EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V

In constant dollars the retail price of top-end games is basically flat, or even lower now.

>Teammates will kick you out for stealing kills from them

Then you find another server that has fostered a better community. Or even start your own.

Even if the ratio of absolute mean-spirited jerks to decent players was 10:1, that's more than enough well intentioned players to foster good server communities. But I suspect the actual number is closer to a reversed amount.

Obviously MMOs would be a different beast, but the type of cheating you're trying to defeat - the threat model - is often different than wallhacking autoaimers.

Votekick systems used to work great for many games. They don't work in games with global ranking systems because those ranking systems create toxic incentives. Once games become "serious business" instead of casual fun, the knives come out.

Political solutions can clearly fail, and that becomes another reason to allow players to run their own servers as it is an "out" in the case of a political solution failing (a different sort of resiliency to the technical sort).

MUDs also have tales of successes. Times when political alliances defeated griefers and the community was stronger for it. Partly because of the relative ease of spinning up MUDs there are so many stories and experiments out there to choose from / learn from. MUDs were an early laboratory for what became MMOs in so many ways, and it will always be easier to reproduce studies done in that sort of a laboratory setting, including the failures. In science often the failures are the greatest learning experiences leading to the most interesting hypotheses.

To the extent that some games can legitimately get away with global competitive ranks without suffering bots, that doesn't mean it's a healthy choice for every (or even most) other games. Of course, no design rule is absolute, we're just speaking in generalities.

That being said, both League and Dota are investing massive resources to prevent botting on a system that arguably would be just as if not more enjoyable if it was redesigned. I feel the same way about games like Overwatch, even some inherently globalized systems like Pokemon Go that would be difficult to change -- I don't personally believe the ranking systems are making them better. I think they're there because they're expected to be there, not because they're reinforcing the core design of the game.

Depends on where you look. I used to see them a lot in certain game modes and when playing with friends that were new. As one commenter put it:

> To play devil's advocate here -- If you were to play summoner's rift AI games, ARAM, or even some summoner's rift on a sub-30 account late night EST you will be DROWNING in bots. They are EVERYWHERE. They also go almost entirely unpunished. You can track their summoner ID's through OPGG and watch them play the same champion 24 hours a day until 30, change name, and swap champions entirely.

> I tried to get some friends to come to league, and they all quit because their teammates were AI every single time. Not "lul ur bad r u a bot??" but a literal bot grinding exp to sell level 30 accounts. Sure, scripting Xeraths/Cassio's are much more rare -- but League has a huge bot problem sub-30.

Low level ARAM and TT you would often have out of 10 players, 1 = you, 9 = leveling afk bots that run around to prevent auto-kick.

Isn't this an argument for skill-based matchmaking rather than against it? (Since the OP whom you agree with makes a case against optimizing for SBMM, I presume you're also against it)

That being said, I would be more amiable to a system that used player skill as a matchmaking tool if it didn't report those numbers to players.

However, I'm not sure I would say that sorting and reporting is usually a side effect or minor mistake on top of those systems, given that many of these games have seasons, rewards, an entire meta-game built on top of their rankings. The rankings aren't just serving the purpose of getting players matched together -- they're serving as player motivators. The responses that players have can't be seen as a purely accidental side-effect when designers are going out of their way to present this information to the player and to encourage the player to pay attention to it.

Hearthstone is a good example here. Hearthstone has brilliant design, but its ladder system is horrible and dumb. It explicitly encourages net-decking and grinding instead of experimentation. Fast decks are objectively better than slow ones with the same win percentage, because ranking is largely determined by win percentage combined with the number of games you can fit into a season.

Season rewards are then tied to rank, so the best way to get new cards if you want to experiment is to build a boring deck and grind. This is despite the fact that for most players, knowing within the first few turns whether or not they're going to win is not fun.

So of course people bot Hearthstone, because before you can build creative fun decks and play against interesting people with interesting strategies, you have to pay the "fun tax" of grinding on the ladder. Everything brilliant about Hearthstone is bogged down by being tied to this kind of toxic experience.

There's no way to say this about such a popular game without sounding naive, and I'll take the criticism, but I do not believe for one second it would be difficult to build a better public ranking system for Hearthstone, especially given the ludicrous amount of player data they have. Even something as simple as balancing rank with deck variety so players got fewer rewards the more times they played the same cards would go a huge way towards getting rid of net-decking.

