Tackling Cheating In Gaming

[Music] thank you for joining me today i'm andrew hogan the cmo and co-founder of and talker i'm going to be talking about tackling cheating and gaming and whilst it might not surprise you that i'm going to be telling you how important it is that we do tackle the problem of cheating um it may surprise you that i'm going to tell you the way to do this is by looking at how we find cheats that is the key to it so we set up and talk about just over a year ago um with a kind of a promise of making gaming safer and fairer and this is supported by three key objectives first of these was to find and stop more cheats the second to save time and money doing so and the third to protect the player experience now i'm sure those those objectives those aims will be talked about a lot over the over the you know the period of this of this summit and yeah i think that's obviously a very

good thing and you know you think these are pretty unarguable but the one thing that's surprised us a little bit since we launched in talker was that this still seems to be or maybe not still since but there isn't there's does seem to be now a bit almost a sense of resignation about cheating amongst some people in the industry almost a feeling that it's just a cost of doing business and there's this is not there's just not much we can do about it so you can imagine how pleased we were to see um cheating featured in the fair play alliance framework alongside issues like dangerous speech extremism aggravation and harassment because it needs to be because that is exactly what it is a disruptive behavior in gaming now the other thing that we were pleased to see was how the definition of cheating news was broader than it sometimes is so it's defined as exploiting the rules of the game to gain an advantage or disrupt play this includes individual cheating and leveraging ai to cheat at scale and

then the examples given included all the usual ones like bots you know the aimbots will hacks and gps bots but also talked about manual and automated farming leveling boosting net code loot and item finders and data scraping and i think this is really important because it's no good just looking at a little you know one particular niche um in this sort of if you're like in the business of cheating the whole the whole piece needs to be looked at because it's also very much linked we ran a poll um just over a year ago i'd say amongst 2 000 gamers and we asked them what would make you stop playing a video game first and we had various rounds um and the finals between these four slow loading speed too many cheats toxicity amongst players and a lack of player support now you can see that toxicity came out as the biggest driver of people you know putting their putting that putting their

mouse down and leaving again but cheating was pretty close behind it and both of these were way ahead um of slow loading speed and lack of player support which were the third and fourth biggest reasons so that really does i think demonstrate how big an issue cheating is it's also worth just highlighting it that the 2000 players that we talked to they were not just pc players these we didn't we went into this quite agnostic actually and you know they were people who played all games on any sort of on all sorts of consoles so they were there were pc gamers there there were console gamers and there were mobile gamers um and i think that's really important because you know cheating just as gaming is of all just as gaming evolves so does cheating um and some and that sometimes it kind of evolves quicker as well so i guess that you know in a way the first question this this this throws up if you like is well how bad is it

so at first glance and if you just look go by some of the headlines you know we all have seen in the game in the games press and things you know it might not be so bad the industry might be getting a hold of it quite nicely quite well i should say activision have announced announced back in february that war zone banned 60 000 cheaters in one massive wave and actually that's been followed up recently with an announcement from raven software who talks about half a million um accounts being banned since the launch of warzone no that's accounts and not players and that's quite important because obviously cheats will use multiple accounts so you'll always have more accounts banned than you all players um but still you know absolutely um great great to see and then of course a couple of months later there was the bus in kunchen china um which it didn't just wasn't just featured in the gaming press i mean it was it was it was all over the main it was all over the mainstream news um and was you know this gang was

reputedly i think responsible for something like 75 million dollars worth of cheats being sold um caught in a massive police sting and you know in that in all the reporting of it they featured this shot of the kind of ill-gotten games um in this case luxury cars that the gang had um managed to acquire um which is which obviously it's great it makes it a great news story but um interestingly what it reminded me of um is actually my favorite tv program which was the wire it's the wire now for those of you who are also fans who have seen the wire you'll recognize bunk and mcnulty there um two of the main protagonists in the in the show um and bunker mcnulty would spend loads of time pushing back against their seniors and um you know the politicians who would constantly be asking for loads of low-level bus to take place to give them their drugs on the table photo opportunities

