6 ms·

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.
  - AJ007 10mo ago
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.

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.
- AJ007 10mo ago

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.