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Comment by vjk800 | Hacker News Reader

This is due to how multiplayer in modern games is orchestrated.

In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.

Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.

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Anticheat was still a thing in the old days, even when it was something the admins had to manually install (PunkBuster for some games, I think?) or at least not opt out of (VAC). So, at least at the time, many admins saw it as desirable despite their own existence.

I recall the signed netrek builds back when I was playing that. Sure, you could read the source - but only signed builds could run on certain servers.

Solving the community game problem doesn’t require Anticheat, just groups of people who organize and nominate admins. But that niche doesn’t pay for the development of the games.

For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.

Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.

More and more it feels like one of the central problems of the modern technical is how to effectively scale trust.

Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.

Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible

Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.

I lived through those days, and you're looking back with rose colored glasses. Most servers didn't have an admin online most of the time, so hacking was still a major annoyance if you didn't have something like VAC.

I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.

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