and um bunker mcnulty would always kind of push back against this and try and convince them that there's no point doing that because it just gives the the gangs higher up the chance to kind of get away if you like and you know they knew that all these all these photo opportunities and drugs on the table busts they didn't really add up too much because there would still be loads of you know drug trafficking going on there would still be lots of dealers out there and you know it's not a perfect analogy but it did remind me when i saw that when i saw the clinician bus it did sort of remind me of it because um you know just as there are loads of dealers left out there there are loads of cheats and in particular loads of cheat sellers out there as any um you know as any gamer will tell you at the moment we're monitoring um over 150 different cheat sellers and you know that's obviously a lot but you know we are under no illusion that um that's all of them we i i would expect that number to double over the next six months or so there are so many

more cheat sellers out there than people realize um and you know and that for me is just a great you know proof point if you like of the extent of cheating go the extent of cheating that's going on out there i think it's also worth noting that that is being driven by the fact that cheating is no longer pc only um and that it's a it's across the board now and that you know you'll find cheats on pretty much um any game you come across even else is at it um and whilst it's you know it's sort of easy to smile at the thought of a frozen there's something as innocent as frozen being cheated being pirated you know this actually um raises a serious problem because as bad as cheating is when it's affecting the player experience in a sort of in a big multiplayer um and that is terrible in the long term will um damage your game's credibility and it's kind of you know success

um this sort of cheating directly attacks the business model that many developers rely on i.e in-app purchases and ad revenue now like you know we might not we may not like ads in our games and stuff but developers you know some developers will be relying on that and these um these sites which are offering you know modified versions of the games with with unlimited unlimited gems or ad blocking etc etc are directly basically directly attacking attacking that business model so it's a really serious um issue and um what i wanted to do now is just talk about um some of the reasons why you know effectively we've got to this place um you know how have we let it get so bad so the first one of those reasons um is around it's the kind of obvious place to start i guess is the rise of online gaming in particular the free to play

games there's no doubt that that has coincided with a rise in cheating and has driven a rise in cheating but as well as the sort of if you like just the sort of hard numbers i think what's particularly damaging about this is that this cheating often takes place in games like battle royale games where if someone is cheating they're seen to be cheated by loads of players in that game um who will obviously then go and talk about it and complain about it on social media and stuff you know they're not just cheating one other person they're cheating a group of people and this kind of magnifies the problem this just sort of makes the problem seem even bigger than it even is um and you know and the real sort of um i think the real problem with that is that this encourages a kind of attitude of if you can't beat them join them you know if you see everyone around you cheating you you know lots of people will eventually just say you know what this is unfair i want to frankly level things up i want to have the same

advantages that they have this is exactly what happened with cheating in traditional sports and it's without a doubt it's happening in this sort of it's particularly in this kind of area of gaming and you know that's a that's a real that's a real issue it's also to an extent i think reflected by um some attitudes in the business itself where you do come across a bit of a sea no evil here no evil sweet no evil head in the sand kind of stance to cheating in that it's just kind of it's just one of those things that's just it's going to always be there just best left alone and actually i think this is brought to life by if you look at the media coverage given to cheating in comparison to the media coverage given to i don't know sort of merge m a's and investment and um sponsorships which get tons and tons of coverage you can't every day there's a new event every day there's a new um multi-million investment in a developer every day there's a brand that's kind of

now sponsoring um an esports team or an esports event but actually stories about cheating are pretty rare actually you know apart from the kind of recent sort of apart from actually part of those two stories i've kind of featured there's not been much there isn't much and i think in a way it's great that those positive stories get so much coverage but we need to be we need to be realistic and honest um because if we don't get a grip on cheating those positive stories will dry up because sponsors particularly non-endemic sponsors like coke and png people they ain't gonna want to be associating their brands which with you know sports or you know gaming um events which are inundated with cheating it's just not good for them it's become it becomes toxic and so it really does you know we we need to sort of um you know be mindful of this the third reason that cheating is kind of as established as it is now i think it comes down to

the third parties um the third parties which in effect unknowingly may be but support the cheating ecosystem you know the cheating ecosystem needs payment functionality it needs to be able to market it needs security and because you know cheating sites are like any other digital sorry any other online retailer they need trust so they go to the big brands for it because they want to have a big paypal logo on their site because it's going to make someone feel that much more comfortable inputting their credit card details when they're buying a cheater when they're subscribing to a chief service likewise you know being seen to be advertised on youtube makes them almost seem proper um and then you have it making the site seem as secure and stuff particularly the rumors that you get around some cheat sites it's it's it's ironic but it's kind of it's it's it's obviously also frustrating when you see these brands on their sites they don't they you know i'm sure most of them that they're unaware of it but the cheat sites are making the

