Comment by J_McQuade
15 hours ago
Was going to post this on a now-deleted comment about anticheat being a hard problem, so popping it here because it might be relevant:
Anticheat is only hard because people are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.
This doesn't scale to massive matchmaking scenarios of course - and so many modern games don't even offer it as an option - so companies would have to give up the automatic ranking of all players and the promise of dopamine that can be weaponised against them, but it works for sports in the real world and it worked for the likes of Quake, UT, etc. so I don't think it's a necessarily bad idea. Social ostracism is an incredibly powerful force.
However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.
> Anticheat is only hard because people are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.
As much as I reminisce about the days of private servers for Quake/2/3, UT99, CS1.6, etc., saying this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works. Some games would simply not be possible without public matchmaking; I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going. Even getting 11 other people to run a game of Overwatch or CS would be a pain. Other games need public matchmaking to have a fair ranking system. You go onto say ranking is "weaponised" but, ranking is a feature, and a lot of people like that feature.
> However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.
The demand for anticheat, and matchmaking/ranking systems, are entirely player-driven, not publisher-driven. If developers and publishers could get away with only implementing player-managed servers and letting players deal with cheaters, they would! It's a lot less work for them.
As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster. I remember needing to install some anti-cheat crap when I signed up for Brood War's private ICCUP ladder.
Large-player count community server driven games actually have a pretty big advantage compared to smaller player count ones: it makes it easier to have somebody with the permission to ban cheaters online at approximately all times.
Squad has 100 player games, and despite its anticheat having well-known bypasses, I don't see a lot of hacked client cheating. Why? Because I play on servers that consistently have a couple people online during the hours I play that ban anybody who cheats.
Community servers have a lot more moderators than the game devs could possibly afford, because they can build trust with volunteers.
> this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works.
If you listen to the people complaining about cheating... it doesn't.
> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.
True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system going to be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames. At least this one doesn't require me to install an umpire in my home at all times.
> As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster.
The difference is that you could have played the game without doing that. If you didn't trust the people on that server, how likely would you be to install those tools?
> True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames.
I played against the EVO 2025 world champion Street Fighter 6 player in ranked matchmaking last week. When's the last time your county cricket team played against anyone who's won the Cricket World Cup?
We're fundamentally talking about different activities here. Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment. Your "solution" is essentially telling Lamar to not worry about it and just play flag football with his friends instead.
I realize this type of activity isn't for everyone, and there's something to be said about too many games becoming overly competitive, but your proposed solution doesn't really address the problem.
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This. Back in the day, when you played an FPS on a private server, you'd also be able to observer other players when you died so cheating was discovered pretty quickly. When we had ranked clan matches there'd also be 3rd party observers both for fun (ranked matches were a bit event) and to look for signs of cheating.
My naive take is that technical solutions are possible, but critically they can’t be fully automated. The most effective anti-cheat solution possible probably looks something like a full-time in-house team comprised of seasoned ITSEC, data nerds, a couple of ML people, and a few devs. A team like that could probably pick out and boot cheaters with a very low rate of false positives given adequate data to crunch, and they’d only get better over time as they build a roster of patterns and behaviors to match against.
The problem is that this costs more than game companies are willing to spend, even when they’re raking in cash hand over fist. As long as the problem isn’t so bad that it’s making players quit, it’s cheaper to employ more automated, less effective strategies. The end goal isn’t player happiness, it’s higher profit margins.
I work on one of the games mentioned in this article and you're underestimating cheaters and cheat developers. We're doing this already and we're one of the smaller studios, so the larger studios are for sure doing it on a larger scale. Cheaters are still managing.
Always wondered if some distribute fake cheats that snitch or worse. That'd put the cheaters on defense instead of just offense. Yeah people can make their own, but most aren't.
I think this is the most reasonable take I've seen here. As my sibling comment mentions, people are already doing this. I think that - if anything - my point is that this is being done, but separately to the social element. You could get a hundred PhDs to look at the data and identify a cheater, but what you really want to avoid is someone that 9/10 people don't want to play with... and only the players can really tell you who that is. Data from the PhDs would help, though!
I've not really thought about it so deeply until right exactly now (thanks, all!), but I think doing so might have led me to a very unpopular opinion - I might be prepared to say that this problem can't be solved in an anonymous environment. Unless you have a reputation to ruin (or, say, an xbox account to lose), then being outed as a cheater costs you nothing. Again, this is incompatible with a lot of current multiplayer modes - and most of what I love about PC gaming - but, ultimately, I'd rather be judged by my peers than a rootkit.
Thanks. Personally, I simply refuse to install games with anti-cheats, be it on Linux or on Windows. This mostly leaves me with FOSS games and small communities. For instance, Zero-K. Zero-K is curiously fine for large team games - you will usually find players to play with anytime - but if you are looking for PvP you have to be there when the right players are usually online. Being there and available for a game can be a way to contribute to a FOSS project too.
In some cases there are numerous public servers, which can mitigate the "player availability" problem.
