Damn its actually scary that people will just create accounts with these AI and just destroy the competitive list. You would have hundreds or even more of champ level AI in all ranks. Not only it would make the experience for players worse, i just cannot see how companies could do anything against these bots if they alrady have trouble against cheaters.
The companies are just going to have to wait. For countless companies players have coding their own versions of stuff they should of added for years. Some players even said they would give it to the company for free but these selfish companies never accept it as long as people are buying there products. If this becomes an issue and rl devs cannot figure it out then a player should.
I'm definitely not an expert but I think it's way easier to train an ai to recognize wether a player is actually a human or if it's a bot than to actually train an ai to play rocket league. If even humans can easily differentiate between ai and player that shouldn't be too hard, it's basically impossible to train an ai to actually play like a human. So my guess is you have a programm/ai watching the games and filtering out players with suspicious/bot-like behaviour, then you can even look at the accounts match history etc. and automatically ban it if theres no doubt about it. I have no idea wether that is easy to implement tho.
As a member of RLBot, I am glad you highlighted the fact, that hacked Nexto is probably going to be the only bot to worry about for a long time and that means Psyonix has time to deal with it.
I'm actually surprised (and relieved) that the exploit users didn't try to implement the other ML bots, like Necto or Element, so as to throw them off the scent. Maybe they thought they'd still be too similar, so detection would still be easy?
Usually bots tend to have "an exploit", the more exposure this bot gets the quicker one might be found, and depending on how easily exploitable it is it can render it practically useless at a certain rank. (I don't know too much about nexto, but let's say it wouldn't challenge if a player is dribbling at a certain angle, then a player who is decent at dribbling can use that to consistently beat it and so on)
I think everyone is focused too much on the BOT instead of how the BOT got into ranked in the first place. This is the real issue. We've already seen hacks (demo chase) and people using non-purchased skins in ranked.
@@VilTheVillain the trick is demos. Bots don't have the awareness of a human player and/or aren't programmed for demo evasion, its a major flaw in nexto's game. most players that play slow and controlled are susceptible to a high speed drive challenge, you either demo them or make them jump/flick and you're already zooming on the ground so you'll recover much faster
pros Will not use nexto in pro play, I am gc2 and bots are very bad compared to high level players, and I’m speaking from experience. I had a bot in my gc2 2v2 game and he was not very good lol
One of the things I'd like to mention is that Nexto was designed to play as good as possible, not as human as possible. If you gathered enough replay files from players of different ranks, you could train bots that are designed to act and play like different ranks. If you really wanted, you could cherry pick the best plays from the best players and design a bot that can consistently play like a pro at the top of their game It's not going to happen soon, but it will happen eventually, and I'm not sure how much you can do about it Another option is combining the two techniques and actually training another network called the discriminator that is designed to tell the difference between bots and humans, which could be used to make it blend in even more
Actually a good idea. Imagine using traces of detecting bot-like behavior, and then randomly pairing the suspected account with a bot-detecting bot that is designed to analyze and perform actions that expose the account.
Just some notes I'm copy-pasting to address common misconceptions: Point #1: "Detecting AI with AI" - - - - - As someone who has had experience with developing neural networks and working with machine learning, people who say that training an AI to recognize bots, are wrong. Making an AI to detect bots is NOT easier than training the bots themselves. Generation always trumps detection. This is because of a phenomenon I like to call Detection Singularity: For example, lets pretend an AI has been made to detect AI-generated melodies. Eventually AI will have gotten good enough to generate great-sounding, catchy melodies. But, what happens if, by chance, the AI generates the melody to Mary Had a Little Lamb? It's a pretty simple, catchy melody, and an AI could easily generate it. But, should the detector believe it to be made by AI, or made by a human? When an AI melody generator has gotten good enough to generate human-made melodies by chance, this is called the Detection Singularity. It no longer becomes possible to tell whether a melody was made by AI, or by a human. Now, melodies are pretty simple, as compared to gameplay, which has many more variables, but there's only a finite level of complexity, and AI improves at tasks exponentially. At a certain level, even a game as complex as RL will reach the Detection Singularity, and it won't take long for many games to fall to this. Nexto was made with no funding, and did not even use heavy-duty cloud computing, which is becoming more and more affordable by the minute. Point #2: "The AI would become perfect, as they are designed to get good at the game, not to seem human. Making it seem human is much harder," - - - - - Some people may say that AI is more likely to become perfect at the task, rather than seeming human. But this can be circumvented easily with a GAN, (Generative Adversarial Network). Not only have the AI train to get better, but also have it train something that detects AI (discriminator, AKA detector). The detector will get better and better at detecting the bot, but the bot will get better and better at bypassing the detection. This means, that in order to detect the bot, Psyonix would need a detector better than the bot itself was trained on. This is virtually impossible. And if the detection singularity were to be reached, it would become literally impossible. *Anyone knowledgeable could train an AI like this with a bit of money to spend on cloud computing.* Point #3: "Preventing Cheats by Detecting False Inputs" - - - - - Some people also believe that making an anti-cheat, whether it be by detecting inputs/spoofing a game can detect these cheats. They cannot. The keyboard, controller, mouse, or whatever you use to send inputs legitimately, sends inputs in a very simple way. It is pitifully easy to send inputs virtually through the AI, in a way that perfectly recreates how these inputs are sent. It is as if a real controller were sending the inputs. Point #4: "Stop It The Same Way We've Stopped Cheating Before" - - - - - Some people believe the best way to tackle this is by detecting modified game files, etc. A pleasant reminder: The client-side is always insecure There is the server-side, and client-side. The reason Rocket League has been "unhackable" before, is that almost everything is dependent on the server, not the client. And the only data given and sent from the client, is necessary data of which not can be done with anyways. But AI only modifies the client-side, and the client-side is far more insecure. There is a reason cheaters always find a way to bypass anti-cheats in other games. There is a reason why piracy has always trumped anti-piracy. These are dependent on the client-side. The client-side requires positional, and velocity data, for the game of Rocket League to work. And these things are all that the AI requires to function. By sending inputs securely (which is not difficult at all), it is completely impossible to 'outdetect' cheats on the client-side. Not to mention, if the AI were to be trained using screen-data, rather than positional data, etc. No modifications on the client-side would ever be required. So no, having whitehat-hackers improve Psyonix's client-side anticheat would not fix this at all.
