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Comment by VortexDream | Hacker News Reader

How about no? This will just lead these companies to implement anti-cheat to protect the "integrity" of their single player games (and their MTX) as well. Say goodbye to mods and other forms of benign game hacking (particularly hacks that fix games like Dark Souls).

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Rampant cheating in online FPS games is a problem right now. I've had more games ruined by cheaters than I can count.

So how about yes, let's focus on fixing the problem at hand, and if it's used for something else(like single player games) then I'll complain about it. Right now developers have my full support to use whatever methods they can to make sure the hackers stay out. The game can boot into its own OS for all I care.

I think, honestly, the biggest issue in terms of cheating right now is a lack of responsibility from the companies involved in actually reading and acting on reporting - some companies in particular (EA) are extremely lax in actually dealing with human reports and their games suffer greatly for it.

Dealing with human reports is hard. People will report good players for cheating. People will report bad players for cheating. People will brigade reports. There's also a sense of scale; last I heard cod warzone had 100 million players. If even a _mild_ portion of those players actively use report systems, it's not feasible to manually evaluate them (and is also prone to bias and social factors)

You're saying it's not feasible to manually evaluate reports - but really what you're saying is that nobody wants to pay for it. Set up a very modest subscription model (like 2$/mo) to fund report checking for your game, possibly with a free tier that starts with low trust, and nuke people by credit card number.

Wouldn't that just kill a f2p userbased and just have cheaters go to gift cards?

Maybe the truth is that f2p is not sustainable in the long term, at least not for any game that has competitive elements?

> but really what you're saying is that nobody wants to pay for it

No, I'm saying it's feasible. It's not uncommon to hear of people being reported by their teammates in team games for just having a bad round, and in games with cross team chat (like LoL until very recently) people would request the enemy team to report for "feeding". The SnR is incredibly low when the report button is just used as "I had a bad game and am blaming someone else". The sheer scale of reports in a game like warzone (where there are 150 players per game, and each session takes ~30 minutes) where there are 100,000,000 people playing [0] isn't feasible. Technically yes, nobody wants to pay for it, but nobody wants to pay for it in the way that nobody wants to pay to send every player the hardware required to play the game.

> Set up a very modest subscription model (like 2$/mo) to fund report checking for your game, possibly with a free tier that starts with low trust, and nuke people by credit card number.

This is a terrible idea, for many reasons. $24/year in the US is much less than $24/year in India, the Phillipines, Brazil (which is where many F2P games are popular. You're also competing against games that _don't_ charge $24/year. There is already a secondary market for video game accounts, this just ensures that a secondary market appears for games with valid credit cards attached to them (and this sounds like _exactly_ the sort of secondary market you want to discourage from your game). Having this sort of protection also doesn't weed out cheaters; CS:GO is absolutely rampant with cheaters, despite having an actual price tag, and requiring a _phone number_ for verification (it's now F2P with a prime upgrade for ranked; it's no better). You're also competing against people who are willing to pay $50/month to cheat [1] in a F2P game, so asking them to pay $2 extra to play the game is not going to stop them.

[0] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-04-21-call-of-duty-w... [1] https://battlelog.co/store/product/315-mwwarzone-supreme-20-... - This is a cheat site,I make absolutely no claims about what is actually on the site, wouldn't recommend clicking this link.

Reporting is an awful method for cheat detection. The goal is to prevent cheaters from ruining customer games. If a customer has to report cheaters, they are already having a bad experience. Not to mention for most of these games there is 0 marginal cost to creating a new account.

By the time it becomes a problem, it'll be too late to reverse. You think publishers will willingly give up the ability lock down their games on PCs? It's been their dream for decades. I'd rather not give up what we can do with the software we've paid for (and I don't care what some piece of crap ToS says I can or cannot do with the software), just so you get less cheaters in online games.

