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Comment by fullspectrumdev | Hacker News Reader

I might be old or something, but I really don’t give a fuck if someone’s cheating in a video game.

It was basically the norm when I was growing up, there was always someone using wall hacks or whatever, it was just kinda funny and never ruined the fun.

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You are just old. Hacks absolutely ruin the game even for casual players, especially in the newly popular Battle Royale games where you might not run into the hacker until the very last part of the match. It feels bad to invest 20 minutes into a match, be feeling good about the finale showdown, only for them to aimbot you from nowhere - you never stood a chance.

The issue you're missing is the scale of the cheating.

When it is some small percentage of games you might shrug, hope you don't run into the cheater again, and move on to the next game where nobody is cheating. A few matches of your day get ruined but you still get to enjoy >95% of them so it's overall still a good experience. It has a very small impact on your enjoyment but you can move on and still enjoy most of your time.

It becomes a problem when there are so many cheaters that you encounter one in nearly every single game you play. Making it nearly impossible to play or win because the aim botting, wall hacking, infinite ammo, one-hit-kill, teleporting, invincible hacker is mowing down you and your entire team and the round ends in a few minutes. Except now it is 5 out of every 6 games you play and you hardly get to enjoy playing.

Additionally, back in the day you could leave matches without really getting punished for it. If you encountered an obvious hacker you could just leave and rejoin a new game. Now you get punished for leaving matches and might have to sit out a 15-60 minute timer if you leave too many games. Mix that with some high percentage of cheaters and you might be sitting in lobby waiting to play the game more than you're actually playing the game.

Let's say you enjoy playing Chess. How long would you enjoy playing against Alpha Zero - especially when expecting to play against someone your own ELO? At what ratio of playing against people cheating with Alpha Zero would you stop bothering to try and play Chess? I could tolerate it occasionally but if every single person I was playing against was just using Alpha Zero I'd stop trying to play Chess at all. It's no fun to lose every single time because the other person is always cheating.

Substitute any other pass-time for video games and I think most folks feel differently.

A pick-up game of basketball

A weekend mountain bike race

A corn-hole tournament at your local bar.

Someone cheating in any of these contexts would typically be upsetting. No one likes a cheater.

Video games are different because you can't call them out on it in real-time. You don't usually have any way to prove it. You also can't really escape it because there might be another cheater in the next lobby. In person, you have a lot more power or control over the situation (typically).

There are plenty of games you can play where cheating is allowed.

I think a majority of people who play competitive online games enjoy fair competition, and it really isn’t fun to play against cheaters.

I played NBA2k on PC for a few years, and unlike on consoles, cheaters were rampant. Half the games would be against players who were like 12 feet tall and could make every shot from anywhere on the court. It was zero fun, and I stopped playing.

I think “just let people cheat” is not a viable option.

It really depends on the level of cheats. Someone using wall hacks has a huge advantage, depending on the game, but it doesn't take that much more skill to outplay them. But when you get to a point where the cheats aren't just a tool anymore but do most of the work, the skills required to still win get so astronomically high that you will lose every time unless you are a top 0.1% player. Which isn't really fun anymore. And many cheats nowadays are exactly that: practically unbeatable. Not a challenge, not hard but doable with enough work, just unbeatable

Getting a win is the intermittent reward players get from these battle royale games against 20 or so other teams, when a hacker ruins that it's pretty annoying.

I think it depends on the kind of game. I played Team Fortress Classic back in the day and if someone was cheating it didn’t have a big impact. During the pandemic I got into FPSes again and played COD Warzone. In a game like that you have a multi minute build up to actually engaging another player, to go through all that then get beamed by someone with an aimbot is very frustrating.

Speaking as a 40 year old card carrying old man you are wrong. Cheating was never fun except maybe for the cheater.

This makes sense if you're playing games for fun with people you know, like on the old community servers, but nowadays games like CS are played competitively for money and clout, and usually with complete strangers. Fun isn't part of the equation anymore, or at least comes as a side-effect.

Wall hacks might be funny, but when you get killed on sight in .25 sec it’s not so fun anymore…

By the time multi-player FPS's came out, cheaters were definitely annoying enough that cheat detection / banning became a thing.

I didn't even really care when it mattered. For money. We could dispute, an investigation would happen. Life went on.

People get sweaty in competitive online these days, especially on the AAA titles.

not only that.. we're not far from the point where it becomes undetectable because a camera fed AI instance on one computer is manipulating the inputs on gaming machine

I kinda feel the same way.. I imagine games not having community servers and focusing heavily on rank/seasons etc makes it feel a lot more serious? Idk I used to find community on dedicated servers, it was part of the game, with in game text/voice chat, now the community exists entirely outside of it in discords etc.

I mean try to play TF2 with the bots and report back. The game is ruined. Thank Jeebus for community servers

I haven't touched TF2 in almost a year. The joy I felt playing that game has left since the cheating epidemic and I don't think it's ever coming back.

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