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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 s

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.
  - ndriscoll 10mo ago
    Are the stakes not still zero? Aren't like 99.9% of players not at all competitive in any meaningful sense basically by definition? Like if Counter-Strike has 1M active players, and you are in the 99.9%-ile, you are still only in the top 1,000. Do people watch the rank 1000 players? Are they making a career out of it? What fraction of the player-base thinks they are actually competitive vs. is just playing a game?
    - bee_rider 10mo ago
      I actually think a big part of this anti-cheat push is just developers wanting their players to think something real is at stake. Yes we put a ton of effort into protecting your very important Elo score from hackers so you confidently sink hours into improving it. If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies and we wouldn’t have to deal with them.
      - ndriscoll 10mo ago
        Right, this is also my suspicion. It's all ultimately a way to psychologically manipulate people into buying more microtransactions. It's then important to always point out how silly and obvious the whole thing is. It's like if your local sports organization at the park insisted on drug testing everyone so they can try to convince you your beer league volleyball game is actually very serious and you should buy Air Jordans or fancy shorts to up your game. These people are a joke.
      - dtdynasty 10mo ago
        For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them marginally better at the game but much more frustrating to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and instant action scripts both of which can be useless without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of these cheats make playing against them frustrating but they wouldn't rise to the top.
        bee_rider 10mo ago
        Again I think there’s a better way if we push through the concept of a fair game, and just focus on fun. It should be possible and accepted to block (and never match with going forward) players who are just… unfun. Annoying, poor sports, or cheaters. Heck, maybe player-curated and shared matching and blocking lists could become a thing. Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there’s no obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging out with annoying people.
- LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
  More distributed and more manual. More administrative overhead. More localized culture we all get nostalgic for. Much more effort to play against peer competitors. It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors. Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.
- babypuncher 10mo ago
  PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.
thomastjeffery 10mo ago
People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now. The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping. Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
- LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
  What, 2000 players? 5000? Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles. No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.
  - guizadillas 10mo ago
    I wouldn't measure anticheat success by esports earning
    - LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
      It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think is going to happen to tournament money if every other tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to go play League after watching Faker decimate another team if they have cheaters in their match every other day? What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
  - thenthenthen 10mo ago
    Studios could release the server files when the game is EOL…
  - thomastjeffery 10mo ago
    My point is that player-moderation scales, while corporate moderation does not. The fact that there are more players on corporate moderated servers only makes this reality more significant.
LanceH 10mo ago
We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps. It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map. The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map. Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game. I especially miss custom maps.
- Rohansi 10mo ago
  This has nothing to do with anti-cheat. I work on Rust and most servers are hosted by the community and there is a good modding+custom map scene. The game has an anti-cheat because it's a big target for cheaters.
  - LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
    Do you work on community maps? Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison. I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.
    - s0ss 10mo ago
      Too bad rust isn’t playable on linux due to anticheat.
      - ThatPlayer 10mo ago
        Rust is playable on Linux on servers that disable anticheat
        antonyh 10mo ago
        Implying that Linux gamers have to play with cheaters. It may as well not be playable at all.
jsheard 10mo ago
> 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. Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  > and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point. Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.
- kartoffelsaft 10mo ago
  Counter Strike makes matchmaking far more prominent than community servers, so I don't think this is that good of an example. For a game like Team Fortress 2 where the options are presented more equally, It seems the players are closer to a 50/50 split. The reality is that most people follow the light patterns that get them in a game, which most modern multiplayer games make that matchmaking.
MetaWhirledPeas 10mo ago
> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with. I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least. That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
- duskwuff 10mo ago
  WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree. Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the number of online players searching for a game at the same time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a single highly skilled player who happened to be searching for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill. Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.
  - simoncion 10mo ago
    > Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?". You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0] [0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.
0x1ch 10mo ago
UGC Highlander and the countless CS pug servers show otherwise, to some extent.
thayne 10mo ago
> Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.
- LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
  Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real? A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.
  - ItsMonkk 10mo ago
    This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.
    - squeaky-clean 10mo ago
      Two reasons this doesn't work Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat. For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc. It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.
beeflet 10mo ago
The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into the bot issue. There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center
salawat 10mo ago
Matchmaking isn't worth rooting my machine. Give me a dedicated server to host for folks, and we'll work out an equilibrium eventually.
JulianHC 10mo ago
Not necessary, case in point skill-based-matchmaking got a lot of blow back when studios want to implement it.