@@XerosOfficial I completely agree with all of this. I never said anything about detecting an AI or trying to stop what is going on, just simply pointed out that this isn't the end and that these AI's will get better and better to the point where they're completely undetectable through adversarial training. There is no good solution to detect cheaters like that in the long run because client side anti-cheat is almost entirely pointless, and more likely to be thwarted by cheaters than modders, and it isn't doing anything that is physically impossible
something interesting I notice about nexto from a programmer and game developer perspective and AI enjoyer is that nexto will often prioritise height over power especially when its being challenged, to make sure it gets past its opponent. we should take notes
Because the bot has zero reaction time and can save everything. Power for human players is preferable because we have a reaction time. Well, in reality, top human players go after power and height. You not watch Mawkzy flicks?
Sometimes I think its some low level bot, when they all have the same name and end with 1, 2 or 3 and they move in very linear way, like their programmed to moce in that way.
I think a good tweek to this experiment would be to just put them in 3 games and tell them that something will change from game to game. Then, have them guess AI or human at the end so that they weren't already hyperanalyzing each game for that specific thing.
A better methodology would've been to tell the players that they would play 3 games against grand champ players and to get their opinions after each game, which is more in line with a normal ranked experience. Although they would surely still suspect Nexto, it would've less obvious and closer to reality. But that's just a small detail, nice video man
Agreed, Sunless took the approach of “can I play like a bot” instead of taking a pool of ~1700mmr players, randomizing them, and mixing the bot into those matches to see if ppl could spot the difference. But then again, this was for a YT vid so it’s not that serious lol
I'm a GC2 in 2's and a C2/C3 in 1's. I'm now facing off against these bots 50/50 in my matches. Some people even pretend to not be one replying to questions asked in chat, but proceeding to do the EXACT same kickoff 100% of the time. Keep in mind, a speed kickoff will always beat this bot no matter what. The funniest part is, if you keep the ball in your own half, about 30% of the field, close to the midfield line, the bot will NEVER challenge you. This is absolutely getting ridiculous, even people pretending it's them while clearly it isn't. Honestly so surprising that this is being shared through multiple people. Insane.
"And not just Rocket League; every online game is in trouble!" Bots and cheating has ran rampant in other games forever, the fact that Rocket League has gone this long without suffering this as a mainstream issue is a miracle.
Well, for now there's three weaknesses in Nexto that you can use against it: It has no aerial game, it has bad boost management, and its kickoffs are hardcoded.
@@zxstyyhvh ya i know but usually the cheater is worse so after 2 minutes the guy started pressing lmao, i saved some of the replays it’s really interesting
Last night was the first night I ever felt like I was facing bots in 8 years of playing rocket league. Coincidentally today, I see this video. I was in a 2v2 champ tournament. They had perfect gameplay throughout the entire match.
I had a lobby somewhat recently where one of the players was invisible. It was a casual game but I couldnt report them because they couldnt be muted/blocked and they werent on the scoreboard.
It kind of makes sense how the bot is able to calculate the ball on the client end. You can see an example of this when you are lagging in a match and the ball moves smoothly when nobody is interacting with it (like maybe its just flying in the air towards you). So a lot of information is given to the client side of a rocket league game, so there may have to be more tests about input and how the ball is registered on the client so that the bots cannot access that information.
This is crazy I didn’t believe it to be true at first. Sucks to see bots and cheaters finally coming to rocket league. Also Crim is like me man lmao a ex gc stuck in c2/c3 rn
I played a bot today. He did not go on kickoffs, but kinda just powerslide in a 180. He made perfect flicks, every time. He did not go as left, and kinda just sat there. The game is more on the dying point than ever before
Sounds like we need another experiment where you get random GC’s or Champs and don’t even tell them the premise so they can truly just play and then try to figure out if something is fishy and see if they can guess correctly
It's too bad you told them that there was a bot, because like you said; then they start paying attention to the little behaviours which make it very obvious. Could maybe put a bot in a different challenge where the focus lies on something else - like toxic takedown, maffia or some other 1v1 shenanigans, to really test if people notice.
phenomenal video sunless, I am really interested in the programming behind nexto and what it means to the game as a whole. I think if the right person has the right motivation, this could be a giant threat to online play.
there has been some tries of training bots by having them use the data from thousands of ssl replays. they didn't carry on as they are other better ways to have the bot develop airplay (like changing rewards)
@@swagie_ The point of imitation learning is it's good to start off with, then you train the bot against itself to improve it afterwards, which has been proven to work in other games.
I gotta admit, recently you upload quite good videos. I really enjoy the mix between plain entertainment and the ending in which you got more serious. Keep up the good work
My guess on how it happened is that someone is using nexto to to input their controls on their client side but this wouldn’t really be seeable on the server side because it would just show up as regular inputs to the server. Don’t really know how they would control it though.
It’s not as complicated as one might think. Human vs artificial inputs can be pretty easily discerned (at least with current ai’s used) based on how consistent they can hold the stick in some direction, how many inputs are done in a certain time frame, etc. I’d recommend looking into trackmania cheating (wirtual has some good vids) and how they discovered similar cheats in that game. Almost certainly would take a bit of time to implement, as I don’t think rl currently stores the inputs a player made during a game(very easy), and then they’d need to develop their artificial input detection system, which will mainly be a good amount of research, and some testing. Should be doable in 3ish months with a small team so they can still continue regular game development.
@@DaTimmeh yeah. I’ve seen some of those videos on the track mania cheating. I think that RL does store player inputs for goal replays, but there is no way that I, with a very basic understanding of coding, could prove or disprove that.
@@DaTimmeh There are "some" inputs captured, but not enough to get any useful data on to train a network. A simpler method might be to just alter the game in a very small way that is indiscernible to humans, but would throw the bot for a loop. Something as mundane as adding a bunch of invisible actors with no collision physics either in or out of the arena, could/would cause catastrophic failure in the bots I/O.
