Comment by ultimafan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ultimafan | Hacker News Reader

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Not him, but why? Cheaters in multiplayer games seek a gain for themselves at the expense of everyone else playing. They provide no benefit to a community and it's not something anyone should be even remotely proud of, even if they put a significant amount of intellectual effort into doing so.

A few years ago, I used to play EFT with friends after work and putting my kids to bed quite frequently. For a group of friends living quite far apart it was one of our favorite gaming experiences as a group. But our feeling on it soured as the game was slowly but surely taken over by large amounts of cheaters in every single match we played. The developers weren't able to deal with it at all and eventually we all quit playing. There's nothing that takes the wind of your sails in gaming like sitting down to unwind for the hour or two a week of free time with your friends and just being completely unable to enjoy that time because a significant portion of the lobby is made up of selfish cheaters. I can remain friends with someone who cheats in a multiplayer game but I never play with them after finding out they did so. I don't hesitate to report accounts. There's no benefit to you as a player keeping them around unless you're somehow making money off cheat sales.

My disdain primarily comes from going out of your way to snitch on someone, regardless of why.

But in general I'm not upset with cheaters anyway. People are always going to push boundaries. It's a fact of life.

I also believe that most cheats, at least the more invasive ones, are only possible because the game was poorly designed, without cheating in mind. Instead most game companies seem to just slap a commercial anticheat product on top and hope for the best.

I see, thanks for clarifying. I guess my frustration with that viewpoint comes from a personal bias- I can't share any sympathy for reports of that nature after seeing many of my friends and my own hours "wasted" when budgeted free time that could have been lighthearted and relaxing turns into frustration, venting, anger etc. after getting repeatedly shut down by blatant cheaters (though one could say games are wasted time in and of themselves). That I paid for the game to play with friends and none of them are willing to play it anymore because of how ineffectual the developers were at dealing with the problem compounds that frustration.

I do agree that developers should put more effort into thinking about proper design and anticheat protections. But it's also a huge ask for smaller or more inexperienced studios when they have to waste time dealing with bad actors that could have been better spent on game development, and an excuse for antisocial cheaters to keep behaving poorly. People want to assume the best out of each other. In an ideal world, people who can't keep themselves from making their hobby that of making others miserable for pleasure would be the ones being punished instead of laying the blame on those naive enough to assume that everyone is good natured and cooperative.

In an ideal world there would be no cheats, no (need for) lawyers, no bankers and things would be much better. It's not an ideal world.

I agree, it's not, and people should be more careful. But at the same time it's just strange to me to see someone actually trying to clean up an online community and make it more ideal labeled as "pathetic" and a "snitch," as if a cheater's right to waste other people's time and pleasure is more important and people should just accept someone bragging about acting poorly in a social context. I don't think that's very productive behavior.

The thing is they're not really going to accomplish anything. Okay the accounts were reported. Great. Good chance no one is ever going to look at it and nothing will happen. The only thing accomplished here was the original poster trying to gain brownie points for doing a good boy thing (and then bragging about it).

Btw, they definitely did not find my steam account or actually report me. Even if they did, it’s literally a free shooter. Id be on another account within minutes. Yes I’m aware of how to get around HWID/IP bans…

Glad to see that my comment caused quite the shit storm though.

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