Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousab | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the problem de facto solved by matchmaking? The player that aims better will quickly win more and be elevated to the level of opponents on par with them. From the perspective of the player that loses to them, it's no different than losing to a regular player who aimed really well; you're quickly separated from them in the queue.

This wouldn't apply to games with only a few hundred active players but I think most proponents of this change aren't really thinking of those games.

View on HN

> Isn't the problem de facto solved by matchmaking? The player that aims better will quickly win more and be elevated to the level of opponents on par with them.

Matchmaking decreases the odds you meet a cheater for low rank players, and significantly increases it for higher rank players -- and since there's fewer of them due to the Bell curve, they are going to feel the cheaters that much more.

If you just rely on rank and not on anti-cheat efforts, you'd be just destroying one of the loyal cores of the playerbase, one which is also quite vocal online.

From my personal experience of thousands of hours in competitive FPS shooters on PC, there is no point in ranking where playing against a cheater becomes fair or fun.

modern matchmaking includes streamers that pay for accounts that have purposefully lost repeatedly so they've tanked their rank so they can stream themselves pubstomping noobs.

Back in the day an obvious cheater would get booted from the server, nowadays, they literally record themselves doing it and nothing happens because it brings in an incoming to the company.

I can tell you which I prefer.

Generally yes in any tier with a big enough pool, and has been my experience. I've been playing team based competitive shooters for over 2 decades, and while I occasionally notice an obvious cheater with amazing aim and improbable aim jumps during replays. My experience is that they often aren't very good at the game in general. Or at least, it's their crutch to play at my level. Cheating was a much bigger problem for me when I'd personally pick the servers I played on, but I hardly think about it any more. Modern match making tends to be pretty good at leveling the playing field. Cheating kind of sucks, but generally I don't notice on the games I like to play. Plus, there's just as much chance the cheater will be on my team as the opponent, so it evens out that way as well.

Problem is that console gamers are by default cheaters on FPS since all of them have aim-assist. If I were a competitive player I would be pissed off if a console player is higher in the ranking because of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com