@@KCM25NJL Ooooh that's a great one! If the bot is programmed to flick over opponents or do something to avoid them, adding invisible obstacles with no collision is genius. 👏🏻
I've seen someone use an AI to predict where pro players would position themselves on the pitch and then use it to analyse their replays however it's not publicly available. Maybe something like this could be made in the future?
I mean... Even if you just play against Nexto for an hour... You'd be able to tell EASILY after if you're playing with a human like SunlessKhan or not. Edit: Also, there are specific strats you just have to turn on when playing against Nexto. Like, it 100% ALWAYS falls for the single jump bait when it's dribbling the ball on top of the car. It will never fake it.
I think it might wind up being easier than we think to detect this. In both this case and in the case of chess engines in competitive online chess, AIs calculate the best inputs and the raw inputs themselves are identical to those from a real human. In chess, AIs can be detected if the play is *too perfect*. Humans make mistakes. I think this principle would work even better in detecting AI in rocket league, because a series of inputs to flick as perfectly as Nexto is probably even more conspicuously perfect than chess. Nexto moves with perfect smoothness and turns without the ball even wobbling. The set of inputs would have none of the little jitters and oversteers that literally every human cannot completely avoid, at least not in consecutive plays. It could take some doing to implement a way to check the inputs, but at least in principle it wouldn’t be all too complicated.
@@n.r.r1385 but it’s not that the bot doesn’t make mistakes, it’s in the fluidity of inputs, the perfection of steering when dribbling. Humans twitch ever so slightly with every movement, but Nexto’s maneuvering of the ball is always done with perfect mathematical fluidity, even if that fluid motion is a mistake. The inputs should be a dead giveaway and the server should be able to detect that with some clever programming.
I really like the way you approached this topic. Not just an quick info-video about bots in rankend, but a creative experiment to give more insight. Great idea! I have only one thing that bothers me a bit: If you bring other users into your videos i would really like to know their rank in the game Mode they are actually going to play in (here: 1s) and not their best rank in any gamemode. Especially in 1s the rank-difference to other modes is too big! Anyways, keep doing these awesome videos! Thanks man!
I just played against a bot in 1s. I'm from SAM so i wasn't expecting bots here so soon but i seems like they are among us now. To anyone who goes against this bot, just heavily abuse kickoffs you you can speedflip. Be cautious if your recovery off the kickoff is not too great tho, the bot manages to get back quite quickly. If you can't speedflip, rely on powerslide cuts and if it starts dribbling, shadow and don't fake challenge, just get near the net and cover as much space as you can and flip into the ball.
I told some guys on discord like 6 months ago that "I think people will find a way to hack in rocket league with bots" and I was laughed at. Oh how the tables have turned.
That really bums me out that bots are in ranked. Rocket league has always been a sacred game where cheating was impossible. Hopefully psyionix comes out with a solution, although I don’t know how it could work.
There are plenty of solutions. The bots work in the same way that bakkesmod works which uses a form of DLL injection to rewrite the underlying libraries. Anti piracy tools exist to validate the checksum of libraries. Though, blocking bakkesmod would pretty much break the game for the comp scene
@@nyny Would be fine if you whitelisted BM. Frankly though, Windows should be signing all DLL's associated with an app install and preventing the hooking mechanism by requiring a valid signature for the hook.
@@KCM25NJL yes good reply. However bakkes is heavily driven by it's plugin architecture. That's why I didn't go into all of the details. They would need to make a submission and approval system and set up some kind of dev mode. All doable, but a bit of work
Cheating has been possible in RL in many different aspects for a long time, the knowledge has just stayed confined within specific communities, and now people are realizing. Cheating has never been impossible: there have been auto demo hacks, item hacks, and fake freestyling using replay editing or TAS, as well as a bunch of exploits which were reported first so Psyonix just gave the player a white hat and people didn't realize they were ever possible.
I feel like the easiest way to use nexto would be to have a mirror system in place that allows a separate instance of RL to control another and thus allowing a nexto bot to run rampant
Honestly it blows my mind how a fun and impressive project that takes intense knowledge gets weaponized in ranked. I didn't know people would even think of the idea to use a bot in ranked
The past few weeks, I've gotten quite a few bot teammates in tournaments who just don't play. You can tell they're a bot because for some reason they are setup to instantly forfeit whenever you vote to ff. Like they ff so fast that you can't even read the vote to ff popup.
This is such a good representation of how far AI has come, back in 2016, using bots was literally considered impossible and the best bots were the built in AI, shits crazy
Rocket league can fix this issue the same way trackmania speedruners check to see if the speedrun is a bot. It will have the exact same or very similar movements for when it does something. Check how they find bots in a trackmania vid if curious.
This is actually a real thing, my brother who doesent even like or play rocket league found put how to get access to a nexto like bot and just has it carry his friends in 2s, its sad to think a game i thought was impossible to cheat on wpuld end up in this state.
i just played a bot in a tournament, i think, his flicks were perfect and hits were mostly on target. on his rl tracker website is nothing unnormal to find. he started in plat in may and reached nearly champ 2 today. he didn't play in between these months. the wierd thing is he could use the chat. i don't know if he's a bot or not but i think so. they're nearly impossible to win against.
I encountered a bot yesterday myself. I'm just champ 1 and this bot was catching everything perfectly and flicking perfectly every time as well. Plus there were many times where they would be super aggressive immediately before I even knew where the ball would be. It was not playing like a champ 1 and was not playing like any player I've ever played against. It was frustrating for sure.