most out of those those business relationships now the good news is this actually does offer an opportunity i think um well i was coming to talk about a bit later but another an opportunity for how we can potentially disrupt the cheesy or one way we can potentially disrupt the cheating ecosystem next is the i suppose the history of cheating um and specifically the history of um attitudes towards cheating because cheating didn't always seem so bad it wasn't always frowned upon um it was kind of seen as a as a genuinely integral part of gaming you know when when you really when you watch these documentaries about the history of gaming and you see people talking about their first arcade games i mean inevitably they'll start how they used to hack them um to make them actually ironically have to make them harder um because those arcade games are pretty simple and but quite if you pay if you spend enough if you put enough money into it and played it enough you'd eventually beat it um so

hackers would work out how to make it more difficult and then obviously also pro you know and developers also use cheating for play testing and things um and this picture brings to life hackers are sort of heroes and kids films um now this is obviously before um hacking and cheating became a multi-million dollar industry um occasionally with links to crime but it does bring to life how things have changed or have they because actually there is still what i call sort of mixed opinions around um how bad cheating is and how we should um if you like react to it um i'm going to show you some uh posts from reddit um that we saw which were about a month or so after the the bust in china that we just looked at and it had these people talking about it um and i'll just read these out to you because it's kind of it does bring to life the fact that there's different opinions so firstly i can't believe that chiefs and hacks

for games are now criminal offenses what is this world coming to it is the end times like op said if you read the article it's not the cheaters getting arrested it's the organization making tens of millions selling cheats and hacks to subscribers it's always about money when players are paying for hacks instead of loot boxes that's when big business brings out the dogs just because they're making millions doesn't mean they deserve jail time cheating in a video game doesn't actually hurt anyone calling them a gang is pretty ridiculous people should be able to modify any software that runs on their computer by default i don't think you read the article they weren't just cheating they were selling cheats on a subscription basis for multiplayer games so should people be able to modify that software if the intent of the software is to be played with other people using the same software creating an equal playing ground what if they compete and win money over people with unmodified copies we're talking about actual real jail for cheating at video games that's not

really in line with the offense in my opinion it's another case of passing responsibility off to the government now a couple of things one i promise you we didn't write those um posts in defense of the um bust but also i think what this kind of you know was if neither side's probably a 100 right but i think what it shows undeniably is that there are still different opinions about cheats amongst you know i would assume um honest players now the final reason the final factor i think behind um you know the sort of where we are we're cheating at the moment is the is this is frankly the speed um of uh the cheat industry um this you know the the how quick they are to market if you like what this graph shows is um the noise around cheating in in the blue line cheap communities themselves so cheap forums and things and on the red line um

regular player communities and it shows the noise as i said it shows the noise around cheating um after a period you know when when this game suddenly became massively popular last summer from pretty much from nowhere and you can see that so we you see the blue line in week four there suddenly starts to rise as cheap communities clock onto this game start cheating it start sharing sheets start selling them only takes two weeks for that to start flowing through to the player communities who start complaining about the cheating on the game and then you can see for the next few weeks how those lines correspond pretty closely there's a pretty close correlation there until um the complaints about cheating just go off the scale um as people just kind of frankly just you know just ditch it um and by this stage it wasn't even just the player communities talking about cheating on the game it was all over the media as well um and it was a it was a well acknowledged problem that this game had to sort us out and eventually they did um and you can you know you can still

see the lines coming down now as well as showing i think a strong correlation between you know what happens in the teaching communities having a knock-on effect in player communities what this also shows is that how it shows how developers can get caught out and even established developers because this was an established developer but they didn't have anti-cheats set up for this game or proper anti-cheat processes and strategies and the results are pretty clear to see now what those factors um combine to do here's what we call is create what we call the um anti-kid game of whack-a-mole where you know anti-cheat teams are kind of constantly trying to they're currently running around trying to get to the next cheat knocking on the head reverse engineering and then they're off to another one not knowing where the next one is going to come out and it's amazing because we've spoken to lots of people in the industry and this analogy has come up so many times we

can't even claim it's original so many people in the business refer to dealing with cheating as like a game of whack-a-mole and that's why we need to do things differently if we're going to get a hold of cheating and tackle cheating properly now i was going to say some of you may remember this but probably not it was quite a long time ago but i think some of you will recognize this this is um an athlete called dick fosbury competing at the 68 mexico olympics in the high jump obviously he won a gold medal the interesting thing is he won this gold medal by doing the high jump in a completely new way no one had done it this way before up until then people did a kind of scissors approach or they rolled over it kind of on their side but what dick fosby realized is by going backwards he could lift his legs higher and therefore clear a higher bar because the item's always about best pounding it's all about getting the legs over is the tricky piece

