The Cheater Situation in Dead By Daylight

Preface

I'm not a BHVR employee. I dont know what happens behind their closed doors. This thread is merely an outside observation with some very basic logical chains. Please be respectful to the developers.

HACKERFEST

Image Credit: CoconutRTS

Let's quickly go through what hackers can do in the now 6 year old videogame made by Behavior Interactive a company with over 900 employees.

They can:

• Bring infinite amounts of perks from either side on their character.
• Bring cheated offerings from either sides or offerings that are unobtainable on their brand new 2022 accounts.
• Teleport around the map and fly.
• Speedhack.
• Easily manipulate their "healthstate",become hooked anywhere, instantly heal or escape.
• Instantly regress any gen on the map and do any action.
• Become a Killer character on demand even while playing Survivor.
• Quite literally do anything to the game, including abusing BHVR's very poorly made back-end architecture to literally spawn bots on demand that stream snipe popular creators and target them.

Great. Just jolly.

How Is This Allowed,Again?

Now in the most recent Q&A by the devs, they've said that they don't announce any changes because anticheat is an arms race against cheaters and they prefer to just silently work against them without any indication. This is only a half-truth.

While many players are quick to blame Easy Anti Cheat to be bad and garbage and easily allow cheaters to do anything, the story is not quite so simple.

To explain the critical flaw in Dead By Daylight that's been unadressed since release, let's turn to another infamous game in regards to cheaters. Counter Strike: Global Offensive & it's infamously "bad" anticheat VAC.

Now, can we remember what kind of cheaters are there in that, horribly cheater infested game?

Wallhackers, Aimbots & Lagswitchers. That's it. How come? Is VAC somehow incredibly good at stopping all the other types of cheats? No.

The reason nobody can speedhack in that game or teleport around the map or spawn in 600 weapons or kill all players instantly is, simply competent netcode. That's it.

DON'T TRUST THE CLIENT.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons that have supposedly been ignored by Behavior Interactive while updating their game to "Dedicated Servers" was the "Don't Trust The Client" mantra.

While you're designing how your multiplayer game will function you need to inherently assume that the client cannot be trusted and needs to be kept in check. So instead of the client telling the server "Hey I'm now suddenly on Jupiter in 1ms" and the server sending that info to all other players, the client tells the server "I've pressed these inputs and I am trying to move in this direction or do this action" to which the server responds with "Ok, gotcha" or "Eh, no bud, you can't do that" whenever the player tries to phase through a wall.

This is precisely how any other multiplayer game makes such insane cheating as what is present in Dead By Daylight impossible and only leaves hackers to see loaded models through walls and use computer assisted movement of their characters and cameras.

So why did Behavior, not do this then?

Dedicated Peer To Peer Servers.

Originally when Dead By Daylight came out, it was a small party game which used peer-to-peer. The Killer essentially hosted the server and any kind of attempts at security were very fruitless, since you pretty much allowed the clients to run the whole game and decide what happens. It's completely OK that they did not address the major server flaws described above at that time, as that's pretty much impossible with peer-to-peer connections.

HOWEVER. Since then Behavior Interactive put their big gamer pants on and released so-called DEDICATED SERVERS. However, since then they have neglected completely to change their game's netcode to maybe, just maybe, not assume the client telling the server that they have infinite perks and are now on the top of shack, hooked and screaming, while damaging all gens on the map is perhaps, hacking?

This is the core issue. Behavior needs to introduce ACTUAL DEDICATED SERVERS to this game. Not the ping-stabilizing, hit-rejecting mess that is the nightmare fuel for literally anyone I know who has spent an hour looking into networking. Please spread this information and hold Behavior accountable for trying to frame the hacker problem in Dead By Daylight as an industry issue and not a Behavior issue. It's their fault, they just seem to not want to spend the resources on it.

Once more, please do be respectful to the developers. This is highly likely some kind of high-up management and corporation decision, not one made by them.