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