9 ms·

Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away th

• sofixa 10mo ago
  > caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
  • afavour 10mo ago
    I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.
  • galbar 10mo ago
    For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source. Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further. IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.
  • squigz 10mo ago
    > Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software? A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem. To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...
    • keyringlight 10mo ago
      Running/renting hardware and connectivity and administrating a service and development are slightly different.
      • squigz 10mo ago
        It's not the 2000s anymore - you don't have to run/rent "hardware" and worry about "connectivity" and whatnot. For most games that offer dedicated servers, there are services with easy to use panels with fancy colored buttons and everything. As another example: how about hosting a website?
  • rererereferred 10mo ago
    There are games I play were one of the players' machines becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and you even have to input the host's IP to enter. Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.
  • hamdingers 10mo ago
    This isn't a problem because any given server can support hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your playerbase needs to run a server. We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.
  • hparadiz 10mo ago
    We used to run these servers on machines that today aren't even 20% of the M1 in my MacBook air.
• hombre_fatal 10mo ago
  Even if custom game servers were a preferable experience, which I would argue against, it doesn't really do anything for this problem. By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone. It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures because your website's users can just report the bots: by the time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for everyone except the bots.
  • squigz 10mo ago
    > By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone. The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust between people playing on a private server. Usually your group would know ahead of time if someone is going to potentially be a problem. Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our very next game will also contain a cheater Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually... you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?
    • hombre_fatal 10mo ago
      If I already have a preformed 4v4, then I don't need anticheat. The question is what to do about the rest of the time for everyone else. Shopping around private servers and dealing with individual server admin quirks is a regression from matchmaking UX that Starcraft had in the late 90s or that Halo 2 had in the early 2000s.
      • 10mo ago
• Kuinox 10mo ago
  Did you played in this era ? - If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned. - If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating. - Cheaters could just change server often. It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers. Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.
  • hamdingers 10mo ago
    All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server. Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
    • Kuinox 10mo ago
      They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
      • hparadiz 10mo ago
        Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
        • Kuinox 10mo ago
          > Back then at least you could do something about it. Back then, the most common option taken was leaving the server to find another one.
          • hparadiz 10mo ago
• LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
  This isn't the reason. The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today. And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.
  • t-writescode 10mo ago
    How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S) and GameSpy days?
    • organsnyder 10mo ago
      I think a big part of it is the stakes were just lower. There wasn't money and careers in it the same way there is with egaming now.
      • bee_rider 10mo ago
        I think it’s streaming in particular. With actual competitive games, like, tournaments and whatnot, the players are well known and they are competing in actual tournaments, right? The play is broadcast and all the players have their professional game-player reputation at stake, so there’s a strong incentive to not cheat (it is a very cushy and high-skill job with almost no transferable skills, so like, better not get booted). It is just that streamers might bump into cheating and that’s annoying for their viewers I guess. When people play in these “competitive” matchmaking queues, it is more like a pickup game. If somebody shows up to a pickup baseball game with a corked bat, they are just kind of a loser and it isn’t a big deal, right? There’s no actual reward for hitting “platinum rank” or whatever in most games, other than skins or something. Nothing real is on the line. IMO: we really should just have let these people cheat their way out of the normal matchmaking population. Smurfing is a much bigger problem. I don’t actually care if the guy dominating the match with some 60:0 kill-death-ratio is cheating or a semi-pro beating up on casuals, haha.
      • 10mo ago
• vel0city 10mo ago
  > It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity. Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.
  • orbital-decay 10mo ago
    All of this is hard but solvable at least for some genres, with the help of the platform and game devs. A decade+ ago, I ran servers for several PvP sandbox games, we've been one of the major EU hubs. This was pretty complicated - tons of custom observability tooling, a community with 24/7 mods, investigations, mod transparency, etc. The IDs were partially solved by Steam, the rest was handled by player behavior tracking and reputation. We also had skill-separated servers. Casual ones had votebans for teams and players that were too organized/skilled/abusive, with case by case mod approval. Anarchy servers had nearly zero rules and were absolutely cutthroat and toxic but fair, you always knew what you were signing up for. They even had mods temporarily banning players for whining. Cheaters never lasted long in our servers, including returning ones. Running a dedicated server takes some dedication. Know the game and people you're doing this for.
• dmayle 10mo ago
  The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards. When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others. Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at equivalent skill levels. The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun. I say, let the people cheat.
  • drdaeman 10mo ago
    Not just single player. Even in competitive multiplayer a lot of the complaints about "cheating" are actually complaints about matchmaking, and "cheating" is a giant red herring (griefing is a different matter, of course, that gets lumped into the umbrella term of "cheating"). But trying to explain this is typically like pissing against the wind, because people already believe in the existing status quo (no matter how irrational it is) and no one wants to change their beliefs unless it obviously and immediately short-term benefits them.
