I'm ending the Bot Crisis (Part 1/3)

a previous hire has been unable or unwilling to perform the tasks made before him we have struggled to find a suitable replacement until now first off a couple Channel updates we're monetized we have a Discord server and channel memberships are open since the upload of the database video I've been kind of stressed actually on the one hand I've received many messages of support from not just YouTube comments but also old friends on Steam and Discord as well as randoms in the game and I fully appreciate that support you guys are in effect my only source of income now thanks to YouTube however there's also a group of you that have legitimate concerns about the database and you guys are just as valuable to this project of mine the way I see it there are two possibilities the good ending and the bad ending if I leave the database as is I worry we'll get the bad index so since I dropped the last video I've been devising plans on how to improve the database and through brainstorming many ideas I've come up with a way to not just expand the database but build a functioning entity that will protect casual TF2 forever more first though let's look back at the OG database and see what those concerns were foreign I've already taken action the white dots on the graph here represent accounts that are being watched if your frames were two or more cheaters you'll get watched however there's no mechanism to automatically remove someone for a private database that's fine since my friends and I aren't using the starter for malicious purposes however there were concerns raised about watched accounts that are no longer friends with cheaters they're not friends with cheaters why publish all their past aliases now that we're public I realized it wasn't appropriate to be publishing this information so I updated the graph to hide accounts that don't qualify for being watched anymore the data is still being collected but it's not public you can see all the white nodes around the green area have all disappeared the rest of these concerns I haven't taken action on but I plan to address in the next major version of the database let's have a look at suspicious accounts when you see an account marked as sus what's that actually mean it could be anything from one of the database contributors getting super unlucky or they could be having the skill issue but on the other end of the spectrum sometimes we find steam groups filled with cheetahs like this one here where we know 95 of the members are cheaters so we Mark the remaining five percent as sus I hold a strict policy of not marking anyone as a cheater unless the person marking them sees them cheating first hand so if that can't be done we default to marking Asus until someone else can confirm the suspicion there's also the issue that once marked as SAS there isn't a mechanism to unmark them as such unless someone in the server recognizes the accounts is they're the top EU sniper or something like that [Music] [Laughter] just got baby while he's fully invisible I just saw the shatter and went for it finally the biggest issue for a public database in my opinion where's the evidence don't get me wrong I stand behind what I display on the site but since this was originally a private thing between friends we weren't concerned about collecting Clips as we didn't anticipate going public remember I made the decision to go public because the database was leaked and yeah I've learned a few lessons from that too since we've gone public I've made a point to collect Clips where possible with the exception of bots because those are stupidly obvious however not all the members of our database group have the know-how or are able to collect clips for various reasons with that said I've spoken to some people who used to be a part of the cheetah circles I've marked and they've said the database is captured pretty much all the cheaters in the Australian region with no false positives they're aware of a few of these cheetahs that I know of have turned legit apparently starting on Fresh accounts but uh I guess we'll know for sure in due course while these concerns are all valid and I thank those of you who've raised them I don't think this database Endeavor of mine is a failure I've noticed one or two cheaters who previously would blatantly cheat decide to play closet for a change remember the cheetah from the bonus clip at the end of my last video I caught him the other night impersonating a different friend of mine but this time he was either not cheating or was too subtle for me to detect his friends got Auto balance to my team so they eventually re-queued and this isn't a one-off either my friends who were harassed by cheaters when this first blew up are now noticing similar things in their games this gives me hope that if I can somehow make this database thing a global effort we can actually make a difference across the entire community oh [Music] with those concerns in the back of my mind I set a few requirements that the new database has to fulfill one all accusations need to be backed by evidence two everyone should be able to submit evidence three evidence needs to be verified to prevent false accusations four don't let anyone be the sole Arbiter of Who's Cheating in TF2 5. don't make information public unless it has to be and six make it open source so everyone can see what's going on and contribute I brainstormed some ideas we all know I've got my database but because it's one database for one group of friends it's never going to cover U.S servers or EU servers because we don't play in those regions so if we want this to be Global we need to let you guys host your own databases so my friends and I have our database you and your friends could have yours etc etc ideally we would have a bunch of databases that could be used to cross-reference each other I've noticed a bunch of you in the comments have been keeping track of cheaters yourselves and happily you've reported that my database is very consistent with what you've discovered to make this kind of cross-checking standard we need a way to collate all these databases together that's honestly not hard technically speaking just set up a master server that all the databases report to and aggregate the data the hard part is deciding how to aggregate that data how many reports does it take before a user is marked as a chair in the master database masterbase let's call it the master base there are all sorts of statistical methods that could be used but relying on user reports is still kind of iffy and it opens the potential for coordinated abuse now when designing a program it's not enough to look at the high level concept you've got to look at the user experience and make sure it works properly right now in order to scan my games I have to copy the output status command into a Discord Channel I've gotten quick at it because I've done it so many times but I can't expect all of you to put up with that especially when a bunch of other console stuff gets in between the lines and you see end up with copying something larger than what Discord can handle so you've got to upload as a file and oh my God please stop there must be another way introducing bash not the language the developer you know they're a talented software engineer when they got the furry profile picture and they've been subscribed to Discord Nitro for two years but in all seriousness this guy reached out to me on Steam and I was about to reject it like the other 200 friend requests I've gotten the last couple weeks thank you yeah but then I saw the GitHub link turns out I was talking to the person behind this TF2 bot kicker plugin so now we're gonna work together to integrate it with the database that way you guys can solo a database using this tool or you can link it to someone else's I'll keep the Discord integration though as being able to discuss cheaters outside of the game is super convenient especially if you're on mobile the way the tool works