now interestingly at the time everyone thought what's what's this about this is kind of this is this is this is crazy but you know obviously now we all think they're gracing that he's a sensible one the interesting thing in this though is that he also was taking advantage of a technical development in the sport because up until then people basically the landing area was basically either sand or some old mattresses and it was only at the 68 olympics they brought in um you know like full the full foam landing mats that you know that you see now today so it's interesting as well as his kind of you know um his in his his sort of like the math that he used to work out he'd get his legs higher there was also a he was also taking advantage of a technical change to the sport and i think basically what this you know what this for me does is it says what's our foster flop how are we going to disrupt how we tackle cheating in gaming in the same way that he disrupted how you did high jump and for us the foster flop the

equivalent in gaming is how we find cheats where we look for them and how and where and how we find them um in order to get to them before they impact the game it's about going to where the cheats are going to where the cheats are marketed youtube in this case going to where they're discussed so you know whether that's telegram twitter reddit discord and of course going to where they're sold um you know whether it's i want cheats no please no bottom right the visa logo though which is you know not a plant that is that's genuine but actually i think what's interesting with this site is look how professional it's looking and that does not look like a dodgy site game prawn another one omega cheats and private sheets and these are just four these are four sites out of those

that 150 um i mentioned to you earlier um so you know really just not even the tip of not even the tip of the iceberg but you can already see by going to where they're sold where they're discussed and where they're uh marketed you can imagine that's going to be a lot of data coming in and you know i mentioned the 150 sites that we're monitoring we've also um as you know in amongst that we reckon at the moment we are somewhere north of 25 000 different cheat products that we found again we know that that number's definitely going to get larger but it gives you an idea of how much data there is out there um around the whole you know the whole cheating space now the question is how what can you do with that how do you manage to find how do you control how do

you pull that data in in a useful way and that's why we've created in talker and we've specifically um why we've created a tech stack which is made up of custom uh collectors and crawlers to go out there and effectively monitor the dark web the web and social media 24 7 looking at places like you know discord reddit telegram all the cheap sites youtube and indeed the dark web as well and take all that data and ingest all that data and then tidy it categorize it by community and measure and evaluate it to kind of to prioritize the re prioritize by risk for different teams whether that's legal game security or player support because all those are what we see is the three key

to the three teams that are gonna um most you know most benefit from this sort of data but so those teams can take affirmative action quicker than they can today so if you're a legal team you can do a takedown much quicker so if your game security team you can start reverse engineering against achievement much much quicker and then if your player support you can you know you can proactively go out to your community and highlight a risk for example so we have this text that which pulls in this massive amount rather pulls out of this massive amount of data relevant information to um so to start acting on cheese and taking action against cheese much much earlier so we're no longer waiting for the cheats to impact the game and we're no longer relying on effectively manual research which we know lots of the developers and indeed some of the anti-cheat firms um the the anti-cheap firms also currently rely on

and as you can see from that amount of data or the you know automating automated monitoring is the only way through that is if you like automated monitoring is our philosophy flop so let's just have a look at what that looks like in action i'll show you how it moves and it shows show i'll show it i'll show an animation in a second um but this is um this is effectively the heart of the entorka platform these are what we call boards and these present all the data that um any searches you set up find so what i mean by search is if you're if you're if you're using intalker you can set up various searches using our tag system so you can search on like you can search by game you know apex legends you can search by um type of site so you could just go for cheap vendors or you could you'd be looking you could be more interested in um you know reddit posts or youtube um films so you can do or you can always

search actually by cheat cheat type so by aimbots for example and you set up all these searches and that data is pulled in in real time and presented on a board like this and i'm going to quickly show you guys that animation it's a gif really i'm going to show you something which will show you someone using this and effectively what i'd like you to look for is how quickly you can go from effectively looking at first person shooter genre board to looking at a specific game to looking at a specific cheat and then actually being in a position to download and start taking action against that sheet

