AI cheats: Why you didn’t notice your teammate was cheating

For the past few years, cheats have evolved rapidly. First came memory reading aimbots, then colorbots, and now AI aim assist. Cheats have escaped the host PC. How does it affect the players and anti-cheats?

vike256

That's me, or the handle that I use online. I've been in the video game hacking scene on and off for what seems like forever. I don't know the exact point when I stumbled upon it, but I was making my first cheats on my Android phone when I was 12.

I didn't have a PC at the time, so I sat on my bed with a rooted phone in my hands that had GameGuardian installed. I remember writing a trainer with Lua for a game called Growtopia. I've since gotten a PC and programmed a few more cheats. Most notably Unibot, an open-source colorbot. [1]

Image of Unibot debug screen while detecting an enemy. Green box is the detection area. Red box is the target. Read more

Colorbots, why they work... or don’t

Colorbots read the enemy positions from the screen. They scan every pixel and filter based on enemy colors. It works for games that have colored enemy highlights or outlines.

Their flaw is that they don't work in every game, and they can merge multiple enemies into a single target if they are too close together. This can lock the cheater’s aim between enemies, unable to shoot either.

Image of someone having issues with multiple enemies merging into a single target. The user seems to be using Unibot. The post

Colorbots became popular as the first cheats to achieve aimbot without memory reading. Colorbots are quite hard to detect. You can essentially just plug in a capture card to your PC and pass the images to another PC that the cheat runs on.

The aimbot input can be sent along with your normal mouse input through an Arduino or a KMBox. Just plug the KMBox to your PC and connect both the cheat PC and your mouse to it.

Diagram of how a 2PC cheat could function. This would work for both AI and colorbot cheats.

AI cheats are essentially advanced colorbots

Colorbots don't work on all games, because not all games have distinct enemy colors. This is where AI comes in. Developers train AI models to detect enemies, then distribute these models to users. This makes a single cheat work on every game imaginable.

So, the host PC only has a capture card and a "mouse" plugged into it, and the second PC runs the cheat. The anti-cheat has no idea, and...

You have no idea

You probably won’t notice the cheat while spectating, because cheat developers are intentionally nerfing their cheats to evade detection. Anti-cheats have made cheats more expensive, time-consuming, and less effective.

Today's cheats cost more but do less. Now a typical cheater needs an extra PC, external hardware, and $5-500 monthly payments just to bypass a decent anti-cheat.

After all that, they are still at a risk of getting banned. Cheaters must reflash their BIOS, wipe their PCs, reinstall Windows, and create a new account to play again. That's not something I'd like to do once a few weeks.

Cats seems to be the most helpful bunch among cheater forums.

So you being unable to spot a slight aim assist while spectating is normal. Of course you'll notice the aim assist if the player is insanely bad and has the aimbot configured wrong, but that's just plain stupidity being witnessed.

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