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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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"?
Gonna have to ponder if people who aren't cheating are cheaters.
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...
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.
Valve did it for CS, and it was called overwatch, sorry. [0]
Yes, its prize pool is order of magnitude higher than either of Olympics sports or Chess.
I grew up with star trek and star wars wondering what a “I’ll transfer 20 units to you” meant. Bitcoin was an eye opener in the idea of “maybe this is possible” to me. But it shortly became true to me that it’s not the case. There is no way still for random agents to prove they are not malicious. It’s easier in a network within the confines of Bitcoin network. But maybe I’m not smart enough to come up with a more generalized concept. After all, I was one of the people who read the initial bitcoin white paper on HN and didn’t understand it back then and dismissed it.
I have always wondered why more companies don't do trust based anti cheat management. Many cheats are obvious from anyone in the game, you see people jumping around like crazy, or a character will be able to shoot through walls, or something else that impossible for a non-cheater to do.
Each opponent in the game is getting the information from the cheating player's game that has it doing something impossible. I know it isn't as simple as having the game report another player automatically, because cheaters could report legitimate players... but what if each game reported cheaters, and then you wait for a pattern... if the same player is reported in every game, including against brand new players, then we would know the were a cheater.
Unless cheaters got to be a large percentage of the player population, they shouldn't be able to rig it.
Players in some games with custom servers run webs of trust (or rather distrust, shared banlists). They are typically abused to some degree and good players are banned across multiple servers by admins acting in bad faith or just straight up not caring. This rarely ends well.
I used to run popular servers for PvP sandbox games and big communities, and we used votebans/reports to evict good players from casual servers to anarchy ones, where they could compete, but a mod always had to approve the eviction using a pretty non-trivial process. This system was useless for catching cheaters, we got them in other ways. That's for PvP sandboxes - in e-sports grade games reports are useless for anything.
Out of curiosity I did a quick internet search and a couple of months ago a new wave of bots has emerged. Those bots also join as majority group but never fully join the game, they simply take up slots in a team, preventing others from joining. Makes you wonder why the server isn't timing them out.
I played COD4 a lot, though not competitively. I used to say that I had a bad day if I didn't get called a cheater once.
I didn't cheat, never have, but some people are just not aware of where the ceiling is.
The cheaters that annoyed us back then were laughably obvious. They'd just hold the button with a machine gun and get headshots after headshots, or something blatant like that.
True of everything. Getting good just lets you see the skill gaps. I've sunk a serious chunk of time into both pool and chess. In both I'd be willing to take a bet that I can beat the median player with my eyes closed (in pool, closing them after walking the table but before getting down on the shot).
And in both of those activities, there are still like 10-20 levels of "person at skill level A should always win against person at skill level B" between me and someone who is ACTUALLY good at pool or chess. Being charitable, in the grand scheme of things I might be an intermediate player.
And even that's the (relatively) straightforward part. The hard part is doing this without injuring the kernel enough that the only sensible solution for the security conscious is a separate PC for gaming.
Problem is that only works if the two OSes are different (Windows vs Linux) or else they can just stomp each other
That solution only works on servers hosted by players - I've never seen huge game companies that run their own servers (like GTA) have dedicated server admins. I guess they think they can just code cheaters out of their games, but they never can.
(Not being sarcastic.)
Sort of like nuclear weapons
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/01/20/elon-musk-...
Kernel anti-cheat isn't an elegant solution either. It's another landmine, security holes, false positives, broken dev tools, and custody battles with Windows updates while pushing more logic server-side still means weeks of netcode tuning and a cascade of race conditions every time player ping spikes, so the idea that this folds to "better code disipline" is fantasy.
I play fps competitively and valorant is by far the most least cheater fps game on the market
nothing perfect in software world and this is the best tool for its job
if your pc is so important then maybe don't install these particular software
its all about trade off
Kernel level anticheat isn't a silver bullet, either. It just simplifies the work of the anticheat programmers. I personally think that the silver bullet is behavioral anticheat and information throttling (don't send the player information about other players that he can't see/hear)
if you can design a better one without drawback then you could try to release a better one
It's kind of weird that we still don't have distributed computing infrastructure. Maybe that will be another thing where agents can run near the data their crunching on generic compute nodes.
> The general simplistic answer from those who never had to design such a game or a system of “do everything on the server” is laughably bad.
What “Netflix did” was having dead-simple static file serving appliance for ISPs to host with their Netflix auth on top. In their early days, Netflix had one of the simplest “auth” stories because they didn’t care.
It would add some latency but could be opt-in for those that care enough for all players in a match to take the hit.
You can't make a competitive fps game with a dumb terminal, it can't work because the latency is too high so that's why you have to run local predictive simulation.
You don't want to wait the server to ack your inputs.
There's an exception with fighting games. Fighting games generally don't have server simulations (or servers at all), but every single client does their own full simulation. And 2XKO and Dragon Ball FighterZ have kernel anti cheat.
Well I'm just nitpicking and it's different because it's one of the few competitive genres where the clients do full game state simulations. Another being RTS games.
It works fine for LAN but as soon as the connection is further than inside your house, it’s utterly horrible.