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Comment by ridgered4 | Hacker News Reader

This always seems obvious to me with F2P games. They create more and more complicated measures to detect cheats, but when it cost nothing (except an SMS service now I guess) to spin up a new account you aren't getting anywhere.

The old business model of just charging a lot of money up front for the game seems like it wouldn't have this problem to the same extent. You just ban their key and they're out $20-60. But that business model is less popular now I guess.

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> The old business model of just charging a lot of money up front for the game seems like it wouldn't have this problem to the same extent.

The problem with such games exists as well but challenges are different:

- cheaters still have access to phished/hacked abandoned accounts that own the game that they can buy very cheap

- another way to get new accounts for cheap is to buy the games in countries where the games are cheaper i.e. argentina or turkey

- there is very little motivation from developers to completely stop the cheaters or slow them down (every banned account is a potential sale of new copy of the game) the developer benefits financially from cheaters continuing to evade bans

- the players hurt the most (who already bought the game and paid the developer) don't generate any new income to the developer and dont pose any risk to income generation unless they quit the game en masse (discouraging potential new players from buying the game)

Yep. There’s no incentive to catch every cheater because it helps sell the “need” for advantages conferred by DLC and virtual currencies.

It doesn't work for all games, but I was a big fan of Dark Soul's method of dealing with cheaters.

If your character or account was flagged for cheating, you were put into a public multiplayer pool/jail with all the other cheaters and would only match games other cheater.

It's clever because you never actually know what you did to get caught or if you have even been caught.

You can only suspect when you notice nearly everyone else you play with also cheats.

Wasn’t dark souls famous for getting you flagged as a cheater because a real cheater joined your game and dropped a hacked item? There were streamers doing this to ruin the play of ordinary players all the time

Believe you had to pick up the item, and IIRC if you got rid of it they would let you off.

The common free to play guard is you need to play X number of unranked games before you can play ranked. The account is “paid” for with some proof of work.

I've had the idea that a deposit in free to play games would be sufficient. Put some amount of money in, say $20. When you are done with the game, you get the $20 back. If you cheat, you lose the $20.

Nowadays money is not a problem for full time cheat developers - they sell the cheats (often in a monthly subscription model) to the cheaters or they sell a service where the cheater joins you in the game and does all the cheating for you (so called carry services, e.g. in escape from tarkov a cheater joins your game, kills all your enemies and lets you take all the loot).

I have seen ads for cheats where a monthly cheat subscription costs more than a new copy of the game.

Who finds any of that fun?

I learned something watching a champion, a world class cheater, discuss bridge. He played the game to outcheat other cheaters. Regular players were more like bots, but the cheaters, those were the real players.

Oh I get the fun of finding loopholes and subverting expectations, but paying someone else to play a game for me... Where does that get fun?

Edit:. I think I get it maybe. I play games to play them, and if I cheat it is to enjoy figuring out the cheat. I kind of get how having an advantage in the game would be briefly fun for the sense of power. But in single player games that wears off quick. My guess is some people enjoy winning more than playing, or the status of gear more than playing to get it. I don't understand that, but that must be it right?

I think you're right. Feeling like you are the pinnacle of the game, at or near the top of the culture you're immersed in is probably a rush. I'm curious if the programmers making the cheats generally get their kicks the same way.

I think Valve uses the spending of some amount of money as a gate to some features of Steam but the free to play games seem to be free for all.

You can bet F2P games generally aren’t playable without buying virtual currency and DLC.

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