I agree so much, that I’m always upset when I see comments on a post about anti-cheat software that only focus on the downsides of needing it. They never acknowledge the need.
The benefit of an anticheat can be replaced by an old-fashioned kick vote system. The downside of an anticheat is that I’d need to install Windows and a rootkit on my computer to play some games. Not a problem till a younger relative is over and you have to explain how your gaming PC won’t run Fortnite or GTA Online for security and ideology reasons.
Yeah, I honestly like manually kicking cheaters! However, it is not enough on its own. It doesn’t help when BOTS join the game in hordes and outnumber the human players enough to make themselves impossible to kick…
That is, I would prefer even bots to a kernel-level resteictive anticheat.
Passworded rooms then! Even in games where you play on a centralized server, it’s sometimew possible to have passworded matches. GunZ online comes to mind. I think that game had passworded mqtches. TBF that game had anticheat too, but it never really worked properly. Client side anticheat doesn’t work because someone will always bypass it somehow, and then the server doesn’t know that funny things are happening. And server side anti cheat is going to decrease server performance because you have to track more things in the server and trust the clients less.
Depends on the game. In mine, that would work for matches you organize with friends, but wouldn’t work with continuous public matches. Bot hosters would find the passwords and still flood the rooms. However, the safe place during the bot crisis were indeed community servers! I don’t know what exactly they did.
That doesn’t scale to larger games. Rust, for instance, has servers with many hundreds of players (and a huge cheating problem). MMOs will have thousands (and constantly fight bots). The nature of massive, real-time games makes self-policing solutions like votekick or manual whitelists infeasible. Manually investigating user reports is slow. And you pointed out the problems with different kinds of anticheat.
It’s easy to see the allure of root-level monitoring, with all that in mind. Both for developers and players oblivious to or willing to accept the risk. Of course, it also isn’t a silver bullet…
I’m aware of situations in games where kick vote does not work, because they hacked that too. This is possible in some situations where the networking is P2P without an authoritative server.
They still make a big impact on culture and social norms surrounding cheating. But you’re right. There is no fool proof anti-cheat. Software or hardware. Server side authoritative or Peer to Peer. Even with streaming only (Stadia/GeForce Now). None of them are perfect.
It’s all about mitigation and not having a free for all.
Especially since a lot of games are live service, and banning a regular player who buys cosmetics left and right for bad behavior is detrimental to profits. It’s not about making sure everyone has a good time anymore, it’s about “Getting those couple of whales to keep paying.”
I totally agree.
I agree so much, that I’m always upset when I see comments on a post about anti-cheat software that only focus on the downsides of needing it. They never acknowledge the need.
The benefit of an anticheat can be replaced by an old-fashioned kick vote system. The downside of an anticheat is that I’d need to install Windows and a rootkit on my computer to play some games. Not a problem till a younger relative is over and you have to explain how your gaming PC won’t run Fortnite or GTA Online for security and ideology reasons.
Yeah, I honestly like manually kicking cheaters! However, it is not enough on its own. It doesn’t help when BOTS join the game in hordes and outnumber the human players enough to make themselves impossible to kick…
That is, I would prefer even bots to a kernel-level resteictive anticheat.
Passworded rooms then! Even in games where you play on a centralized server, it’s sometimew possible to have passworded matches. GunZ online comes to mind. I think that game had passworded mqtches. TBF that game had anticheat too, but it never really worked properly. Client side anticheat doesn’t work because someone will always bypass it somehow, and then the server doesn’t know that funny things are happening. And server side anti cheat is going to decrease server performance because you have to track more things in the server and trust the clients less.
Depends on the game. In mine, that would work for matches you organize with friends, but wouldn’t work with continuous public matches. Bot hosters would find the passwords and still flood the rooms. However, the safe place during the bot crisis were indeed community servers! I don’t know what exactly they did.
That doesn’t scale to larger games. Rust, for instance, has servers with many hundreds of players (and a huge cheating problem). MMOs will have thousands (and constantly fight bots). The nature of massive, real-time games makes self-policing solutions like votekick or manual whitelists infeasible. Manually investigating user reports is slow. And you pointed out the problems with different kinds of anticheat.
It’s easy to see the allure of root-level monitoring, with all that in mind. Both for developers and players oblivious to or willing to accept the risk. Of course, it also isn’t a silver bullet…
I’m aware of situations in games where kick vote does not work, because they hacked that too. This is possible in some situations where the networking is P2P without an authoritative server.
At which point you can’t even have a truly functional anticheat because any client side anticheat, no matter how invasive, can be defeated.
They still make a big impact on culture and social norms surrounding cheating. But you’re right. There is no fool proof anti-cheat. Software or hardware. Server side authoritative or Peer to Peer. Even with streaming only (Stadia/GeForce Now). None of them are perfect.
It’s all about mitigation and not having a free for all.
Especially since a lot of games are live service, and banning a regular player who buys cosmetics left and right for bad behavior is detrimental to profits. It’s not about making sure everyone has a good time anymore, it’s about “Getting those couple of whales to keep paying.”