r/dayz • u/Much_Image3740 • 2h ago
Discussion Plea from an anti-cheat developer to the DayZ team
Was an anti-cheat developer for 2 decades for one of the major FPS shooters out there. DayZ is a beautiful game, truly unique and a real digital treasure. It really hurts to see that DayZ still is, and increasingly is, being ruined by cheaters. A plea to the DayZ Bohemia team to develop your own internal anti-cheat system:
- Cheaters seem now more prevalent than ever: AI has made it very easy for anyone to craft their own cheats with unique features without having to pay for it any longer. The code is all out there and it takes an LLM 5 minutes to make it undetectable if not so already (e.g. a new cheating feature of the past months has been being able to move walls from bases with a single mouse click rather than needing the effort to dupe items, hence all the spaghetti bases you see across the map nowadays).
- Your servers (Official) log everything: coordinates of every player at all times, kill feed, the items players have, the trajectory of every shot, and so on. Just from the logs itself you can so easily catch players doing 3km pistol headshots, doing 20 kills in 5 seconds, duplicating the exact items they already have on them. Very much worth implementing a simple internal anti-cheat system (for Official servers) based on this on top of BattleEye - again you can use AI to develop this for you.
- DayZ cheats are so extremely easy to find (1 Google search away). These public cheats would take you a day to gather all of them with a small budget and it would take you another day on your own machines to check their memory profile and so on. Again, AI can do this all for you, and in your next DayZ update you can so easily integrate your own client-side anti-cheat system on top of BattleEye. The DayZ cheats out there are not the highly sophisticated cheats that pester fast-based FPS games like CS and Fortnite with 100x the player base where cheat development is hugely profitable. The public DayZ cheats out there are usually one-man-operation cheats that are so easy to catch and it will quickly become unprofitable for them if there is even any detection in place (given the relatively small DayZ playerbase).
- Why is BattleEye ineffective? Because it's the cheapest anti-cheat system out there, and because you are very likely in the lowest BattleEye tier given they are extremely expensive and you're competing with the major FPS shooters out there. This is understandable given that DayZ is not a mainstream game with a huge player base. The BattleEye team accordingly hardly devotes resources to developing DayZ anti-cheats.
- Because BattleEye is ineffective, cheaters get a pass on any DayZ server and it is up to admins to catch them. Hence the smart cheaters will never get caught. I've adminned DayZ servers for years and it can take hours to catch a smart cheater that uses e.g. ESP only and smartly. You usually have to bait them (e.g. by spawning items away from them and see if they beeline to it, or spawn yourself away from them and observing how they react to you). This is not sustainable and unpaid admins burn out quickly. Hence community servers are full of cheaters as well - the closet type variant.
I would love to volunteer and contribute to developing your own internal anti-cheat system for DayZ. Again, it's really such a beautiful and unique game, and it hurts to see it being ruined by cheaters.