Add a Watch Dog like Hypixel.

No, Watchdog and BAC work quite differently.

 

Both anticheats look at how players act and they look at their specific actions, picking up a ton of information on players and saving it if they think it's fishy. In order to determine if this information is fishy or not is done differently. BAC has a set of criteria that this information needs to meet in order for it to think a player is hacking, whereas Watchdog uses a deep learning algorithm to teach itself what is fishy or not.

We hard-coded BAC's knowledge of what hacking is. However, Watchdog's deep learning algorithm analyses the information picked up on legit players and hackers, and uses this information to teach itself what hacking is.

The main difference is this - BAC can pick up blatant hackers very quickly (most of the time, faster than players are able to report) and bans them 10 seconds after it's sure they're hacking (the 10 seconds are given for mods to cancel the autoban so we can watch and give them a longer ban). However, when it comes to hackers that aren't blatant, it's simply not able to detect it. Also, we need a coder to change it in order to fix bypasses. For example, we have players who are coding clients specifically to bypass BAC, and we'd need a developer to fix it.

Watchdog, however, can pick up all sorts of hacks. It can differentiate between someone who is using regedit and someone who is legit. However, it takes Watchdog a very long time to do this (a good few months). Certain hacks, such as fly, get banned almost immediately. Some outdated clients will be banned very quickly as well. However, some hacks (such as reach, killaura and anti knockback) can take a few hours for Watchdog to pick it up. This is also combined by the fact that Watchdog works in "ban waves" - they ban players a few hours after Watchdog thinks they hack, so the player doesn't know what hack they were using. This is only for certain hacks.

An advantage of Watchdog's deep learning algorithm is that it can automatically adjust itself to detect clients designed to bypass it. For example, if Hypixel had players specifically designing clients to bypass Watchdog, eventually the anticheat will learn how to detect it.

The main issue with Watchdog is that deep learning algorithms require a very large dataset to work properly. It needs to pick up on a lot of information, meaning it's expensive to afford the storage to save all of this, and will cause the server to lag. Our servers wouldn't be able to handle having Watchdog on it. Also, Hypixel just doesn't get enough players to get a large enough dataset, which is why it takes so long for it to pick up on hacks like killaura or autosoup, which BAC can do almost immediately (yes, Hypixel used to have a soup gamemode).

If Hypixel doesn't get enough players to have an anticheat which utilises deep learning, Brawl certainly doesn't (unless we made it very effective, but we're not finding someone who can do that with the wages we're paying).

Watchdog arguably is better for Hypixel, but it certainly wouldn't work on Brawl.

 

The only thing we're currently working on regarding anticheats is getting one implemented into War. For the time being, I don't think any other work will happen on our anticheat.