> No, it's about latency. See the absolutely vehement reaction to streaming services for twitch shooters on gaming forums. By putting trusted hardware close en

> No, it's about latency. See the absolutely vehement reaction to streaming services for twitch shooters on gaming forums. By putting trusted hardware close enough to the player you reduce the latency problem to a cost problem. This is more or less what game consoles currently happen do (of course the issue is that users still pay for it rather than the game company). Also, twitch shooters existed before rootkits. Choices made by game companies such as matchmaking with untrusted strangers probably exacerbated the problem over the years. > Waiting for a round trip from two players with server frame times could be up to 250ms, Only if they're living on different continents or have very high latency internet providers. Many games provide region-based servers for that reason. And it's only a roundtrip that has to happen anyway. Clients stream their updates as they take actions, server reconciles them as they arrive and broadcasts the updates to all clients. This is the minimum amount of time it takes to get the information from player A to player B anyway unless you establish p2p connections between the clients and those happen to be lower latency than contacting the server. > you can spin that either way, either the shooter gets the advantage, or the defender gets the advantage. That doesn't matter, the point is that leaving reconciliation of some game actions to the client means clients can lie about something and claim that it was preempted by another action. > Most game engines are broken. The reality of the situation is that 1) this stuff is _really hard_, and 2) there are tradeoffs to be made at every single step of the process that affect how the game plays and feels. A problem being difficult is not a good justification for externalizing the costs, especially considering that hardware may be shared with other people and botnets that might use those weaknesses create further externalties. > "I actually did shoot at that guy 50ms ago". That would mean trusting the client's clock which quite obviously is something you shouldn't do. Arrival time should be the only thing that matters. > The number of people who are willing to do that is drastically smaller than the number of people willing to pay $130 a month for a rootkit that they willing install [0]. As I said in my previous comment, this isn't about eliminating cheating 100% - it's a cat and mouse game. It's about raising the barrier to entry from credit card to specialised hardware. That's only the tradeoff from the game dev perspective. It's totally ignoring the security or privacy implications of running these rootkits and the ever-escalating system restrictions that they demand. This is the crux of the argument. If we were only talking about game devs making tradeoffs between different game experiences, risk for themselves, profit and so on there wouldn't be a problem. But they're making a tradeoff with other assets that are not theirs.