Consider how cheating was handled back before AAA games turned into videogame equivalent of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you were found cheating, you were booted off the server, period. There was no matchmaking bullshit, the games weren't nudging or limiting you to play on the ladder, against global ranking. Instead, you had local and international servers, public and private; you had neighbourhood servers, and servers run by groups of friends, and themed servers, etc. - in other words, servers were communities. As diverse and rich as human communities can be. And they handled cheating in ways communities do it.
On smaller / local servers, people wouldn't cheat because the community extended past the game to other on-line places, and/or to meatspace. Everyone was friends with each other, and being a cheating asshole is a fast way to lose your friends. Scaling up, you had all the mechanisms one also saw on discussion boards: some servers had owner or moderators ban anyone they didn't like; others voted. It was nicely self-regulating: servers weren't sticky, so being banned as false positive (or out of spite) didn't hurt. People didn't like power-tripping server operators? They'd switch over to a new server, run by someone saner.
Were there still cheaters? Yes. Assholes and griefers happened. But without a single global ranking to compete for, cheating was mostly self-defeating: there was no reward, no incentive, and you'd be just ruining the fun for yourself.
Yes, cheating is kind of a proxy reason why I don't enjoy multiplayer games. But the real reason is this: modern games feel like suddenly all the little soccer leagues were required to follow all the FIFA rules, were allowed only to play registered games, only to use pitches and equipment and balls and clothes that are certifiably up to spec, regularly audited - all because it might happen that our ad-hoc team of Sunday players would one day be visited by a World Cup team, and it would suck if we had an unfair advantage.
It's just ruining the game for everyone, for the sake of a small group of people running a racket.
I booted up the computer to take a break from the assholes, not to get shot by them.
If you buy a game and receive only a client without a server, you only bought half a game. Expect to rent the other half.
Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”
Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.
The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.
Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.
Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking
This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.
See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.
> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer
Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.
The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.
> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.
Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.
This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).
At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.
What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?
(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
It would be pretty trivial to hook up a Pi Pico through the jacks and USB ports to be able to make a KBM adapter like that. There just hasn't been a point making such a device when the xim/cronus works fine.
It might not even need the jacks, according to https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib... the USB-A ports accept HID gamepads.
The creators of the xim will want to make a new product to sell if their old one no longer works. It might even be possible with a software update.
The difference is Microsoft will now get more money out of the cheating products than before, not sure that sounds the right incentive but that's what is going to happen.
Those things cannot be fixed with software.
I have sold a half-dozen Cronus Zen adapters in person via Craigslist/OfferUp.
Every single buyer claimed that it was for a friend, brother, etc.
Don't do that, please. Sell drugs or something, less damaging to society.
(FWIW I don’t think it’s worse than [some] drugs and I doubt GP does either)