so you can see within just a few clicks we've gone from looking at all the latest cheats for sale cheats being spoken about across first person shooters to finding the latest aimbot available for cs go so you can see immediately how we're ingesting all that data and presenting it in a way that is usable now talking of usability you know we are firm believers that data is only valuable if it gets used you know too often everyone talks about having lots of data but if you're not using it it's all it's it's it's it's it's effectively meaningless which is why for us comprehension and shareability um are absolutely key for what we do and as a result of that we use a cluster analysis tool to make this data even easier to um to share with people within a business but

most importantly make it easier to see where the real threats are coming from um because obviously this is just looking at words can be can be quite hard to do that so what we've done is using this cluster analysis tool made it so that you can very quickly see what the biggest threats are um for any game that you potentially will be interested in again i'll show you a little film some do using our cluster analysis tool it's a very quick there you go

it's going to play it again if i stop it so that there you go now the other thing we wanted to be able to do is make sure our data can be integrated very quickly so we've included um through our apis you can set up alerts um so that any information that in talker pulls in can be integrated into any internal system just to make it that much quicker to be able to take action and then finally the final stage of the demo bit of this presentation i wanted to talk about our crawler because obviously this is all about the data that we're crawling now when we crawl aside we're pulling in something like 50 different data points um behind that site you know it can be it can be who's what sort of cyber security it has what payment providers the isp et cetera all the all the information about that site but it and very interesting and i mentioned this right at the beginning of

the presentation in terms of these third party providers because we're pulling in all this data we can see which third party providers are being used by these cheat sellers and what that enables us to do is as you can kind of see here we can see for example that providers for this site gameb2c.com included paypal school westminion etc etc um and what we're doing for one of our clients at the moment or rather what they're doing with the information we give them is they're putting pressure on these cheap on the likes of paypal and skrill basically saying you shouldn't be working with these guys as a result of that at the very least the the payment brands looks like in this case are no longer working with them but actually what's happening as well is these sites because we're disrupting them so much they close and even just in the last couple of months we've seen something like eight different sites completely closed um as a result of this pressure that we're putting on their third-party providers so you know a direct result of this of

using this data so what does this all mean well we think it helps publishers and developers monitor more more cheats more sellers more forums you know just more cheating in general um but importantly they can do this spending less um financially you know they no longer have to rely on throwing man hours um at you know at researching cheats out there um which let's be honest most developers able don't want to do and b can't afford to do it also means they can act faster and act smarter you know you've seen how quickly we can pull this data in and you can imagine that data can be very quickly used to take legal action to start reverse engineering um or you know managing from a player support point of view it also means acting smarter because we're looking at the whole cheating if you like ecosystem

and all the cheating that's out there we can see um when we actually evaluate the anti-cheat action you're taking we can sort of see how the level of cheating may be going down on a particular game versus um other games in that market so as opposed to a market effect thing making us think oh we're doing really well no we can kind of take that out and actually say no this actually cheat that you know strategy that you're doing is definitely working it also means as i mentioned earlier by sit with using the clusters you can prioritize your resource and action you can see where the biggest threats are coming from rather than effectively having to guess and finally this is me this means you've got happier players there was less complaining which means they're less pissed off and which in turn should mean your colleagues in particular players supporting community management are also happier but also because they've got they've got more tools now so that if players are complaining the players support people managing these problems will have much more data than they've had in the past and will know more about

what steps are being taken to combat it and i think that's really important because you know if that if we can help those people spend less time worrying about cheating or having to deal with people worrying about cheating that means they can spend more time dealing with these other issues which takes us back to the framework you know they can spend more time dealing with harassment dangerous speech anti-social actions and that can only be a good thing now i'm not for a minute gonna sit here and say we can eradicate cheesy there will always be people trying to make a buck from it there will always be people who want to get one over it's just it's kind of it's it's it's the way it's the way of the world but what we can do is we can reduce it and we can disrupt the cheating business model and the cheating ecosystem so there is less of it and we feel that is really important and that would itself be a big step and i think i want to finish with some words from the framework itself which i think brings to

life why it's important why we love gaming with the advent of reliable in-home networks and other technologies online multiplayer games have become an ingrained part of our social tapestry they enable us to make friends and escape the monotony and stresses of everyday life games bring people together through the power of shared experience we can fight alien invaders explore distant lands plant a garden or push each other in a shopping cart at their best games reflect the peak of humanity collaborating with one another across what might otherwise be vast divides anyone can belong in a game no matter where they are in the world or if they never leave their home thank you [Music]