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Show HN: A searchable public database of cheaters in video games (gamingherd.com)

29 points by liamneesonsarm ↗ HN
Hey all I've been working on a website called GamingHerd that has spawned from dealing with so many cheaters in Valve's Counter-Strike 2.

Watch this video if you're interested into the different scales of cheats that can be used, pretty much undetectable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox1mBxrVulk&ab_channel=HaiX

Currently, Valve does not seem to have a viable solution for dealing with cheaters nor are they transparent about their intentions (I'm sure for good reason). I can only imagine the complexities they have to deal with, and at the same time there is a potential negative monetary impact. Valve makes boat loads of $$ from Counter-Strike through skins for weapons and models. It is its own economy. Banning people, even though they are cheaters, is money lost.

Furthermore, some of the solutions to deal with cheaters are to play on 3rd party services (i.e. FACEIT) that require you to install an "anti-cheat" that gives kernel level access and is owned by some questionable folks (I won't get into the details of that you can do your own research).

That brings us to GamingHerd. For now, my idea is to be Google for PC video game cheaters, smurfs (read this about smurfs https://www.idnow.io/glossary/smurfing/#:~:text=What%20is%20....), racists, throwers, etc. People you do not want to play video games with. Let me tell you, there are a lot, unfortunately.

Currently, I am working to grow this into a community and build a matchmaking service around it. The matchmaking would obviously utilize the Toxic Gaming DB (TGDB) to never allow them to use the service. I'll also have community-driven moderation, you can read a bit more about that https://slash-lathe-f55.notion.site/GamingHerd-moderation-ov.... In the perfect world this is a community of trusted gamers that you want to play video games with.

Let me know what you all think. Look forward to your feedback.

Cheers, Chris

39 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] thread
dbalatero
What can one do with this database?
liamneesonsarm
Right now not much. If you do play Counter-Strike you could use it to cross check and give yourself sanity.

In my post I mentioned a matchmaking service. So having this database will serve as a filter to prevent having to play with these toxic players.

cowthulhu
I think a service like this is incredibly prone to false-positives and abuse, especially if you’re going to try to flag subjective things such as throwing or smurfing.

It also seems like it could be damaging, and I’m skeptical of this the “proof” in all of these proof-based accusations of boosting I’m seeing on the site. If I can find the steam ID of the owner of the site, I know who my first totally-proof-based report of boosting will be against!

liamneesonsarm
All the boosts had queued with cheaters.

I do agree though that this could have false-positives. Right now anyone marked as guilty a moderator had went through and looked at stats or a demo if not sure.

Which boosted ones looks skeptical to you?

Im wondering if i should have information about who reviewed the report and have something written up in steps taken for proof. Thoughts?

cowthulhu
How do you tell the difference between someone being boosted by a cheater, and someone playing with their friend, who they don’t know is a cheater? I think the distinction to me is whether there is reasonable doubt. If a player has a VAC ban, sure, not much doubt there. But queuing with cheaters seems murkier! I’m not sure how you’d prove boosting by watching a replay, but I could be missing something.
liamneesonsarm
Yes that’s a good question and something I’ll take into account when reviewing. TBH these reports are all the obvious ones. Like straight up aim lock or spinning. I basically just took people queuing with them because they 100% know they’re cheating. You’ll notice there are several that have “needs more evidence” and I personally viewed the stats and found them inconclusive. I tried a demo but it was expired so it got the needs more evidence status and I emailed the reported to add more context.

If there is someone you see that you feel is misreported I’m happy to explain or delete it if wrong. Maybe I need a “contest report” feature so you can make your case for why it’s a false report.

cowthulhu
I think the concept is somewhat fatally flawed, so I don’t really have any suggestions about how to improve it.

I totally get that I’m just throwing a bunch of problems at you without providing solutions, sorry I know that’s not very fun to deal with. It definitely shows through that you are doing this with good intentions!

