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Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

GDC Festival of Gaming

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 5 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2021 to 2025.
  • Presented by John McDonald, Software Engineer at Valve
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 6 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

35K views6 years ago5 recommendations

AI and machine learningGame developmentNeural networks and deep learningGame programming

John McDonald explains how Valve uses deep learning and VACnet to detect aimbots and other cheats in Counter-Strike.

In this 2018 GDC session, Valve's John McDonald discusses how Valve has utilized Deep Learning to combat cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Join the GDC mailing list: gdconf.com/subscribe Follow GDC on Twitter: twitter.com/Official_GDC GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

Why it's here

5 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Highly recommended for its fascinating look at how machine learning and human review are combined to combat game cheating at scale.

schmorptronon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)”

Woah, cool to see a bit of how it all works. Seems similar to basic antivirus signature checking? As a side note, a few years back, they had a GDC talk about a (then-new) machine learning based approach to catching cheaters. Regardless of how it worked out, I found it fascinating. The presenter delivered the problem and solution approach so well I'd still like to work on something like this some time. I think they're still updating this for CS2, so it would be really cool to see how far it's gotten now. link to this video
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schmorptronon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Valve accused of ignoring existing RCE vulnerability in Source games for 2 years”

…ch to detect aimbots that way. There's a really good talk that someone from valve gave about 3 years ago0. The bigger problem is that even with input recognition, one of the biggest problems are wallhacks, meaning you can see other players through walls which is an advantage that's almost as large as aimbotting in tactical shooters like CS. 0: link to this video…
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crtasmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Thank You, Valve”

Valve do this, here's a good talk: Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive link to this video
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kllrnohjon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The ABI status of ELF hash tables”

Or server-side automated review using machine learning models, which is what Valve is trying with "vacnet" (with then manual review to confirm the model's results are accurate - something most tech companies should learn from) Great talk on it here: link to this video
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arwineapon Hacker News • Recommends

On “AI Learns to Play CS:Go via Large-Scale Behavioural Cloning”

…duct is probably good enough that it's ranking reviewers too to determine how good reviewers are at detecting if there's cheats or not. It's pure genius Here's a GDC talk you may find interesting: > In this 2018 GDC session, Valve's John McDonald discusses how Valve has utilized Deep Learning to combat cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. link to this video…
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magic123_on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?”

Unfortunately the Overwatch system has been disabled for years, and we currently have no reason to think it will be reopened for CS2. I take this opportunity to share this great talk about Valve's usage of deep learning to fight cheating in CS:GO: link to this video
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pityJukeon Hacker News • Disputes

On “Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton”

this is already running in production for Counter-Strike since 2018 01. to be honest, it isn’t particularly good - all serious CS2 games operate on a third party provider with a kernel-level anti-cheat. also, the cs2 update banned people for spinning their mouse too fast 2. 0: link 1: link to this video 2: link
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u/CalleKeboolain r/dataengineering • Mentions

Catching cheaters in CS:GO using data TLDR, no you can't. Sorry for the baiting title, but my colleague wrote an article about extracting data from Faceit API and looking at the data to see if you can get any insights into who's cheating based on the data from Faceit. Thought some people might find it interesting. https://medium.com/@twkuhn/analysing-faceit-cs-go-data-14847a3cd2a9 If you're more interested in learning how Valve works to catch cheaters in game, you can check out these two videos: [video \- Anti-Cheat for Multiplayer Games [video \- Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
93View on Reddit

forestoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Call of Duty Adds Kernel Level Driver for Anti-Cheat”

John McDonald did a talk at GDC 2018 about how Valve was starting to integrate deep learning into their server-side cheat detection. IIRC, some of the process was automated, some was player-reported, and some was done through human review. As a gamer averse to both cheating and spyware, I found this very appealing. I wonder how their systems have evolved since then. The original youtube clip (v=ObhK8lUfIlc) has been made private, but I think this is a copy of the same video: link to this video
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d3faulton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Thank You, Valve”

As far as I'm aware Valve does use ML (called VACnet) to detect cheaters. At the time of the GDC talk0 it was only implemented for CSGO but it could've expanded since then 0 link to this video
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markjgxon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Valve releases Counter-Strike 2”

Some players will also be convinced that you're cheating if you play the game really really well, and they will get upset. CS:GO (now CS2) has a very fascinating way of determining if someone is cheating. A ML based heuristic that is constantly being retrained, that can accurately judge whether someone is actually cheating or not based off their Overwatch (not the game) replay system. link to this video
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Starz0ron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?”

What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don't blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It's come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with someone else to do a redesign, which I think has done great for the project at large. I originally created the site as a way to track which games would be supported on Linux, since at the time the Steam Deck was releasing, and some games were turning to support it. And it has since…
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