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The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating. The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a l

The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating. The problem historically has been that game clients have access to a lot of game state that enables cheats. With a "thin client" like Google Stadia, there should be a lot less opportunity for hacks. The incoming game data is an audio/video stream, which makes many hacks hard/impossible. It would be great to play FPS games without any cheaters, they can easily spoil an otherwise amazing game. Maybe future online tournaments will be cloud gaming only.

ianai 6y ago
That’s a great idea. Hope it happens.
jakear 6y ago
Another solution might gaming “country clubs”. Where you pay/deposit to join the club and access servers/etc., and validated reports of cheating are bans and you lose your deposit. Not sure if something like that exists (I don’t game really)
- bri3d 6y ago
  This is pretty much what subscription gaming services like the mentioned ESEA and FaceIt are and do. The problem is that validating a report of cheating is actually an extremely hard problem. Did the user have this mini-map software running, or just good game sense?
  - jakear 6y ago
    I wonder if there’s a price point at which only people who actually want to play fair would join. If you’re cheating anyways, it doesn’t make as much sense to pay large sums of money to be on a server where people aren’t cheating. Alternatively, servers where certain categories of cheats are allowed, so if you just prefer playing with a minimap you can be with like-minded people. This is assuming the mind of a cheater is “I prefer playing in this mode”, rather than “I want to win a lot of fake internet pints”. Idk which is more accurate.
    - jyrkesh 6y ago
      Yeah, Valve already tries to account for some of this by building a Trust Factor of your account based on how much money you've spent, how long you log in, how frequently you log in and out, etc. (which is especially important since CS:GO went free-to-play). Of course, that doesn't address all of it: one could still have the very best cheats that never get detected on a highly trusted account. It's silly, but then if they did get detected one day, they'd lose all their precious skins (which have non-zero to significant monetary value), as they become untradeable forever. But yeah, I think ESEA has some of what you're talking about built in already. Why spend a bunch of money on accounts that keep getting banned?
- rienbdj 6y ago
  This already exists with services like FaceIt Premium and ECL. Valve also do this on their matchmaking servers semi-secretly using Trust Factor. Unfortunately this can make the experience for new players much much worse.
wolfd 6y ago
Competitive gamers care way too much about latency to use cloud gaming services for tournaments. Some Counter-strike players still use CRT monitors due to the latency advantage over LCD. I think that you won't see much adoption in competitive gaming, where every millisecond counts.
- jdc 6y ago
  Haha, how is 240hz not quick enough for these guys?
  - foota 6y ago
    I think there's delay regardless of the refresh rate.
  - shripadk 6y ago
    You will have latency due to network effects. Streaming video/images is always going to be slower than streaming just coordinates and player metadata.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      The parent was talking about LCD vs CRT displays. The parent is confusing throughput (240 frames/second) with latency.
      - jdc 6y ago
        It's not throughput if the 240 refreshes per second are evenly-spaced apart in time. It's a polling rate and it absolutely effects responsiveness.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    240hz is butter smooth. But if there's a 200ms delay, then you will still lose before you even see the enemy. The problem here is buffering. Stadia can produce 60hz video, but that doesn't mean you will see it immediately. It first needs to be encoded, buffered, transmitted, buffered, decoded, buffered, sent to the screen, buffered, refreshed, and then you'll see it. And unless people find a way to increase the speed of light, the transmission will always take time proportional to the distance between Stadia's servers and you.
bri3d 6y ago
Why cloud gaming instead of console gaming, which as of the Xbox One is similarly secure without the latency penalty? Of course with cloud gaming you can make map-hack style cheating a theoretical impossibility (as the client never has the data) while with a console you're always relying on client-side hardware countermeasures, but the practical differences until console hardware are broken are non-existent.
jrockway 6y ago
