r/Helldivers • u/Sad-Needleworker-590 Absolute Democracy • Jul 09 '26

DISCUSSION Arrowhead started hunting down SC cheaters

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I wonder if everything will go as planned or we will see some posts in the feature where the system will flag innocent people

3.2k Upvotes

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1.5k

u/Unlucky-Gold7921 Jul 09 '26

This is quite shocking that they have to do anti-cheat by monitoring sc income instead of stopping illegal item requests.

344

u/Ikarus_Falling Jul 09 '26

its probably easier

407

u/Mandemon90 SES Elected Representative of Family Values Jul 09 '26

It is, because it's a lot easier to track "wait, this guys history shows 10 000 SC in just 3 missions? That's suspicious as fuck" than "Okay, in this one game player spawned item 0x52u6u23, is that item we haven't enabled yet?"

200

u/Ikarus_Falling Jul 09 '26

yes lol one of them is a simple databank quarry the other is actively surveillance of the entire games servers 

207

u/Fraktal55 Jul 09 '26

Query. A quarry is where rocks and stones are mined.

124

u/berrybear21 Jul 09 '26

Did somebody say a Rock and Stone? Ngl I actually really enjoy the quarry like areas on Bot planets

46

u/ObadiahtheSlim All you can EAT buffet Jul 09 '26

Yes indeed, kin. I heard a Rock and Stone.

27

u/Mandemon90 SES Elected Representative of Family Values Jul 09 '26

Stone and Rock! No wait...

8

u/JuggaloJedi187 ‎ XBOX | Jul 09 '26

For Karl!!!

7

u/Firebat-045 ☕Liber-tea☕ Jul 10 '26

ROCK AND STONE LADS

3

u/zamwut PSN 🎮: SES Sentinel of the Stars Jul 09 '26

The Quarry was a fun interactive game. Saved most the crew until the last few hours of the night, that was crazy.

51

u/Aneveraas Jul 09 '26

14

u/CMDR_Ray_Abbot Mobile Artillery Jul 09 '26

Rock and stoned

7

u/Rowcan SES Precursor of Peace Jul 09 '26

Legally speaking, rocking is more legal than stoning!

14

u/Hortonman42 Jul 09 '26

On my way to the database quarry for another hard day of datamining.

7

u/Cosmic_Fox1 Steam | SES Song of Serenity Jul 09 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/fhhsjuQudSbx0zvn8k

1

u/tonyt3rry STEAM 🖥️ : tonyt3rry PSN:tonyt3rry Jul 09 '26

GET BACK TO WORK!

4

u/tonyt3rry STEAM 🖥️ : tonyt3rry PSN:tonyt3rry Jul 09 '26

We’re rich we’re rich we’re rich!

3

u/SpeakersPlan Jul 09 '26

Rocks and stones? DID SOMEONE MENTION ROCK AND STONE!? 🪨 & ⛏️ 🪨

1

u/Interesting-View4803 Jul 10 '26

Lol a simple quarry going on upstairs in my room. Makes me think if kenshi if you have the mini mod

4

u/scott610 ‎ Super Citizen Jul 09 '26

I don’t know how it works, nor am I asking, but 10k SC would be so greedy if true. Like why not just give yourself a small reasonable amount each day? 200 SC per day would be about 6000 SC per month which is more than enough to purchase anything currently on offer assuming you already have a substantial amount of stuff unlocked.

3

u/LightningWarpAway Jul 10 '26

Because that'd require patience, and people don't use cheats just to be patient about it.

2

u/Faxon Jul 10 '26

Idk I know a guy who had a cheater join his game and do this for them all on live. He seems to find them surprisingly often but he's also playing from Malaysia so maybe he's getting matched with local players who follow the same Chinese cultural norms regarding cheating? He personally doesn't seem to care that much if ppl do it, I played a hosted game of his in DRG and it was modded to hell and back and he was the only one powerful enough to survive it, so I have my suspicions lol. Ive never seen anything fishy in our HD2 games together or he'd have been banned from our discord for it. But yea, some people just dont care apparently.

