On non-technical video-games cheat mitigations

Back in my younger days, I had admin privileges on a UT2k4 server. There was usually a nice group of regulars around. If I was playing and one of the regulars reported someone suspicious I could go into spectator mode, watch through their point-of-view to make sure, record it to a demo file for evidence, and then immediately ban them.

Beyond the community of regulars on our own server, we had good contacts with admins on other servers that catered to a similar gamestyle. We'd regularly exchange ban-lists with them. (I.e., there was kind of a meta community of server operators.)

I realize that that doesn't scale the same way as modern approaches, but the modern approaches also feel like they're trying to use technical means to solve a social problem.

https://www.polygon.com/24002666/dota-2-frostivus-2023-bans-...

Reminds me of what made things like Melee or GunZ: The Duel great. You had glitches that people learned to use to make the game much faster paced and with a much higher skill-ceiling than it was supposed to have. GunZ was particularly funny, where it was supposed to be a shooter where you could do all sorts of cool matrix-style running on walls and blocking bullets with a sword, but that got amplified 100x by the worst netcode ever written along with the ability to cancel almost every animation. So the high-level players learned to fly[0] and switch weapons multiple times per second, which really just made it feel even more like what an ideal matrix-inspired game ought to be.

[0] https://youtu.be/MKD32TiPusI?t=273

(FWIW I'd definitely give it a shot on that basis alone :)

I've found the opposite to be true, at least to an extent.

Especially in the old counterstrike 1.6 days where 'ranked' was just privately organized matches from third party leagues, cheaters were much more of a problem for the lower ranked games because that's when you were playing against new accounts and there was no reputation on the line. Anyone who cheated would just make a new account and be right back in the entry leagues

Get good enough to rank up and you get to avoid most of the cheaters. some people still cheated, but it was also easier to spot when there are less players and you generally knew the players you play against.

These days I just play overwatch where I think both things are true. The automated matchmaking does let cheaters rank up a bit more but new accounts are still more likely to be cheating than established ones so getting to a higher rank let's you avoid a lot of them that would get banned before they can rank up enough