If I write a cheat for your game that operates on the kernel level, how would you detect it from the game that runs in user space?
Should also reduce smurfing somewhat - you'd only be able to dominate a match once with a given account.
Then the cheaters organically get placed in lobbies with other cheaters, ruining the fun for them. If the system doesn't work the best right out of the box, that's fine, because you are still gravitating those cheaters upwards in rank, which will most guarantee that they get reported from other players.
The problem with "a working report system", by which I take it to mean you have actual humans reviewing reports, does get you somewhere, but it doesn't touch 'humble' cheats, ie: rather than headshotting everyone 100% of the time, a cheat that lowers your recoil 15%. For an already very good player, -15% recoil in CS:GO or PUBG is a crazy, crazy advantage... and yet you couldn't notice it by looking at a video.
Even though it's an impossible fight to win completely, I don't think the answer is to "give up early".
Not possible. Sure, it might be possible to detect a player instantly snapping to the center of an opponent's head and clicking, but cheats could easily make the aim move over the course of several frames, and make the target off of the center of the head by a couple pixels to simulate someone just being really good.
I've watched some really good gamers in person. People's ability to quickly flick their mouse and pop shot to a target only 1/4" inch wide on their screen in a tiny fraction of a second is insane to me.
So being able to differentiate between a cheat that tries to behave like a god-like player (rather than simply aiming to a head in a single frame) and an actual god-like player is not possible.
> a working report system.
Also not possible because of the sheer number of reports. There are people that will report 100% of the time they lose a firefight, even if a replay makes it very obvious that the person they lost against was not cheating.
And again, even with a replay, it can be impossible to differentiate between a cheater and a really good player, except in the case of OBVIOUS cheats, like shooting through a wall with 100% accuracy, or firing into nowhere and scoring hits on targets a mile away.
At best, you could ban people from using the report system when it's obvious they're abusing it, but evaluating reports has to be a manual process, but manual processes doesn't scale when you've got a player base of 7 figures or more.
2. Ideally you want to prevent cheaters from playing a single game. Reporting cheaters does nothing as legitimate customers still have to deal with cheaters and cheaters will just make new accounts.
I guess radar cheats where the ethernet cable to split to a second computer could also be considered a hardware cheat, since it's running between an airgap.
Incredibly difficult to detect, you basically need to model the way users behave differently from bots... but at the high end of competitive play people tend to approach more bot-like behaviors.
Besides, I know like 90% of cheaters are 14 year old kids who used the first google result because it's so easy to. Any resistance and that'll stop a majority
Even if you made a specialized item it would still cost a lot mostly due to the ML requirements. Maybe smartphone + a specialized input device would reduce the 'cost', but you still need to buy a several hundred dollar cell phone.
(As an aside, we already have games using built in assistance/cheats as an accessibility feature to level the playing field for people using certain hardware or controllers e.g. games with PC and console crossplay, so perhaps there's some approaches and lessons from that which we can apply here as well.)
The only thing at stake then is the integrity of leaderboards or tournament brackets, which is a problem that already had some different, separate approaches to solve. But IMO that a problem is absolutely subservient to the integrity and playability of the base game.
"... that a problem is absolutely subservient to the integrity and playability of the base game."
If you use hacks/cheats to help you play higher than your natural skill/ability, doesn't that ruin the integrity of the game? The mission is not accomplished in this case. Instead it's just tricky to determine who's hacking.
Headshotting everyone on-sight also sounds like the old days of hacks in games. In my experience, there is more nuance to the way these cheats are used these days. Most people aren't trying to be obvious about it.
It'll still be better than 99.99% of human beings at clicking on heads, and will still win you 99% of fights against non-cheaters.
Now what do you do, in your correctly coded game?
Keep in mind, as a cheat developer, I can keep moving these goal posts.
I actually think the worst thing about the suggestion you're replying to is that it is an over-generalisation. "Most players will do X", "they nearly always do Y"... yeah, okay, but what about the 10% who don't? The 1% or the 0.1% who don't? What about the ones who do as you describe, except for 5% of the time when they don't, or when they get lucky? I've hit genuinely lucky shots in a game, accidental good plays, for the receiving player they probably thought I was cheating, and yet I wasn't. The potential for false-positives is horrible, and you end up outlawing legitimate behavior based on a poor understanding of play.
Do you have any experience developing networked multiplayer games? I do it for a living, and it's not that easy, at all. In a situation where I shoot at your head on my screen, but you were already around the corner on your screen, what happens? This happens _all_ the time due to latency, and has nothing to do with development costs or infra. There's no way to avoid the problem when you have people with varying levels of connection quality, and different distances to the game server.