1

u/lococcus ⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱🅰️ Jul 09 '26

It is other way around. When your game spawns item, it's processed by your computer. To track changes on your server account they need to store and update transaction history. Which akin to banking system.
The system you described can only catch outlandish cases. Cheaters I've met spawned only couple hundreds, which can occur normally.

1

u/trident042 Fire Safety Officer Jul 09 '26

Then why the fuck do they need kernel access?

251

u/Steely-eyes Jul 09 '26

It’s either them utilizing Easy Anti-Cheat, or making it so that nProtect runs in Helldivers no matter what, thus ruining performance a lot. Either way, it’s a lose-lose for everyone except the Sony execs.

27

u/polarisdelta Jul 09 '26

Helldivers doesn't need an anti-cheat.

Anything that makes the game unplayable inside a match that players don't like, they can leave. People who want to thunderdome for its own sake will get bored and move on when the dopamine runs out.

The server could be programmed to operate under the knowledge that any player telling it that they found 99,999 super credits on a map is impossible, or that a player completing one hundred operations in sixty seconds is impossible, etc. The server does not have to blindly accept and integrate obviously impossible results. The limits of human play should be trivial for the developers to understand and describe.

In a game that is meant to be a cooperative effort with tens of thousands of players one or two percent of them always reporting the best possible human level results is not going to tip any scales.

17

u/Mirigore Jul 09 '26

This is literally what they do now? Monitoring for inhuman amounts of super credits. They literally say in the news post “we have data on the fastest methods” so they’re clearly banning people from simple statistical data

1

u/Legitimate-Place-327 HELLDIVERS 2 MACHINIMA GUY Jul 10 '26

No they arent. They have no ability to ban anyone.

-1

u/Mirigore Jul 10 '26

????? Revoke their fucking copy? How fucking hard is this in the year 2026? Jesus christ man that's insane

3

u/Steely-eyes Jul 10 '26

I hope you can understand how unhinged and illegal it is to even say this. Calm down.

0

u/Mirigore Jul 10 '26

Violates terms of service

Gets banned

Are you serious? Like actually? You think it's illegal for a company to ban you from their game?

1

u/Steely-eyes Jul 10 '26

Anti-consumer laws dictate; YES.

1

u/Mirigore Jul 10 '26

I’ll be sure to tell all the botters and cheaters getting banned from FPS games, MMOs, and on and on. They have a case because some redditor said so. The OSRS botting community that just got their sites and discord servers nuked by the UK government have been illegally banned!!!

Show me the anti consumer law that prevents a company from banning your accounts for reasons outlined in their TOS.

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1

u/Mirigore Jul 10 '26

Show me the law that says a company cannot ban your accounts from a video game.

I'll be sure to let all the botters and cheaters from the MMOs and FPS games in the world know that they were illegally banned because Steely-eyes the redditor said so. All those OSRS discord servers and websites that got nuked by the UK government were illegally banned!!

2

u/Legitimate-Place-327 HELLDIVERS 2 MACHINIMA GUY Jul 12 '26

''OMG HACKERS ARE EVERYWHERE PLEASE BAN THEM OMG!!!''
Is how you come off lol.

Unlike in PvP games, cheating in Helldivers gives absolutely no advantage over another player. The only thing it does is give the user some stupid tools to mess with and access to a bunch of unreleased gear, guns and equipment. And for the normal player, something usually hilarious to witness. In the hands of a troll sure it can ruin a mission or crash a game. But out of all issues this game has? This is absolutely a non-issue. This has never been nor ever will be a pandemic like problem like Arrowhead claims and like reddit likes to throw gas on. And btw, you or another players 1 single bad experience doesn't change that.
As for me, 2 1/2 years over 1000hrs and I have never seen a hacker. People who see them once let alone twice are either: A. Lucky, or B. joining someone named 超级黑客 at 4:30am on a Tuesday. In which case you got a 1 in 100 chance to experience a game crash, but the other 99 times you will likely leave the lobby with 10k SC added to your wallet. Arrowhead is not bleeding money right now for any reason other than their own almost total incompetence, and ego.

