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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat

I could almost get on board with the idea of invasive kernel anti-cheat software if it actually was effective, but these games still have cheaters. So you get the worst of both worlds--you have to accept the security and portability problems as a condition for playing the game AND there are still cheaters!

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It's kind of like when people say Google is getting worse and has too many spam results even while I suspect they're actually improving, but the volume and quality of spam has gone up 100x so it looks like they're doing worse. The question is what is the base rate of attempts to cheat and how many of those attempts does kernel anti-cheat prevent vs. conventional mechanisms. I don't have the answer, but my intuition is cheating is more accessible and viral in many ways now with professional level marketplaces and actors working to build and sell cheats. I also don't think the industry would dedicate so much effort into invasive anti-cheat which is difficult, risky and gets them negative PR unless they felt it truly necessary. Counter Strike a few years ago had huge, huge numbers of cheaters and the super popular games like that attract a lot of attention. But ultimately, this is a cat and mouse game like search & SEO, so you're right there are still cheaters and getting that number to 0 is probably impossible.

I wonder why the volume of spam has come up 100x. seems like maybe Ads are the only way to make Sense of it

Worst of both worlds? In theory this is accurate, in practice, it isn’t. The crux of why people are fine with it as far as I can identify is “but these games still have cheaters” - people aren’t looking for 0 cheaters so much as < X% are cheaters, keeping the odds low than any given match they are in has a cheater.

Valorant really is the only FPS where I was never once suspicious that someone may be hacking. I mean, I don’t play it and the anti-cheat is part of the reason, but it does absolutely work.

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