We interviewed a former Valorant Vanguard Anticheat Developer... 

Never let goat interview again!!!!!!!!!!!! He know zero about IT.

G0at needs to learn to stop interrupting people and let the developer that knows what he is talking about talk.

Timestamps *[**00:00:00**] Disclaimers* *[**00:01:41**] Credentials* *[**00:03:13**] Kernel-level Anti-cheat* > 00:00:53 What is kernel-level? > 00:07:13 Privacy infringement > 00:09:22 Potential for exploitation as an attack vector *[**00:12:30**] Day in the Life of an anti-cheat developer* *[**00:14:58**] The role of anti-cheat vs game developers* > 00:19:06 Tarkov "stanky leg" cheat > 00:22:10 Buying cheats to find cheats > 00:24:02 Barriers of entry to buy cheats *[**00:25:16**] Machine learning anti-cheat* > 00:29:43 Waldovision AI anti-cheat *[**00:34:35**] False Bans* > 00:34:39 How much "collateral damage" is acceptable? > 00:37:35 Delaying ban waves *[**00:40:00**] Cheating as an Addiction* > 00:41:21 Motivations for cheating *[**00:46:48**] Linux hate from AC developers* > 00:49:26 Why games won't launch in a VM *[**00:52:40**] Replay systems for the use of manual review* > 00:54:32 Subjectivity in replays > 00:56:25 Luck vs cheats > 00:59:17 How important is a replay system? *[**1:01:55**] Thinking of Anti-Cheat while developing a games* *[**1:04:15**] Identity Management for Anti-Cheat purposes* > 1:05:38 Trust factors of clients > 1:07:23 Building barriers to deter cheat > 1:08:42 Consoles and locking down operating systems to prevent cheats > 1:10:21 Trusted lobbies and opt-in measures > 1:11:28 Personal identity verification via a third-party company *[**1:13:40**] Off Topic: Sucking at playing guitar* *[**1:14:28**] Decreasing cheating through anti-cheat innovations* > 1:16:45 Key things that help reduce cheats and playing catch-up > 1:18:26 Revealing how much work is against cheaters > 1:21:20 Monetization to fund anti-cheat > 1:26:00 Increasing barrier of entry to games *[**1:28:07**] Dangers of using cheats* > 1:29:26 Safe or not safe? > 1:30:47 Cheat developer vengeance *[**1:38:54**] Will cheaters always exist?* *[**1:42:16**] Real world trading and hacker services* > 1:46:21 Riot got fast at detecting cheats *[**1:47:14**] Cheaters vs in-game items with real world value* *[**1:51:29**] External image-based cheating* > 1:55:47 Claims from AI-based anti-cheat services > 1:57:24 Using models to detect bots *[**1:58:10**] Protection against false bans* *[**2:03:04**] DMA hardware detection* > 2:05:40 Tarkov cheats requires uninstalling Vanguard *[**2:08:17**] Closing comments* > 2:12:05 Should you report someone if you're not confident? > 2:13:50 The "Swiss cheese" method *[**2:15:04**] Socials* Very interesting and insightful conversation!

He is such a cool, down to earth, Profesional, Knowledgeable human. And im so glad he agreed to come talk to yall. He taught me alot and I thank him for it. Thank all of you dudes ❤

More people have to watch this now! This is so fantastic to learn so many sides surrounding the word "cheater". And having a someone to expound upon the anti-cheat process and give information to the people who just know surface level knowledge at best. This was a great video!

need more, as a game dev hearing this it's so good to guide my future work on games to try and negate some of these things with the server authority and stuff

This talk was really insightful, such a great dude to listen to! imagine all the storys he has but cant tell 😁

Great and a much needed conversation. Hopefully someone at BSG is listening. But I'm not holding my breath

This was definitely needed. I'm so glad this out to help educate the community!

Gonna be honest, didn't think I was going to watch for 2 hours but threw it on during work and it was a great interview! Bringing attention and knowledge to how cheating & anti-cheating works really helps keep perspectives realistic

Veritas, love your work mate!!!

Still the best reason for why this channel should be running so many game development circles. Its down to earth and it gets straight to the point without having an ego to worry about satisfying. You are the best Veritas! hopefully others listen like you have gotten them to in the past.

