Cheating in Company of Heroes 2 (news from Relic)

http://blogs.companyofheroes.com/2014/04/11/cheating-in-company-of-heroes-2/


With the release of the Company of Heroes 2 Battle Servers late last year the development team has been working to increase the fairness of matches, particularly in our competitive Automatch mode.

Recently we have added anti-cheat detection capabilities to our servers, that are able to detect when a player is using a third party application to alter the way that our game is meant to be played.

This week we reset the ladder stats of fourteen players who have used this sort of program to alter our game in competitive play. Those players who we had contact emails for also received a warning email prior to the reset.

Using any third party app or hack to alter how our game plays in our competitive multiplayer is something we consider cheating. It goes against the nature of competitive multiplayer. Players caught doing so in the future may be banned from further online play in Company of Heroes 2.

To be clear this is not to discourage modding the game. Though currently modding abilities are limited, we are happy to see players modding our custom game modes. Several players used these sorts of hacks to play games against the AI, and we took no action against them since if you want to cheat against the computer that’s up to you.

So 14 players got their wins blanked (it busted our ladders, but we fixed it). I wonder what "third party program" they were using and what it did.

Erghhh I hope it does detect autohotkey scripts. I use it for my stream and need it to resize my game in windowed mode.

I remember when I used to play BF3 and I accidently left my script running, I would be kicked for third part program cheating.

I guess they're not going to list the players...I can't be arsed to figure it out. But I think they should make them public. I don't want to accidentally team up with a known cheater.

Props to Relic for keeping the game clean.

It's pretty damn obvious when you look at their playercards. We could write code to find them all easily enough.

Erghhh I hope it does detect autohotkey scripts. I use it for my stream and need it to resize my game in windowed mode.

I remember when I used to play BF3 and I accidently left my script running, I would be kicked for third part program cheating.

noun has posted a way to get borderless windows mode via steam works better then that program i have been using. so without further ado...

Noun:

First, for image quality I recommend going into the CoH2 options and setting the resolution to as close as your monitor resolution, if your computer can handle it.

In Steam, right click Company of Heroes under the My Games list on the left, select properties, and click the SET LAUNCH OPTIONS… button.
Paste in
-window –fullwindow
And press enter.

Next time you run the game, it will run in borderless fullscreen windowed mode.

There’s also several other launch options that most users don’t know about.

-nomovies
Skips the into scenes so you can start playing faster.

-forceactive
Makes sound continue to play in the background, so if you alt tab while automatching, you know when you’ve been matched by the sound.

-lockMouse
Makes it so that your cursor is “locked” into the game screen. Very useful for multi monitor setups so you can still use edge scrolling

I personally run with all of the following:

-nomovies -window -fullwindow -forceactive -lockMouse

Way cool for Relic to even acknowledge there is cheating happening. Given that they weren't all out banned I'm curious what sort of tool set they were using to give themselves and advantage. I'm thinking no fog of war.

the cheaters should of just used NKVD rifle disruption tactics.

the cheaters should of just used NKVD rifle disruption tactics.

That would be a great punishment.lol

Just want to clarify a few things, because there are a lot of misconceptions flying around. Of course, nothing I say can be verified, and Relic is likely not going to speak publicly about the details of their anti-cheat solution, but we can make some basic assumptions from what they announced.

First of all, this is a server-side anti-cheat solution. This means the information they're detecting is information that has to be sent to the battle servers. This isn't VAC or Punkbuster, it doesn't look at the processes running on your machine. It's simply processing the data received from players.

What this means is the anti-cheat has no way of detecting the use of third-party programs, such as AutoHotkey, or local third-party modifications, such as sound or skin packs, that only modify local data for one player and don't interact with the core gameplay information that is being sent to the servers. That would require client-side anti-cheat, which almost certainly doesn't exist in CoH2.

What it can likely detect, however, are telltale modifications to the game data that a maphack would create. Things like setting a specific bit in a command that otherwise wouldn't be set, or detecting an injection or addition to a command instruction that would never come from a clean player's game client. Commands can be scanned server-side and these telltales can be detected. This is the most likely way Relic caught the people it banned.

There is some precedent for this method of detection. A few years back Relic discovered that a popular vCoH maphack modified replay files in a very specific way that would never happen in a clean game. They wrote a tool that could scan replay files for this telltale modification, and used it to catch Snej, a prominent player at the time. Replays are just game instructions compiled into a single file; now that Relic has transitioned away from true P2P into a client-server relay model, they have access to this raw information server-side as it is being communicated to clients in a match. It's likely that they've repurposed this tool into a real-time server-side scanner.

Assuming Relic isn't lying to us about their anti-cheat being exclusively server-side, the only people to have to be concerned are those who have used maphacks in ranked automatch games. Local modifications, such as AHK and visual mods, are undetectable because they never interact with Relic's servers.

Burn the cheater scums!!!

Cheating cost only 3.99$ via Pay-2-Win-Commander-Cheat.

noun has posted a way to get borderless windows mode via steam works better then that program i have been using. so without further ado...

Quite offtopic, but thank you dude. Esp for the sound switch.

So they only got a stat reset or are they banned from automatch completely?

So they only got a stat reset or are they banned from automatch completely?

Currently it's just a wins reset. We'll be doing a regular review and from this point forward handling things a bit stronger.

I assume there has been a streak reset to -1 too, and a rank reset?

Btw just FYI this led to some 2vs2 (or more) teams having 0 games together (if they had only wins) which is not logical and could crash naive % calculation since total of games would be 0.

A simple stats reset seems a little weak for maphacking...

A simple stats reset seems a little weak for maphacking...

it might not be for map hacking.

Holy maphacks batman.

If they're using server-side detection I'm not really sure what else it would be for. Only other options are people finding an exploit to bypass drop detection or stat hack. We know a maphack has been published online. A drophack tool hasn't been published yet.

Maphack seems likeliest from the methods they described (albeit vaguely) in the blog post.