Machine Learning Models for Cheat Detection

[MillyBays]

Valve has begun employing new detection algorithms in Dota2 to some success, banning 150,000 players that were using a 3rd party tool for seeing players most-played heroes. Short version: ranked games have a pick/ban phase where players choose and eliminate heroes from the active pool. Seeing which heroes your opponents are often winning with is an unfair advantage.

My understanding is they trained a model and employed it over a several week period, detecting how consistently a player's hero-bans matched their opponents' top-picks. That information is not supposed to be publicly available, but the client was aggregating data on all publicly available replays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL8ee0Vz_10

Separately, a group of 20-30 independent developers are making their own addon for Team Fortress 2, which will serve as a client for users to submit replay files as evidence for their ML model to analyze and confirm cheater accounts. Users of the client will also automatically start votekicks and all other users in the match will vote yes when a confirmed cheater joins their matches. They've been working on it for 8 months or more now, and hope to release a beta soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPsWjdkyoPo

Now with FFXIV, many can already make strong guesses as to if someone is auto-cleansing or syncing LBs with a cheat client, but manually reporting often results in no action. Our word isn't evidence, and even with a video, it's asking a lot for someone to manually comb through replays to pick apart what's happening. Even if the whole report process plays out perfectly, those cheaters carry on for days or weeks before action is taken.

Imagine, trained algorithms on the server backend, automatically spotting players responding with consistently inhuman reaction times, swapping targets instantly when an available target hits a LB-able health total, or when a group reliably, simultaneously hits LB in a way that's consistent with 3rd-party app coordination. Isolating and banning cheaters becomes trivial. I'm pretty psyched if this becomes the norm in multiplayer games.