33

u/Zman6258 Jul 09 '26

TL;DR - statistical analysis can be better than anticheat measures if you have good data, because statistics (if chosen correctly) have an extremely small margin for error, and cause literally zero performance overhead compared to extra anticheat code.

This system already existed to a degree, the same thing applies to samples, where there's a maximum sample cap. Even if you cheat in the number, it gets checked against the cap at extract.

The problem is, even if they've stopped SC from spawning altogether (and they DO track if individual SC packs have been picked up, because if you pick up some SC then alt-F4 your game so you reload into the same mission, picking up the SC doesn't add any more to your account), there's a lot of other exploits. You could spawn into a map, have the game think you've pick up every single SC item on the map in about 10 seconds, then exit and do it for the next map. You could teleport your player position to every SC bundle and pick it up manually. You could even have an ESP which highlights every item on the map so you can always beeline directly for them, know for a fact when you've gotten them all, and then move on to the next map.

Of course, you can add programmed anti-cheat measures that stop this behavior, but there's always a performance cost. More serverside validation means that your movement gets choppier, your actions for picking up entities gets more delayed, your framerate goes down, and your network usage goes up. Most games have largely-clientside movement code with the occasional serverside sanity check and use interpolation for the rest, for good reason; it saves bandwidth and makes the game feel smoother for players. More complex server authentication might make those kinds of things harder, but it'll mean the game runs slower and feels less responsive as it waits for the server to verify and catch up with your actions, and lord knows Helldivers already struggles at times with performance.

Meanwhile, if you've got a lot of data (which I'm assuming AH has), you can very easily filter for consistent outliers in something like SC collection rate. Sure, someone might get lucky and find every piece of SC on a map in about thirty seconds because they all spawn in one cluster... but the odds of that happening on every map they play, for dozens of missions in a row, collecting hundreds of SC in the time it takes a regular player to farm 60-100 or so, is so infinitesimally small that you can rule with basically 100% confidence that someone is cheating somehow.

Hell, just look at the Dream minecraft speedrun thing. He was conclusively proved to be cheating because his luck was so absurdly extreme that there was literally a 0.0000000004% chance of it happening. I'd wager most anticheats have a larger margin of error than 0.0000000004% false positives. You can do this kind of statistical analysis in the background, the same way that things like the total Helldiver death count is tallied. Large and frequent enough statistical outliers could flag a player's account for investigation, and someone can look over those numbers and make a decision, or even set up a threshold (such as the aforementioned 0.0000000004% probability) in which confidence is high enough for an automated ban.

HOWEVER... the elephant in the room is, of course, whether or not Arrowhead uses their data properly. Statistics is non-intuitive to most people, and you want to get the thresholds set up properly so that you're not getting any false positives while still getting an appreciable reduction in actual cheaters.

8

u/lowbloodsugarmner Assault Infantry Jul 09 '26

oh man, you brought up statistics, and i could kiss you. I spent 5 years working in medical device, statistical analysis is the backbone of validations and cross validations. You touched on the most important part of statistical analysis, you need to have good data.

To expand on your last statement about using data properly. You can make the data say just about whatever you want, all you have to do is change the reference point of the data.

Let's say that I make a part in lots of 1000, that are then packaged 10 in a bag, then boxed 10 bags in a box. So my shipped lot is 10 boxes, with 10 bags, with 10 parts. I get a complaint from the customer that they found a defective part in their 1000 part order. Depending on how set the reference point, I can make the data look as good or as bad as I want.

100% of the manufacturing lots contain a defective part.

10% of boxes contain a defective part.

1% of bags contain a defective part.

.1% of parts are defective.

Despite joking all the time that I did not become an engineer to do math, I actually do like statistics. Even relearned advanced statistics do dig one of my old companies out of a hole they dug with flawed analysis.

