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Comment by strgrd | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny that Fortnite will probably cause the inevitable unraveling of UE4, as yet another game engine without baked-in anti-cheat.

Cheating in Fortnite is practically unheard of at this point. But it won't be long until the player base is just as jaded as PUBG's: https://github.com/Griizz/Fortnite-Hack

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Given that Epic makes Fortnite and Unreal, is it that implausible to assume that "lots of people wanting to cheat in Fortnite" might instead lead to "Epic builds anti-cheat stuff for Unreal, puts it in the next release"?

(FWIW, a little searching reveals that Fortnite seems to use the exact same anti-cheat company as PUBG: https://www.battleye.com)

I have a few reactions here:

1. Why should Epic go and reimplement anti-cheat that you can grab off the shelf?

2. A big part of limiting cheating comes down to the specific game design and implementation. You need a server implementation that is as distrusting of clients as possible, you need secure (networking) code, etc. Anti-cheat is not a cure-all.

3. Even without anti-cheat, Unreal Engine is still well-used by tons of single-player video games. I don't see it "unraveling" regardless.

> 2. A big part of limiting cheating comes down to the specific game design and implementation. You need a server implementation that is as distrusting of clients as possible, you need secure (networking) code, etc. Anti-cheat is not a cure-all.

Unfortunately that's just not realistic for a large category of games. If you can trust the clients to some degree then you can really really offload a lot of server work. It's not feasible to process user's mouse input on the server in an FPS for example. Not just from a server load standpoint but from a latency standpoint.

You don't need to do this in real time, instead you could log the data (e.g. mouse clicks, key presses) to something like a database, Kafka, or Kenesis. Now you've unloaded the anti cheat logic to other servers.

You don't necessarily need to ban a player immediately. If you can accurately ban people within a day of using a cheat, then that's a pretty serious deterrent from using them.

I would think I'd rather avoid the whole issue via nerfing hitscan and high-velocity-projectile weapons, and buffing lower-velocity-projectile and melee weapons.

There have been successful FPS games with that formula (Tribes comes to mind). There are cheats/hacked clients, but they're on a much less problematic level (mostly around visibility).

Fortnite currently uses EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e...

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