Comment by dmayle

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.

Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around objects.

There was plenty of cheating when there were no global leaderboards. People will happily do things just to ruin other people's day.

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.

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.

You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely ruin the experience for top-10% players