  • Tadpole9181 10mo ago
    Comments like this just make me upset to the point I can't cohere an appropriate argument. It's so out-of-touch with reality and completely ignores the core problem that I have to believe you're just fucking with us. No, it is not fun to play against smurf accounts using hacks. They aren't doing it for the leaderboards, they actively downrank themselves to play against worse players! And no, it's not fun to play against cheaters who are so bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your experience. And no, I actually do care that people are cheating in multiplayer games because it's not fair. Since when do we reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the game? Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it. Who cares if the sanctity of the sport or competition is ruined - we're a community of apathetic hacks.
  • cortesoft 10mo ago
• thomastjeffery 10mo ago
  Absolutely! The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how. The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!
  • throw10920 10mo ago
    > fascist How are game studios "fascist"?
• cortesoft 10mo ago
  There are still plenty of games that use community hosted servers for multiplayer. I play some of them (Rust, for example). First, cheating is absolutely still an issue in Rust. Sure, server admins can kick them out... once they have been discovered, verified by an admin, and kicked. The damage is usually done by then, and that is the best case scenario... often, the admins aren't available at that moment, because they are normal people who are not online all the time. Plus, this means you have to search and find a good server to play on. That isn't always easy, and limits your ability to find a good game. Second, lots of games I love to play don't make sense in the 'server hosted by a community member' model. I love playing sports games... Madden, FIFA (now called FC), NBA2k, etc. The best way to play those games is often 1on1 against someone who is close to your skill level. It isn't fun to play against people way worse or way better than you. The only way to do this in a way that lets me get a good game whenever I want to play is to have some sort of matchmaking system, that keeps track of how good i am and finds players who are about the same skill level. There is no way this would work on user hosted servers, and even if it did, why would a user hosted server be better at solving this problem than a company hosted one? You need a TON of players to be able to do good skill based matchmaking 24 hours a day. I have been playing multiplayer online games for over 30 years. I started playing when I had to call my friend on the phone, tell him to tell his family not to answer the next call because it was my modem calling, and then hope to god my sister didn't pick up the phone during our game and break the connection. We had to develop a code to signal if I was actually trying to call him to talk about an issue; if I called and hung up immediately it meant I was voice calling and the next call he should answer with the phone. I have played every iteration of multiplayer gaming. I played Warcraft II when you had to pay $20 to subscribe to Kali to use their virtual IPX service. I played local Counterstrike games at the college dorms on the local network (which was not even a switched network!) I run Minecraft servers for my kids on my local network. I have written multiplayer games for both peer-to-peer and server based multiplayer. No, you can't recreate the modern convenience and pleasure of company provided matchmaking by going back to community hosted servers.
• AJ007 10mo ago
  Interesting thing I noticed trying to play old versions of Call of Duty a year or two ago -- the oldest ones which supported hosted servers, there are still players, but once they switched to matchmaking either no one is playing or its so tiny you never get connected.
• rowanG077 10mo ago
  Not really true. For years you had both co-existing. Anti-cheat and people running their own servers where they could ban people.
• babypuncher 10mo ago
  Community-run servers weren't a magic bullet, and they had a lot of other problems that modern matchmaking systems solve more effectively.
• ThatPlayer 10mo ago
  This ignore actual history: anti-cheats started on community run servers. Because the majority of admins are not dealing with cheaters it because they enjoy it, but rather out of necessity. I see everyone here appreciating good admins, not many people are going to be volunteering themselves. Punkbuster for Team Fortress. BattleEye for Battlefield. EasyAntiCheat started for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War ICCUP's anti-hack client. You can see this in modern community servers too. Face-IT and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheat, not less. FiveM, which modded GTA V for community servers, never worked for Linux even before they added anti-cheat to the full game, because they had their own anti-cheat, adhesive. Admins for modern game servers are not going to be interested in turning off their anti-cheat. That just gives them more unpaid work for little gain.
  • skeaker 10mo ago
    This is the exception that proves the rule. When you host your own community server, you control how much anti-cheat is built into it, like GP said. That usually meant about none but manual admin bans, but it could also mean lots, like you said.
• arp242 10mo ago
  Back in the "small communities on their own servers" people also cheated. It was never entirely clear who cheated and who was just good and/or lucky with plenty of false positive bans also. Nothing about this was "easy" in any way. Which is why anti-cheat tools like PunkBuster have been around for 25 years.
• misswaterfairy 10mo ago
  Instead of anti-cheat on the client side, which 'kernel level' anti-cheat still gets beaten, why not look at a wholly server-side statistical analysis of player stats? Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input. Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters. You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones: - time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error) - % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes and so on (depending on the game). These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money. For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to: - flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation - Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours). Even if cheats were used on the server, their