I don't think cloud-gaming prevents you from writing an aimbot. Enemies are often visually distinctive (for example, Overwatch outlines them in red), so you can look at the video stream and move the mouse to their head, and synthesize a click when the crosshair is in the right place. I almost want to write one of these that looks at Twitch streams to figure out how common the "no-reg" that streamers complain about actually happens. (Or, if I were the game company, I would write one of these to figure out if there's a bug in the netcode, or people just aren't really as good as they think they are. I have a theory, but data is better than a theory.) To eliminate cheating, I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, which is harder to write a cheat for. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the new heroes in Overwatch have projectile-based weapons instead of hitscan weapons -- even if you're cheating with a projectile, you're not guaranteed to hit the shot. The enemy can just move out of the way. (Of course, a "move out of the way" bot could be written, which would be a lot more insidious and harder to detect. Overwatch streamers accuse everyone that hits a hitscan shot of cheating, but nobody has ever accused someone of moving out of the way of cheating. There is enough spam in the game that eventually you'll kill the enemy; writing a cheat that kills enemies more quickly will get you better results than a cheat that lets you live longer.) There is also a lot of low-hanging fruit where the client is trusted when it doesn't need to be. Hearthstone had a combo where people could generate infinite copies of a card ("SN1P-SN4P Warlock"), but the animations on the client limited the number that could actually be played in a turn. This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. So people hacked their client to skip animations. This would be fixed with a thin client, but it's also possible to fix with 100% certainty on the traditional fat client. Just calculate how long the animations take on the server side, and reject client updates after the server thinks the turn is over. Add a few seconds of slop for people playing on 2G networks.
- cletus 6y ago
  > I don't think cloud-gaming prevents you from writing an aimbot. This isn't true for a number of reasons: 1. Good players are exceptionally good. In pro gaming you'll hear the term "pixel shot" because someone fired at essentially one pixel. The shooter is holding an angle where they know that a change of one pixel is someone running by. That sort of thing; and 2. If you watch any streams you'll see aimbots from cheaters (eg when the streamer gets killed and spectates who killed them) and it's pretty funny to see just how blatant aimbots are, like shooting through bushes that don't block bullets but have no visible indication of an enemy. But I agree with other comments: I think cloud gaming is 100% never going to be relevant for competitive esports (of this kind) because of latency. That's not a technology problem. It's a physics problem. > I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, It's interesting that you bring that up. That's actually a criticism a lot of people have of games like Overwatch (that you mention) in that it's not about gun play but ability management. That's actually seen as a negative by many. Riot Games apparently has made a deliberate design decision to focus more on gun play than ability management in Valorant, as just one example. > This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. This is surprisingly common actually. Timers on many games are really just approximated with frame rates. Good players will do better at a game if they can get 200fps over those that get 100fps. An example of this is the much-beleaguered Fallout 76. Bethesda games use this pervasively and, at least for awhile, Fallout 76 had a cap put in place of 63fps to avoid some of the benefits high frame rates gave players (eg faster movement), such that I took to calling it Fallout 63.
tomc1985 6y ago
Please god no. Gaming is one of the last bastions of owning your bits. It kills off tinkering, modding, poking around asset data, and yes, some cheating. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is already too much rent-seeking in gaming.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- earthtourist 6y ago
  You can't run a server for yourself for most games. You have to sign into a proprietary service to download/run games. We already lost this battle. I'd like to at least get some advantages like less cheating!
na85 6y ago
The best gaming experience, even in games with known/available cheats, remains LAN plan. The publishers demanding that every goddamn game have a 5v5 ranked queue/matchmaking system with lootboxes and whatever else means LAN play is a thing of yesteryear. Frankly, so are dedicated servers. I like competitive games, or at least I did when I was younger, but nowadays I yearn for some good-ol' tribes server community where you have 32 players playing CTF and there are actual administrators who are engaged with the community. If someone becomes a problem you just ban them from your server. Similarly if someone brings a friend to your LAN party and that friend is a cheater, you uninvite your friend and/or punch the cheater. "Cloud gaming" sounds like a hellscape.
- ramses0 6y ago
  https://www.playmidair.com/ https://www.playmidair.com/ ... there's a discord, but no true "play" community like you remember.
- boobsbr 6y ago
  I was thinking of Tribes this week when I watching the Cursed Halo mod video https://youtu.be/dMxIjGjMJz0?t=240 https://youtu.be/dMxIjGjMJz0?t=240. There's a flying Warthog, a sedan and a limo. It reminded me of the Heavy Personnel Carrier. Loading the HPC with 5 heavies armed with Grenade Launchers and Heavy Mortars was fun.
serf 6y ago
> The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating. it'll just turn the cheats from memory manipulation to computer vision -- less powerfully 'psychic', but still fast enough to cheat.
fxtentacle 6y ago
There's little financial incentive for most games to fully prevent cheating. But a streaming-exclusive game would be impossible to pirate. That's why publishers are so enthusiastic about it.

