Hiltscher: "we got a huge advantage"

HLTV.org sat down with Vice President of Gaming Communities at Turtle Entertainment GmbH David Hiltscher and questioned him on the new ESL Wire Anti-Cheat tool, where he replies to several interesting matters.

HLTV.org had last month reported about the Electronic Sports League being in the process of unveiling a new anti-cheat tool meant to replace Aequitas. The project was said to cost over the staggering price of €500,000.

Today was the grand date - the release of the new client. It had taken a developer team of 13 to finish it, and the organization had even brought in an anti-virus developer with over 10 years of experience within the field to help its progress.

In this exclusive interview with HLTV.org, Hiltscher talks about how the new anti-cheat client operates, how the planned successor for Aequitas failed, how it is coordinated with ESL Wire and much, much more.

Feel free to introduce yourself to the audience.

Hi, my name is David Hiltscher. I was one of the founders of readmore.de back in the day. For 4 years now, I've been working for Turtle Entertainment and currently hold the position of VP Gaming Communities. As such, I'm responsible for the development of our web and desktop software (including anti-cheat) and community management on the German and European ESL websites.

The ESL Wire Anti-Cheat, when compared to Aequitas, was said to be based on completely new technology. What exactly does this entail?

The core of ESL Wire Anti-Cheat operates on the ring 0 level. That means it operates as a system driver with full access to everything that is happening on the operating system. That makes it a lot easier to detect cheats that are also running on the ring 0 level.

With the new tool being an actual computer driver, what exactly does this mean, and how will it prevent the use of cheats?

We will not prevent cheating directly. Our approach is to detect cheating, which is a lot easier to do. Our Anti-Cheat tool has access to everything happening in the computer's memory, so it's just a question of detecting patterns or manipulations. That may sound easy, but that's the hard part and also the one that needs constant attention over time as cheats evolve.

What made the Electronic Sports League start developing the ESL Wire Anti-Cheat when Aequitas 2 was already underway?

The development of Aequitas 2 entailed a lot of research. One of the results of the research was that our approach of having an Anti-Cheat tool solely as a normal program running on ring 3 level is not sufficient for the more sophisticated cheats that are already out there. It's quite common to already start planning the next generation of a program when you're still developing it. Additionally, the development of Aequitas 2 stalled in the first half of the year. The risk of having no Anti-Cheat tool at all caused us to hurry our next gen tool into actual development.

Why did the ESL Wire Anti-Cheat progress better and faster than what Aequitas 2 did?

We tried out a lot of different things with Aequitas 2. That helped us define more clearly what we wanted from Wire Anti-Cheat. Also we brought on external help. Programmers from other computer security software projects bring a lot of experience to the table, and that really helped us to stay on schedule with Wire Anti-Cheat.

Aequitas has received much criticism for causing computers to slow down and several other issues. Was this something you were able to fix in the planned successor, or was it still an issue?

At the state where we abandoned Aequitas 2, it seemed to have solved a lot of performance issues. But unfortunately the program was in too rough a state overall, while Wire Anti-Cheat was already well polished when it entered its beta phase. We didn't reach the phase of a broad open beta test for Aequitas 2, so there's no way to tell how it would have really turned out 

Many are wondering whether the ESL Wire Anti-Cheat will have a negative effect on their computers, performance wise, as many experienced with Aequitas. What have your tests concluded on this matter?

Wire Anti-Cheat is fully optimized for performance. So if your PC has at least halfway modern components like CPU etc., is cleaned up (no viruses etc.) and runs on an up-to-date OS (Windows XP SP3) or above, you shouldn't notice any influence on gameplay. The problem is, that there are still people playing CS on 10 year old PCs or using strongly modified and illegal Windows versions. We can't guarantee that it will run smoothly on these kinds of systems, but that basically goes for all kinds of software. You just can't fully support these systems any more in the year 2010.

Our testers have been very satisfied, with only a very small percentage encountering any problems at all. And those problems mostly stemmed from running too much software at once or from being infected with viruses.

How will the new program be integrated with the already existing software ESL Wire?

The charm of it all is, that Wire Anti-Cheat is just a component of ESL Wire that is started automatically, when you start an anti-cheat protected match. That comes in handy when you want to play PCWs through our gather system. You just join up, click the launch game button on our website, and ESL Wire will automatically start the game, connect you to the server and protect your game. We also have an ingame overlay similar to steam but with more functionality, that you can access during games.

Since the latest Beta that now supports the Gather system, I've finally started playing Counter-Strike again after three years. The whole game experience became so much easier and everyone is now real friendly, because they know that the game is cheat protected. So no one really has any reason any more to start a flame war in-game. :)

It was said that a developer with over 10 years of experience within the anti-virus scene had been brought in to help develop the new anti-cheat tool. How was this person beneficial to the project?

Anti-cheat software is usually programmed by community people because of their direct experience with the games. We took a different approach and analysed the cheating problems from an abstract perspective. We quickly found out that cheats work in a very similar fashion to viruses and other malicious software. It was just the logical step to go looking for people that have already worked on general IT security and use their valuable experience to solve our very specific problem. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel. We took what was already there and adapted it to the specific needs of eSports.

During the development of Aequitas 2, it was expected that it would be good for 6-12 months. How long do you expect the new anti-cheat tool to stick around without being exposed?

I think it won't be too hard for experienced cheat programmers to find out what it is that Wire Anti-Cheat does exactly. The hard part will be getting around it. Keep in mind, that cheat programmers are also mostly community people with little to no formalized programming education so I think we have a huge advantage right now. And we're already planning out the next steps to counter the moves that we expect cheat programmers to make.

The stage is all yours for any last words, David!

Thanks for the interview! I'd like to point out one more thing: ESL Wire Anti-Cheat now fully supports the ESL Gather system. Together with Wire, it's very easy to use and I believe we now have a big advantage over the regular PCW searches on IRC since ESL is cheat-protected and not anonymous. At the moment, it's not really being used by fixed teams although we do have a specific option for that. So hopefully people will try this feature out, and maybe even at one point prefer it to IRC.

You can head over to ESL's official website in order to download the new anti-cheat client, as well as read up on additional information. Do so by clicking here.