I hope you figure out solid solutions to the issues… if in five years I’m playing on servers that use a version of your system to do a better job of keeping the cheaters/griefers off, I will definitely owe you one!

liamneesonsarm
All good I appreciate you voicing your opinion. I’m not 100% sold either but it’s worth a shot and I’m a new Dad so have had time on my hands and wanted to build something. Dealing with cheaters is also time consuming and frustrating.

Hope that I see you in five years too

viraptor
Smurfing and throwing is totally subjective though. I've played on really bad days that someone could classified as throwing and then I regained rank quickly which someone could clarify as smurfing. I've also tried playing some moba and after my 4th game I got placed in their cheater purgatory. Why? No idea, I didn't even understand all the game mechanics yet. So yeah, I would totally expect grey area, even with human review of the demos.
liamneesonsarm
These are all good points and I think you’re right. I’ll most likely get rid of smurfs and throwers as a report since it makes sense the grey area.
John_Cena
When you have a entry open and you click "show evidence", what is the user supposed to do from there?

Looking at a player with all /////////// chars in their name. The evidence is a game they lost, in which they lost every clutch. Their k/d is not great. Aim metric looks to be maxed out, but I don't know the weight of that metric and most everyone in that match had near max aim stat.

EDIT: There is a demo download in one of the horizontal toolbars.

liamneesonsarm
Most pros have aim around 90. Anything going over 95 is absurd and highly unlikely. Some of the matches end up being “head v head” or HvH where it’s all hackers and so may the best cheat win. A bit of this is contextual.

Also a lot of cheaters you’ll see have like aim in the 90 range and < 30 utility. That is a huge smell as well. You typically have that aim after thousands of hours and with that comes knowledge on utility.

AntiMS
Billy Mitchell isn't even in this database.

(Kidding. I know that's not quite what this site's for.)

liamneesonsarm
lol I watched a documentary on that guy not too long ago. There’s competition for everything…
reactordev
This isn’t the way. The way is to allow private servers/matchmaking with your friends. Make friends outside of the games to play with. Smurfs and throwers and racists and mic djs and all of those people are your experience because devs decided rando-army matchmaking was a good idea. It’s not.

Also, you will never have a cheat less video game. There will always be a way. And if you don’t think there is, then they can continue their current iteration in perpetuity.

It’s too easy for someone to pull out their credit card and buy a cheat than it is to catch them.

I don’t play FPS games anymore because every lobby is full of them. Tracking behaviors and putting them into their own tier of matchmaking is one way. Detecting modifications of memory and banning is another. The issue is that most game devs are using an engine and the engines themselves are vulnerable.

Private servers, self-hosted servers, are the way. You get admin control and you decide who you want to play with.

username923409
CS2 (the topical game of the post) allows for playing exactly how you outlined to be the "ideal" way. however, this method of playing will never* come back to be the most popular way to play the game. so, i don't see the harm in this attempt at a contribution to counteract the largest problem with the most popular way of playing.

* at least until there are so few players searching for matchmaking games that it never succeeds in finding a lobby, of course. see diabotical for example ;-(

liamneesonsarm
Appreciate the support. Yea the having enough people for matchmaking is for sure a challenge.
liamneesonsarm
I played Counter Strike Source and that community experience is one of the drivers for my idea. I want to build a community that you can see as “friends” and people you can trust.

From my experience it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare to organize groups and cost prohibitive to spin up servers. Yea we can typically get 5 but a full balanced 10 man is real hard.

100% agree you can’t rid of cheaters but this is the hope to just avoid them through a platform.

ndriscoll
How is it cost prohibitive to run a server? With the recent FCC rule change now even Comcast gives everyone 20 Mb/s upload. Even at 64 players, that's over 300 kb/s per client, which should be plenty?

A modern mid-range phone is probably more powerful than any server 20 years ago and those ran 64 players.

liamneesonsarm
Well I don’t expect the average gamer to know about these things. I was talking from the perspective of services that offer the ability for you to spin up servers in the context of Counter-Strike. Popflash is one of those services and you can look at the pricing to see what I mean.
ndriscoll
I guess in theory I figured if they just try to run the dedicated server from steam they should find that their home setup is more than adequate, but then I forget that it's <current year> and we still don't have ubiquitous/seamless ipv6 and upnp to make that work, and even after people try to open ports on their router, they can't get people to connect to them (and of course don't know how to debug it). Sigh. And every thread about ipv6 has people still saying no one needs it.