ianai 6y ago

That’s a great idea. Hope it happens.

jakear 6y ago

Another solution might gaming “country clubs”. Where you pay/deposit to join the club and access servers/etc., and validated reports of cheating are bans and you lose your deposit. Not sure if something like that exists (I don’t game really)

bri3d 6y ago
This is pretty much what subscription gaming services like the mentioned ESEA and FaceIt are and do. The problem is that validating a report of cheating is actually an extremely hard problem. Did the user have this mini-map software running, or just good game sense?
- jakear 6y ago
  I wonder if there’s a price point at which only people who actually want to play fair would join. If you’re cheating anyways, it doesn’t make as much sense to pay large sums of money to be on a server where people aren’t cheating. Alternatively, servers where certain categories of cheats are allowed, so if you just prefer playing with a minimap you can be with like-minded people. This is assuming the mind of a cheater is “I prefer playing in this mode”, rather than “I want to win a lot of fake internet pints”. Idk which is more accurate.
  - jyrkesh 6y ago
    Yeah, Valve already tries to account for some of this by building a Trust Factor of your account based on how much money you've spent, how long you log in, how frequently you log in and out, etc. (which is especially important since CS:GO went free-to-play). Of course, that doesn't address all of it: one could still have the very best cheats that never get detected on a highly trusted account. It's silly, but then if they did get detected one day, they'd lose all their precious skins (which have non-zero to significant monetary value), as they become untradeable forever. But yeah, I think ESEA has some of what you're talking about built in already. Why spend a bunch of money on accounts that keep getting banned?
rienbdj 6y ago
This already exists with services like FaceIt Premium and ECL. Valve also do this on their matchmaking servers semi-secretly using Trust Factor. Unfortunately this can make the experience for new players much much worse.

wolfd 6y ago

Competitive gamers care way too much about latency to use cloud gaming services for tournaments. Some Counter-strike players still use CRT monitors due to the latency advantage over LCD. I think that you won't see much adoption in competitive gaming, where every millisecond counts.

jdc 6y ago
Haha, how is 240hz not quick enough for these guys?
- foota 6y ago
  I think there's delay regardless of the refresh rate.
- shripadk 6y ago
  You will have latency due to network effects. Streaming video/images is always going to be slower than streaming just coordinates and player metadata.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    The parent was talking about LCD vs CRT displays. The parent is confusing throughput (240 frames/second) with latency.
    - jdc 6y ago
      It's not throughput if the 240 refreshes per second are evenly-spaced apart in time. It's a polling rate and it absolutely effects responsiveness.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  240hz is butter smooth. But if there's a 200ms delay, then you will still lose before you even see the enemy. The problem here is buffering. Stadia can produce 60hz video, but that doesn't mean you will see it immediately. It first needs to be encoded, buffered, transmitted, buffered, decoded, buffered, sent to the screen, buffered, refreshed, and then you'll see it. And unless people find a way to increase the speed of light, the transmission will always take time proportional to the distance between Stadia's servers and you.

bri3d 6y ago

Why cloud gaming instead of console gaming, which as of the Xbox One is similarly secure without the latency penalty? Of course with cloud gaming you can make map-hack style cheating a theoretical impossibility (as the client never has the data) while with a console you're always relying on client-side hardware countermeasures, but the practical differences until console hardware are broken are non-existent.

