Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

> Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration.

Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals.

The main issue is that 'at scale' you have the fact that a certain percentage of people are sociopaths, a certain percentage of people are really smart, and a certain percentage of people have the time and motivation to do something, and when they all cross you end up with a person who breaks your system.

View on HN

> Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals.

The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.

> The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.

That's not true and there isn't data to show it.

The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them".

Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.

Really? Most gaming communities seem to hate kla as it breaks their steam deck compatibility or linux compatibility.

Most players don't use Steam Deck or Linux.

They might not own one themselves but they beat its drum and support the idea of it. That’s something developers would realize if they spent even a little bit of time looking at such sentiment in their communities.

It's only the answer if the goal is to not feel like you're being cheated by cheaters: realistically cheating would be absolutely fucking bonkers if you actually tried to treat DIY matchmaking as a form anti-cheat.

Voting to kick/ban and sharing ban lists only works for ragehacking, but the most joy stealing form of cheating is people using hacks and cheats subtly enough to beat an average player, but not strongly enough to guarantee they'll be caught by the community.

I don't think anyone is saying "DIY matchmaking", they're saying "community servers" - and everyone in any given community knows everyone else, ideally IRL, and any newcomers are going to be watched, both for their technical performance but also their social performance.

Cheating among your friends has the ultimate death penalty of losing those friendships. Most people don't want that.

This is why most cheating is not among close friends, but where there's an open buffet for the energy vampires; anodyne corporate "matchmaking" where the game corporation will place you with other customers of the game corporation at its choice. The cheater does not have to face a panel of their peers, they only have to slip past the inattentive corporation to be placed in a server with delicious innocent strangers who they will never see again once they've had their fun.

Equating cheaters to energy vampires is great comedy, I'm stealing that.

I'd love to see Colin Robinson play CS 1.6 with wallhack in his basement.

How's that any different from just having a really good player in your community - which, in many cases, also spoils the fun?

Are you seriously asking me how getting killed by someone cheating to know exactly where you are feels different than just being outplayed?

Actually yes.

If you've never been falsely accused of cheating in an online game by people who can't tell the difference between that and getting outplayed, chances are you haven't played any multiplayer games long enough to get any good at them.

You'd end up pretty awful at games if you treated getting killed by something that has no counterplay the same as getting killed by something that does...

A person who's good enough to know where you are for in-game reasons is something you supposed to learn to respond to: They aren't cheating so they're using heuristics and information that you're supposed to learn to counter play.

A person who has omniscience at the press of a button does not play similarly at all. Often times that's how they're even caught: since they're not bound by any sort of in game heuristics no counterplays work against them.

In some games that even makes cheaters a liability when they're on your team. With any ranked game mode "soft cheating" will result in them climbing to a rank where non-cheaters have all sorts of great heuristics on how to play that they lack. So without ragehacking they're actually at a disadvantage and either need to get increasingly bold with cheats or lose.

In some games that's transformed into another way cheaters ruin modern competitive games: intentionally de-ranking so they'll play against less mechanically sound players who are easier to cheat against.

The only real answer for this is self-imposed handicaps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com