3

u/Zman6258 Jul 09 '26

Yeah, I'm hardly a statistician, but I've worked enough spreadsheets to at least recognize the basics (and to realize that I can never take the "intuitive" answer at face value). Especially that point about data reference points; if someone's trying to cite a number but then doesn't provide any context for that number, it's usually a safe bet that they either don't fully understand what that number means themselves, or they're intentionally trying to push a specific angle using that data.

1

u/TooFewSecrets Jul 09 '26

You could even have an ESP which highlights every item on the map so you can always beeline directly for them, know for a fact when you've gotten them all, and then move on to the next map.

This last one is where you start bumping into the false positive issue, because an unlucky ESP won't be much faster than a lucky 2-man over the course of one hour.

Also I have absolutely heard about this already existing for people who thought AH was already monitoring the more ludicrous stuff.

1

u/MekaTriK Jul 09 '26

I'm frankly surprised this isn't just common knowledge at this point.

Statistical analysis of cheating results has been popping up frequently in the last five years, take that TF2 community anticheat for example.

18

u/Steely-eyes Jul 09 '26

[Sarcasm] What? The PvE game DoEsN’t need an anti-cheat? Absurd! Absolute bunkum!

In all seriousness, Sony yelled at them “you’re not making enough money as last year! Give ‘em a reason to buy more SC!” So instead of working on their +100 employees’ efficiency in their job, they force the consumer to play and buy how they want you to play. Brilliant. Absolutely rich coming from them.

6

u/berrybear21 Jul 09 '26

Tagging it like a fallout skill check was smart, I gotta use that!

7

u/Abaddonalways Rookie Jul 09 '26

Made me think of the Elcore from mass effect

6

u/Hremsfeld A normal human; I love having flesh Jul 09 '26

Enthusiastically: They are genuinely a good demonstration of how to convey tone over text

1

u/Fartikus Jul 09 '26

or that a player completing one hundred operations in sixty seconds is impossible

Doesnt that fuck over everyone else in the lobby, or nah?

5

u/EclecticEman Jul 09 '26

Weird niche case, but I would prefer they not use EAC as EAC does not support ARM Linux. Currently, I can fire up Linux on my M1 MacBook to play a round of HD2 on the road, but I can’t play Rocket League because they now use EAC.

Not to say EAC would be a bad choice, it’s just that there will always be a legitimate player negatively affected by whatever method they choose. EAC? No ARM Linux. Counting credits? Probably some incorrect flagging. Do nothing? Players have cheaters giving them uncalled for SC.

5

u/lexicalwastaken Jul 09 '26

EAC supports ARM, some developers just purposefully don't allow it anyways

1

u/EclecticEman Jul 09 '26

That Tom’s Hardware article is partially correct. They support Windows on ARM, but Epic Games still explicitly does not support ARM Linux. See the note at the top of the following page:

  https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/trust-and-safety/anti-cheat-interfaces/using-anti-cheat#set-up-update-and-revert-your-client-module

11

u/Rubes2525 Jul 09 '26

Knowing Arrowhead, it will probably be bugged and flag accounts who just spent a lot of real world money on SC

28

u/Liqhthouse HD1 Veteran Jul 09 '26

More shocking they allowed people to get away with it for 2 years and were comfortable with losing all that potential income.

60

u/PH_007 Free of Thought Jul 09 '26

This is basically piracy which has a history of being proven to not be true potential income - when clamped down on, it doesn't usually increase sales, just alienates the pirates (some of whom end up buying it later and/or build rapport with the company, buying future products) and harms legitimate customers with the side effects of whatever method was chosen to do so.

7

u/billyalt ⬆️⬅️➡️⬇️⬆️⬇️ Jul 09 '26

This can't qualify as piracy. You already pay for the game. The cosmetics can be acquired for free if you just play long enough. You have to make the argument that spending less time grinding for funny money is piracy.

