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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I have abandoned many games due to cheaters, I think it's great to look at technical solutions but I think the real solution is in community, community tools and less lock in to matchmaking.

We don't have this problem on well moderated servers, or even self-moderated servers (vote kick etc). Smaller better supported communities can self manage the cheating problem but only if they are given the tools to do so. Yeah cheaters can still sneak in, but only until they are kicked and banned.

Matchmaking for many games just gaurantees cheaters both in bottom tier play (cheaters on new accounts) and high tier play (cheaters not yet detected). There's no relief for the casual gamer, who plays well but not often enough to warrant moderated league/ranked games.

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> less lock in to matchmaking.

I have very fond memories of playing on a clan owned server the first few years after TF2 came out. Slowly, I got to know people, and even overcame some pretty severe shyness to talk on a mic during games. My Steam friends list grew and we learned where each other lived around North America, what each other did, who was in a relationship with who. Some people even went so far as to offer couches if someone was visiting their town.

When I last booted up TF2, I was sad to just get put in a random server and couldn't find the old crews stomping ground.

Being older now, I sometimes wish I could find a game where communities like that could form. In hindsight it felt like one of the last breaths of the old internet...

Well, it's time for my weekly "You should try old school runescape" suggestion!

Most of the player base is approaching middle aged, and it's as close to a democratically driven game as there ever was. Jagex is very responsive to the community, almost too much.

That said, I know what you mean. Long gone are the days of internet wonder bringing people together over a quest or a death match.

I agree that self-policed communities seem like the best solution to the general problem.

For example, public Minecraft servers often get harassed by cheaters and griefers. Some servers try to circumvent this with all sorts of complicated anti-cheating mods and moderation tools... but ultimately the easiest solution is to just have a whitelisted server with only people you trust. This tends to work better because every player is accountable, and has the bonus side effect of fostering a community of people who actually know each other.

Private, moderately sized, self-policed communities really do seem like the only sure-fire approach to avoiding cheaters in online multiplayer games. Otherwise it's just a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cheaters usually coming out on top.

One of my memories of being a gamedev is when I tried to convince people at S2 not to go all-in on matchmaking for the reasons you outline. They looked at me like I was an alien.

Unfortunately the wild success of Dota 2 proves that this model is superior for generating monetary returns.

This. Valve set TF2 on this path when they introduced the matchmaking, which killed off a huge portion of the community servers.

These sort of moves were made by pretty much every single multiplayer game around from the mid 2010s forwards. Even at the time it was very obvious what would be the result. But the casuals and new players loved it for a while $$$

Wouldn't surprise me if Valve sends a DMCA to their host for using their art assets

Yup. The whole Diablo series has been ruined by cheating, too. The companies seem sooooo terrified to ban cheaters, and I guess I really don't understand why.

Cheaters usually go on to badmouth the game on public forums. Sometimes they will attempt to also seek financial repercussions when denied access to their purchase. It is not common but it does happen, usually the game companies end up settling before the case.

Nah I got an account banned I used to like a lot for doing stuff other people did and got away with.

Would have been super simple to patch the bug. Honestly made me turned off by the entire country associated with the game.

Oh, i'm not saying you wont get banned, i'm just saying that some companies have fears of bans and repercussions.

After initial contact with the company failed, I found assigning it a CVE describing the problem ( CVE-2017-14748 for example) got the ball rolling quickly.

Ya. This is rampant in the gaming industry. The industry is surprisingly one of the most toxic to work in IMO. At least from a consumer communication perspective. It is actually wild to think there are individuals out there that think and act this way

Some cheaters also have no problem doxxing the game developers, CM's, and anyone else they perceive to have slighted them. In a world where swatting is a real danger to a person's life, that can be quite a serious threat.

But that behavior badmouth the game publicly and seek financial repercussions, as written, are indistinguishable from what I'd expect someone who was wrongly banned by an automated anti-cheat system with all appeals met by robo-denial.

Recently got back into playing Diablo Immortal because i got a new m4 ipad, was playing with a standard nintendo switch controller for 2 weeks fine just doing standard story quest/leveling then banned for "Severe Exploitation - Automation (Botting), Hacks, or Third-Party Software". I tried to appeal but just automatically rejected and no recourse or way to even know what they think i did wrong besides that vague statement above.

I'm 100% sure i didnt do anything that would count as cheating, was just playing the game normally on an unjailbroken device, never interacted with another person in the game either.

Yet the chat is full of bots spamming stuff that dont seem to get banned.

Luckily i got banned before i decided to spend any money on it besides $8 for the battlepass.

100% this. Game companies want to treat games as e-sports platform, but that's incompatible with casual play. IMHO, the solution is to allow self-hosted community servers and adapt matchmaking to this, or ditch it entirely; social mechanisms will handle cheating there just fine, like they always did. Separately, create e-sports track, where entry requirement is kernel level anticheat or playing on vendor-supplied hardware in vendor-approved location or whatever bullshit is necessary. Just don't mix the two.

But iirc TF2 always has community-hosted servers.

kernel level is bullshit and unnecessary

Bullshit. ‘Cheats’ like wall clipping used to make the games feel like actual fun.

Anyone saying otherwise shouldn’t be allowed to write software.

Cheats are fine and fun in single-player games. Not in online multiplayer experiences, and certainly not flooding every single server.

In multiplayer, cheats are literal plague that kill the entire experience for everyone, including the cheater. Social gaming is based around mutual understanding. If the understanding is that we play by the rules, then a cheater is going against that understanding, thereby ruining the mutual-ness.

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