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Comment by dmayle | Hacker News Reader

The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards.

When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others.

Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at equivalent skill levels.

The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun.

I say, let the people cheat.

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Comments like this just make me upset to the point I can't cohere an appropriate argument. It's so out-of-touch with reality and completely ignores the core problem that I have to believe you're just fucking with us.

No, it is not fun to play against smurf accounts using hacks. They aren't doing it for the leaderboards, they actively downrank themselves to play against worse players!

And no, it's not fun to play against cheaters who are so bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your experience.

And no, I actually do care that people are cheating in multiplayer games because it's not fair. Since when do we reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the game?

Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it. Who cares if the sanctity of the sport or competition is ruined - we're a community of apathetic hacks.

I play online FPS with friends for fun. I don't care about leaderboards, but I know people that do and don't want to take them away from them.

You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating. People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier aim activated only if they lose too much, making the experience very inconsistent.

Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game. As soon as a non cheating player is in view of a cheating player, the non cheating player dies. That doesn't make for a fun game mechanic.

>"Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game"

Fun fact, this does exist. There used to be old CS:GO servers that were explicitly hack v hack, would make it abundantly clear to any new visitors that stumbled upon the servers that you would NOT have any fun without a "client", and it was a bunch of people out-config'ing each other. It was actually kinda cool for those people, it would NEVER be fun for anyone else.

Pretty sure HvH is still alive and well in CS2 and high rank Premier is still basically Valve-hosted HvH.

Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around objects.

>"Try playing Rust [...] and you will immediately change your tune."

In general, really.

Yea, that's one game that's more fun to watch than play I will admit, so mostly I'm a "pro rust watcher with over 300 hours watching rust" (this is a bit of an in-joke, sorry) who sees the annoyance and lack of fun people have when they get destroyed by cheaters. I did play one wipe, and spent 25 hours over 3 days in the game, so I chose to quit right there instead of doing that on a regular basis.

Oh for sure, and even now I occasionally watch videos as background noise during work - but it's just not a fun game for the vast majority of times I log in. I'm about 175 hours in now; and for the one time a month I play, I can't be assed joining anything besides a 3x anymore with a wipe at least 10 days away, it's just too much sunk cost and wasted time even getting a 2x1 down in official or vanilla servers.

It's fun when I get something down (and fully use a starter kit, if a server has it) and have neighbors to dick around with, or there's not enough traffic to actually enjoy landmarks and underground, or occasionally when I meet someone that's down to team up or just talk on mic while pacing around one of our bases. But when that doesn't happen, I'm just not having fun haha

I am a casual watcher of Willjum' Rust single and cooperative plays whenever it rarely pops into my YT feed.

It's almost a meme in Willjum's comments that people watch Willjum's channel but don't play Rust!

I am also a WJ watcher.

There was plenty of cheating when there were no global leaderboards. People will happily do things just to ruin other people's day.

Not just single player. Even in competitive multiplayer a lot of the complaints about "cheating" are actually complaints about matchmaking, and "cheating" is a giant red herring (griefing is a different matter, of course, that gets lumped into the umbrella term of "cheating"). But trying to explain this is typically like pissing against the wind, because people already believe in the existing status quo (no matter how irrational it is) and no one wants to change their beliefs unless it obviously and immediately short-term benefits them.

At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.

The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.

> Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.

...and, even worse, if they ever got to the very top of the ladder and started only playing against other cheaters, then they'd actually weaken their cheats so that they could drop down in ranking to play against (and stomp) non-cheaters again, and/or find creative ways to make new accounts.

Cheaters ruin games. The fact that the GP is so deluded as to claim that "The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards." suggests that they've never actually played a competitive matchmade game on a computer before.

I worked at a company once that didn't use any anti cheat. I once asked why, and they said the matchmaking system solved the problem for them. The matchmaking was good enough so cheaters only ever played with other cheaters, and it kept the numbers up.

Honest players never really complained, so I guess it worked for them.

This is fine if you are low level, because the cheaters will be too good to play in the low level games.

If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat. If the cheat lets you be better than the best human players, the best human player will end up just playing cheaters.

> If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat.

It's almost kind of worse than this. If you are in higher skill levels, you end up getting matched with cheaters who lack the same fundamental understanding of the game that you do and make up for it with raw mechanical skill conferred by cheats.

So you get players who don't understand things like positioning, target priority, or team composition, which makes them un-fun to play with, while the aimbots and wallhacks make them un-fun to play against.

And as a skilled player, you are much better equipped to identify genuine cheaters in your games. Whereas in low skill levels cheaters may appear almost indistinguishable from players with real talent so long as they aren't flat out ragehacking with the aimbot or autotrigger.

You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely ruin the experience for top-10% players

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