I used to use VM's to play video games in the VM because of security reasons and staying under the radar is very important to me. There where other beneficial reasons like running untrusted software (you know what I mean) especially for video editing. But still have this layer of security which has no access to any vulnerable information. So I was fine with having a infect VM as long as I can use the software I needed. Sure there are exploits which allows for VM escape but they are extremally rare I took that risk willingly (there is almost no financial benefit from running untrusted video editing software that has some sort of 0 day VM escape exploit so there is usually not that much time spend in investigating such exploits that target at a group wanting to cut videos) I stopped playing any video games that disallowed VM's which cut me off from most competitive games. Which in turn lead to me stop playing games all together I'm neither sad nor happy about it. I don't think playing games is wasted time neither I think it's time well spend. But sure there are valid reasons to run video games in a VM. Most of them are practical reasons and security related reasons. Not needing to get out of Linux and boot into windows is very practical if you really do not want to use windows or reboot your system all the time if you feel like gaming, a VM is really neat in that regard. If you interested into VM gaming. Check out the VFIO/OVMF GPU Passthrough guides (google can help you). Nowadays I don't use VM's anymore. I have a BareMetal windows running with no personal information connected to it to play games. Reason is: I upgraded to a GPU that does not work well with GPU Passthrough. For everything else I have a dedicated Linux Notebook like browsing and data etc... Probably no one cares to read this but well I wrote it anyway.

It’s awesome to see this happen, great job boys

Bro he made cheats for GUNZ THE DUEL!?! Broooo, no way. Talk about an obscure start. Gunz was and is one of the most insanely technically advanced shooters known to man. Can't believe my guy started with that. Ggs dude

Amazing interview. Thank you for posting this!

Dude im so fucking thankfull for your honnesty there man and i saw what it took from you. Man your an hero

learned so much from this convo thanks 😊 knowledge is power indeed

these 3 dudes never stop talking. they love their own voices.

Very informative! Thank you Veritas!

"Stop yelling at me!" to Veritas had me dying hahaha

I love hearing this dude talk, thanks for the interview sooo interesting to watch!

I been balls deep into researching guitar equipment I can't really afford and missed this one.

He said Gunz the Duel and I had so many childhood memories rush back in. Holy hell. Halfway through the video and just gotta say - I really enjoy the way this guy communicates. Very chill to listen to. Needs more freedom to speak, though. I feel bad that he keeps getting cut off. Lmao. But this is the first of these things I'm prepared to sit all the way through because this guys input is so interesting. Absolutely need more stuff like this. Update - Finished the video. Really would have liked if he had been presented the current setup of Tarkov and then probed for how he might go about tackling the issue, if even to begin a snowball effect. I feel like there were moments he was prepared to make suggestions in a string of "you can start here and do this, and move into this, and these settings being like this, etc." But the topic moved on before it happened. I feel like there was a lot of discussion but not a ton of groundwork. I learned that writing cheats is profitable, it can be dangerous, but it can also net you a job with an anticheat company though. But besides that, hearing a bit of the corporate side of it, and understanding that investing in anticheat is expensive, ehhhhhhhh.

so rare that a dev actually talks openly about this topic! really interesting

Damn, GunZ the Duel. This guy definitely knows his stuff and I am barely a few minutes in.

tf2's comp scene uses demo files (replay files) that can have a anticheat client that is inserted into it that rips data that goes over potential cheat locations

Think this guy was mid werewolf transformation. Look at dem claws! Oh and this was very interesting. Thanks dudes

i really felt like i actually achieved some understanding of cheats when he said capcomdriver and i instantly knew what he was talking about since i used that driver too. all the time i felt like i have learned so much but yet so little. The fact that i knew everything he talked about and bit of things he didnt wanna go into deeper gave me a bit of hope to keep on going.

38:53 I don't want their cheats to take me out of the game. I want to FEEL like it was a fair fight. Even if a cheater is tracking me and waiting a half second more to pull the trigger. I want it to feel like im still playing the game.

This was a great so interesting. Great interview!

The amount of interrupts are upsetting.

The moderator of the interview was unresponsive, and did not allow the interviewers to speak at all. Instead, he displayed his lack of competence by suggesting that he could not comprehend words used by the developer, even though he himself did not understand their meaning.I've got about four minutes into the session, and I'm not going to watch the rest of it...

I feel so bad for the anticheat dev, this must have been hard for him to sit through

44:05 funny story. Every time i've asked or suggested (multiple times) that bsg should get a lawyer and just sue the websites it somehow always got deleted.

I learned how much harder and complex the problem Tarkov has with cheating. Game of trust seems like the best option.

