Comment by kaoD
1 month ago
Exactly 20 years ago I was both a competitive CS player and I also liked reverse engineering so I was somewhat interested in the cheating community and even programmed a custom injector and cheat for CS (it was surprisingly easy if you knew a bit about Windows APIs).
Cheats were a problem. Not even a nascent problem, but already established. Bad enough that VAC was released in 2002, Punkbuster in 2000...
In competitive gaming you cannot just find a stable friends group to play against: you need competition, and a diverse one. We somewhat palliated this by physically playing in LAN, but that still limits to a radius around you and it's cumbersome when you can just find an opponent online (we had manual matchmaking on IRC before modern matchmaking existed).
The problem is that cheating can be very subtle if done correctly. The difference between "that guy is better that me" and "that guy can see through walls" is pretty much undetectable through non-technical means if the cheater is not an idiot. This poisons the competitive scene.
Competitive gaming is huge. It was big back in the day but now it's a monster. Just check the largest categories on Twitch: LoL, TFT, WoW, CS, Valorant...
Competitive gaming cannot possibly be huge. Like literally it is impossible for 99% of gamers to be competitive in any meaningful sense (if you play a game with 1M players and are in the top 1%, congrats, there are 10,000 people who are better than you. You are still unremarkable). It never was huge; it was just a niche you were in. There's massively more people that are just playing the game too blow off steam.
"Competitive football cannot possibly be huge"
"Competitive tennis cannot possibly be huge"
"Competitive coding cannot possibly be huge"
People play competition sports. They except no, or minimal amounts of cheating. Your personal feelings about it don't matter. The kid that plays basketball with 12 years olds on saturday mornings has the right to not have to deal with cheaters, and it doesn't matter if he's in the top .0001% or a shitty player that cannot distinguish his hands from his ears.
Have a quick look at the ladder on Counter Strike, or Faceit, or ranked play on League of Legends/Valorant/Whatever: it's not a niche. These games requiring kernel AC no matter the type of play is another subject, but people play to compare themselves to other, massively.
The kid that plays basketball with 12 year olds on Saturday mornings has the right to just go use the court at the park without being strip searched and drug tested because it's just a game and he's there to have fun. He actually does not have some right to demand no one else cheat, or even that they use the court to specifically play with some established rules. If other people are there playing HORSE or "what time is it Mr Fox", that's fine.
People who get intensely serious about 12 year olds playing basketball because their kid will be in the NBA some day so everyone needs to take the game very seriously so their kid can practice have rightly always been mocked. The entire point is to have fun.
I've played in Friday night sports leagues where people were drinking during the tournaments (and sometimes that's the point, c.f. sloshball). There are absolutely tons of people that do not take even the "competitions" seriously, and even more that aren't even serious enough to join a league.
Video games being something people play at home, I'd probably be surprised if there weren't more people that regularly play any given esports title under the influence of marijuana or alcohol than there are those who take it as a serious thing[0].
On competitive coding, Advent of Code removed the global leaderboard exactly because "people took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest".
[0] A quick search turns up this poll in the competitive halo subreddit where 40% say they play high. I doubt that's a good sample, but I'm sure the true number is not insignificant: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveHalo/comments/10mvihq/we...
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> in any meaningful sense
Who said anything about meaning? People being shit at the game invalidates that the game ruleset is competitive?
It invalidates the idea that we need to take it seriously and have locked down computers with remote attestation to play games. People who take games seriously are a very small niche. You are in a bubble if you think otherwise.
This is like saying we need to institute drug testing at all parks to play football. Cheating in sports is a problem that very few players are concerned with. Caring about who wins isn't even common. Most are just kicking a ball around with their mates.
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