Comment by J_McQuade

> Anticheat is only hard because people are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.

As much as I reminisce about the days of private servers for Quake/2/3, UT99, CS1.6, etc., saying this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works. Some games would simply not be possible without public matchmaking; I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going. Even getting 11 other people to run a game of Overwatch or CS would be a pain. Other games need public matchmaking to have a fair ranking system. You go onto say ranking is "weaponised" but, ranking is a feature, and a lot of people like that feature.

> However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.

The demand for anticheat, and matchmaking/ranking systems, are entirely player-driven, not publisher-driven. If developers and publishers could get away with only implementing player-managed servers and letting players deal with cheaters, they would! It's a lot less work for them.

As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster. I remember needing to install some anti-cheat crap when I signed up for Brood War's private ICCUP ladder.

My naive take is that technical solutions are possible, but critically they can’t be fully automated. The most effective anti-cheat solution possible probably looks something like a full-time in-house team comprised of seasoned ITSEC, data nerds, a couple of ML people, and a few devs. A team like that could probably pick out and boot cheaters with a very low rate of false positives given adequate data to crunch, and they’d only get better over time as they build a roster of patterns and behaviors to match against.

The problem is that this costs more than game companies are willing to spend, even when they’re raking in cash hand over fist. As long as the problem isn’t so bad that it’s making players quit, it’s cheaper to employ more automated, less effective strategies. The end goal isn’t player happiness, it’s higher profit margins.

I agree with you the issue is scale, but the scale when it worked was when gaming was niche. You can't put that back into the bottle.

The history of plenty of anticheats start with community servers, not matchmaking. Even Team Fortress Classic had enough of a cheating issue that community members developed Punkbuster, which went on to get integrated into Quake 3 Arena. A lot of 3rd party anticheats were developed in that era for community servers. BattlEye for BattleField games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War's 3rd party ICCUP server with 'antihack'.

You still see this today with additional anticheats on community server solutions. GTA V's modded FiveM servers had anticheats before it was added to the official game. CS2 Face-IT and ESEA servers have additional anticheats as people do not think VAC is effective enough.

There are quite a few games that are fun because they throw dozens of players into the same event. I don't have over 100 friends to play with, let alone over 100 friends I trust not to cheat.

For some games the small group approach works, but even a game as simple as Counter Strike requires at least a dozen players to make the most of.

That said, there are perverse incentives in many of the games hit worst by cheaters. Games that invent more and more prestigious rewards and titles for accounts that do well in hopes of them spending more money on microtransactions, or the microtransaction hell-holes like GTA Online that exist as a vessel to take your money more than to be of any fun. Adding upgrades and other desired items behind a gambling mechanic makes the whole ordeal extra shitty, praying on the psychological weaknesses of the unfortunate souls to get a digital gambling addiction so they can be sucked dry by billion dollar companies.

I've personally never run into anticheat issues because I find most of the games that require anticheat for online play just aren't worth the time and effort to play online in.

But still, the old SW Battlefront II wouldn't be fun without the massive online matches, and those require some form of anticheat to stay fun.

Making sure you can get enough people together for a game is one thing; making sure you can get enough people together for a game that you know aren't cheating is even harder. Most "friends" these days are online-only acquaintances that you simply can't know well enough to know if they're cheating or not. In the heat of the moment while playing a game it's tough to tell if someone's cheating or just good at the game. The toxicity of people being accused of cheating and defending themselves will quickly split apart any acquaintance group.

Thanks. Personally, I simply refuse to install games with anti-cheats, be it on Linux or on Windows. This mostly leaves me with FOSS games and small communities. For instance, Zero-K. Zero-K is curiously fine for large team games - you will usually find players to play with anytime - but if you are looking for PvP you have to be there when the right players are usually online. Being there and available for a game can be a way to contribute to a FOSS project too.

In some cases there are numerous public servers, which can mitigate the "player availability" problem.

Also, for these online FOSS games the servers are community-owned and moderated. Cheaters, trolls, inappropriate chats are monitored by someone who is interested in, and generally quite knowledgeable about, the game.

I think there's immense value in being able to just press a button and jump into a game, without having to actually know people and build up a community.

However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players. (Or maybe you rank players so you can match people of similar skill levels, but you don't tell anyone what their rank is.)

> The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.

One of the games mentioned in this article is Rust. Playing with only people you trust defeats the point because it's a game full of betrayal. At best you'll be able to get a group together once and then destroy your relationships more than Monopoly would.

I cannot agree. Getting a Quake game up in the early 2000s could take hours worth of sitting in IRC pickup channels, if it happened at all. I don't feel publishers are at fault here. I figure the vast majority of players would pick an instant game with potential cheaters over an hour wait for a 50% chance at a game.

Yeah, or don't play video games that people treat as jobs, cause that's where cheaters go. Csgo was one. Better yet, there are hobbies.

So how am I supposed to play a game of PUBG if I don't have 99 friends who I trust not to cheat who also play it? How is any community going to establish and continuously monitor that their members don't cheat, while also allowing new members to join over time? I don't have a big group of friends who also like playing the same games I play at the same times I want to play, sounds like a total non-starter to me.

Even people you think you trust might cheat.