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Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

>Realistically what is the alternative?

What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.

It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.

The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.

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So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)

Making it hard enough is good enough. The difference in 1% of games having a cheater and 5 or 10% is massive in the player experience.

> So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)

If the locks treated me, the legitimate owner, as a criminal and required the kind of low-level access that software that runs at the kernel level gets, and still didn't work, then maybe.

it's more like, I'm not going to spend money on a smart lock that reports my movements to a third party just so a burglar can chuck a landscaping stone through my window and unlock the door

> So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)

The solution is not to make the lock so hard that it inconveniences you, the user, it is to shoot intruder on sight (aka better moderation).

This is more like giving control over the locks to a corporation so they can make sure you are safe. Its not even remotely the same thing as you just described.

> Players never get rid of the cheaters completely

> The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.

Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test your cheats)

https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617

> Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back in. When we outright “block” a cheating method, we are technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats until they find something that is actually undetected at that layer.

> unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers

If you think it is an issue then don't play their game. Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to effectively detect the cheats too)

Ban delay is a standard practice, as is raising the entry barrier, but everything both did was creating a culture that made cheaters adapt and get more and more involved, to the point where the cheating itself is the game. What anticheat companies brag about in your link and in the PR piece in OP is entirely irrelevant, the reality is pretty different. I know because I'm pretty familiar with it, having studied it for years in a low-energy mode.

>If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.

This is a hypothetical example which would affect everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing thing, thankfully.

(although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian measures without affecting everyone else never stopped anyone)

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