch is a pretty good idea. It allows Valve to test and train the system in real situations for as long as they need whilst at the same time being able to monitor the exact success rate.
God knows how they’re going to get the final necessary version in place, we all know Valve don’t care THAT much about CSGO to build a datacenter around it, but if it starts working enough to ban on its own, or at least cross-check with VAC, that’d be pretty awesome for those who don’t or can’t have Prime status.
Nice idea BUT: The process of refinement will take much longer. A corporate like Valve with big buck shouldn’t save money and rely on communities to deal with its problems
You should be rewarded overwatching. Like with a cool skin or anything else, this would change a lot, since most players want good skins. They don’t need to drop us D’ lores, but Knights would be fine.
Jk, just get us something good and no shit grafities
Machine learning lol, how about checking for continuous head shot, wall tracking or simply an obviously silly score. None of which are checked by anti cheat, machine learning, lol!