Comment by LanceH 2 days ago
Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers.
It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.
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.
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.
This is the truth of it. If you can unlock all the on-disc DLC or create and use your own maps, mods, skins, etc. it risks the money companies want to take from you after you've already paid the $60-$80 for the incomplete game itself.
Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.
It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.
There are hundreds of popular games with mod support. See https://mod.io/g
If anything, we are in a golden age of mods!
Not really. A huge number of players are on consoles that have little to no support for mods and games today have too many centralized online servers and companies who keep insisting on control over your local PC which means that game companies can decide what mods you can and cannot have on your system.
There was a time when the concept of "banned mods" only ever applied to a specific server out of countless other servers and locally you could do anything you wanted, even run your own server.
I agree with you in sentiment and am very nostalgic for the pre-monoculture days, but I also acknowledge that competitive games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and trying to moderate a game with millions of players in a distributed environment is just a non-starter.
You reject the premise that such control is necessary for your idea of fun.
But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with cheaters.
I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It sucks, but that's just what's happening.
Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's often also a game integrity component. All of these things can be true simultaneously.
Make a list of all game genres and modes that sprung out of player modification
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.
However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.
Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.
But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.
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.
> 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.
How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S) and GameSpy days?
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.
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?
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.
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.
PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.
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.
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.
Studios could release the server files when the game is EOL…
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Did you played in this era ?
- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.
- Cheaters could just change server often.
It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.
Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.
Custom lobbies don't meet the same need. That's for playing with your friends, or at least, people you vet yourself. Community servers are a sub-community in of themselves: people tend to play on the same servers on a regular basis, allowing you to build rapport, community norms, and have substantially more direct moderation than company-run servers.
Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That comes with the territory of having moderators. But the upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need to shop around a bit for a good server.
I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's server system: The developers offer a contract to server owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended" server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use). Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.
two or three months ago, I played a game that did exactly what you proposed, V-Rising, it have a server browser, I played a week with friend on a busy server. Then the server was gone for two weeks. When it was back, mosts of the bases were gone due to inactivity.
That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you forgot about it.
All the multiplayer games I play today are either community server based, or I exclusively interact with private lobbies.
My negative experiences with community servers represent a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.
All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server.
Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a custom lobby implies invite only.
Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
> The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match
Playing against overwhelming odds has its own kind of charm. I once spend days just sabotaging the top players on some gun game servers, only wining myself once or twice. Games against friends with various fun handicaps and flat out abuse of any knowledge you could gain from playing against the same people repeatedly - what good is a hidding spot when everyone knows you will be there 50% of the time.
"Fair and balanced" games against completely random people are just missing something for me.
This is something matchmaking games totally miss which keeps them from being truly competitive in the way sports or old games were: a competitive community. You need other players with known identities to compare yourself against on a consistent basis.
Of course, classic competitive institutions had problems as well (“he’s very competitive” is not necessarily a nice description of a person!), but they seemed more enjoyable that this matchmaking stuff.
I hated wasting a whole half hour server hopping until I found one that didn't suck
I did indeed play in the era LanceH is talking about, and I agree with them! We had many thriving communities with no serious cheating problems because of community moderation.
Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could simply leave and try a different community until you found one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.
Initially, until you found the right community run ones? I don't see the issue. Today is worse, especially when there is no server browser but just a blackbox that drops you in a random match.
This ignore actual history: anti-cheats started on community run servers. Because the majority of admins are not dealing with cheaters it because they enjoy it, but rather out of necessity. I see everyone here appreciating good admins, not many people are going to be volunteering themselves.
Punkbuster for Team Fortress. BattleEye for Battlefield. EasyAntiCheat started for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War ICCUP's anti-hack client. You can see this in modern community servers too. Face-IT and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheat, not less. FiveM, which modded GTA V for community servers, never worked for Linux even before they added anti-cheat to the full game, because they had their own anti-cheat, adhesive.
Admins for modern game servers are not going to be interested in turning off their anti-cheat. That just gives them more unpaid work for little gain.
The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards.
When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others.
Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at equivalent skill levels.
The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun.
I say, let the people cheat.
I worked at a company once that didn't use any anti cheat. I once asked why, and they said the matchmaking system solved the problem for them. The matchmaking was good enough so cheaters only ever played with other cheaters, and it kept the numbers up.
Honest players never really complained, so I guess it worked for them.
I play online FPS with friends for fun. I don't care about leaderboards, but I know people that do and don't want to take them away from them.
You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating. People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier aim activated only if they lose too much, making the experience very inconsistent.
Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game. As soon as a non cheating player is in view of a cheating player, the non cheating player dies. That doesn't make for a fun game mechanic.
>"Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game"
Fun fact, this does exist. There used to be old CS:GO servers that were explicitly hack v hack, would make it abundantly clear to any new visitors that stumbled upon the servers that you would NOT have any fun without a "client", and it was a bunch of people out-config'ing each other. It was actually kinda cool for those people, it would NEVER be fun for anyone else.
Yea, that's one game that's more fun to watch than play I will admit, so mostly I'm a "pro rust watcher with over 300 hours watching rust" (this is a bit of an in-joke, sorry) who sees the annoyance and lack of fun people have when they get destroyed by cheaters. I did play one wipe, and spent 25 hours over 3 days in the game, so I chose to quit right there instead of doing that on a regular basis.
Not just single player. Even in competitive multiplayer a lot of the complaints about "cheating" are actually complaints about matchmaking, and "cheating" is a giant red herring (griefing is a different matter, of course, that gets lumped into the umbrella term of "cheating"). But trying to explain this is typically like pissing against the wind, because people already believe in the existing status quo (no matter how irrational it is) and no one wants to change their beliefs unless it obviously and immediately short-term benefits them.
Comments like this just make me upset to the point I can't cohere an appropriate argument. It's so out-of-touch with reality and completely ignores the core problem that I have to believe you're just fucking with us.
No, it is not fun to play against smurf accounts using hacks. They aren't doing it for the leaderboards, they actively downrank themselves to play against worse players!
And no, it's not fun to play against cheaters who are so bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your experience.
And no, I actually do care that people are cheating in multiplayer games because it's not fair. Since when do we reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the game?
Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it. Who cares if the sanctity of the sport or competition is ruined - we're a community of apathetic hacks.
This is fine if you are low level, because the cheaters will be too good to play in the low level games.
If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat. If the cheat lets you be better than the best human players, the best human player will end up just playing cheaters.
> If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat.
It's almost kind of worse than this. If you are in higher skill levels, you end up getting matched with cheaters who lack the same fundamental understanding of the game that you do and make up for it with raw mechanical skill conferred by cheats.
So you get players who don't understand things like positioning, target priority, or team composition, which makes them un-fun to play with, while the aimbots and wallhacks make them un-fun to play against.
And as a skilled player, you are much better equipped to identify genuine cheaters in your games. Whereas in low skill levels cheaters may appear almost indistinguishable from players with real talent so long as they aren't flat out ragehacking with the aimbot or autotrigger.
At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
> Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.
...and, even worse, if they ever got to the very top of the ladder and started only playing against other cheaters, then they'd actually weaken their cheats so that they could drop down in ranking to play against (and stomp) non-cheaters again, and/or find creative ways to make new accounts.
Cheaters ruin games. The fact that the GP is so deluded as to claim that "The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards." suggests that they've never actually played a competitive matchmade game on a computer before.
You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely ruin the experience for top-10% players
There are still plenty of games that use community hosted servers for multiplayer. I play some of them (Rust, for example).
First, cheating is absolutely still an issue in Rust. Sure, server admins can kick them out... once they have been discovered, verified by an admin, and kicked. The damage is usually done by then, and that is the best case scenario... often, the admins aren't available at that moment, because they are normal people who are not online all the time.
Plus, this means you have to search and find a good server to play on. That isn't always easy, and limits your ability to find a good game.
Second, lots of games I love to play don't make sense in the 'server hosted by a community member' model.