Watching Veritas fix his video cracked me up

17:30 Oh, I got it, so like for example being able to pick up items that are on the other side on the map, being able to levitate in the air far beyond the actual game possibilities, being able to take items from other players, being able to run faster than it would be possible and so on just reminder that the game is in Beta guys :)

Now for the tech deep-dive talk with V alone :))

Also I'm not sure about other countrys but in Australia we have certain consumer rights and given I'm buying a product and not a service if I no longer have acess to that product because of a false negative hackusation the company would be breaking the law if it doesn't issue a refund (of course this then needs to be inforced but I see a future where group actions are taken due to the fact that terminating an account without the account holder being at fault would be considered unconscionable and thus void the ELUA "we can terminate for any reason" clause. It would be a different story if the developer/anticheat had proof but they would then need to show such proof in a court were it to go that far.)

damn that was interesting. its weird to think this guy mightve lingered in the same forums i did around 2010s and went on this path instead of stopping.

Oh man, I gotta grab some popcorn I'll be right back.

this guy is so advanced in his field he explains data science terms with more data science terms lmao

So cool you had Tom Hiddleston on the podcast!

Fascinating interview.

Very insightful video, the only question I wish was asked was if there is ever a possibility of anti-cheat company's sharing tech with eachother and work together instead of as it is now where it is every game fends for itself. Surely if they all worked together it would be way better for gaming in the along run. Thanks for the vids

An Idea this YT brought to mind was, given that the anticheat developers don't ban 'BAD' cheaters (referencing somwhere around the 30 min mark) shouldn't they at least inform the game developers and stuff them up in other ways. EG battle eye detects a cheater but is aprehensive to ban them due to them being shit a tarky/not wanting to escalate the cheat/anticheat armswar for nothing. They then tell BSG who then gives them a black dot behind the scenes and that in turn causes scavs to headshot them with greatly increaced frequency?

damn im early lmao waaaaiiiit, he made *cheats* for GUNZ back in the day??? thats craaazy, and the slight shade "none of you old enough to know that game" LMAO he rolled you

What a nice and interesting talk, thank yall :)

I can't believe this guy was making cheats for GunZ i was not expecting that name in this interview AT ALL lol

actually kinda funny philip was talking about server sided checks while on valo the bullet randomization is generated from the client 💀

Sooo interesting. Rly great interview

The epitomy of a "cat and mouse" struggle

Damn, i'm not that bad in english and i'm still learning it but damn that i understood like 50% of the words the Anti Cheat guy said ^^

All I know is that Vanguard detected my Deathadder's drivers as cheat and broke the software capability to detect it and allow me to control it. After fixing that I never touched Valorant or Riot games ever again, cause if I have to uninstall half of my pc everytime I need to update my drivers I'd rather not play cs:go with superpowers.

17:57 like being able to vacuum every bit of loot out of a raid of tarkov

There are still Gunz the Duel private servers up and running was a 10/10 game back in the day and some aspects are still good to day lol

i went for a job interview there and asked for a 500k salary and stock options to show them how to SHA-2 encrypt the memory binary they did not hire me and still don't know how to encrypt the memory lmao.

I was hoping someone would ask him what it was that made him swap from hacker to hacker cracker.

Very interesting, wish you would have touched on the Dota honey pot tho.

I really found this interview enjoyable and informative, but it was pretty annoying for me that this guy was constantly spoken over and not allowed to talk. I mean he's the king in this interview.

Very insightful. But it was hard watching at times. You can tell that Goat and Onepeg are very jaded and clearly dislike the game currently (which they can be, no one has to like Tarkov). Like when talking about Dylhero, who is a friend of theirs. No one knows what exact evidence was used, which was clearly a wrongful ban, but both of them assumed it was because of one clip. While the expert was saying it's not done that way. Either way, great interview. All around. Even with a few cringe moments.

Bro the people who make cheats are like hackers and stuff, imagine being dumb enough to give them your drivers license or ssn. Maybe there is a bright side to cheating, anyone dumb enough to do it might get their identity stolen lmao

He played Gunz, he is cultured.

He was the one fucking up my GunZ lobbies, I see 🤣

Hah, joke's on you, I played GunZ back in the day. Fuck I'm old.

2 days later and just over 13k views. What. The. Fuck.

I remember gunz the dual..... I really am getting old

@1:28:42 "the beloved gamer doc"? is he saying DrD is a cheater?

