vdrift server

[thelusiv]

In that post you cover several good ideas for detecting cheating in championships, this reflects alot my line of thinking but clearly you've thought it out a little further than I have...


edit: reading back over the checkdata portion of the post you linked, it seems like this would work. One issue I see is that we already have a replay system that records user inputs and plays it back to produce the same result. It isn't perfect, and occasionally it seems like the car strays off its originally recorded path, only to "jump" back into its path when the next frame of replay data is read. This is only noticable sometimes, but would probably be flagged as a deviation by the algorithm you described and could lead to false positives in cheater detection.

It's probably caused by low sample rate on the replay data, and though this can be raised it may be infeasible to collect real-time input data from the user and send it across the network real-time as well. It might be better to record it locally in high detail, and then upload it at the end of the race.

Another possible method would be to collect input data at a lower sample rate, and mark cheaters that have a high standard of deviation between the positions they send during the game and the positions determined through the replay check procedure. So perhaps allow up to 2% deviation but not more. Either way, it's likely some cheaters may still exist in the margin, or legitimate users will be frustrated by being marked as cheaters.

An even further idea to augment all this would be to allow players to establish a reputation somehow, whereupon we could assume that they will not cheat. There could be a minor mandatory fee for official tournaments, which would certainly weed out most of the riff-raff - or at least drive them more towards unofficial servers. Also, there could be a simple reputation score for users based on how many races they've participated in. Rewards could be given to those with good reputation. Perhaps known good players would get to start in the first half of the positions in a race while unknowns must start at the back of the pack.