Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

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> What is the difference in your mind between someone who is really good at the game vs someone who is cheating?

Cheaters are regularly banned and are matched up with new players.

Additionally, cheaters have super-human reflexes and powers that make them completely unkillable.

Cheaters are much more common than elite players, so you are much more likely to run into them than an elite player.

Finally, getting matched up with an elite player in an online video game as an average player is something online video game companies invest technology into avoiding.

> If we're saying that being beaten in a video game is a entertainment-ruining experience akin to someone hacking my Chromecast, I see virtually no distinction except that one "earned" the skills. At the end of the day, my displeasure comes from being beaten, so morally speaking I don't see a difference here.

OK so you just don't like video games and want an opportunity to shit on them.

This is a huge leap. Who said their entire argument is based on winning vs losing? Losing can be fun, it's not the same thing.

Being beaten by a hacker with super-human reaction speed and is completely unkillable is experience ruining. Losing in a game against a skilled player can be rewarding. And if the other player is so skilled it's not even a competition, it's a bad matchmaking system and it should be changed.

>This is a huge leap. Who said their entire argument is based on winning vs losing? Losing can be fun, it's not the same thing.

I think this is a key difference of opinion we have here.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to beat people in games, and failure obviously gives it that challenge. That being said, there's a point where there's a big enough skill difference that it is practically impossible to win against another player. This is what I'm mostly arguing here. I see the management of cheaters as the same problem as the management of overly skilled players being matched against those who aren't. Go look at some pro CSGO players for example, their performance is sometimes almost indistinguishable from cheating.

> Being beaten by a hacker with super-human reaction speed and is completely unkillable is experience ruining.

Doesn't Fortnite immediately let you enter a new match? How likely are you to encounter new cheaters long enough for the experience to get tedious? Why is suing cheaters a more fair solution to the problem of reducing this probability vs figuring out how to ban the specific cheats that have the largest userbase? Banning cheats in general is hard problem. Banning specific cheats is often not (barring crazy shit like the cheat running at hypervisor level).

> figuring out how to ban the specific cheats that have the largest userbase

This works great, but holy cow is it an art, especially with free games. VAC bans players a random time after they cheat (more than one month), so they never know which cheat got them caught. They also have crowdsourced moderation using replays. Daybreak can somehow track bans across new accounts, but how they do this is a closely guarded secret (for obvious reasons).

Yet there are still cheaters in all these games.

> Why is suing cheaters

They are suing the people who make the cheat mods. Cut the cheats off at the source, then you can ban players using known cheats while worrying less about new cheats entering the market and circumventing detection.

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