What I hate is Psyonix didn't give a SHIT about smurfs or boosting, but now that a bot is in comp it's a problem, because only high ranked players are affected.
my friend played the bot in 1s a few weeks ago, and yesterday i vsed the bot in 2s 5 times between c3 and gc1. its counter is aerials cuz it cant read them, but the players in ranks with inconsistent aerials will be screwed :(
yeah, other day me n my friend were queueing comp 2s and we got in match against 2 AI's who were actually queueing together, both weren't skipping replays at all, weren't moving after any goal, were acting very unusual, like acting the same in weird scenarios and the bot-like dribbling is something else, so unpredictable
When emulating his odd behaviours you're in a way self reporting since you know the bot wouldn't copy your gameplay and only you could copy its gameplay and that it did it in both gameplays, it was 100% easy to figure out it was u
I had one on my team last night, the guy was typing while playing and saying stuff like "Im going to sell this bot once it gets good enough" How is this even allowed
"it was way harder and more complex than I thought." Yeah, no shit. Take it from a software engineer who deals with ignorant fools all day, people ALWAYS waaaaay underestimate the skill, talent, and time/effort that goes into building software, especially something as complex as this.
I've looked into the bots a bit, the 'impressive' part would have been reverse engineering nextos actions into controller inputs. Controller inputs aren't sent to the server, only some data like pitch / speed / etc. However, the client app can detect if there are controller inputs, which the bot creators would have to implement for any hope at going undetected, because the client can communicate with Epic still. There are solutions for Epic, it would also block bakkesmod though which is pretty much game breaking at comp levels.
Had a match against 3 bots in casual the other day. didn't recognize it while playing but after the game the bot team hit "play again" exactly at the same time (like no delay on the green checkmarks at all). Also their pings where exactly the same all the time. Maybe there should be something like a bot league, where bots play against each other and the best trained bot wins? ;) But please somehow kepp them out of regular RL.
I had a similar ones experience recently. Every movement was precise and perfect and nothing was in the air, even though I was the one trying to take it to the air. It was crazy.
A little more context - to make a bot the quality of Nexto, you have to run your AI through tens of thousands of scenarios (matches) for it to learn and improve. You want to parallelize that as much as possible, otherwise it'd take forever, so you train the bot on a bunch of computers simultaneously. This isn't free, and can actually be very expensive depending on the complexity of the program.
I remember telling my friend one game “this is a bot for sure we are playing against wtf!” based purely on its play style. I was convinced it was not a human and it turned out I was right that time and many others..
4:16 "I suck in the air... I'm breaking in, shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus. This is it, the apocalypse. Whoa.... I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones!"
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
The day has finally come. Being called a bot is now officially a compliment instead of an insult.
Oh hey tena, remember me ? ;D
lol
@@ceodasala3297 tough
They should add the Nexto bot to be Unstoppable as dofficulty setting bot in offline Rocket League.
been called that for years, new around here?
Plats are so unpredictable that even nexto gets confused
Most underrated comment.
So true
Damn its actually scary that people will just create accounts with these AI and just destroy the competitive list. You would have hundreds or even more of champ level AI in all ranks. Not only it would make the experience for players worse, i just cannot see how companies could do anything against these bots if they alrady have trouble against cheaters.
The companies are just going to have to wait. For countless companies players have coding their own versions of stuff they should of added for years. Some players even said they would give it to the company for free but these selfish companies never accept it as long as people are buying there products. If this becomes an issue and rl devs cannot figure it out then a player should.
@@averagebrownie2491 those evils at psyonic can suck on my cock hope that this game gets flooded with bots serves them right
As someone who plays TF2 as well I'm worried for Rocket League's future
I'm definitely not an expert but I think it's way easier to train an ai to recognize wether a player is actually a human or if it's a bot than to actually train an ai to play rocket league. If even humans can easily differentiate between ai and player that shouldn't be too hard, it's basically impossible to train an ai to actually play like a human. So my guess is you have a programm/ai watching the games and filtering out players with suspicious/bot-like behaviour, then you can even look at the accounts match history etc. and automatically ban it if theres no doubt about it. I have no idea wether that is easy to implement tho.
honestly once ue5 rocket league comes out it will delay the bots because it will have all the coding completely rebuilt from the ground up
the ai has gone rogue it's like detroit become rocket league
“Detroit become rocket league” is a wild comment and I love it! Lmao
“ “Detroit become rocket league” is a wild comment and I love it! Lmao “ - 🤖
@@noahgrimmer5095 robot ahh response
@@weymoo oh fuck their onto me
Fire comment
"Would I be able to play like a bot?"
"Frankly, I don't think I've ever been more qualified for anything in my life"
🤣
😂😂
@readmyname. we dont really care mate
@@tomaskoza4439 mate that account is a bot lol
you can just look at the spectate and who's spectating. it was to easy for them to guess
As a member of RLBot, I am glad you highlighted the fact, that hacked Nexto is probably going to be the only bot to worry about for a long time and that means Psyonix has time to deal with it.
I'm actually surprised (and relieved) that the exploit users didn't try to implement the other ML bots, like Necto or Element, so as to throw them off the scent. Maybe they thought they'd still be too similar, so detection would still be easy?
@@TrulyLegitGaming bro can’t even get gc rewards on his own lmao
@@TrulyLegitGaming gcs will easily tell a bot apart from a player lmao
@ToxpoV well so far they haven't been able to tell. And I've played well over 50 games with the bot
@@TrulyLegitGaming they've probably been able to tell, they just dont say anything. Also... you are cheating for gc? Gc isnt even hard anymore.
This is our computer chess moment! The real question is whether Pros will use bots in their training scrims to come up with new strats or play styles.
Usually bots tend to have "an exploit", the more exposure this bot gets the quicker one might be found, and depending on how easily exploitable it is it can render it practically useless at a certain rank. (I don't know too much about nexto, but let's say it wouldn't challenge if a player is dribbling at a certain angle, then a player who is decent at dribbling can use that to consistently beat it and so on)
I think everyone is focused too much on the BOT instead of how the BOT got into ranked in the first place. This is the real issue. We've already seen hacks (demo chase) and people using non-purchased skins in ranked.
@@VilTheVillain the trick is demos. Bots don't have the awareness of a human player and/or aren't programmed for demo evasion, its a major flaw in nexto's game. most players that play slow and controlled are susceptible to a high speed drive challenge, you either demo them or make them jump/flick and you're already zooming on the ground so you'll recover much faster
pros Will not use nexto in pro play, I am gc2 and bots are very bad compared to high level players, and I’m speaking from experience. I had a bot in my gc2 2v2 game and he was not very good lol
@@solarft give it time. Eventually they will be better than pros without a doubt. They havent been out very long
Sunless 2 momths ago: *Suddenly gets better*
Now: Nexto taking over Rocket League
I knew bob wasn't human.
