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I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but: Cheating in online games is not a problem. We have essentially two cases to consider: 1. The cheater is usi

I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but: Cheating in online games is not a problem. We have essentially two cases to consider: 1. The cheater is using a rage cheat to get ahead of everything, in disregard of wether he will keep the account. This is pretty easy to detect programmatically, even more so for a human watching the demo. This case is rather rare, because accounts tend to be expensive/annoying to get into a state where competitve queuing is possible. 2. The cheater is using a tool to covertly rise the competitive ranks without showing his advantage directly. This is also not a problem because for 99,9% of players there is no difference if they're playing against a cheater who gives himself a slight advantage or simply against a better player. This player will rise through the ranks until he finds the spot where his tool assisted performance places him or he will have to increase the assistance to a point where he's getting into category 1 territory and is banned. If hidden cheating is getting important because money is in the performance when reaching the top 0.0001% of players, we're getting into lan territory where the hardware setups are either provided or checked. For fair players type one is annoying, but a rare occurance due to the deterrences measures taken for new accounts. Type two is moot. I conclude: Cheating is not an issue for normal people.

GauntletWizard 5y ago
There's actually a lot more room between #1 and #2 than you'd believe, and human review is expensive, especially in F2P games like Fortnite. The cost of a mistaken ban is also high. It used to be a meme that any decent CS player got banned once a day for hacking by clueless admins, and that was with review (CS had great replay tools for server admins) by players who cared enough to host their own servers. That was also in the days where if you got banned, you moved to another server, no biggie. In the F2P shooter world, there are often several hundred dollars of spend on cheaters accounts, because the people who crave instant gratification of cheating are generally also the whales. That creates a perverse incentive on both sides - Ban then and you've taken their money for "nothing", don't ban them and get more money from them.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
Both of these types of cheating can be a big problem for online game if it becomes prevalent that it starts to cause attrition among the rest of the playerbase.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Spoken like someone who has never played games against cheaters or tried to build anti cheat software. 1. is absolutely not rare at all, particularly in F2P games and even in paid games. I've seen periods where CSGO and PUBG games were filled with blatant cheaters. They were usually detected and banned within a few games, but the community still had a problem because there were enough of them that there would be a few cheaters in every match ruining the whole thing. The metric that matters for a player is cheaters/game not games/cheater. Given enough cheaters, they can dominate a large fraction of games even if they are banned quickly. 2. is also frustrating to play against. There are cheats that show players where everyone is on the map in COD Warzone or PUBG. It's subtle to detect, but in practice is a huge huge competitive advantage and gives you 0 chance of surviving an encounter with them. And just like the previous case, they may rise through the ranks eventually but ruin 100s of 100s of games in that time. With a large enough fraction of these cheaters, you will encounter a few every game you play. Not to mention other perverse incentives - the "smurfing" impulse many cheaters have, where they will abandon the account as soon as it gets to a high enough rank go be even remotely competitive. They just create a new account at level 1 and start all over again. So the steady state you imagine never happens, and that cheater goes right back into the pool of low rank games. Banning an account wrongly is also very costly. A good player wrongly banned will hate your game forever. But a cheater often will have no qualms spending money to buy a new account even if banned. So the detection systems have to have both very low false positives and high recall on true positivies and very quick detection of true positives. Another thing HN frequently overlooks is "but I could bypass this by just writing a fake mouse driver/run on Android blah blah". Cheaters are generally people looking for a quick hit. They are not the type of people who will spend days or have the knowledge to setup whatever complicated _technically_ possible but difficult workaround. Making it difficult to install, buy or use cheats easily is an effective deterrent. It's really a very difficult problem.
- f1refly 5y ago
  Actually, spoken as someone who has played his fair (1000h+) share of Counter Strike Global Offensive since it came out. 1. Is and always was rare. During all my time on official matchmaking servers I encountered maybe one or two raging spinbots per year tops. I don't know if this is region dependent, I always play on EUW. 2. Again, how do you know? Do you watch the whole demo after the game to judge wether someone was cheating all along or do you just go "he just couldn't have known I was here, he must be cheating"? If they raise through the ranks and "ruin" games along the way, how is it not blantant enough to cause an ban? Besides, I don't know much about the fow in those large-map royale type games, but why does the server even sent every other players position to the client? Hiding as much info as possible from the client from the start is like anticheat 101 and in most cases much, much easier than trying to get the players computer to disobey him. In Counter Strikes case, player positions are only sent