I love playing sports games... Madden, FIFA (now called FC), NBA2k, etc. The best way to play those games is often 1on1 against someone who is close to your skill level. It isn't fun to play against people way worse or way better than you.
The only way to do this in a way that lets me get a good game whenever I want to play is to have some sort of matchmaking system, that keeps track of how good i am and finds players who are about the same skill level. There is no way this would work on user hosted servers, and even if it did, why would a user hosted server be better at solving this problem than a company hosted one? You need a TON of players to be able to do good skill based matchmaking 24 hours a day.
I have been playing multiplayer online games for over 30 years. I started playing when I had to call my friend on the phone, tell him to tell his family not to answer the next call because it was my modem calling, and then hope to god my sister didn't pick up the phone during our game and break the connection. We had to develop a code to signal if I was actually trying to call him to talk about an issue; if I called and hung up immediately it meant I was voice calling and the next call he should answer with the phone.
I have played every iteration of multiplayer gaming. I played Warcraft II when you had to pay $20 to subscribe to Kali to use their virtual IPX service. I played local Counterstrike games at the college dorms on the local network (which was not even a switched network!) I run Minecraft servers for my kids on my local network. I have written multiplayer games for both peer-to-peer and server based multiplayer.
No, you can't recreate the modern convenience and pleasure of company provided matchmaking by going back to community hosted servers.
Interesting thing I noticed trying to play old versions of Call of Duty a year or two ago -- the oldest ones which supported hosted servers, there are still players, but once they switched to matchmaking either no one is playing or its so tiny you never get connected.
> It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing
I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.
Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.
Back in the "small communities on their own servers" people also cheated. It was never entirely clear who cheated and who was just good and/or lucky with plenty of false positive bans also. Nothing about this was "easy" in any way. Which is why anti-cheat tools like PunkBuster have been around for 25 years.
> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers
Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
This isn't a problem because any given server can support hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your playerbase needs to run a server.
We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.
There are games I play were one of the players' machines becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and you even have to input the host's IP to enter.
Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.
For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.
Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.
IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.
> Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server?
Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software?
A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem.
To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...
Running/renting hardware and connectivity and administrating a service and development are slightly different.
It's not the 2000s anymore - you don't have to run/rent "hardware" and worry about "connectivity" and whatnot. For most games that offer dedicated servers, there are services with easy to use panels with fancy colored buttons and everything.
As another example: how about hosting a website?
Community-run servers weren't a magic bullet, and they had a lot of other problems that modern matchmaking systems solve more effectively.
Absolutely!
The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how.
The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!
Even if custom game servers were a preferable experience, which I would argue against, it doesn't really do anything for this problem.
By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.
It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures because your website's users can just report the bots: by the time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for everyone except the bots.
I would much rather my 45 minute game be disrupted and the user booted permanently by moderators VS every game be disrupted for months while the developers try and work out which parts of my privacy they can invade to maybe hopefully boot the cheaters.
> By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.
The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust between people playing on a private server. Usually your group would know ahead of time if someone is going to potentially be a problem.
Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave
Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our very next game will also contain a cheater
Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually... you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?
If I already have a preformed 4v4, then I don't need anticheat.
The question is what to do about the rest of the time for everyone else. Shopping around private servers and dealing with individual server admin quirks is a regression from matchmaking UX that Starcraft had in the late 90s or that Halo 2 had in the early 2000s.
I'd love that. I bet that a lot of players would like having the choice, too. AND, data from a few months of a relatively popular game implementing this system should pretty much conclusively settle the question of whether competitive matchmade games should have anticheat.
counterpoint: my 45 min 4v4 game gets terminally disrupted if I can't run the game on my device
Sure, but that's a trade-off everyone already enjoying the game might be fine with if it means a better experience. That's how bad cheating is.
> Sure, but that's a trade-off everyone already enjoying the game might be fine with if it means a better experience.
Does it mean a better experience though? This isn't like, a theoretical GP is talking about. We don't have to imagine if
> That's how bad cheating is.
Seems like the answer is no?
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.