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Comment by throw10920

18 hours ago

I would love to see a modern competitive game with optional anticheat that, when enabled, allows you to queue for a separate matchmaking pool that is exclusive to other anticheat users. For players in the no-anticheat pool, there could be "community moderation" that anti-anticheat players advocate for.

It'd be really interesting to see what would happen - for instance, what fraction of players would pick each pool during the first few weeks after launch, and then how many of them would switch after? What about players who joined a few months or a year after launch?

Unfortunately, pretty much the only company that could make this work is Valve, because they're the only one who actually cares for players and is big enough that they could gather meaningful data. And I don't think that even Valve will see enough value in this to dedicate the substantial resources it'd take to try to implement.

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throw10920

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Cyph0n  18 hours ago

> I would love to see a modern competitive game with optional anticheat that, when enabled, allows you to queue for a separate matchmaking pool that is exclusive to other anticheat users. For players in the no-anticheat pool, there could be "community moderation" that anti-anticheat players advocate for.

This is roughly what Valve does for CS2. But, as far as I understand, it's not very effective and unfortunately still results in higher cheating rates than e.g. Valorant.

  • throw10920  18 hours ago

    Huh. When you say that "it's not very effective" do you mean the segmentation between the pools, or the actual anticheat isn't very good? (I'm assuming the latter - I've heard that VAC is pretty bad as far as anticheat goes)

    • Cyph0n  18 hours ago

      Oh sorry - I misread your suggestion! I thought you were talking about separate matchmaking logic for known cheaters, but you're asking about opt-in matchmaking for those willing to use invasive anticheat.

      The example still kind of applies. In the CS world, serious players use Faceit for matchmaking, which requires you to install a kernel-level anticheat. This is basically what you're suggesting, but operated by a 3rd party.

      5 replies →

denalii  12 hours ago

It exists, it's called FACEIT (for CS, specifically). Anyone who seriously cares about the game at a high level is pretty much exclusively playing there.

Community moderation simply doesn't work at scale for anticheat - in level of effort required, root cause detection, and accuracy/reliability.

hirvi74  4 hours ago

I support this idea. Personally, I do not really care about cheating in video games. If some is cheating in a video game, I can just turn it off, go outside, and take deep breath of fresh air and touch some grass.

I rather play with cheaters here and there than install some kernel level malware on machine just to make sure EA, Activision, et al can keep raking in money hand over fist.

Or better yet, I can just play on console where there is no cheating that I have ever seen.