to the client if they have to be, based on how the maps parts are attached to each other iirc. > Not to mention other perverse incentives - the "smurfing" impulse many cheaters have, where they will abandon the account as soon as it gets to a high enough rank go be even remotely competitive. They just create a new account There is two parts to this. The first is the smurfing problem, which I personally find the most annoying thing in competitive matchmaking based videogames to date. In regular sports, when someone joins who is much better, you could always just say "fuck this, I'm leaving", but in competitive games only you are punished for leaving and the other guy gets to abuse you for the duration of the match. I have yet to see effective counter measures against this and I doubt there will be any soon. It is a legitimate player after all, there is no real reason to ban him since bad intention can rarely be proven. Many people abandon their accounts for months, get back worse and climb the ranks again afte swiftly resharpening their hibernated skills. Note however that smurfing has nothing to do with cheating -- it's generally just players who misuse the ranking system for their own amusement while destroying the fun for others. The second part falls under the same catergory as my original first point. It doesn't really matter if the cheater is banned or just gets bored and makes a new account. This is directly correlating with the friction of creating new accounts and it's not an anticheat problem. Back in the day when CS:GO still cost money, there where waves of new smurfs and generally trolling or annoying (and yes, people I would suspect of cheating as well) players after every steam sale when the game would be sold a neglectible amount of money. Now it's a lot better since new accounts are distrusted by default and require a lot of effort to get into a trusted state where normal matchmaking is even available, dramatically reducing the number of throwaways due to the sheer amount of effort of creating a new competitive account. So this problem is nothing that couldn't be reduced to neglectable amounts if the makers of the game cared enough to properly filter new accounts. > Banning an account wrongly is also very costly. Yes, I'm not sure how this is related to the discussion. If you ban my account because I looked up what cheats are available for a game, sent my entire browser history to the mothership to throw it against some domain blacklist and ban my account based on that I'd be pissed as well. False positives are nothing an invasive anticheat system wouldn't have. > Cheaters are generally people looking for a quick hit. They are not the type of people who will spend days or have the knowledge to setup whatever complicated _technically_ possible but difficult workaround. Making it difficult to install, buy or use cheats easily is an effective deterrent. I have never even once heard of a cheater who programmed his own cheat for a game and inteded to actually use it for competitive matches himself. There are two types of people, and both are highly sophisticated: The first type creates cheat for shits and giggles. He does not intend to actually use them beyond proving that they indeed fall through the filters. The other type is a professional cheat publisher. He has the expertise, often publishes for multible games accross genres and offers personalized cheating systems on a subscription basis. The people willing to use the cheat will follow every given instruction, even stuff like rebooting windows into recovery to install unsigned drivers and things like that. They have no idea what harm this can do to their systems and they don't care because they are not techincal and don't need to be. It's a pure service economy, and not even an illegal one. Source: I had a friendish guy for some years who eventually had his account banned because he stopped installing updated versions of a cheat and eventually got caught when VAC got onto the older one. Everyone who played with him had no idea he was a cheater until that moment, he just hit some crazy shots from time to time, sometimes while he was high on weed. Enemies didn't know nor complain, neither did we. It was indistinguishable to a high-skill player. > It's really a very difficult problem. Yes, but I'm convinced Valve solves this with great brilliance. Next time you tell someone he has no idea what he's talking about, please consider you might be wrong.
phendrenad2 5y ago
> I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion > Actually, spoken as someone who has played his fair (1000h+) share of Counter Strike Global Offensive since it came out Something doesn't add up about your story. You really played 1kh+ and have never seen how much people hate cheaters? Anyway, there's a very simple psychological explanation for why they do: Video games are only as good as the rules they abide by. If you go into a game and are surprised by rules you didn't know existed, then that's no fun. Likewise, if you have to guess if someone is a hacker to determine if you're able to defeat them, that's a surprise, and no fun. It's frustrating enough when you pull off a daring maneuver and suffer a framerate stutter or network congestion and the opponent gets away or destroys you. Now imagine when the other person (surprise) is playing by a different set of rules where they can see you around corners and never miss.
- f1refly 5y ago
  I experience people hating cheaters every other lobby. Mostly they can't proof someone is indeed cheating. In any case, watching the demo after the game will make them begrudgingly admit that the other guy really was better than us. > if you have to guess if someone is a hacker to determine if you're able to defeat them, that's a surprise, and no fun Seems like you didn't understand my argument. If someone is indeed cheating and you don't notice anything fishy, how do you know that he isn't just a better player? If you can clearly see that he's cheating, how is that player not banned after a short amount of time?