jrockway 6y ago

I don't think cloud-gaming prevents you from writing an aimbot. Enemies are often visually distinctive (for example, Overwatch outlines them in red), so you can look at the video stream and move the mouse to their head, and synthesize a click when the crosshair is in the right place. I almost want to write one of these that looks at Twitch streams to figure out how common the "no-reg" that streamers complain about actually happens. (Or, if I were the game company, I would write one of these to figure out if there's a bug in the netcode, or people just aren't really as good as they think they are. I have a theory, but data is better than a theory.) To eliminate cheating, I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, which is harder to write a cheat for. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the new heroes in Overwatch have projectile-based weapons instead of hitscan weapons -- even if you're cheating with a projectile, you're not guaranteed to hit the shot. The enemy can just move out of the way. (Of course, a "move out of the way" bot could be written, which would be a lot more insidious and harder to detect. Overwatch streamers accuse everyone that hits a hitscan shot of cheating, but nobody has ever accused someone of moving out of the way of cheating. There is enough spam in the game that eventually you'll kill the enemy; writing a cheat that kills enemies more quickly will get you better results than a cheat that lets you live longer.) There is also a lot of low-hanging fruit where the client is trusted when it doesn't need to be. Hearthstone had a combo where people could generate infinite copies of a card ("SN1P-SN4P Warlock"), but the animations on the client limited the number that could actually be played in a turn. This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. So people hacked their client to skip animations. This would be fixed with a thin client, but it's also possible to fix with 100% certainty on the traditional fat client. Just calculate how long the animations take on the server side, and reject client updates after the server thinks the turn is over. Add a few seconds of slop for people playing on 2G networks.

cletus 6y ago
> I don't think cloud-gaming prevents you from writing an aimbot. This isn't true for a number of reasons: 1. Good players are exceptionally good. In pro gaming you'll hear the term "pixel shot" because someone fired at essentially one pixel. The shooter is holding an angle where they know that a change of one pixel is someone running by. That sort of thing; and 2. If you watch any streams you'll see aimbots from cheaters (eg when the streamer gets killed and spectates who killed them) and it's pretty funny to see just how blatant aimbots are, like shooting through bushes that don't block bullets but have no visible indication of an enemy. But I agree with other comments: I think cloud gaming is 100% never going to be relevant for competitive esports (of this kind) because of latency. That's not a technology problem. It's a physics problem. > I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, It's interesting that you bring that up. That's actually a criticism a lot of people have of games like Overwatch (that you mention) in that it's not about gun play but ability management. That's actually seen as a negative by many. Riot Games apparently has made a deliberate design decision to focus more on gun play than ability management in Valorant, as just one example. > This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. This is surprisingly common actually. Timers on many games are really just approximated with frame rates. Good players will do better at a game if they can get 200fps over those that get 100fps. An example of this is the much-beleaguered Fallout 76. Bethesda games use this pervasively and, at least for awhile, Fallout 76 had a cap put in place of 63fps to avoid some of the benefits high frame rates gave players (eg faster movement), such that I took to calling it Fallout 63.

tomc1985 6y ago

Please god no. Gaming is one of the last bastions of owning your bits. It kills off tinkering, modding, poking around asset data, and yes, some cheating. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is already too much rent-seeking in gaming.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
earthtourist 6y ago
You can't run a server for yourself for most games. You have to sign into a proprietary service to download/run games. We already lost this battle. I'd like to at least get some advantages like less cheating!

na85 6y ago

The best gaming experience, even in games with known/available cheats, remains LAN plan. The publishers demanding that every goddamn game have a 5v5 ranked queue/matchmaking system with lootboxes and whatever else means LAN play is a thing of yesteryear. Frankly, so are dedicated servers. I like competitive games, or at least I did when I was younger, but nowadays I yearn for some good-ol' tribes server community where you have 32 players playing CTF and there are actual administrators who are engaged with the community. If someone becomes a problem you just ban them from your server. Similarly if someone brings a friend to your LAN party and that friend is a cheater, you uninvite your friend and/or punch the cheater. "Cloud gaming" sounds like a hellscape.

ramses0 6y ago
https://www.playmidair.com/ https://www.playmidair.com/ ... there's a discord, but no true "play" community like you remember.
boobsbr 6y ago
I was thinking of Tribes this week when I watching the Cursed Halo mod video https://youtu.be/dMxIjGjMJz0?t=240 https://youtu.be/dMxIjGjMJz0?t=240. There's a flying Warthog, a sedan and a limo. It reminded me of the Heavy Personnel Carrier. Loading the HPC with 5 heavies armed with Grenade Launchers and Heavy Mortars was fun.

serf 6y ago

> The main benefit of cloud gaming might end up being a significant reduction in cheating. it'll just turn the cheats from memory manipulation to computer vision -- less powerfully 'psychic', but still fast enough to cheat.

fxtentacle 6y ago

There's little financial incentive for most games to fully prevent cheating. But a streaming-exclusive game would be impossible to pirate. That's why publishers are so enthusiastic about it.