Tru tru
One of the things I'd like to mention is that Nexto was designed to play as good as possible, not as human as possible. If you gathered enough replay files from players of different ranks, you could train bots that are designed to act and play like different ranks. If you really wanted, you could cherry pick the best plays from the best players and design a bot that can consistently play like a pro at the top of their game
It's not going to happen soon, but it will happen eventually, and I'm not sure how much you can do about it
Another option is combining the two techniques and actually training another network called the discriminator that is designed to tell the difference between bots and humans, which could be used to make it blend in even more
Bro, its already a thing watcha talking about xD
Actually a good idea. Imagine using traces of detecting bot-like behavior, and then randomly pairing the suspected account with a bot-detecting bot that is designed to analyze and perform actions that expose the account.
Just some notes I'm copy-pasting to address common misconceptions:
Point #1: "Detecting AI with AI"
- - - - -
As someone who has had experience with developing neural networks and working with machine learning, people who say that training an AI to recognize bots, are wrong. Making an AI to detect bots is NOT easier than training the bots themselves.
Generation always trumps detection.
This is because of a phenomenon I like to call Detection Singularity: For example, lets pretend an AI has been made to detect AI-generated melodies. Eventually AI will have gotten good enough to generate great-sounding, catchy melodies. But, what happens if, by chance, the AI generates the melody to Mary Had a Little Lamb? It's a pretty simple, catchy melody, and an AI could easily generate it. But, should the detector believe it to be made by AI, or made by a human?
When an AI melody generator has gotten good enough to generate human-made melodies by chance, this is called the Detection Singularity. It no longer becomes possible to tell whether a melody was made by AI, or by a human.
Now, melodies are pretty simple, as compared to gameplay, which has many more variables, but there's only a finite level of complexity, and AI improves at tasks exponentially. At a certain level, even a game as complex as RL will reach the Detection Singularity, and it won't take long for many games to fall to this. Nexto was made with no funding, and did not even use heavy-duty cloud computing, which is becoming more and more affordable by the minute.
Point #2: "The AI would become perfect, as they are designed to get good at the game, not to seem human. Making it seem human is much harder,"
- - - - -
Some people may say that AI is more likely to become perfect at the task, rather than seeming human. But this can be circumvented easily with a GAN, (Generative Adversarial Network). Not only have the AI train to get better, but also have it train something that detects AI (discriminator, AKA detector). The detector will get better and better at detecting the bot, but the bot will get better and better at bypassing the detection.
This means, that in order to detect the bot, Psyonix would need a detector better than the bot itself was trained on. This is virtually impossible. And if the detection singularity were to be reached, it would become literally impossible.
*Anyone knowledgeable could train an AI like this with a bit of money to spend on cloud computing.*
Point #3: "Preventing Cheats by Detecting False Inputs"
- - - - -
Some people also believe that making an anti-cheat, whether it be by detecting inputs/spoofing a game can detect these cheats.
They cannot.
The keyboard, controller, mouse, or whatever you use to send inputs legitimately, sends inputs in a very simple way. It is pitifully easy to send inputs virtually through the AI, in a way that perfectly recreates how these inputs are sent. It is as if a real controller were sending the inputs.
Point #4: "Stop It The Same Way We've Stopped Cheating Before"
- - - - -
Some people believe the best way to tackle this is by detecting modified game files, etc.
A pleasant reminder: The client-side is always insecure
There is the server-side, and client-side. The reason Rocket League has been "unhackable" before, is that almost everything is dependent on the server, not the client. And the only data given and sent from the client, is necessary data of which not can be done with anyways.
But AI only modifies the client-side, and the client-side is far more insecure.
There is a reason cheaters always find a way to bypass anti-cheats in other games.
There is a reason why piracy has always trumped anti-piracy.
These are dependent on the client-side.
The client-side requires positional, and velocity data, for the game of Rocket League to work. And these things are all that the AI requires to function. By sending inputs securely (which is not difficult at all), it is completely impossible to 'outdetect' cheats on the client-side.
Not to mention, if the AI were to be trained using screen-data, rather than positional data, etc. No modifications on the client-side would ever be required.
So no, having whitehat-hackers improve Psyonix's client-side anticheat would not fix this at all.
@@XerosOfficial what an effort you have to write this out man love it
@@XerosOfficial I completely agree with all of this. I never said anything about detecting an AI or trying to stop what is going on, just simply pointed out that this isn't the end and that these AI's will get better and better to the point where they're completely undetectable through adversarial training. There is no good solution to detect cheaters like that in the long run because client side anti-cheat is almost entirely pointless, and more likely to be thwarted by cheaters than modders, and it isn't doing anything that is physically impossible
something interesting I notice about nexto from a programmer and game developer perspective and AI enjoyer is that nexto will often prioritise height over power especially when its being challenged, to make sure it gets past its opponent. we should take notes
Yes, it pops it up real high and consistently takes advantage of our momentum going in the wrong direction to take back possession of the ball.
Interesting, I wonder if that's because Nexto was trained against itself and it barely ever aerials, so it would make sense to prefer height
Because the bot has zero reaction time and can save everything. Power for human players is preferable because we have a reaction time. Well, in reality, top human players go after power and height. You not watch Mawkzy flicks?
Well i wouldn't risk it, he probably doesn't know how to recover from complex airplays
Kinda scary to think that we could have played against bots without knowing
Haha yes and I'm gonna name myself "nice flick" to troll people XD
nah youd know.
Sometimes I think its some low level bot, when they all have the same name and end with 1, 2 or 3 and they move in very linear way, like their programmed to moce in that way.
Bro why is this scary to you. It’s not like they in your crib ready to hang.
bro why the fuck is it scary? it's a fucking video game bro
I think a good tweek to this experiment would be to just put them in 3 games and tell them that something will change from game to game. Then, have them guess AI or human at the end so that they weren't already hyperanalyzing each game for that specific thing.