But that's really not a great place to use this argument - this isn't surveillance infrastructure or encryption backdoors where yes, once it's built a) it will be used for nefarious purposes b) it's really hard to get rid of. Game sandboxing is already very easy to achieve(at least on windows) and doesn't require any special software to be developed or deployed. It's all part of the Microsoft GDK and is already used - a recent game that is deployed like that is The Ascent, which deservedly got into a lot of shit over it, because the Gamepass version runs poorly compared to the non-sandboxed version on Steam. Likewise, other games that have done this suffer for it and publishers shy away from it, just how aggressive DRM gets a lot of pushback and publishers either don't include it or are forced to remove it post launch.

That's why I'm not really worried about this tech "spilling" to single player games to protect MTX or anything like that, but I'd really really really like to see it deployed as aggressively as physically possible in online competitive games.

I think it's probably the correct argument to use.

As you pointed out, what the vast majority of gamers will respond to is performance. In order to get performance, you have to start cutting other areas like graphics. However, those are other important aspects - maybe particularly to marketing.

The reason it's not palatable enough to be widespread is because of it's technical limitations. If you throw enough resources at the matter to remove those limitations, you won't see all the pressure you're mentioning that keep companies from making maximal use of this kind of tech in all games all the time.

I'm pretty comfortable erring on the side of caution here. Cheaters are rather annoying, but at least it's a relatively contained problem with a fairly wide range of options for how I want to respond to it. Worst case, I can go try to find a smaller community or even just go play another game. Meanwhile, most every game being fully locked down in all the ways... I can't really do jack about that.

Play with only/mostly your friends...?

Don't ruin my ability to run graphics mods on GTA, ha

This sounds like a job for virtualization. Run the game in a restricted environment and let the anticheat snoop that sandbox however it likes without digging through everything.

Surely they'd just ban you, since that means you could have a cheat hypervisor.

Would it be in a game company’s interest to implement anti-cheat for single player games? Mods and other forms of benign game hacking increase the popularity and longevity of games which presumably benefit profitability.

I don't think it's a question of "would", it's a question of "why", since that's what's going on right now. You can point to single player paid cosmetics as a profiteering aspect. Greedy executives who care about short-term quarterly sales numbers for bonuses and stock influencing maybe aswell? I wouldn't consider myself knowledgeable of the game industry, but that's one of my bets.

EA and Rockstar banned people from Battlefield 5 multiplayer and GTA online for having modded their single player games. Google for a few minutes and you'll come across plenty of horror stories and news items.

But of course the real reason they would love to prevent anyone from tampering with the game is so they can sell more single player cheats such as experience booster packs.

They do? I googled it and it's full of "I accidentally left my mods on and connected to GTAO and got banned", not " I was banned for playing modded single player games"

Yeah, listed some random hits for you below.

I don't personally play either game, but from what I've come across on the subject over the years, publishers seem to be a lot less difficult about it today compared to a few years ago. I recall reading about them denying a ban was due to mod use when they were wrong, being ridiculously vague about what modding was and what wasn't allowed, refusing to fully restore a player's character even after a ban was rescinded, etc.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gta-online-players-report-multiple-u...

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/g139nu/eas_volunt...

Interesting edge case: https://www.pcgamer.com/gtav-modders-reportedly-banned-for-c...

If you leave a program running that you were using to make Michael's face into a school bus, in a perfect world that shouldn't be grounds to ban etc.

Unfortunately for you, that program is indistinguishable from one that replaces walls with transparent textures.

Yep. https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/25o2411812k47...

Banning on single player would be silly. But GTAO is another story. It's designed as a cash farm. You have to grind missions, buy shark cards or use cheats. So as I understand they will ban anyone if they detect it's using mods/cheats. But GTA anti-cheat systems are weak and sessions are P2P or at least were.

Both of those games have multiplayer components.

I would be more interested to hear about games such as god of war or horizon zero dawn, which have no online play at all, used anti-cheat.

They could do that regardless. Anti-cheat already exists in many forms. They just don't because it adds work for little gain.

They could, but if Microsoft provides a native sandbox that publishers can default into without extra effort that effectively protects "their" property from meddling by nosy end-users, they absolutely will. It'll become a standard instead of some fringe practice. Right now the only real options are Denuvo and server-side processing. Microsoft is in a position now with W11 to change that in a fundamental way.

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