Highlights
- Nvidia has patented a new system to detect cheaters in PC games, focusing on identifying superhuman mouse movements that give players an unfair advantage.
- The technology compares gamers' movement speed data with motion data from other sources to determine if the movements are impossible for a human to perform without cheating.
- Other companies, such as Ubisoft, have had success with similar anti-cheating systems, resulting in a reduction in the number of bots and cheaters in games like Rainbow Six Siege.
The technology giant Nvidia has recently patented a new system that may be deployed to detect cheaters using superhuman mouse movements in PC games. A few months ago, the company devised a technology that enables AI NPCs to understand and engage with players in real-time, and this is the latest attempt of the graphics card manufacturer to also provide useful software to the gaming industry.
Many companies are trying to tackle online cheaters and bots right now, such as Ubisoft and Bungie. While Nvidia is better known for making some of the best graphics cards for gaming in the market, its anti-cheating system may potentially be used in upcoming competitive games of other companies.
Nvidia’s newly patented tech will identify cheaters in games, focusing on detecting super-human movements in titles that may allow the user to get an unfair advantage in competitive environments. Specifically, Nvidia states that the primary goal of the technology is to crack down on gamers who use aim assists or aim bots in games.
While the actual technology works in a way that a layperson wouldn’t probably understand, the short version is that the system obtains data from the gamer’s movement speed, then segments that information and compares it to motion data from other sources. This way, it’s able to determine whether or not the movements are unusual enough to be considered impossible for a human to perform without cheating. In this case, the system is warned, and the gamer using the cheating program will likely receive some kind of penalty for breaking the rules.
Similar projects have garnered pretty good results so far. For instance, Ubisoft’s MouseTrap anti-cheat system works in a fairly similar way, by diminishing the returns of people cheating, instead of banning them, and it has been drastically reducing the number of bots and cheaters in Rainbow Six Siege. That is probably why more companies are investing in these anti-cheating solutions.
Methods for preventing cheating in online games can take many forms. While some companies such as Nvidia and Ubisoft are trying to find cheaters using new in-game technology to detect and ban them, others such as Bungie are using more aggressive methods. A few days ago, for example, Bungie continued its crusade against Destiny 2 cheaters, targeting a company named Ring-1, a prominent cheat seller. Bungie’s strategy seems to be to target cheater sellers and try to shut down their operations by going to the root cause of the problem: people providing the cheats.