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Less skilled players can't distinguish better players from cheaters, and reports are usually abused and used in bad faith. Even a good-faith report really just

Less skilled players can't distinguish better players from cheaters, and reports are usually abused and used in bad faith. Even a good-faith report really just means "I don't want to see this player for whatever reason". It's used as a signal of something in most systems but never followed outright in good games because players get a ton of useless reports. Players in some games with custom servers run webs of trust (or rather distrust, shared banlists). They are typically abused to some degree and good players are banned across multiple servers by admins acting in bad faith or just straight up not caring. This rarely ends well. I used to run popular servers for PvP sandbox games and big communities, and we used votebans/reports to evict good players from casual servers to anarchy ones, where they could compete, but a mod always had to approve the eviction using a pretty non-trivial process. This system was useless for catching cheaters, we got them in other ways. That's for PvP sandboxes - in e-sports grade games reports are useless for anything.

cortesoft 7mo ago
No, I wasn’t saying the human player would report them, I am saying the game itself would. If the game receives an update from another player showing them in a location that is too far away from their previous spot, for example, the client would know the other client is cheating, and would report it automatically.
- orbital-decay 7mo ago
  That's pretty redundant then, and also subject to abuse. Server state is already an authoritative source of truth, and the server itself should be doing behavioral analysis (which many do, it's not enough). In real-life conditions of most games, what you see, what server sees, and what each other client sees are entirely different and unrelated things.
  - cortesoft 7mo ago
    Yeah, that is why the reputation factor matters. If these games are relying on peer-to-peer connections for gameplay, then a client could lie and send different data to the server and to the other players. I acknowledge you can't trust the clients to report a cheater, because cheaters could report innocent users. My idea is that if you see the same player being reported by many clients across many games with random pairings, it becomes less and less likely that those reports are from other cheaters trying to get innocent players in trouble.

cortesoft 7mo ago

No, I wasn’t saying the human player would report them, I am saying the game itself would. If the game receives an update from another player showing them in a location that is too far away from their previous spot, for example, the client would know the other client is cheating, and would report it automatically.

orbital-decay 7mo ago
That's pretty redundant then, and also subject to abuse. Server state is already an authoritative source of truth, and the server itself should be doing behavioral analysis (which many do, it's not enough). In real-life conditions of most games, what you see, what server sees, and what each other client sees are entirely different and unrelated things.
- cortesoft 7mo ago
  Yeah, that is why the reputation factor matters. If these games are relying on peer-to-peer connections for gameplay, then a client could lie and send different data to the server and to the other players. I acknowledge you can't trust the clients to report a cheater, because cheaters could report innocent users. My idea is that if you see the same player being reported by many clients across many games with random pairings, it becomes less and less likely that those reports are from other cheaters trying to get innocent players in trouble.