now is it runs as a separate app and reads the console output from your TF2 via archon yes archon I didn't know the TF2 client itself could be archoned but apparently it can and in my experience it works when you're in a game you can just Tab out to the application and Mark someone as a body cheater it's beautiful the version that's going to be used in my application will be accessible through the steam overlay so you don't even have to alt Tab out of a source game but hang on something's missing here it's time we talked evidence this part was the trickiest part to figure out what I've done with my database since the last video is allow text information to be attached to any account since it operates in Discord you can put links to videos and have them embed within Discord see this account here one piece of evidence on record apparently aim lock with a shotgun on trolls were of all things let's have a watch oh this clip's pretty definitive and you might conclude that a similar system may work for the new database but there's a problem if I deleted the message containing the original clip this link would break not to mention video files can be huge I use Nvidia shadowplay specifically it's instant replay feature to save Clips at the Press of a mouse button a 90 second clip at 1440p 60fps is 240 megabytes with the settings I use I ain't saving that evidence on a global database too expensive man not to mention I used to play with g-sync enabled with a refresh rate of your display changes depending on how fast the game is rendering to prevent screen tearing for my display the frame rate could vary from 48 to 180 Hertz but Shadow play in its Infinite Wisdom decides that all recordings should be done at 48 fps when that's turned on even with g-sync off though that's two out of three frames that don't appear in the footage and that's just on my computer all these different configurations who knows what other inconsistencies could occur with other people's systems I've seen footage as low as 22 FPS get submitted for evidence that's practically useless when you're trying to determine if a flick shot is sus or not yes [Music] so video footage lots of challenges there what's a way of ensuring consistency when capturing a game I know one competitive leaks use it all the time demo recordings instead of capturing a raw video file a demo file keeps track of information player positions view angles what weapons they're using projectiles everything gets tracked inside this demo file from what I've been able to gather the demo file stores everything in packets similar to what you receive from a server when playing and the TF2 client interprets these in real time when you play it back so not only can we get video footage we have the raw data as of writing we've successfully worked out how to reverse engineer demo files we've got position and view angle working so far and that's where the anti-cheat comes in imagine what we can do with all this data from so many casual games that's right I knew I purchased an RTX 4090 for a reason hey I we're gonna get some AI in this and build Jensen our cheat detector vac ain't doing the job so we're gonna do it for them now I say AI but machine learning is really just one way to approach this problem there's going to be many algorithms working together to figure out who's cheating all that sounds good but we don't possess the power to vac band players how's this going to make a difference well I've seen a few people suggest even in my own comments section the idea of antibots that targets and kick cheetahs this is obviously a stupid idea I don't want any bots in my games but you don't need Bots to automate the kick process introducing Interceptor the vote kick coordinator imagine you're in a casual game and there's a cheater on your team now none of you have noticed yet because it's still set up time but as soon as those gates open Blue's push is going to be destroyed by this aim locking loser however six of your teammates have mega anti-cheat installed and our AI Overlord has already scanned a bunch of demo recordings containing this user determining with overwhelming confidence he's a cheater that's when Interceptor kicks in it can see that six anti-cheat users are in the game on the Cheetahs team and Order their anti-cheat clients to carry out a vote kick automatically booting him off the game this method requires zero human intervention although we'll program in a few fail safes just in case something goes wrong like the cheetah starting a vote kick right before Interceptor does so as of now this is the plan going forward first I need to update the existing database so it's good and proper there's lots of small things to change to bring it up to standard like using Discord slash commands once that's done I'll work on the master base and set that up to receive data then we'll work on the desktop client and start integrating everything together we're making good progress demo recordings have already been reverse engineered and those Discord commands I mentioned I've got the skeleton of them completed they just needed the implementation once the basics are in place we'll launch a beta test out to everyone and start collecting data for those of you who pay for a channel membership will get special attention when it comes to bug fixing tech support Etc when the time comes I'll put out a video explaining how to participate once we've got enough data we'll figure out how to interpret it and we'll publish our results on Mega scatterbomb.com that will Mark the official launch of the new database then once everything's running smoothly I'll look into machine learning and start training the AI on all the data we've received and see if we can produce an effective anti-sheet we'll use conventional algorithms too for cases where AI doesn't work so well like detecting crit hacks and if all goes well we'll activate Jensen the AI part and Interceptor the auto kicking part at the same time if the upload of my last video was D-Day then these two systems coming online are like fat man and little boy the bot crisis will come to an end many of you guys have been super enthusiastic about my efforts from the start so here's what you can do to support our efforts first and foremost subscribe to the channel so you know what's going on and you don't miss any important announcements second a vote from dub Channel memberships members will get privileged access to database stuff don't expect one-on-one tech support if you're not a channel member I don't have time to help all of you get this installed also the money will help pay for hosting we're going to need a bit more than this piece of I might even get a new microphone third join the Discord the developer channels are locked to developers obviously but you guys can peer in and see what's going on and if you're a channel member you can talk to us directly I did not my pants at an engadine maccas in 1997. I don't know where this has come from but stop it fourth here's our git repo submit issues if you come across a bug if you want to make a pull request to message us developers on Discord first to make sure you're not doing any redundant work and First Once the tool is out use it we're going to need lots of data if we want this anti-cheat to work effectively and with enough users the Interceptor will be able to protect most casual games more people using it the better get your friends on board I may or may not upload for a little while I've got a couple of video ideas that aren't related to cheaters but we'll see if I get around to those to be honest my main ambition in life was never to be a YouTuber I've got other plans bigger plans in life but that's for the future for now I'll settle for ending the bot crisis stay tuned we're gonna make history thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: megascatterbomb

Views: 662,125

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Id: EPsWjdkyoPo

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023