As one of the most popular sub-genre of video games, FPS games feature a first-person perspective with which a player witnesses the action through the eyes of the in-game avatar, centered on guns and other weapon-based combat. Because of the strong social and interactive nature of multiplayer video games, cheating tactics are easily spread to other players and seriously damage the integrity of the game.
Common Cheats in FPS Games include Aimbot, Targetheck, Speedhack, No Recoil, ESP, and Accelerator. Players cheat in FPS games to easily level up and accumulate cyber assets, critical to increasing their success in the game and upgrading their abilities.
Aimbots: This program helps a player aim more accurately. It can automatically target an opponent’s head, making it very difficult to miss.
Targetheck: This allows players to see through opaque objects, such as walls and mountains, and pinpoint all players on the map, giving them an unfair advantage over their opponents.
Speedhack: This gives players a temporary speed boost, making them much harder to hit.
No recoil: This eliminates the recoil from a gun, making it easier to fire accurately.
ESP: This stands for extra sensory perception and allows players to see information about their opponents that they wouldn’t usually be able to see, such as health, ammo, and location.
Accelerator： This involves skipping a weapon’s reload time by quickly switching weapons back and forth without actually reloading the weapons.
According to a survey of GuardEase, Targetheck, speedhack, ESP and no recoil account for more than 65% of games, followed by aimbots and accelerator.
Those Cheats are realized mainly by modifying the game memory, cracking the client-server architecture, tampering game data and manipulating game codes. How to prevent cheating in FPS games?
Currently, developers combat cheating by looking at the dataset, friendship network, signature matching, and deploying anti-tamper measures to all categories of game resources, especially for the engine, memory, files, and protocols.
Another way to counter cheaters is to utilize machine learning technology to recognize abnormal visual elements in the ongoing game graphics and to measure a player’s movements which is impossible to accomplish by human beings.
GuardEase leverages all of these versatile approaches into one anti-cheat solution to augment game developers with management functionality to perform cheat detection.