GauntletWizard 5y ago

There's actually a lot more room between #1 and #2 than you'd believe, and human review is expensive, especially in F2P games like Fortnite. The cost of a mistaken ban is also high. It used to be a meme that any decent CS player got banned once a day for hacking by clueless admins, and that was with review (CS had great replay tools for server admins) by players who cared enough to host their own servers. That was also in the days where if you got banned, you moved to another server, no biggie. In the F2P shooter world, there are often several hundred dollars of spend on cheaters accounts, because the people who crave instant gratification of cheating are generally also the whales. That creates a perverse incentive on both sides - Ban then and you've taken their money for "nothing", don't ban them and get more money from them.

bluefirebrand 5y ago

Both of these types of cheating can be a big problem for online game if it becomes prevalent that it starts to cause attrition among the rest of the playerbase.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

Spoken like someone who has never played games against cheaters or tried to build anti cheat software. 1. is absolutely not rare at all, particularly in F2P games and even in paid games. I've seen periods where CSGO and PUBG games were filled with blatant cheaters. They were usually detected and banned within a few games, but the community still had a problem because there were enough of them that there would be a few cheaters in every match ruining the whole thing. The metric that matters for a player is cheaters/game not games/cheater. Given enough cheaters, they can dominate a large fraction of games even if they are banned quickly. 2. is also frustrating to play against. There are cheats that show players where everyone is on the map in COD Warzone or PUBG. It's subtle to detect, but in practice is a huge huge competitive advantage and gives you 0 chance of surviving an encounter with them. And just like the previous case, they may rise through the ranks eventually but ruin 100s of 100s of games in that time. With a large enough fraction of these cheaters, you will encounter a few every game you play. Not to mention other perverse incentives - the "smurfing" impulse many cheaters have, where they will abandon the account as soon as it gets to a high enough rank go be even remotely competitive. They just create a new account at level 1 and start all over again. So the steady state you imagine never happens, and that cheater goes right back into the pool of low rank games. Banning an account wrongly is also very costly. A good player wrongly banned will hate your game forever. But a cheater often will have no qualms spending money to buy a new account even if banned. So the detection systems have to have both very low false positives and high recall on true positivies and very quick detection of true positives. Another thing HN frequently overlooks is "but I could bypass this by just writing a fake mouse driver/run on Android blah blah". Cheaters are generally people looking for a quick hit. They are not the type of people who will spend days or have the knowledge to setup whatever complicated _technically_ possible but difficult workaround. Making it difficult to install, buy or use cheats easily is an effective deterrent. It's really a very difficult problem.

