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Comment by Cloudef | Hacker News Reader

Has worked well ages for games that had replay and spectating capabilities. MMOs are usually slower paced than fps games so in those server-side checks alone are enough. (Most asian mmos are lazy though and just trust the client and hope their shitty anti-cheat keeps cheaters away, of course it doesnt)

Games for some reason today want single central server, instead of dedicated servers with user maintained communities is part of the problem. (E.g. cs:go vs older cs)

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User maintained communities are not friendly to new users. CS:GO has user maintained communities, but most players do not use it. You can't build a community without new users, and new users want to play the game, not build a community.

Especially with team gameplay, players want proper skill based matchmaking. So that they don't have someone on the other team who destroys them. Or someone on their own team that is dead weight.

CSGO relatively heavily suppresses "user maintained" community servers, the entire experience from onboarding to client launch prioritses the Valve-run official matchmade servers for casual/competitive/etc and any special game modes.

Server browser is a hidden afterthought behind a dropdown.

I was active player during CS 1.6 era. I really didnt see the issues you mention and rarely actually met cheaters. When i did they were quickly vote kicked or banned out.

And times have changed. The spread of skill levels has increased with better players getting better, and more and more new players.

As well as more structured games that are not 10v10, but rather smaller 5v5 or 6v6 games, where each player can make a difference.

Cheaters are better at hiding too. Toggling aimbot for a quick kill or two isn't enough to arouse suspicion, and can be passed off as a lucky headshot. Just because you think you've never run into a cheater doesn't mean you haven't.

On the other hand, a really skilled player might be good enough to make you believe he is cheating. Getting vote kicked or banned out for that is not good either.

And anti-cheat doesn't really help the problem either at all. They are easy for cheaters to get around, and it's possible to even have cheat that the anti-cheat can't detect at all as it would use the same inputs normal player would use. Anti-cheat is same as DRM, the only people that suffer are the actual players, not the cheaters or pirates.

It's another social problem that engineers try to solve with technology.

No, 100000s of cheaters get banned every year, it works. Normal players actually enjoy not playing with tons of cheaters.

I would like to ask you to present some proof for those numbers. There's also tons of legitimate players that can't play at all since the anti-cheat system thinks their install is not good. At which point is it okay for anti-cheat developers to tell customers to get a new PC (with their approved hardware and drivers) and install nothing but clean copy of windows and their game on it?

Consider game like Dark Souls 3, it has very simple anti-cheat system and trusts the client completely. Yet you rarely see actually cheaters online, this is purely a social problem.

You can search any rootkit based anti-cheat software and find just how many people have issues with them. Just some examples from the infamous riot vanguard which developers boast it being "user-friendly" rootkit.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/gead0n/riot_vangu...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/geqc73/have_you_d...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/gbebt0/if_riot_is...

* https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/g5aem3/vanguard_a...

Here is 200k bans in one game: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/over-200000-modern-...

Anyway, it seems to me that most of those people just need to update their fan control programs. One example I saw was CPU-z which had a CVE in their driver a few years ago. They are using drivewrs with known vulnerabilities. You also need to consider that some cheaters will also spread mis-information.

"Anti-cheat" making their AIOs or fans stop seems more like virus like behavior instead of telling the user maybe they should update or buy different hardware (which even then is shitty behavior just for some damn game).

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