Also, for these online FOSS games the servers are community-owned and moderated. Cheaters, trolls, inappropriate chats are monitored by someone who is interested in, and generally quite knowledgeable about, the game.
Can you please list some more FOSS games that are "good" in your opinion? would be very appreciated.
I agree with you the issue is scale, but the scale when it worked was when gaming was niche. You can't put that back into the bottle.
The history of plenty of anticheats start with community servers, not matchmaking. Even Team Fortress Classic had enough of a cheating issue that community members developed Punkbuster, which went on to get integrated into Quake 3 Arena. A lot of 3rd party anticheats were developed in that era for community servers. BattlEye for BattleField games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War's 3rd party ICCUP server with 'antihack'.
You still see this today with additional anticheats on community server solutions. GTA V's modded FiveM servers had anticheats before it was added to the official game. CS2 Face-IT and ESEA servers have additional anticheats as people do not think VAC is effective enough.
There are quite a few games that are fun because they throw dozens of players into the same event. I don't have over 100 friends to play with, let alone over 100 friends I trust not to cheat.
For some games the small group approach works, but even a game as simple as Counter Strike requires at least a dozen players to make the most of.
That said, there are perverse incentives in many of the games hit worst by cheaters. Games that invent more and more prestigious rewards and titles for accounts that do well in hopes of them spending more money on microtransactions, or the microtransaction hell-holes like GTA Online that exist as a vessel to take your money more than to be of any fun. Adding upgrades and other desired items behind a gambling mechanic makes the whole ordeal extra shitty, praying on the psychological weaknesses of the unfortunate souls to get a digital gambling addiction so they can be sucked dry by billion dollar companies.
I've personally never run into anticheat issues because I find most of the games that require anticheat for online play just aren't worth the time and effort to play online in.
But still, the old SW Battlefront II wouldn't be fun without the massive online matches, and those require some form of anticheat to stay fun.
Making sure you can get enough people together for a game is one thing; making sure you can get enough people together for a game that you know aren't cheating is even harder. Most "friends" these days are online-only acquaintances that you simply can't know well enough to know if they're cheating or not. In the heat of the moment while playing a game it's tough to tell if someone's cheating or just good at the game. The toxicity of people being accused of cheating and defending themselves will quickly split apart any acquaintance group.
I think there's immense value in being able to just press a button and jump into a game, without having to actually know people and build up a community.
However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players. (Or maybe you rank players so you can match people of similar skill levels, but you don't tell anyone what their rank is.)
> For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players
Good skill matching is one of the most important advancement in gaming over the last few decades. Being able to consistently play against people who are fair competition for you makes the games so much more fun, especially if you are much better or much worse than the average player. In the old days, you could alternate between opponents that were no challenge at all and opponents you would have no chance against; both types of games get old really fast.
In some ways, good skill matching can alleviate the harm cheaters do; if the cheating makes them way better than everyone else, then good matchmaking should start to match them up only against other cheaters. In many ways, this is the ideal scenario - cheaters play against each other, and everyone else plays against people who are close in skill level.
I think you might have missed my parenthetical! :)
That still exists in many games with server browsers. The game just goes through the server list to find a populated one with low latency and “official” settings (ie not knife only or modded).
Works basically the same as matchmaking does now, albeit in only matching on server quality and not player skill.
> However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players.
This does not stop cheaters whatsoever. Anyone who played during the private server era of FPS in the late 90s/early 00s knows this; wallhacking, modified character models with big pointy spikes indicating player locations, aimbots, etc. ran rampant, even when nothing was on the line.
They could still have this with a campaign/story-mode or even a simple bot-mode.
Even as someone who plays very few games online, I can tell you that playing against bots isn't the same as real people, even if they're randoms you don't know. Maybe that could be improved if developers prioritized bot AI, but since they don't, here we are.
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> The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.
One of the games mentioned in this article is Rust. Playing with only people you trust defeats the point because it's a game full of betrayal. At best you'll be able to get a group together once and then destroy your relationships more than Monopoly would.
I cannot agree. Getting a Quake game up in the early 2000s could take hours worth of sitting in IRC pickup channels, if it happened at all. I don't feel publishers are at fault here. I figure the vast majority of players would pick an instant game with potential cheaters over an hour wait for a 50% chance at a game.
That's because few people played Quake, it got elitist really fast. I had the same issue with it. I had zero issues with CS, though, finding a match was pretty easy. PUGs aren't a thing of the past, PUBG players used to do them for example.
Yeah, or don't play video games that people treat as jobs, cause that's where cheaters go. Csgo was one. Better yet, there are hobbies.
Even people you think you trust might cheat.
So how am I supposed to play a game of PUBG if I don't have 99 friends who I trust not to cheat who also play it? How is any community going to establish and continuously monitor that their members don't cheat, while also allowing new members to join over time? I don't have a big group of friends who also like playing the same games I play at the same times I want to play, sounds like a total non-starter to me.