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This is a pattern I see very often and that I think all of us can see all the time. The developers of software try to control how the users use the software. T
by robalni 4y ago
This is a pattern I see very often and that I think all of us can see all the time. The developers of software try to control how the users use the software.
This is not just a regular customer or user relationship between the user and the developer. This is something else, some kind of controlling behavior that we need to get rid of.
You can't force someone to stop doing something as long as they do it on their own computer. You have to choose; either people use your computer with your rules or they use their own computer with their rules.
If players want to cheat, that's the player's problem, not the developer's problem.
- smileybarry 4y ago…and on that same note, the developers have total say over what someone does on their computer — the server.
- robalni 4y agoNo player runs code on the developer's server. They just send packets to it, just like my web browser sends packets to web servers. Nobody is trying to put anti-cheat software in my web browser.
- smileybarry 4y agoSo? You’re still using their server. They can choose to require you to follow certain rules to do so.
- robalni 4y agoThey can choose the server rules but I choose what code runs on my computer.
- smileybarry 4y agoMy point is that they can stipulate to run their code on your computer if you wish to connect to their server — which is the current situation. If you uninstall/disable anticheats, the server declines your connection.
- robalni 4y agoThat's what I meant in my first post that we need to get rid of. There is too much of this behavior that companies try to get into people's computers and control what they can do with their own computer.
- smileybarry 4y agoBut, again, why can’t they stipulate requirements for using their services? If you don’t want to run their anti cheat then you can’t play on their servers, simple. It bothers you and (relatively) few others that they need to run a kernel driver to prevent cheats, but it bothers countless players when a game is plagued with cheaters, and yes, there’s some prevention done by anti-cheats. Call of Duty: Warzone has/had a notorious cheating problem and absolutely no anti-cheat system.
- robalni 4y ago> why can’t they stipulate requirements for using their services? They can and they do, but there is too much of this behavior that companies require too much access and control of people's computers. My computer is my private thing. It's like my home. No company requires to come home to me when I want to do something; they send mail. I want more things to work like the web: everyone has 100% control of their computer and web browser and they can connect to web servers and those web servers can have whatever rules they want but they don't try to get into people's computers.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoIt becomes the developer's problem when the players are quitting the game because cheaters are ruining it though. And also the player's problem who want to play a game without cheaters. For example, BattlEye started out as 3rd party anti-cheat for Battlefield Vietnam because the players wanted better anti-cheat. Similarly Face-IT and ESEA run their own anti-cheats that are opt-in and not part of the developer's game.
- robalni 4y agoIt becomes the developer's problem because they put themselves in a position where their money and future depends on what random people do in a game. Nobody should expect it to go well when you connect random people on the internet and require them to behave. Just look at Twitter and places like that. We need a different structure.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoWhat do you have in mind for a different structure?
- robalni 4y agoOne old and tested solution is that you play with your friends or people you trust. This has worked perfectly for board games and other pre-internet games for many years. Otherwise if you want to play at a bigger scale, I don't know how you would do that. Maybe that's just the lesson you have to learn, that random people on the internet can't be trusted.
- enragedcacti 4y agoYou have the "right" to run cheats on your machine and Riot has the right to stop you from connecting to their servers and ruining the experience for their customers when you do it. The software is still installed and you can use all of its offline features all you want, which in the case of Riot games is stare at a login screen because they are all live service multiplayer games. Why is your right to disrupt a service for other people more important than their right to enjoy that service?
- robalni 4y agoI'm not interested in any right to disrupt a service; it's just something that can happen because of other rights: to run arbitrary code on your own computer, and trying to remove that right is not going to work. We need a better solution.