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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have power over the software running on the hardware, it ain't your hardware. Force the consoles to be open and give power back to the users.

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It’s always fun to see that viewpoint run face-first into real life, as it inevitably and immediately devolves into a cesspool of cheating that either drives everyone off the platform or loops back around to being forced to run anti-cheat software you don’t have power over.

These vapid comments about freedom And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian

"Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client. Meanwhile, these draconian anti-multiplayer-cheating methods obliterate single-player-game freedoms by removing all potential for modding, which is the only good thing about the medium of gaming these days.

These vapid comments about convenience over freedom and short-sighted notions of corporate control over our devices always strike me as naively and comically authoritarian.

There is also the solution of running "competitive" games in person, and providing equipment to play on.

> If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client

Yep, but that would result in no games being commercially viable, and so no games existing.

So there needs to be a compromise in order for those games to exist.

It you want to play a mod friendly game, then… go play one? Lots exist.

Or invent a way to allow anyone to modify and run their game clients in any way they want to preserve abstract notions of freedom whilst also preventing them from modifying and running their game clients in a way that hurts the experience of others.

Good luck!

> "Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client."

This isn't really enough these days. There's proof-of-concept videos on YouTube of people developing ML-Image Recognition aimbots that move a physical mouse.

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