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Comment by Draiken | Hacker News Reader

I mean, people are dumb.

Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct.

Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor).

You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.

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The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.

I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”

It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.

To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here already: https://playsafeid.com/

I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.

The marketing works because of what I said: people are dumb.

Anyone that's not dumb will know (maybe after the heat of the moment) why they lost, but the vast majority of people will blame anything they can instead. Teammates, lag, the developers, etc. Cheating is merely one of these excuses.

> I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”

This entire idea is so dumb it makes my head hurt. You can't eliminate bad actors no matter how hard you try. It's impossible in the real world.

All these "if only we could prevent X with more surveillance/control" ideas go up in flames as soon as reality hits. Even if a single person bypasses it, we can question everything. Then all we're left with are these surveillance systems that are then converted into pure data exfiltration to sell it all to the highest bidder (assuming they weren't doing this already).

I applaud Valve for not going down the easy route of creating spyware and selling it as "protection".

> Cheating is merely one of these excuses.

Cheating is a very real problem in most competitive matchmade video games. The fact that you think that this is an "excuse" conclusively indicates that you don't actually have experience with them and that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

> This entire idea is so dumb it makes my head hurt. You can't eliminate bad actors no matter how hard you try. It's impossible in the real world. ... Even if a single person bypasses it, we can question everything.

This is clinically insane. 99.999% of people, including most of those two-sigma below the mean in terms of intelligence, correctly recognize how stupid of an argument this is, and that eliminating the majority of crime/cheating is absolutely a huge victory that is worth sacrificing for.

Think about that - some of the dumbest people in our society realize that the argument "if we can't stop every criminal/cheater, then there's no point in trying" is bad. What does that make you?

(it's also abundantly clear that you have zero experience in finance or security, either, because anyone competent in those fields can tell you exactly what it means to impose costs on an adversary and why your argument is factually incorrect)

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