How detectable is AHK?

[jasonjacob]

To be clear: i dont write fully autimated bots that run 24/7 or stunbreak macros etc, i just do minor things like autoclickers, autowalk, autocasting certain things and automating some tedious menues. I do this because i am a lazy cunt and i like the challange i see in "beating" parts of the game by coding simple scripts like this.

As stated above, i have never been punished for any of this, nor have i been warned etc.. But recently i heard lots of talk about how ahk is super easy to detect. Some just saying its detectable, others claiming "devs can just pull up the plain text of the macros that are running".

allthough i do relatively harmless stuff, i feel like atleast one of my scripts should have violated SOME rule or ToS of SOME game at SOME point if it was this easy to detect.

Does anyone have (confirmed) insight on this? Again, im not trying to get away with serious cheating or something, just curious about this.

[Gio]

Hello JasonJacob.

Welcome to the AutoHotkey community forums.

Concealing the application from third party programs is NOT one of the goals of the AutoHotkey interpreter. Thus, it is likely that nothing has ever been done (nor will ever be done) in the source code of the interpreter to try and prevent an anti-cheat mechanism from detecting AutoHotkey. It is (arguably) as easy to detect AutoHotkey running as any other windows application (such as notepad, firefox, chrome, etc).

[jasonjacob]

To be clear: i dont write fully autimated bots that run 24/7 or stunbreak macros etc, i just do minor things like autoclickers, autowalk, autocasting certain things and automating some tedious menues. I do this because i am a lazy cunt and i like the challange i see in "beating" parts of the game by coding simple scripts like this.

As stated above, i have never been punished for any of this, nor have i been warned etc.. But recently i heard lots of talk about how ahk is super easy to detect. Some just saying its detectable, others claiming "devs can just pull up the plain text of the macros that are running".

allthough i do relatively harmless stuff, i feel like atleast one of my scripts should have violated SOME rule or ToS of SOME game at SOME point if it was this easy to detect.

Does anyone have (confirmed) insight on this? Again, im not trying to get away with serious cheating or something, just curious about this.

thank you

[Gio]

im not trying to get away with serious cheating or something, just curious about this.

I really don't think a serious company would take action on a account based on wether an AutoHotkey instance is simply running in the system. That would be extremelly unfair and completely prone to cause legit users to get flagged as macro abusers. From the perspective of an anti-cheat engine AutoHotkey is just another windows tool that may (or may not) be used to create macros. There are thousands of other tools that can also create windows macros (and which could theretically be used to violate a games TOS), and also, AutoHotkey can be used for an enormous variety of legit tasks in a system. Thus, i assume most serious game developer companies would not be willing flag an account just because AutoHotkey is running in the system. That being said, i find it much more likely that such engines are looking for specific actions (such as automated keystrokes or automated clicking in their game clients). If this is the case, the matter of "how detectable" is completely impossible to predict (it will depend on what exactly the anti-cheat engine is looking for, ranging from a pattern of clicks to a time interval between clicks, in example, or even something else).

To be safe: if you are in doubt of wether an AutoHotkey script would violate an EULA or TOS, just don't use the script.

[Xtra]

When ahk is not restricted in a game the general rule is:

one keypress = one action

Even then you have to use common sense like not using precise actions.
You should be more concerned with what you are trying to do instead of the tool you use to achieve it.

-GL

[Helgef]

@Gio, keystrokes sent by ahk command send, are flagged and can easily be detected as generated by an ahk script by any program by installing a hook. Send mode play might not be affected but often do not work at all.

Cheers.

[nnnik]

Most games with serious anti cheat prevention t will close if they see an ahk program running. And no no account measures will be taken.