Profile of Inverse

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.

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.

I feel like AC spam with Kettens and MP44s would shit on this pretty hard. Run in with the ACs and focus the snipers, then run in with MP44s when they retreat, using Kettens to cap the map (because a sniper spam start isn't going to have capping power). ACs are less manpower than snipers, so even if you lose an AC for every sniper you kill it's worth it because you should have most of the fuel. I'm not a PE player though so I don't know the timings.

I can see this working against PG spam into halftracks and against a player who doesn't react to it properly, but it's a big risk.

Well, your opinion is not indicative of the opinion of the community at large. Every developer of multiplayer games with matchmaking these days prioritizes timely matchups over better matchup balance. They wouldn't be doing this if they believed a majority of their player base was fine waiting two or three times as long if it meant a better matchup. People don't like waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a game. Look at what Valve has done recently with Dota 2 matchmaking. When they split off into ranked and unranked, they removed a number of options that segmented the player pool in order to keep wait times down around their 2 minute 30 second target. And this is a game with 400,000-600,000 concurrent players every single day. Even they don't want to risk segmenting their community too much.

As for the first 10 calibration games, those aren't completely random. You still have a rating, it just has a higher degree of uncertainty, so the range of players you can be matched against is greater and the number of points you can gain from a win is greater since the system doesn't have enough games to make an accurate guess about your skill. It's pretty standard procedure in matchmaking systems these days. So is weighting arranged teams higher than random teams.

As for higher ranked teams getting poor opponents, that's kind of how matchmaking works. It's awful for players at the top because there aren't enough opponents at their rating, so they wait longer and get weaker opponents more often than the average player. This is doubly true for a game like CoH2 with such a small base of players.

I like the vCoH options for this so much better, having a shield on the side that you could hover over to show all of the unit icons in that group. It meant not having to waste a click on opening/closing the tree and not having it constantly occupy screen real estate when you don't need it.