Comment by mjr00

Comment by mjr00 20 hours ago

> 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.

OkayPhysicist 20 hours ago

Large-player count community server driven games actually have a pretty big advantage compared to smaller player count ones: it makes it easier to have somebody with the permission to ban cheaters online at approximately all times.

Squad has 100 player games, and despite its anticheat having well-known bypasses, I don't see a lot of hacked client cheating. Why? Because I play on servers that consistently have a couple people online during the hours I play that ban anybody who cheats.

Community servers have a lot more moderators than the game devs could possibly afford, because they can build trust with volunteers.

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J_McQuade 20 hours ago

> this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works.

If you listen to the people complaining about cheating... it doesn't.

> 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.

True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system going to be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames. At least this one doesn't require me to install an umpire in my home at all times.

> As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster.

The difference is that you could have played the game without doing that. If you didn't trust the people on that server, how likely would you be to install those tools?

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mjr00 20 hours ago

> True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames.
I played against the EVO 2025 world champion Street Fighter 6 player in ranked matchmaking last week. When's the last time your county cricket team played against anyone who's won the Cricket World Cup?
We're fundamentally talking about different activities here. Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment. Your "solution" is essentially telling Lamar to not worry about it and just play flag football with his friends instead.
I realize this type of activity isn't for everyone, and there's something to be said about too many games becoming overly competitive, but your proposed solution doesn't really address the problem.

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- J_McQuade 19 hours ago
  
  > We're fundamentally talking about different activities here.
  It seems so, and I think your example underlines this:
  > Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment.
  I don't know who those people are, but I'll assume that this is a reasonable pairing of NFL players. Are you saying that there is no system in place to catch cheating in the NFL? Because I'm pretty sure that there is - it is just made out of people, rather than software.
  Software anti-cheat seeks to stop everyone cheating everywhere, and this is clearly impossible. Using current anti-cheat methods in IRL sports, then in a game with as many involved participants as NFL a cheater might get away with it for a bit, but I'm sure if it turned out if the Steelberg Bunglers were deflating their balls every game, then this would be a massive scandal that makes national television. They would probably have to be audited (install anti-cheat) for a season or two before people would trust them to play a clean game for a while.
  
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- namibj 19 hours ago
  
  Move to console or an arcade or something, but away from general purpose personal computers, if you want that level of assurance from the system.
  Please. They'll take our collective computing freedom if we don't keep these separate.
  
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notnullorvoid 5 hours ago

> 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.

Good bot AI is the solution. Playing with 99 bots that you can be sure aren't cheating, is better than playing with 99 people you don't know who might be cheating.

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daveidol 4 hours ago

Playing with bots takes away the human element though

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dismalaf 15 hours ago

This. Back in the day, when you played an FPS on a private server, you'd also be able to observer other players when you died so cheating was discovered pretty quickly. When we had ranked clan matches there'd also be 3rd party observers both for fun (ranked matches were a bit event) and to look for signs of cheating.

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