5 ms·

You may not, and that's ok.

chowells 2y ago
It's not ok for people playing those games. They'll quit playing that game and go to one with invasive client-side anti-cheat instead. The incentives and priorities are very different for people who want to play fair games than they are for people who want to maximize their own freedom.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  This is a solved issue already. Vote kicks or server admin intervention. Aimbotting was never an issue for the old primitive fps games I would play because admins could spectate and see you are aimbotting. A modern game need only telemetry that captures what a spectating admin picks up, rather than active surveillance. Hackers are only a problem when servers are left unmoderated and players can’t vote kick.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    You can't have vote kicks/server admins/hosted servers with competitive ranked ladders. If your solution is "don't have competitive ranked ladders" then you are just telling the majority of people who even care about anti-cheat to just not play their preferred game mode.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      Why can’t you have that with competitive ladders? Presumably theres still mechanisms to kick people in game if they start for example spewing racist messages in the game. What difference is it to kick someone one way or another? Not to mention plenty of games with vote kick mechanisms did have strong competitive scenes.
      - nemothekid 2y ago
        If you only allow users to kick their teammates for suspected cheating, they will have little incentive to do so. If you allow users to kick opponents for cheating, they will have an incentive to kick legitimate players who are playing well. You cannot have a global competitive ladder if the ladder is split into a ton of different admin-run servers. overwatch had a version of this problem where people would queue into the Australia region during low traffic times to boost their rank.
  - chowells 2y ago
    That stopped being a solution when winning online started mattering. There are real money prizes for online game tournaments. Weekly events can have hundreds of dollars in their prize pools. Big events can have thousands. Suddenly vote kicking had to go, because it was abused. Not in the tournaments themselves, but in open ranked play which serves as qualifiers. An active game can rack up thousands of hours of gameplay per day, far beyond the ability of competent admins to validate. Especially because cheating is often subtle. An expert can spend more than real time looking for subtle patterns that automated tools haven't been built to detect. Games aren't between you and your 25 buddies for bragging rights anymore. They're between you and 50k other active players for cash prizes. The world has changed. Anti-cheat technology followed that change.
- JasonSage 2y ago
  I play one of those games that doesn’t strongly enforce anti-cheating, and I agree with you that it’s a huge detraction compared to games with strong anti-cheat. But I strongly disagree about the use of invasive client-side anti-cheat. Server-side anti-cheat can reduce the number of cheaters to an acceptably low level. See for example how lichess detects and aids in detection of cheaters: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin And chess is a game where I feel like it would be relatively hard to detect cheating. An algorithm looking at games with actors moving in 3D space and responding to relative positions and actions of multiple other actors should have a great many more ways to detect cheating over the course of many games.
  - JasonSage 2y ago
    And frankly, I think the incentive structure has nothing to do with whether tournaments are happening with money on the line, and a great deal more whether the company has the cash and nothing better to do. Anti-cheat beyond a very basic level is nothing to these companies except a funnel optimization to extract the maximum lifetime value out of the player base. Only the most successful games will ever have the money or reach the technical capability to support this. Nobody making these decisions is doing it for player welfare.

It's not ok for people playing those games. They'll quit playing that game and go to one with invasive client-side anti-cheat instead. The incentives and priorities are very different for people who want to play fair games than they are for people who want to maximize their own freedom.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
This is a solved issue already. Vote kicks or server admin intervention. Aimbotting was never an issue for the old primitive fps games I would play because admins could spectate and see you are aimbotting. A modern game need only telemetry that captures what a spectating admin picks up, rather than active surveillance. Hackers are only a problem when servers are left unmoderated and players can’t vote kick.
- nemothekid 2y ago
  You can't have vote kicks/server admins/hosted servers with competitive ranked ladders. If your solution is "don't have competitive ranked ladders" then you are just telling the majority of people who even care about anti-cheat to just not play their preferred game mode.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Why can’t you have that with competitive ladders? Presumably theres still mechanisms to kick people in game if they start for example spewing racist messages in the game. What difference is it to kick someone one way or another? Not to mention plenty of games with vote kick mechanisms did have strong competitive scenes.
    - nemothekid 2y ago
      If you only allow users to kick their teammates for suspected cheating, they will have little incentive to do so. If you allow users to kick opponents for cheating, they will have an incentive to kick legitimate players who are playing well. You cannot have a global competitive ladder if the ladder is split into a ton of different admin-run servers. overwatch had a version of this problem where people would queue into the Australia region during low traffic times to boost their rank.
- chowells 2y ago
  That stopped being a solution when winning online started mattering. There are real money prizes for online game tournaments. Weekly events can have hundreds of dollars in their prize pools. Big events can have thousands. Suddenly vote kicking had to go, because it was abused. Not in the tournaments themselves, but in open ranked play which serves as qualifiers. An active game can rack up thousands of hours of gameplay per day, far beyond the ability of competent admins to validate. Especially because cheating is often subtle. An expert can spend more than real time looking for subtle patterns that automated tools haven't been built to detect. Games aren't between you and your 25 buddies for bragging rights anymore. They're between you and 50k other active players for cash prizes. The world has changed. Anti-cheat technology followed that change.
JasonSage 2y ago
I play one of those games that doesn’t strongly enforce anti-cheating, and I agree with you that it’s a huge detraction compared to games with strong anti-cheat. But I strongly disagree about the use of invasive client-side anti-cheat. Server-side anti-cheat can reduce the number of cheaters to an acceptably low level. See for example how lichess detects and aids in detection of cheaters: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin And chess is a game where I feel like it would be relatively hard to detect cheating. An algorithm looking at games with actors moving in 3D space and responding to relative positions and actions of multiple other actors should have a great many more ways to detect cheating over the course of many games.
- JasonSage 2y ago
  And frankly, I think the incentive structure has nothing to do with whether tournaments are happening with money on the line, and a great deal more whether the company has the cash and nothing better to do. Anti-cheat beyond a very basic level is nothing to these companies except a funnel optimization to extract the maximum lifetime value out of the player base. Only the most successful games will ever have the money or reach the technical capability to support this. Nobody making these decisions is doing it for player welfare.