Ningin’s Anti-Cheat Filter

Hoc Poeng on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 10:00PM

It seems that ever since we started the DBSK Decathlon we’ve been attracting a lot of cheaters. Even in the recently concluded KPOP Battles: DBSK vs Big Bang, there were quite a few cheaters among you. The cheating has been so bad and so numerous that I started to wonder if I should be doing anymore MLG matches at all. Well fortunately a friend of mine that attends a very prestigious engineering college helped me come up with a unique application - the Ningin Anti-Cheat Filter - another tool that we’ve developed in a long list of them to help prevent cheating. How does it work?

Well, it’s really quite complicated. It also isn’t in Ningin’s best interest to tell you how it works just like it’s not in Google’s best interest to tell you how their search algorithm works. It would be like telling cheaters exactly how I’m stopping them so they can find a way to get around it.

How does it affect MLG matches? At the end of every MLG match, we’re going to run the filter against all the scores submitted. It will then show me all the high scores for the match and next to the scores it will show me a number that we call the cheat index. The cheat index is basically the probability that this score is fraudulent. If the cheat index is too high then I’m going to throw your score out and not count it for the match. If I find that I’m throwing too many of your scores out, I could block you from playing in future MLG matches, reset your EXP, suspend your account or just ban you from Ningin.

How accurate is this filter? Well, we ran the script against all the known cheaters that we’ve caught manually and it’s been 100% right. And it has also identified other cheaters that we haven’t caught. It’s kinda crazy how many cheaters we haven’t caught…

From now on, when you guys participate in MLG matches, you will agree to have your scores tested against the cheat filter. If the cheat filter says you cheated, then your scores get thrown out - no arguments. This is pretty much the same as when I said I can throw out your scores at my discretion. But now I have an automated script that can process a lot more scores than I manually can on my own.

This does not mean I’m bringing back Decathlons or prizes in MLG matches. In fact, I’m going the opposite way. You no longer get EXP points for participating in MLG matches or for even playing games. That’s because in addition to finding people who cheat in games, I found people who abuse game bugs to cheat in EXP. You might notice that there are people usually in the top 10 every week that are no longer there anymore. Well it’s because they cheated their way up there.

We’re also getting rid of Record Holders and Rank Gamers. Those just don’t mean anything anymore. At one point nearly half of the records were fraudulent - mostly from a couple of users. So that was another way to abuse EXP as Record Holders received a ton of EXP points.

All these changes may seem drastic, but I kinda expected this stuff would happen eventually. There’s just a lot of people who, for whatever reason, does not know how to or just don’t want to play fairly and as a consequence can never win anything from Ningin again. Oh well, their loss.

At the same time, we’ll continually find ways to reward good users.

Categories :