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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

> Anti-cheat and anti-crack has created far too many issues for me as a legitimate customer.

Let me get this straight, though: you would rather that CoD, Fortnite, LoL, Lichess, etc. just make it open season; no anti-cheat. You believe that as a gamer, your gaming experience would be enhanced if there was no anti-cheat.

If that's your logical conclusion -- that no anti-cheat is the answer because there are always going to be some cheaters -- then I have nothing. We'll just have to agree to disagree. As a gamer, I'm happy to install anti-cheat if it can defeat the majority of casual cheaters -- even if it costs some frames or adds overhead to the startup time.

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I'd argue that anti-cheat is analogus to security-by-obscurity. It is basically a bad compromise to mitigate issues of a broken architecture.

Imagine that online banks would do login checks on client side, and you'd have to install anti-steal software before you can login. Would that be acceptable to reduce fraudalent transactions? Of course, there'll still be a signifcant amount of stolen funds, but it'd prevent most of your neighbors to login to your account.

Well, this is horrible design (and has basically happened with credit cards btw...) and you should address it at it's core, by bulding the architecture in a way that such fraudalent transactions are next-to impossible.

My point is: if cheating is so much of an issue, games should be architected in a way to avoid the ability of cheating from client-side at all, without additional monitoring required. Anti-cheat is a bad workaround to a core development problem, at the expense of the customer instead of developers.

Anti-cheat is a) only neccesary for for competitive games, which is only a fraction of possible games and b) only needed there because publishers want to remain in control of the servers instead of letting the community run their own. With community-run servers the admins can kick disruptive players wether they are cheaters or not, no spyware needed. You could even require your own spyware for your server and let others play on servers that are more reasonable. And for tournaments the organizer should control the hardware and software anyway to make sure there is a level playing field.

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