>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. That's like sa

>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. That's like saying it's acceptable for innocent people to rot in prison as an acceptable price to pay for catching criminals. Obviously this isn't as serious, but the comparison stands. Then again, I would argue that in an MMO context, banning a long-time player who's innocent could easily lead to their suicide. >It’s often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. >It's unfortunate that it is necessary, ... I don't think it is necessary. Virtually anything can be defeated, including invasive rootkits. The best defense is simply updating the game on a regular basis, and in doing so changing up the game's internal data structures such that reversing it on any sort of ongoing basis becomes completely untenable. To do this however, you would have to integrate anti-cheat into the very fabric of the software, and unfortunately nobody does this. Instead, anti-cheat is usually approached as a third-party add-on service after the fact. Statistical analysis is another promising angle that's passive and has a very low false positive rate if used correctly. In other words, a small amount of players end up fucked over because larger publishers are cheap and lazy.