That’s a really good idea I’m shocked sunless didn’t think of. Just have them play 3 games without telling them what the deal is til the end of it
A better methodology would've been to tell the players that they would play 3 games against grand champ players and to get their opinions after each game, which is more in line with a normal ranked experience. Although they would surely still suspect Nexto, it would've less obvious and closer to reality.
But that's just a small detail, nice video man
Agreed, Sunless took the approach of “can I play like a bot” instead of taking a pool of ~1700mmr players, randomizing them, and mixing the bot into those matches to see if ppl could spot the difference.
But then again, this was for a YT vid so it’s not that serious lol
Yea he could do another test and not tell people. Giving that information tainted the results.
@@L3thalShad0ws7 Yeah, if it were serious it also wouldn't be vs a group of plats, it would be against the GCs getting "smurfed" on
I'm a GC2 in 2's and a C2/C3 in 1's. I'm now facing off against these bots 50/50 in my matches. Some people even pretend to not be one replying to questions asked in chat, but proceeding to do the EXACT same kickoff 100% of the time. Keep in mind, a speed kickoff will always beat this bot no matter what. The funniest part is, if you keep the ball in your own half, about 30% of the field, close to the midfield line, the bot will NEVER challenge you. This is absolutely getting ridiculous, even people pretending it's them while clearly it isn't. Honestly so surprising that this is being shared through multiple people. Insane.
The outro really had me thinking about the future of online gaming.. Great video!
This isn’t new in the gaming community. I used to play a mobile game called clash Royale and the game was flooded with bots.
"And not just Rocket League; every online game is in trouble!"
Bots and cheating has ran rampant in other games forever, the fact that Rocket League has gone this long without suffering this as a mainstream issue is a miracle.
6:40 "Maybe our strategy... uh, wh-...bro"
lol
It's official, we've lost. The bots will take over now. We will all be bronze now.
Well, for now there's three weaknesses in Nexto that you can use against it: It has no aerial game, it has bad boost management, and its kickoffs are hardcoded.
@@theKiwii good you said "for now" because that comment wouldnt age well without it xD
“It’s not as robotic like as you might thi- that was a pretty calculated flick” 4:35
Amazing content sunless ❤
Totally watched the whole thing
you cant say that 4 minutes after the video was posted. Hmmmm
i’ve played a few of these in c3-gc2 1v1s. if you go up a goal you can just keep possession of the ball in your end and it will not challenge you
pretty easy loophole to beat them if you’re having trouble challenging because their flicks are pretty much perfect
@@JMoffRL you can take over the bot if you press numlock so if the cheater isnt afk he can counter
@@zxstyyhvh ya i know but usually the cheater is worse so after 2 minutes the guy started pressing lmao, i saved some of the replays it’s really interesting
Last night was the first night I ever felt like I was facing bots in 8 years of playing rocket league. Coincidentally today, I see this video. I was in a 2v2 champ tournament. They had perfect gameplay throughout the entire match.
Looks like we'll be clicking all the pictures with a plane in them before each round
Imagine when we get to the point where the bot purposely makes mistakes to lower suspicion.
I had a lobby somewhat recently where one of the players was invisible. It was a casual game but I couldnt report them because they couldnt be muted/blocked and they werent on the scoreboard.
“The true answer to your question is. Who will stick to a rule 1?” Haha love the vids sunless❤
Nexto usually respects rule 1 unless the ball gets too close to him
It kind of makes sense how the bot is able to calculate the ball on the client end. You can see an example of this when you are lagging in a match and the ball moves smoothly when nobody is interacting with it (like maybe its just flying in the air towards you). So a lot of information is given to the client side of a rocket league game, so there may have to be more tests about input and how the ball is registered on the client so that the bots cannot access that information.
Love you Sunless, vid’s keep on comin consistent 🤙🏼
This is crazy I didn’t believe it to be true at first. Sucks to see bots and cheaters finally coming to rocket league. Also Crim is like me man lmao a ex gc stuck in c2/c3 rn
7:18 master has given nexto a sock, nexto is free lmao
I played a bot today. He did not go on kickoffs, but kinda just powerslide in a 180. He made perfect flicks, every time. He did not go as left, and kinda just sat there. The game is more on the dying point than ever before
this is just a way for sunless to show that he's at the same level as perfection 🤣
Sounds like we need another experiment where you get random GC’s or Champs and don’t even tell them the premise so they can truly just play and then try to figure out if something is fishy and see if they can guess correctly
It's too bad you told them that there was a bot, because like you said; then they start paying attention to the little behaviours which make it very obvious. Could maybe put a bot in a different challenge where the focus lies on something else - like toxic takedown, maffia or some other 1v1 shenanigans, to really test if people notice.
You know it’s gonna be a good day when sunless posts 😊
3 days ago I played against 'Urabot' in a Champions Tournament (2v2). He got incredible flicks but always backflipped when going for an airial
Congrats on making #27 on trending that’s insane!!!
Really scary that this might be in my servers if i play ranked
phenomenal video sunless, I am really interested in the programming behind nexto and what it means to the game as a whole. I think if the right person has the right motivation, this could be a giant threat to online play.
I think I faced one of these types of bots in ranked because I ran into a player with perfect flicks every time.
4:05 I wonder if since it's an AI you could train it on pro players that are almost in the air all the time to have a bot with perfect air control.
@@blobedm you clearly have no idea about how AI works
Then, make Nexto and the new AI battle it out and make Nexto learn from the AI, that would be _awesome_
there has been some tries of training bots by having them use the data from thousands of ssl replays. they didn't carry on as they are other better ways to have the bot develop airplay (like changing rewards)
Rolv did imitation learning from SSL replays, but it is not as good as Nexto.
@@swagie_ The point of imitation learning is it's good to start off with, then you train the bot against itself to improve it afterwards, which has been proven to work in other games.
I gotta admit, recently you upload quite good videos. I really enjoy the mix between plain entertainment and the ending in which you got more serious.
