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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Preventing cheating is hopeless.

Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess. It’s more like pickup league. Preserving competitive purity should be a non-goal. Rather, aim for fun matches. Matchmaking usually tries to find similar skill level opponents anyway, so let cheaters cheat their way out of the wider population and they’ll stop being a problem.

Or, let players watch their killcams and tag their deaths. Camper, aimbot, etc etc. Then (for players that have a good sample size of matches) cluster players to use the same tactics together.

Treating games like serious business has sucked all the fun out of it.

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Unfortunately that has been proven to not work.

Matching based on skill works only as long as you have an abundance of players you can do that based on. When you have to account for geography, time of day, momentary availability, and skill level, you realize that you have fractured certain players far too much that it’s not fun for them anymore. Keep in mint that “cheaters” are also looking for matches that would maximize their cheats. Maybe it’s 8PM Pacific Time with tons of players there, but it’s 3 AM somewhere else with much limited number of players. Spoof your ping and location to be there and have fun sniping every player in the map. Sign up for new accounts on every play, who cares. Your fun as a cheater is to watch others lose their shit. You’re not building a character with history and reputation. You are heat sniping others while they are not realizing it. It may sound limited in scope and not worth the effort for you, but it’s millions of people out there tht ruin the game for everyone.

Almost every game I know of lets players “watch their kill cam”, and cheaters have adapted. The snipped people have a bias to vote the sniper was cheating, and the snipers have a bias to vote otherwise. Lean one way or the other, and it’s another post on /r/gaming of how your game sucks.

Well it is a professional sport -- there's tournaments worth tens of millions of dollars. But honestly it is probably easier to catch cheaters in that environment. The real issue is that cheaters suck the fun out of the game, and matchmaking doesn't fix this because cheaters just cheat the matchmaking (smurf accounts, etc) until they're stomping regular players again. I don't think throwing our hands up and letting the cheaters go on is a real solution.

Smurf accounts are a real problem, but they are a real problem whether the person stomping beginners is using cheats or is just experienced. The target should be preventing smurfing in the first place.

That's a good point.

> The real issue is that cheaters suck the fun out of the game

Unpopular opinion: cheaters don’t, griefers do.

“Cheater” is a pejorative for someone who sidesteps the rules and uses technology instead of, uh, pardon a potentially word choice, innate skills. They don’t inherently want to see others suffer as they stomp - it’s a matchmaking bug they’re put where they don’t belong. They just want to do things they cannot do on their own, but what are technically possible. A more positive term for that is a “hacker”.

Griefers are a different breed, they don’t just enjoy own success but get entertained by others’ suffering. Not a cheating issue TBH (cheats merely enable more opportunities), more like “don’t match us anymore, we don’t share the same ideas of fun” thing. “Black hat” is close enough term I guess.

YMMV, but if someone performs adequately for my skill levels (that is, they also don’t play well) then they don’t deprive me of any fun irrespective of how they’re playing.

> They don’t inherently want to see others suffer as they stomp

Cheaters want to dominate other players, feel like they deserve to dominate other players and are perfectly happy for other players to suffer as long as they feel good.

That’s provably not universally true, although I have no idea about the exact demographics.

Best I’ve ever seen was some online discussions about motives, but I never compiled any statistics out of random anecdotes (that must be biased and probably not representative).

If they weren't motivated by a toxic sense of self regard and a desire to humiliate others they wouldn't cheat. This is axiomatic.

That's a gross exaggeration. Some people just want to play the game, but lack motor skills commensurate with their other abilities.

Are players who take advantage of developer-supplied aim assist and other assistive technologies "motivated by a toxic sense of self regard and a desire to humiliate others"?

Are people who play the game as the developers intended using the tools the developer supplied cheaters? Wow, deep philosophical questions there.

Gonna have to ponder if people who aren't cheating are cheaters.

Yeah thats a really unpopular opinion. Cheaters dont want to play the game. There is no matchmaking for them that makes sense.

They have inhuman skills usually paired with terrible game IQ and generally awful toxicity. They get boosted up to play with intelligent players purely because they can hold a button to outplay. It gets to the point where you have a player on your team who has no idea how to play but is mechanically good and it breaks the entire competitiveness of the game.

> let cheaters cheat their way out of the wider population

In a 5v5 shooter this ruins 9 people’s game along the way, times however many games this takes. Enough people do this and the game is ruined

> or let players watch their killams and tag their deaths

Players are notoriously bad at this stuff. Valve tried it with “overwatch” and it didn’t work at all.

Forgetting about anti cheat for a minute though, may hamming for different behaviours is a super interesting topic in itself. It’s very topical right now [0] and a fairly divisive topic. Most games with a ranked mode already do this - there’s a hidden MMR for unranked modes that is match made on, and players self select into “serious” or “non serious” queues. It works remarkably well - if you ever read people saying that Quick Play is unplayable it proves that the separate queues are doing a good job of keeping the two groups separate!

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/arc-raide...

Did Valve really do that for Overwatch? It is on their store, so maybe, but I’d expect Blizzard to implement that sort of thing.

I agree that killcam tagging is not great for, like, actual “you are breaking the rules” type enforcement (because, yeah, players will generate a ton of false-positives). But if players had a list of traits and match-making tried to minimize some distance in the trait space (admitting it could’ve be perfect), it might result in more fun matches.

> Did Valve really do that for Overwatch? It is on their store, so maybe, but I’d expect Blizzard to implement that sort of thing.

Valve did it for CS, and it was called overwatch, sorry. [0]

[0] https://counterstrike.fandom.com/wiki/Overwatch#Verdict

> Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess.

Yes, its prize pool is order of magnitude higher than either of Olympics sports or Chess.

I’m sure there’s a game out there that has a prize pool for matchmaking mode, because any silly thing has happened somewhere, but I’d expect that sort of thing to mostly be handled in proper tournaments.

It's not so much tournaments but viewership. People watch others play on Twitch, that gets you money directly as well as sponsorships. This incentives people to cheat so they're good on stream.

It is a lot harder to cheat on a live stream though.

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