These systems do increase engagement among very invested players, so maybe that's the only intention. But to heck with engagement -- is laddering at the higher ranks of Hearthstone fun? People do it, people say they enjoy it. Again, I'll take the criticism a statement like this warrants, but I don't believe them. I don't believe the experience of grinding a single 55% win-rate deck for hours and hours is an experience that is worth having or producing.

And when I think about why players do that, the only cause that comes to my mind is, "the game tells them to."

The game ships with tools that allow players to very quickly connect to running games on the same network as them, even if they don't have anything installed. Anyone with a copy of the game can turn on hosting, and the game will not only handle being a server, it will also serve a web-based client for the game.

In practice what that means is that if you own the game, you can pull out your laptop, connect to someone's wifi, turn on hosting, and all they need to do is visit a local IP on any of their devices[0] and they are instantly playing with you.

Of course, networking doesn't force you to be behind a NAT, so there's nothing preventing you from hosting a server on Linode and exposing that IP publicly. But aside from some token authentication options, the game isn't designed to handle a bunch of public anonymous connections. The server also isn't persistent; it's assumed that once you're done playing you will shut the client down, which will also shut the server down.

Short version, you have a traditionally hosted server with an IP address, and it's not pulling any fancy tricks to force you to set that server up in a specific way. But it's not designed to be a persistent server with uptimes of like a month or something, and it's designed to handle a few connections from people that you know. The out of the box experience is going to give you a Intranet IP, not a public one, and if you want to get it working over the public Internet for some reason, you'll need to handle stuff like port forwarding yourself.

That means: no matchmaking (one game per server), no public server lists[1], only minor authentication and anti-spam options, and transient servers that disappear when play sessions are over. Loop Thesis isn't technologically restricted to a LAN, but the experience is designed for drop-in, friends-get-together LAN play.

[0]: No promises, but I am experimenting with touch controls for phones.

[1]: Unless the community builds them and maintains them on their own.

In chess you'll see one player or the other reach over and lay their king over. It's an admission that, while the game isn't technically done, it's unwinnnable. So out of respect for time they simply acknowledge the loss and move on.

If, as you say, most losses see someone use a token, great! That's the point. They use the token, everyone leaves the game. It's done. The winners win, the losers lose.

Now imagine that you're playing and you're winning, but you're an asshole because you're smurfing. One of your teammates tosses out his token, you lose. Now also imagine this keeps happening because you're an asshole. It incentivizes you to stop being an asshole.

Imagine you're playing and 10 minutes in one of your teammates disconnects. Lets assume they're in a storm and the electricity went out. at minute 12, you use your token and move on. You weren't forced to play out a 30-40 minute game. You just moved on.

Imagine that game where your team is literally dying once/minute at minute ten. You just use your token and move on.

---

The only real counter-argument to this is that it might affect people's ranks. People will have losses they may have otherwise won. Or wins that they might otherwise have lost.

This is true.

Do you know what else is true?

The game is riddled with smurfs. People will win or lose games by just being matched with a smurf. The game has autofill. For those not aware, autofill means the game forces you to play a position you don't normally play. People will win or lose games due to nothing more than an algorithm making a decision. The game has streamers who specialize in "bronze to challenger" streams. The people in those games will win or lose due to nothing more than matchmaking.

These are all basically random chance, and what they do is make the error in the ELO system larger. Riot enforces autofill in the interests of short queues. It explicitly allows smurfs and streamers in the interests of marketing.

So Riot has already accepted the random wins and losses.

The question is, can we do it in a way that decreases player tension. The answer is yes.

This isn't about creating a perfect system. This is about the fact that the game currently has a ton of variability from imperfections due to Riot making compromises. The question is how can do it while giving the players more agency over themselves?

And I haven't even spoken about how BAD riot's matchmaking is. It's seriously bad.

I remember a game I had where I was forced bot lane by myself because my support never connected. For those not familiar with the game, this means I was playing in a 1v2.

And I got huge. I took over the game. And not because the opponents went diving under my turret (note: turrets will damage the opponent), but because I just straight up punished them for positioning mistakes and killed them. I legitimately pulled a double kill with first blood in a 1v2 with no jungler help.

In postgame chat, someone on the other team asked me if I was a smurf. Technically no, but I sure as hell was smurfing in that game. Riot's matchmaking should NEVER have placed me in that game.

The fact that it does adds even MORE variability. It gives more random wins and losses to players. It increases the error rate of ELO in the game.

The community has a common sentiment: 80% of the games you play you have no agency in whether you win or lose. You just have to accept it and move on. But 20% of the games you do have an effect and to climb you need to be more consistent so that you're winning in that 20%.

