Players now have a new teammate dedicated to cheat detection on Counter-Strike.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of Valve’s most popular games, with over one million multiplayer matches being played every single day. But, with that player base, not all players are playing fair, ruining the experience for other players. In addition to that, there’s a wide range of cheats available to use over the internet. Therefore, CSGO requires major cheat detection, being its latest addition an artificial intelligence program.
Valve confirmed this in a post on Reddit. The company said it wants to take a machine-learning approach to detect cheaters in its hugely popular competitive shooter following a question about “spinbots” and why they aren’t auto-detected and kicked off the server.
Spinbots, or spinhacks as they are also called, allow a player to automatically spin around quickly during play effectively giving them 360 degree vision. Combined with an aimbot, it becomes a highly effective way of killing anyone who happens to enter the players much-enhanced field of view.
According to Valve, automatically detecting such activity would just lead to “an arms race with cheat developers” who would find the limits of the detection and work around them. You also hit the issue of “is that a cheat or a very good player?” The other big problem is that running auto detection takes a lot of processing power, and ultimately is unworkable for a million+ CSGO matches every day, so an alternative method is required.
Using machine learning, the automated system trains continuously and over time can figure out the difference between a cheat and a highly-skilled player. An early version of this AI is already up and running with the results being “promising.” Valve is now “going to continue this work and expand the system over time.”
If the machine learning system continues to improve itself, Counter-Strike players should eventually have an AI working with them to weed out the cheats and remove the frustration of spinbots and aimbots from play automatically.