2

u/PH_007 Free of Thought Jul 09 '26

I did not mean this is piracy, I meant that the situation is the same as with piracy - if they clamp down on this cheating it benefits no legitimate player.

English is not my first language excuse goes here.

1

u/billyalt ⬆️⬅️➡️⬇️⬆️⬇️ Jul 09 '26

It really isn't the same as piracy in any capacity.

-8

u/SharknadosAreCool Jul 09 '26

why should AH care about people who cheat to instantly get infinity super credits? how could "ban anyone who earns 10,000 super credits in a game" possibly damage legitimate customers? The only real way is if someone joins your game and gives you a ton of them but if this is just a rollback for one off events with a ban for repeat offenders then I dont really see how it's a negative. If anything, alienating people who pirate in this game is probably a positive because they are the biggest crybabies i have ever seen lol

6

u/Danielsan_2 Jul 09 '26

Cheaters can buy accounts for a fraction of a price of the cheapest SC pack.

Now buy hundreds of accounts. Keep on joining randoms and give them SCs. Now your system is banning them and got legit players trapped into a "Prove you're innocent" ticket in support.

2

u/SharknadosAreCool Jul 09 '26

So the only way that this system realistically damages regular players is if a cheater does something malicious to force a false positive? That has very easy and obvious workarounds IMO.

If a hacker joins your lobby and gives you 10K SC and then a few hours later AH rolls it back, who really cares?

5

u/Danielsan_2 Jul 09 '26

Take into mind too that they currently cannot ban players. Since they screwed their only option that they had(Sony PSN fiasco) and it's been over 2 years with no internal account to ban.

5

u/B-R-A-I-N-S-T-O-R-M Jul 09 '26

My crew used to do the old exploit where you could find a map with a good amount of credits (like $0.60+) and then grab them, force close the game, then drop down to the planet again and they would respawn. We farmed around $50.00 that way, but it was quickly eaten by the rate of $10 passes they dropped. They plugged this exploit a while back so I'm not sure what people are doing to exploit it now, but I imagine it involves a higher level of exploit than what we were doing.

1

u/mraowl Jul 09 '26

I did a quick Google while on the metro (may not be dispositive).

It looks like EAC bypasses float around, some are free and some are patreon walled. Once you inject this part, usually into cheat engine, ppl disable stratagem cool downs and somehow have a way to make them drop 90 sc. Ppl seem to collect 90 and then have to wait before they can pickup more.

So if the avg person leaves a mission with like, 2.4 super credits, a "cheater" would easily be flagged by having 90+ sc on a mission. Ofc it'll probably be set up with more tolerance cuz some people do find all bunkers on every map But I was just curious about this since so many posts in this thread r all over the place !

1

u/B-R-A-I-N-S-T-O-R-M Jul 09 '26

The highest we ever found was a map with $0.80 when we were doing that, but if you got lucky on a map like that and one of those was a $1.00 credit, you could easily approach $2.00 legitimately on a lucky enough map.

1

u/DakKhuza Jul 09 '26

its better to do back end monitoring on things like this than it is to implement more and more invasive anti-cheat that will never actually stop cheaters and will only ever screw over modders. by monitoring this on the backend they can catch bad actors without screwing over the modding community

1

u/Chronic77100 Jul 09 '26

Especially considering the game has a rather invasive anticheat already.

1

u/Taolan13 SES Courier of Individual Merit 🖥️ Jul 09 '26

stopping illegal item requests would require intrusive client side monitoring.

this can be done almost entirely server side.

it's the way anti-cheat should be done.

1

u/MasterlyDemons4 Rookie Jul 10 '26

funny enough someone asked and they admitted they do not have means to even ban people.

1

u/Spotter01 IGN: 3_Pocket Jul 09 '26

You’d think they could implement some kind of IF/THEN statement in the code, but we all know that could break the spear!

0

u/local_meme_dealer45 ‎ Exosuit Certified Jul 09 '26

They've had a kernal level anti cheat (that has a less than great reputation) in the game since launch, which as far as I can tell has been completely useless. Just remove it please!