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0 pointsgambiting4y ago0 comments

Rampant cheating in online FPS games is a problem right now. I've had more games ruined by cheaters than I can count.

So how about yes, let's focus on fixing the problem at hand, and if it's used for something else(like single player games) then I'll complain about it. Right now developers have my full support to use whatever methods they can to make sure the hackers stay out. The game can boot into its own OS for all I care.

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10 comments · 4 top-level

munk-a4y ago· 3 in thread

I think, honestly, the biggest issue in terms of cheating right now is a lack of responsibility from the companies involved in actually reading and acting on reporting - some companies in particular (EA) are extremely lax in actually dealing with human reports and their games suffer greatly for it.

maccard4y ago

Dealing with human reports is hard. People will report good players for cheating. People will report bad players for cheating. People will brigade reports. There's also a sense of scale; last I heard cod warzone had 100 million players. If even a _mild_ portion of those players actively use report systems, it's not feasible to manually evaluate them (and is also prone to bias and social factors)

munk-a4y ago

You're saying it's not feasible to manually evaluate reports - but really what you're saying is that nobody wants to pay for it. Set up a very modest subscription model (like 2$/mo) to fund report checking for your game, possibly with a free tier that starts with low trust, and nuke people by credit card number.

2 more replies

nemothekid4y ago

Reporting is an awful method for cheat detection. The goal is to prevent cheaters from ruining customer games. If a customer has to report cheaters, they are already having a bad experience. Not to mention for most of these games there is 0 marginal cost to creating a new account.

VortexDream4y ago· 2 in thread

By the time it becomes a problem, it'll be too late to reverse. You think publishers will willingly give up the ability lock down their games on PCs? It's been their dream for decades. I'd rather not give up what we can do with the software we've paid for (and I don't care what some piece of crap ToS says I can or cannot do with the software), just so you get less cheaters in online games.

gambitingOP4y ago

But that's really not a great place to use this argument - this isn't surveillance infrastructure or encryption backdoors where yes, once it's built a) it will be used for nefarious purposes b) it's really hard to get rid of. Game sandboxing is already very easy to achieve(at least on windows) and doesn't require any special software to be developed or deployed. It's all part of the Microsoft GDK and is already used - a recent game that is deployed like that is The Ascent, which deservedly got into a lot of shit over it, because the Gamepass version runs poorly compared to the non-sandboxed version on Steam. Likewise, other games that have done this suffer for it and publishers shy away from it, just how aggressive DRM gets a lot of pushback and publishers either don't include it or are forced to remove it post launch.

That's why I'm not really worried about this tech "spilling" to single player games to protect MTX or anything like that, but I'd really really really like to see it deployed as aggressively as physically possible in online competitive games.

foerbert4y ago

I think it's probably the correct argument to use.

As you pointed out, what the vast majority of gamers will respond to is performance. In order to get performance, you have to start cutting other areas like graphics. However, those are other important aspects - maybe particularly to marketing.

The reason it's not palatable enough to be widespread is because of it's technical limitations. If you throw enough resources at the matter to remove those limitations, you won't see all the pressure you're mentioning that keep companies from making maximal use of this kind of tech in all games all the time.

I'm pretty comfortable erring on the side of caution here. Cheaters are rather annoying, but at least it's a relatively contained problem with a fairly wide range of options for how I want to respond to it. Worst case, I can go try to find a smaller community or even just go play another game. Meanwhile, most every game being fully locked down in all the ways... I can't really do jack about that.

User234y ago· 1 in thread

This sounds like a job for virtualization. Run the game in a restricted environment and let the anticheat snoop that sandbox however it likes without digging through everything.

astrange4y ago

Surely they'd just ban you, since that means you could have a cheat hypervisor.

atatatat4y ago

Play with only/mostly your friends...?

Don't ruin my ability to run graphics mods on GTA, ha

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