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I've often wondered about escrow for cheat detection. I'll put $10, $100, $1000 up to enter the player pool at that X level. If someone catches me cheating and

I've often wondered about escrow for cheat detection. I'll put $10, $100, $1000 up to enter the player pool at that X level. If someone catches me cheating and can provide evidence via game replays then they can submit it to a group that reviews and then the money is awarded to them. No bans, if I want to play again then I have to pay again or go back to the public level. In my experience, it's always the free product/game/saas tiers that have the abuse. Money is a great curb on bad behavior. Not perfect, but drastically reduces the pool of bad actors.

deweller 4y ago
This is a great use case for programmable money. A smart contract on a blockchain such as an Ethereum layer 2 chain could handle this openly and verifiably.
WhiteDawn 4y ago
Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing. It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys. Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers. Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it. For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.
- ThatPlayer 4y ago
  I think the community servers solution wouldn't have scaled up to current markets. Back in the day with smaller userbases you'd have less casual players, more people who would be interested in administrating a server and willing to work for free. Now that gaming is mainstream and everyone does it, not everyone cares as much as people used to back then. Counter-Strike itself still has community servers as an option. And given the choice between those servers and regular matchmaking, most players prefer the latter. This map hasn't updated in 4 years, but I doubt that has changed: https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live

deweller 4y ago

This is a great use case for programmable money. A smart contract on a blockchain such as an Ethereum layer 2 chain could handle this openly and verifiably.

WhiteDawn 4y ago

Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing. It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys. Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers. Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.

Xeoncross 4y ago
Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it. For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.
ThatPlayer 4y ago
I think the community servers solution wouldn't have scaled up to current markets. Back in the day with smaller userbases you'd have less casual players, more people who would be interested in administrating a server and willing to work for free. Now that gaming is mainstream and everyone does it, not everyone cares as much as people used to back then. Counter-Strike itself still has community servers as an option. And given the choice between those servers and regular matchmaking, most players prefer the latter. This map hasn't updated in 4 years, but I doubt that has changed: https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live