The point is this: The issues of uncontrolled wins and losses already exist in the current system. It's just you're also forced to stay in a game for another 20-30 minutes, and that just increases everyones frustration.

These systems always seem to fail because there is no accountability. You can't allow actions without accountability for those same actions.

The problem is that accountability means involving humans and humans don't scale.

There can still be strategy in it without leaving any easy way to cheat.

If only one game has working anti-cheat, it may not be worth the cheater's time to break it because it's only one game, and they can go cheat in a different game. If all the games had it then more people would try to break it and more would succeed. And once they have a working method, it can be employed against any other game that uses the same kind of anti-cheating, even if it's not the same vendor's, as long as the mechanism is similar.

But having all the vendors get together to pool resources and design one good anti-cheating software makes it even worse, because then it might be a little harder to defeat, but the prize for defeating it is being able to cheat in every game without even having to translate the cheating method to each new game.

So you get small victories or nothing. There is no winning at scale because increasing scale only increases the number of adversaries and the gains from finding an effective way to cheat.

It's basically the same problem as keeping the latest Hollywood releases off of pirate sites. They count success as occasionally having a week before a new release is on the pirate sites instead of being there the same day, and even that doesn't happen very often.

It turns out it's more effective to make it so it doesn't matter. In their case by making it so easy and cheap to watch Netflix on your TV that it's not worth most peoples' time to figure out how to use BitTorrent even if it has 100% of their content. In this case by making more games that humans are better at than computers, so you can't use a computer to cheat.

Except that it's not random, because you can try to figure it out. You know what's in the map. If you go to where a particular weapon is and it's not there, now you can expect the opponent to have it, so you start looking for defenses against it etc. Or you know that you're playing against Bob and Bob always goes for the same weapon like a chump because he doesn't know what to do with any of the others. Or you get a weapon and then go around collecting every defense against it on the map so the opponent can't get them.

> But it’s still very amenable to cheating both because the cheat would be able to switch weapon the instant the client was informed of the state of the opponent, beating a human where it actually matters and would still be able to have a mechanically perfect aim.

Which is why it's not about switching faster, it's about making the right choice to begin with. The whole idea is if you have to switch at all you're probably already dead and switching a half second faster isn't going to save you.

Ah, but Stadia (and Playstation Now, and Geforce Now) are trying to solve a different problem: moving all the compute to the cloud, so that the game console can be wimpy (or of a different/incompatible architecture, in PSNow's case.)

If you remove that requirement—or rather, impose the requirement that the client hardware must be just as powerful as if it were running a full game—then you can do something clever by splitting the game not into "renderer on the server, frame buffer on the client" but rather into "game and projection matrix on the server; display-list renderer on the client."

In other words, the server (or per-client server-side agent) would be responsible for doing all the evaluation of local physics (e.g. soft-body dynamics, constraint-resolution during rigging, etc.), lighting calculation, and all the other stuff that currently requires the client to "know stuff" about the world; and then it'd output to the client, on each tick, just a display-list—a bunch of loaded-model references, their positions in space and the positions of their rigged limbs, and the reflected-light amount on each of their polys; any temporary particles that exist for that frame, and their positions; etc. This would all be culled down to a virtual viewport.

The job of the client would then just be to receive this display-list, each frame, and draw it. It would also perhaps be responsible for doing client-side visual lerps between server ticks. (Probably each rigged limb would be annotated with linear+angular velocity properties.)

In other words, this would be a recapitulation of the X11 protocol, but where the primitives are 3D objects rather than 2D ones. (It'd kind of look like the protocol between games and OS display drivers, but at the same time higher-level in some ways and lower-level in others.)

This would be highly bandwidth-efficient (and jitter-tolerant!) compared to what Stadia is doing. You'd probably be able to play a decent game through this on 3G, even. But you'd need a computer that could do the final rendering passes.

I mean talent in the sense of hiring. Games companies don't hire security engineers by-and-large to work on their systems.

If you only record player input: mouse movement, clicks and keystrokes, it should be much lower.

> Sure we defunded it, but look how crappy it is! Nobody uses it! Guess we don't need it.

That's the thing though. Good games (CS comes to mind) do have some sort of ability to have human intervention.

Building a hack that can't be detected isn't easy, but it's also not _that_ hard with determination.

I think Valve has done most of the legwork with their SteamOS which is based on Debian, but I don't know what libraries or frameworks they're providing as a standard baseline.