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.
- ndriscoll 10mo ago
  Are the stakes not still zero? Aren't like 99.9% of players not at all competitive in any meaningful sense basically by definition? Like if Counter-Strike has 1M active players, and you are in the 99.9%-ile, you are still only in the top 1,000. Do people watch the rank 1000 players? Are they making a career out of it? What fraction of the player-base thinks they are actually competitive vs. is just playing a game?
  - bee_rider 10mo ago
    I actually think a big part of this anti-cheat push is just developers wanting their players to think something real is at stake. Yes we put a ton of effort into protecting your very important Elo score from hackers so you confidently sink hours into improving it. If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies and we wouldn’t have to deal with them.
    - ndriscoll 10mo ago
      Right, this is also my suspicion. It's all ultimately a way to psychologically manipulate people into buying more microtransactions. It's then important to always point out how silly and obvious the whole thing is. It's like if your local sports organization at the park insisted on drug testing everyone so they can try to convince you your beer league volleyball game is actually very serious and you should buy Air Jordans or fancy shorts to up your game. These people are a joke.
    - dtdynasty 10mo ago
      For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them marginally better at the game but much more frustrating to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and instant action scripts both of which can be useless without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of these cheats make playing against them frustrating but they wouldn't rise to the top.
      - bee_rider 10mo ago
        Again I think there’s a better way if we push through the concept of a fair game, and just focus on fun. It should be possible and accepted to block (and never match with going forward) players who are just… unfun. Annoying, poor sports, or cheaters. Heck, maybe player-curated and shared matching and blocking lists could become a thing. Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there’s no obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging out with annoying people.
LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
More distributed and more manual. More administrative overhead. More localized culture we all get nostalgic for. Much more effort to play against peer competitors. It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors. Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.
babypuncher 10mo ago
PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.

thomastjeffery 10mo ago

People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now. The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping. Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.

LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
What, 2000 players? 5000? Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles. No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.
- guizadillas 10mo ago
  I wouldn't measure anticheat success by esports earning
  - LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
    It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think is going to happen to tournament money if every other tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to go play League after watching Faker decimate another team if they have cheaters in their match every other day? What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
- thenthenthen 10mo ago
  Studios could release the server files when the game is EOL…
- thomastjeffery 10mo ago
  My point is that player-moderation scales, while corporate moderation does not. The fact that there are more players on corporate moderated servers only makes this reality more significant.

LanceH 10mo ago

We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps. It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map. The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map. Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game. I especially miss custom maps.

Rohansi 10mo ago
This has nothing to do with anti-cheat. I work on Rust and most servers are hosted by the community and there is a good modding+custom map scene. The game has an anti-cheat because it's a big target for cheaters.
- LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
  Do you work on community maps? Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison. I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.
  - s0ss 10mo ago
    Too bad rust isn’t playable on linux due to anticheat.
    - ThatPlayer 10mo ago
      Rust is playable on Linux on servers that disable anticheat
      - antonyh 10mo ago
        Implying that Linux gamers have to play with cheaters. It may as well not be playable at all.

jsheard 10mo ago

> 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. Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.

hamdingers 10mo ago
> and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point. Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.
kartoffelsaft 10mo ago
Counter Strike makes matchmaking far more prominent than community servers, so I don't think this is that good of an example. For a game like Team Fortress 2 where the options are presented more equally, It seems the players are closer to a 50/50 split. The reality is that most people follow the light patterns that get them in a game, which most modern multiplayer games make that matchmaking.

MetaWhirledPeas 10mo ago

> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with. I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least. That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.

duskwuff 10mo ago
WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree. Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the number of online players searching for a game at the same time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a single highly skilled player who happened to be searching for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill. Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.
- simoncion 10mo ago
  > Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?". You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0] [0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.

0x1ch 10mo ago

UGC Highlander and the countless CS pug servers show otherwise, to some extent.

thayne 10mo ago

> Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.

LMYahooTFY 10mo ago
Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real? A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.
- ItsMonkk 10mo ago
  This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.
  - squeaky-clean 10mo ago
    Two reasons this doesn't work Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat. For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc. It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.

beeflet 10mo ago

The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into the bot issue. There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center

salawat 10mo ago

Matchmaking isn't worth rooting my machine. Give me a dedicated server to host for folks, and we'll work out an equilibrium eventually.

JulianHC 10mo ago

Not necessary, case in point skill-based-matchmaking got a lot of blow back when studios want to implement it.