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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game developers had a bad habit of leaving them running/idle even if you were not playing.

I have a dedicated laptop for gaming that I do absolutely nothing else on, not even logging into email accounts. Just steam + games + whatever video software I might need. This is my sane compromise as someone who participates in a lot of competitive games. it sucks, but I see no better solution than to disclose it (insane this wasn't the standard already). Even that is hard, because if you disclose too much, cheaters can take advantage.

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> cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution.

Cheating is downstream of the trust problem with an anonymous global "community". Anti-cheat is just an arms race, but there are other avenues to addressing it (weak "KYC", like requiring a phone number to play ranked modes).

Deadlock is potentially doing something interesting with its invite-only EA system. They're essentially building a social graph of players, which could be leveraged to identify "cheating rings"/compromised accounts and seed some kind of social reputation system within the community.

This is a really interesting and potentially great idea, but I am fundamentally against the KYC thing because it puts me in a position where I'm at the whims of whatever BS automated moderation systems they put in place these days, which is usually quite terrible.

With effective KYC, each moderation action has more weight (because user accounts have more weight), so in theory the moderators can focus more on quality than raw throughput.

> and I really don't know of any other solution

Behavior AI-driven anti-cheat system running on the server side.

This sounds nice, but it isn't a thing that would really work. This excellent post in this same thread explains why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004965

> That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online

I never understood this.

As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I’m just old or something now, but I’ve never given a fuck if another player was cheating.

Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit.

You would just change server or join a different lobby or whatever if it was really bothering your enjoyment.

Games with ranked systems will always be cheated. If you play competitively and attain a sufficiently high rank, you will encounter cheaters inevitably. If cheating hits a certain threshold (or even the perception of cheating), the system collapses because people won't compete in a system they perceive as unfair. It isn't a matter of just changing servers when there are consequences for winning/losing. Even worse, many competitive games offer specific, tangible rewards such as items/skins/etc. for winning, which heavily incentivizes cheaters even further. I have definitely stopped playing games completely because of cheating issues - one dumb one particularly for me are m/kb players on playstation FPS games, which is trivial to stop and detect, but they won't do it. I'd vastly prefer something invasive on my playstation to prevent that experience than the alternative, which is to just not play.

That's not a thing you can do on many games nowadays. I assume this comment is also related to this thread https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/31/24284644/apex-legends-lo...

There's no concept of "server" or "Change lobby" on Apex or other Battle royales.

You just queue up for a game, which lasts ~20 minutes. As you are in a 3 player team if you disconnect from the game you get a temp ban penalty, since that also degrades other players experience. So there's no disconnecting freely once a game has started. Now imagine you're playing for 10-15 minutes just to die without really having any chance. That gets frustrating, really quickly, since winning is close to the only "reward" you get from playing the game.

It's not like a classic COD or Battlefield game, where you can feely leave or join any game/server. Once you're in you're somewhat committed, and you have no control over where or with whom you're playing against.

until very recently TF2's servers were infested by bots which kill you in one shot across the map. changing the server wouldn't help because they were on every server. this quite literally made the game unplayable for years.

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