I see frustrated reddit threads where people can't get it to work, with some confidently advising in those threads that you only need ipv4. Argh!

liamneesonsarm
I mean I’m sure it’s possible just not the right people for it. There is a diverse set of people not necessarily technical. There is a systemic cheat issue and just type “cheat” in r/cs2 or r/globaloffensive. I have an ifttt that looks for that and get 10+ hits a day. That’s what I’m solving for.
reactordev
I can support this.

In my view a mix of rando’s on quick-play and community run/moderated servers with voting is the only way to keep the riff raff out. You and your buddies play your server. Rando’s can join too but you get to control them and vote for ones you play well with. The ones who get voted up enough gain some limited power to also police the riff raff.

One thing is clear - we can’t keep relying on game dev companies to spawn hosting provider approved instances without oversight.

HeatrayEnjoyer
>Also, you will never have a cheat less video game. There will always be a way.

This is not true and has not been true for years. With crossplay disabled, games on Xbox and Playstation are truly cheat free. It doesn't happen. There is no dark web marketplace selling aimhacks because it isn't possible to install them.

reactordev
Keep thinking that… the most recent iteration was using a Cronos Zen. I’ll let you figure out the rest.
HeatrayEnjoyer
That's a controller adapter. I'm talking about memory manipulation. You do not know what you're talking about.
reactordev
Mmmkay… it’s only the adapter used by ai-aimbot… but wtf do I know? Clearly hacks only are classified as memory manipulation and not using the HDMI out to pass that to ML/AI algorithms that control your player input using… the said controller adapter you so quickly dismissed as “not a thing”.

Keep enjoying your console lobbies… while you can.

golergka
> Furthermore, some of the solutions to deal with cheaters are to play on 3rd party services (i.e. FACEIT) that require you to install an "anti-cheat" that gives kernel level access and is owned by some questionable folks (I won't get into the details of that you can do your own research).

I worked on one of these services, http://fastcup.net, and AFAIK that's all the service did — anti-cheat, although I must admit I didn't work on it myself. What questionable stuff have you heard about these services?

liamneesonsarm
The service is owned by the Saudis…and in the Counter-Strike world there was a company called ESEA that is now owned by the same group and being merged into the FACEIT system. Well, esea was doing some nefarious bitcoin mining on people’s computers (https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/2/4292672/esea-gaming-networ...). While that is old it’s one of the issues with allowing a kernel level cheat. The amount of data that also could potentially be collected.
inemesitaffia
Hope you have money for a defamation lawsuit
itsrebel
That's not at all how defamation suits work, in order to have any ground to file a defamation lawsuit you need to be able to easily prove that a statement is false or unprivileged. each person marked as cheaters in his website have specific evidence showing that they were either cheating or or stacked with an obvious cheater. I'd love to see someone find a lawyer that would be willing to file a suit like this. Not to mention they would also have to show evidence that this "verdict" lead to decreased/loss of income, or tarnished reputation while still proving that the statement the website made was false. You can't just sue for defamation whenever someone says something about you online.
jwalton
Back in the day, I spent a good month playing the original CS non stop. By the end of that, it was common for someone to accuse me of using wall hacks or otherwise cheating. Cheating in these games is definitely a problem, but I’m skeptical this is a good solution.
liamneesonsarm
Yea there is a review process when a report is submitted. They’re not automatically guilty by default. Evidence is required and must have 100% proof of cheating. These days you can pretty much easily capture gameplay footage through demos that you can replay in the game.
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RecycledEle
This reminds me of Evony's ransom/black mail shakedown where they made a demand for payment, or they would contact someone's employer if they did not pay.
liamneesonsarm
Well I have no intentions of finding their personal information quite the opposite I want to avoid these people at all costs.