Thinking about competitive integrity
Essays on trust, evidence, and the technology behind verified play.
Where cheats hide now
Anti-cheat runs at the deepest level of your PC. So how is anyone still cheating? Because the newest cheats aren't on your PC at all. Here is the plain-words map, and what it costs the honest player.
The best cheats have climbed out of reach of the software built to catch them. They moved from the game's memory, to a second piece of hardware, to a whole separate computer that just watches your screen. Once you can see that ladder, you understand why anti-cheat stopped looking for cheats and started judging your play, and why that lands hardest on the people who never cheated.
A signature is a receipt, not a verdict
Our process collector is unsigned. Here is why that is not the contradiction it looks like, and how to check us anyway.
Every dangerous driver in our Field Guide has one thing in common. They are all signed. The certificate did not make them safe. So when we shipped our own collector, we had to decide what we actually wanted you to trust. We did not buy the checkmark. Here is what we did instead.
Present Is Not Proof
We built a check that can spot genuinely dangerous things on a PC. The first thing it taught us was when not to raise the alarm.
A vulnerable driver showed up on one of our own machines, from a tool millions of gamers run. The easy move was a red flag. We didn't make it. Here is why, and what it means if you have ever been good enough to get accused.
272%
AI-driven cheats tripled this season. The industry is building bigger walls. We think that's the wrong question.
AI-based cheat detections surged 272% in a single competitive season. The detect-and-ban model is breaking. The question isn't how to detect better. It's what trust looks like when detection alone isn't enough.