How do games that are played in the world compete against cheat acts?

The online game ' League of Legends ', which has sometimes exceeded 100 million monthly active users, is also known as a game with official professional league and the world's top competition population. However, there are many cheat acts and programs that encourage it, only for games that are deployed on a global scale. Riat · Games , who develops and manages the League of Legends, wrote on the official blog what specific measures are being taken against repeated cheating actions.

Riot's Approach to Anti-Cheat | Riot Games Engineering
https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat

Cheat acts in online battle games are not limited to "League of Legends" but are a problem in various games. Especially from the Paris Olympics in 2024 e-Sports may be adopted as an official event, such as a game management company that is also chosen as a sports event for e-sports, eliminating illegal players using legal means I am moving.

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In general, game companies tend to take countermeasures that are behind the scenes "finding fraud by users and doing BAN , taking measures on every occasion", but Raiat · Games is a prevention / detection / We are taking measures to thoroughly eliminate cheat with emphasis on three points of deterrence. Although there are various kinds of misconduct, Raiat · Games introduces on official blog what focused on the part of "using illegal programs that interfere with game clients".

Riat Games points out that there are two types of misconduct using malicious programs, roughly "scripting" and "botting." Scripting is an unauthorized act using unofficial tools and is used to improperly raise the winning percentage of players by enabling operations that are inherently difficult or impossible. The screen below is where you are actually playing League of Legends using an incorrect tool.

On the other hand, botting simulates game input programmatically and automatically plays games. Botting is mainly used to automatically raise player's level. Both scripting and botting can be done by interfering with the game client by an unauthorized program. In order to prevent interference by such malicious programs, Raiat Games thought that the game client itself should be analyzed, and precautions must be taken to fundamentally prevent program interference.

So far, League of Legends had several design ideas to counter cheat. For example, by periodically changing the network protocol after obfuscating it, it prevents intervention from external games through the network. Also, all judgments in the game should be done on the server side, and the judgment made by the game client is not reflected on the server as "untrusted information". In other words, no matter how much you cheat in the client, even if you make your character stronger, the server will not reflect its strength at all. Furthermore, designing not to share the location and state of other players except when it is not necessary prevents "map hacking" which makes all players on the map visible.

In the first place, it is because the wrong program can interfere with the game client because the program developer knows what kind of action is being done by the memory search tool, and then prepares the program. In other words, if you do not analyze the game code with the memory search tool, it will be difficult to create a malicious program. So, Raiat Games encrypted the League of Legends game client code with its own technology.

In addition, Raiat Games points out that it is common for unauthorized players to use debug tools and binary measurement tools for running game clients when creating cheat tools. By inserting a code called debug check at various places in the built program, it was virtually impossible to use the debugging tool by changing the check order of the debug check code and the contents of the code for every build.

Unauthorized players use memory retrieval tools to analyze which parameters of the game code correspond to "physical strength", "mana" consumed by skill activation, etc. For example, from a game data file in which various numbers are arranged, a place where '100' which will be related to physical fitness is detected is detected, then how much the number of data has changed while being damaged in the game By checking each time, an unauthorized player searches out which parameters are calculated and how to become fitness. Therefore, Riyad Games encrypts the data part, not by overwriting numbers in the same place every time parameters in the game change, but by writing in a completely different place, analysis by the memory search tool It made it difficult.

Although Raiat · Games said that the measure introduced this time is only a part of the cheat countermeasure to the last, it can not disclose everything to fight fraud, but firmly resolutely tough players against cheating players It clearly shows the attitude to take over.