f1refly 5y ago
Actually, spoken as someone who has played his fair (1000h+) share of Counter Strike Global Offensive since it came out. 1. Is and always was rare. During all my time on official matchmaking servers I encountered maybe one or two raging spinbots per year tops. I don't know if this is region dependent, I always play on EUW. 2. Again, how do you know? Do you watch the whole demo after the game to judge wether someone was cheating all along or do you just go "he just couldn't have known I was here, he must be cheating"? If they raise through the ranks and "ruin" games along the way, how is it not blantant enough to cause an ban? Besides, I don't know much about the fow in those large-map royale type games, but why does the server even sent every other players position to the client? Hiding as much info as possible from the client from the start is like anticheat 101 and in most cases much, much easier than trying to get the players computer to disobey him. In Counter Strikes case, player positions are only sent to the client if they have to be, based on how the maps parts are attached to each other iirc. > Not to mention other perverse incentives - the "smurfing" impulse many cheaters have, where they will abandon the account as soon as it gets to a high enough rank go be even remotely competitive. They just create a new account There is two parts to this. The first is the smurfing problem, which I personally find the most annoying thing in competitive matchmaking based videogames to date. In regular sports, when someone joins who is much better, you could always just say "fuck this, I'm leaving", but in competitive games only you are punished for leaving and the other guy gets to abuse you for the duration of the match. I have yet to see effective counter measures against this and I doubt there will be any soon. It is a legitimate player after all, there is no real reason to ban him since bad intention can rarely be proven. Many people abandon their accounts for months, get back worse and climb the ranks again afte swiftly resharpening their hibernated skills. Note however that smurfing has nothing to do with cheating -- it's generally just players who misuse the ranking system for their own amusement while destroying the fun for others. The second part falls under the same catergory as my original first point. It doesn't really matter if the cheater is banned or just gets bored and makes a new account. This is directly correlating with the friction of creating new accounts and it's not an anticheat problem. Back in the day when CS:GO still cost money, there where waves of new smurfs and generally trolling or annoying (and yes, people I would suspect of cheating as well) players after every steam sale when the game would be sold a neglectible amount of money. Now it's a lot better since new accounts are distrusted by default and require a lot of effort to get into a trusted state where normal matchmaking is even available, dramatically reducing the number of throwaways due to the sheer amount of effort of creating a new competitive account. So this problem is nothing that couldn't be reduced to neglectable amounts if the makers of the game cared enough to properly filter new accounts. > Banning an account wrongly is also very costly. Yes, I'm not sure how this is related to the discussion. If you ban my account because I looked up what cheats are available for a game, sent my entire browser history to the mothership to throw it against some domain blacklist and ban my account based on that I'd be pissed as well. False positives are nothing an invasive anticheat system wouldn't have. > Cheaters are generally people looking for a quick hit. They are not the type of people who will spend days or have the knowledge to setup whatever complicated _technically_ possible but difficult workaround. Making it difficult to install, buy or use cheats easily is an effective deterrent. I have never even once heard of a cheater who programmed his own cheat for a game and inteded to actually use it for competitive matches himself. There are two types of people, and both are highly sophisticated: The first type creates cheat for shits and giggles. He does not intend to actually use them beyond proving that they indeed fall through the filters. The other type is a professional cheat publisher. He has the expertise, often publishes for multible games accross genres and offers personalized cheating systems on a subscription basis. The people willing to use the cheat will follow every given instruction, even stuff like rebooting windows into recovery to install unsigned drivers and things like that. They have no idea what harm this can do to their systems and they don't care because they are not techincal and don't need to be. It's a pure service economy, and not even an illegal one. Source: I had a friendish guy for some years who eventually had his account banned because he stopped installing updated versions of a cheat and eventually got caught when VAC got onto the older one. Everyone who played with him had no idea he was a cheater until that moment, he just hit some crazy shots from time to time, sometimes while he was high on weed. Enemies didn't know nor complain, neither did we. It was indistinguishable to a high-skill player. > It's really a very difficult problem. Yes, but I'm convinced Valve solves this with great brilliance. Next time you tell someone he has no idea what he's talking about, please consider you might be wrong.

phendrenad2 5y ago

> I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion > Actually, spoken as someone who has played his fair (1000h+) share of Counter Strike Global Offensive since it came out Something doesn't add up about your story. You really played 1kh+ and have never seen how much people hate cheaters? Anyway, there's a very simple psychological explanation for why they do: Video games are only as good as the rules they abide by. If you go into a game and are surprised by rules you didn't know existed, then that's no fun. Likewise, if you have to guess if someone is a hacker to determine if you're able to defeat them, that's a surprise, and no fun. It's frustrating enough when you pull off a daring maneuver and suffer a framerate stutter or network congestion and the opponent gets away or destroys you. Now imagine when the other person (surprise) is playing by a different set of rules where they can see you around corners and never miss.

f1refly 5y ago
I experience people hating cheaters every other lobby. Mostly they can't proof someone is indeed cheating. In any case, watching the demo after the game will make them begrudgingly admit that the other guy really was better than us. > if you have to guess if someone is a hacker to determine if you're able to defeat them, that's a surprise, and no fun Seems like you didn't understand my argument. If someone is indeed cheating and you don't notice anything fishy, how do you know that he isn't just a better player? If you can clearly see that he's cheating, how is that player not banned after a short amount of time?