Comment by enneff
2 days ago
The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.
I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.
The marketing works because of what I said: people are dumb.
Anyone that's not dumb will know (maybe after the heat of the moment) why they lost, but the vast majority of people will blame anything they can instead. Teammates, lag, the developers, etc. Cheating is merely one of these excuses.
> I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
This entire idea is so dumb it makes my head hurt. You can't eliminate bad actors no matter how hard you try. It's impossible in the real world.
All these "if only we could prevent X with more surveillance/control" ideas go up in flames as soon as reality hits. Even if a single person bypasses it, we can question everything. Then all we're left with are these surveillance systems that are then converted into pure data exfiltration to sell it all to the highest bidder (assuming they weren't doing this already).
I applaud Valve for not going down the easy route of creating spyware and selling it as "protection".
To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here already: https://playsafeid.com/
I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.