Who is that Veritas guy? He's got a sexy beard!

Bro For me he had Knowledgeable but cant express it.

man goat's a good guy, maybe he was too excited, but he definitely needed to take a bit of a backseat on this one. I don't dislike goat, but you gotta let the man speak

great interview

i dont get what he said about the linux user base. I understand the whole thing behind linux users being a very small group of people but he said that you could just use wine which just isnt true and never has been true

My only complaint with anticheats are the ones that run 24/7 even when i am not on the game they are for (i.e. Valorant)

IMHO there are only 2 ways to effectively catch/prevent cheaters: sending the client only the bare minimum it needs to render the game effectively (like in MOBAs, where the server won't send you the position of enemy players if they are not in your or your teammates' view, if FPSs did that, wallhacks would be not viable for example); and through server side AI that can detect if a player's behavior is inhumane or much different than the usual for that player's gaming profile (check the Waldo project to understand better). I don't think running a dedicated app in the client's machine that tries to catch cheat software in real time is the way to go, because it not only is an uphill battle, it also is a thug of war: the cheats evolve, the anti-cheats respond, the cheats evolve again, and the cycle repeats indefinitely. I'm hopeful that we are close to the end of cheating in online games, at least on the AAA side (since running AI on your server is pretty expensive nowadays, I think indie games won't be able to go that route yet).

It's AquaFPS if he wasnt homeless.

"would be ok with 5-10% of people cheating" this guy cheats on his gf or his taxes guaranteed.

1:08:42 THE PLAN - make an OS that is like the steam deck but it runs every single competitive game

1:13:00 yeah confirm your id all official , still free to use your undetectable cheat . Great idea lol

Banning a CPU is kind of a bad way to go about this. What if that CPU is sold? The end user would be out of luck.

1:09:54 though it seems like it'd help the cheating situations with games, I honestly think that pretty much most, if not every, cheater cheats to play the game at a higher level against people who can't possibly play at that level. Therefore splitting up environments into cheating environments and legit competitive environments wouldn't solve the issue because anybody could clearly see that cheaters would want to have the upper hand against legit players and cheat within the competitive environments to have a "dominant" edge which is the point of cheating anyway. Take it back to the days before popular online play and kids would use cheats in old ass games like GTA. The cheats were there so you could do so much more so much easily than if you were playing fairly. In a way, you were using cheats to perform better than yourself in that game. Today with online play so heavily popularized, the idea of fair play is, for the most part, respected, save for cheaters. Cheaters will only want to cheat so long as they have other IRL players to cheat against. When you throw Tarkov into the mix, it is a very competitive game that is based on the idea of survival and relies heavily on the satisfaction of your survival and the dispair of not surviving. This makes Tarkov a fantastic game to cheat in.

I'm a software engineer...can I work under this guy please? I've got 0 anti-cheat development experience but I can learn...

Valorant has replay for more accurate reports of cheating... It is nearly impossible for anyone to report someone accurately in Tarkov...

Holy trio - VOG.

Lol he couldn’t understand how far he was being asked to lower the complexity of his answers. Big nerd energy

Bless

That was fun

yo gunz was fucking sick i want another

A chinese company wants you to install a Rootkit to play their game.. ya nothing wrong with that xD Riot is 100% owned by Tencent so there is no way I give them that access

I think their claim is wrong. There are fraudulent act players, so justifying the fraudulent act of the revolt is not any solution. To correct it, the players who are earning money by fraudulent act should be caught by the police, and the law should change. This is the same for various games, and everyone in the world will need to be sanctioned in court.

One peg.... Boo. Nice contribution lol after 15 min u finally spoke. Veritas god mode put his cam over the discord vid feed of him.

gunz the duel!!

They're Def old enough to know GunZ. That was my ish back in the day lol

I do remember GunZ

It would be nice if more games supported Linux natively.

Any GunZ players also from A.V.A in here?

Computer programming is supposed to be open source, were taught that year one, but i understand how binding those contracts can be. There is some real substance in here, but for the sake of the anti cheats effectiveness, most of the most interesting things to talk about were off the table. It is a shame, i just hope the anti cheat community itself is more opensource, so that different companies can see anti cheat software and work on it, I have a feeling that it isnt though.

i'd pay a good amount fir guaranteed no cheaters. The price of the game, I'm okay with some cheaters, If there were a "prime" lobby as it were, I would pay for that.

My man talks in code