Keep up the good work
My guess on how it happened is that someone is using nexto to to input their controls on their client side but this wouldn’t really be seeable on the server side because it would just show up as regular inputs to the server. Don’t really know how they would control it though.
It’s not as complicated as one might think. Human vs artificial inputs can be pretty easily discerned (at least with current ai’s used) based on how consistent they can hold the stick in some direction, how many inputs are done in a certain time frame, etc. I’d recommend looking into trackmania cheating (wirtual has some good vids) and how they discovered similar cheats in that game.
Almost certainly would take a bit of time to implement, as I don’t think rl currently stores the inputs a player made during a game(very easy), and then they’d need to develop their artificial input detection system, which will mainly be a good amount of research, and some testing. Should be doable in 3ish months with a small team so they can still continue regular game development.
@@DaTimmeh yeah. I’ve seen some of those videos on the track mania cheating. I think that RL does store player inputs for goal replays, but there is no way that I, with a very basic understanding of coding, could prove or disprove that.
@@mik-ws3zw I think I've heard something like that before, could very well be the case.
@@DaTimmeh There are "some" inputs captured, but not enough to get any useful data on to train a network. A simpler method might be to just alter the game in a very small way that is indiscernible to humans, but would throw the bot for a loop. Something as mundane as adding a bunch of invisible actors with no collision physics either in or out of the arena, could/would cause catastrophic failure in the bots I/O.
@@KCM25NJL Ooooh that's a great one! If the bot is programmed to flick over opponents or do something to avoid them, adding invisible obstacles with no collision is genius. 👏🏻
i'd like to see a bot able to critique your game just like computers do for chess games
I've seen someone use an AI to predict where pro players would position themselves on the pitch and then use it to analyse their replays however it's not publicly available. Maybe something like this could be made in the future?
I mean... Even if you just play against Nexto for an hour... You'd be able to tell EASILY after if you're playing with a human like SunlessKhan or not.
Edit: Also, there are specific strats you just have to turn on when playing against Nexto. Like, it 100% ALWAYS falls for the single jump bait when it's dribbling the ball on top of the car. It will never fake it.
It falls for the single jump if you're close enough, also you have to be very careful and very aggressive with your challenges
Sunless these videos are like movies and i love them
I think it might wind up being easier than we think to detect this. In both this case and in the case of chess engines in competitive online chess, AIs calculate the best inputs and the raw inputs themselves are identical to those from a real human. In chess, AIs can be detected if the play is *too perfect*. Humans make mistakes. I think this principle would work even better in detecting AI in rocket league, because a series of inputs to flick as perfectly as Nexto is probably even more conspicuously perfect than chess. Nexto moves with perfect smoothness and turns without the ball even wobbling. The set of inputs would have none of the little jitters and oversteers that literally every human cannot completely avoid, at least not in consecutive plays. It could take some doing to implement a way to check the inputs, but at least in principle it wouldn’t be all too complicated.
If you watched the video you can see that Nexto does make mistakes
@@n.r.r1385 but it’s not that the bot doesn’t make mistakes, it’s in the fluidity of inputs, the perfection of steering when dribbling. Humans twitch ever so slightly with every movement, but Nexto’s maneuvering of the ball is always done with perfect mathematical fluidity, even if that fluid motion is a mistake. The inputs should be a dead giveaway and the server should be able to detect that with some clever programming.
I was convinced I played a bot yesterday at gc in 1s, it just felt to machine like, this has cemented that feeling. Great video
I really like the way you approached this topic. Not just an quick info-video about bots in rankend, but a creative experiment to give more insight. Great idea!
I have only one thing that bothers me a bit:
If you bring other users into your videos i would really like to know their rank in the game Mode they are actually going to play in (here: 1s) and not their best rank in any gamemode. Especially in 1s the rank-difference to other modes is too big!
Anyways, keep doing these awesome videos! Thanks man!
I just played against a bot in 1s. I'm from SAM so i wasn't expecting bots here so soon but i seems like they are among us now. To anyone who goes against this bot, just heavily abuse kickoffs you you can speedflip. Be cautious if your recovery off the kickoff is not too great tho, the bot manages to get back quite quickly. If you can't speedflip, rely on powerslide cuts and if it starts dribbling, shadow and don't fake challenge, just get near the net and cover as much space as you can and flip into the ball.
you can tell pretty well from the kick off , the bot usually uses a delayed kick off and uses a 0 second reaction to react to the opponent s kick off
Its insane people even managed to "cheat" in the most or one of the most unhackable games there is
I told some guys on discord like 6 months ago that "I think people will find a way to hack in rocket league with bots" and I was laughed at.
Oh how the tables have turned.
Rocket League is about to have the same problem that chess has been having, minus the beads
That really bums me out that bots are in ranked. Rocket league has always been a sacred game where cheating was impossible. Hopefully psyionix comes out with a solution, although I don’t know how it could work.
There are plenty of solutions. The bots work in the same way that bakkesmod works which uses a form of DLL injection to rewrite the underlying libraries. Anti piracy tools exist to validate the checksum of libraries. Though, blocking bakkesmod would pretty much break the game for the comp scene
@@nyny Would be fine if you whitelisted BM. Frankly though, Windows should be signing all DLL's associated with an app install and preventing the hooking mechanism by requiring a valid signature for the hook.
@@KCM25NJL yes good reply. However bakkes is heavily driven by it's plugin architecture. That's why I didn't go into all of the details. They would need to make a submission and approval system and set up some kind of dev mode. All doable, but a bit of work
Cheating has been possible in RL in many different aspects for a long time, the knowledge has just stayed confined within specific communities, and now people are realizing. Cheating has never been impossible: there have been auto demo hacks, item hacks, and fake freestyling using replay editing or TAS, as well as a bunch of exploits which were reported first so Psyonix just gave the player a white hat and people didn't realize they were ever possible.
I am completely at a loss for words for how scary this actually is.
Soon, being called a bot in rocket league is gonna be a compliment
First, the outrageous amount of smurfs and blatant carrying and now bots?? Yeah...RLs competitive integrity is fading extremely fast
one ranked 1v1 game i played my opponents name was "Nice one!" and he was playing really precisely and his name changed halfway through the match
I feel like the easiest way to use nexto would be to have a mirror system in place that allows a separate instance of RL to control another and thus allowing a nexto bot to run rampant
Honestly it blows my mind how a fun and impressive project that takes intense knowledge gets weaponized in ranked. I didn't know people would even think of the idea to use a bot in ranked
Rocket League video documentaries and experiments are some of the most enjoyable videos on TH-cam.
The past few weeks, I've gotten quite a few bot teammates in tournaments who just don't play. You can tell they're a bot because for some reason they are setup to instantly forfeit whenever you vote to ff. Like they ff so fast that you can't even read the vote to ff popup.
“not just rocket league every online game is in trouble” bro the trouble has most definitely found every other game already
This is such a good representation of how far AI has come, back in 2016, using bots was literally considered impossible and the best bots were the built in AI, shits crazy
Rocket league can fix this issue the same way trackmania speedruners check to see if the speedrun is a bot. It will have the exact same or very similar movements for when it does something. Check how they find bots in a trackmania vid if curious.
This is actually a real thing, my brother who doesent even like or play rocket league found put how to get access to a nexto like bot and just has it carry his friends in 2s, its sad to think a game i thought was impossible to cheat on wpuld end up in this state.
This is a case of Skynet... clearly. T-800 nexTorminator.
i just played a bot in a tournament, i think, his flicks were perfect and hits were mostly on target. on his rl tracker website is nothing unnormal to find. he started in plat in may and reached nearly champ 2 today. he didn't play in between these months. the wierd thing is he could use the chat. i don't know if he's a bot or not but i think so. they're nearly impossible to win against.
Watch how SunlessKhan unknowingly sets up a Rocket League Turing Test™.
Apparently Jack also talked about the bot "nice flick"
I encountered a bot yesterday myself. I'm just champ 1 and this bot was catching everything perfectly and flicking perfectly every time as well. Plus there were many times where they would be super aggressive immediately before I even knew where the ball would be. It was not playing like a champ 1 and was not playing like any player I've ever played against. It was frustrating for sure.
Finally, chess is not the only game that has very strong bots
"Maintaining competitive integrity"
Now the higher ranks get to feel what it's like constantly running into smurfs.
Did anyone else catch that sunless khan did the Vsause outro. Perfect timing and application, nice touch!
We all knew it was coming, being called a bot is no longer an insult
Love you so much and love watching how you got to this point... it gives me hope
What I hate is Psyonix didn't give a SHIT about smurfs or boosting, but now that a bot is in comp it's a problem, because only high ranked players are affected.
my friend played the bot in 1s a few weeks ago, and yesterday i vsed the bot in 2s 5 times between c3 and gc1. its counter is aerials cuz it cant read them, but the players in ranks with inconsistent aerials will be screwed :(
Bro nexto is just the tip of the iceberg for Rl AI and ppl being able to have a bot in ranked is terrifying
yeah, other day me n my friend were queueing comp 2s and we got in match against 2 AI's who were actually queueing together, both weren't skipping replays at all, weren't moving after any goal, were acting very unusual, like acting the same in weird scenarios and the bot-like dribbling is something else, so unpredictable
When emulating his odd behaviours you're in a way self reporting since you know the bot wouldn't copy your gameplay and only you could copy its gameplay and that it did it in both gameplays, it was 100% easy to figure out it was u
Bots have to learn to be worse in order to be better cheaters.
If this bottling continues it’s gonna be destroying the game!!!
in other games, be a bot is something terrible, in rocket league, being a bot is a god tier compliment
Being called a bot went from insult to praise in like 2 years lmao
I experienced this bot in a D3 tournament. It’s so annoying. Lost in the finals to one “person”.
I had one on my team last night, the guy was typing while playing and saying stuff like "Im going to sell this bot once it gets good enough" How is this even allowed
"it was way harder and more complex than I thought."
Yeah, no shit. Take it from a software engineer who deals with ignorant fools all day, people ALWAYS waaaaay underestimate the skill, talent, and time/effort that goes into building software, especially something as complex as this.
I've looked into the bots a bit, the 'impressive' part would have been reverse engineering nextos actions into controller inputs. Controller inputs aren't sent to the server, only some data like pitch / speed / etc. However, the client app can detect if there are controller inputs, which the bot creators would have to implement for any hope at going undetected, because the client can communicate with Epic still. There are solutions for Epic, it would also block bakkesmod though which is pretty much game breaking at comp levels.
Had a match against 3 bots in casual the other day. didn't recognize it while playing but after the game the bot team hit "play again" exactly at the same time (like no delay on the green checkmarks at all). Also their pings where exactly the same all the time.
Maybe there should be something like a bot league, where bots play against each other and the best trained bot wins? ;) But please somehow kepp them out of regular RL.
Welcome. TO CHESS 2!
I had a similar ones experience recently. Every movement was precise and perfect and nothing was in the air, even though I was the one trying to take it to the air. It was crazy.
A little more context - to make a bot the quality of Nexto, you have to run your AI through tens of thousands of scenarios (matches) for it to learn and improve. You want to parallelize that as much as possible, otherwise it'd take forever, so you train the bot on a bunch of computers simultaneously. This isn't free, and can actually be very expensive depending on the complexity of the program.
It's funny, because I had a conversation with someone about adapting the model to a competitive game while watching the RLGym stream a month ago.
I remember telling my friend one game “this is a bot for sure we are playing against wtf!” based purely on its play style. I was convinced it was not a human and it turned out I was right that time and many others..
There is AI Chess... I would pay SOOOOO much money to see an AI Tournament with self-made bots, no kiddin
yeah i played someone in a 2s game who was a bot he was typing while he played he even admited it was this bot too
4:16 "I suck in the air... I'm breaking in, shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus. This is it, the apocalypse. Whoa.... I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones!"
Sunless just casually using a bot as an excuse to smurf on low ranked players isn't something I expected to enjoy but very much did