Unfortunately, the alternative to uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheat is more cheaters, because cheaters don't care about how intrusive their cheats have to be in order to evade anti-cheat. They will happily run hypervisor-level cheats.
There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots.
Server-side anti-cheat relies on heuristics and can easily be evaded. At the high level, a highly-skilled player may be indistinguishable from a cheater, so you could easily get false positives.
I get that people want to play games with randos and 13-30 yr old basement dwellers on the internet, but the idea never appealed to me.
If the vendors said: Disable anticheat and we’ll block you from tournaments / matchmaking, I’d consider that a feature, not a bug.
If some IRL friend of mine wants to be an asshole and use auto aimers / see through walls to screw with me, then I have ways to deal with it outside the game.
On the other hand, if we both want to run some bullet hell mode + cheats with physics mods and a debugger attached, then what’s the problem?
It’s none of the game developer’s business.
I’m not sure if I am in the minority or majority, but I’m not the only one with this attitude. I suspect the set of people in this boat dwarfs the 5% market share Linux currently has.
They might even get some of us to buy their games if they added support for such a mode. How hard could it be?
> I get that people want to play games with randos and 13-30 yr old basement dwellers on the internet, but the idea never appealed to me.
When it comes to most competitive games, you're an outlier.
I'm a gamer, and one thing I've learned in my 10+ years reading HN is that there are very few gamers here, and the gamers that are here are a different breed. Significantly less focus on competitive games, more interest in Factorio, and a strong anti-anti-cheat vibe, not to mention pro-Linux. It has certainly created an echo chamber when it comes to gaming-related topics such as anti-cheat.
there should be just an anti-cheat lobby an a no anticheat lobby
Anti-cheat lobby and a "check out my cheats" lobby.
At best you can get no-anti-cheat private matches.
Yea, no cheating on anti-cheat servers. Never...
It used to be an admin would just kick them. Now we don't get to be in control of our own games.
I don't think that's necessarily true, I think companies are lazy and highly invasive anticheat is an easy win they can license from a 3rd party. Algorithmic security, server-side heuristics, and human review can get you far. I have very, very rarely seen a blatant cheater in Overwatch (maybe 3 times in 10 years?), for example, and yet it's been playable via WINE for almost its entire lifetime.
Overwatch is more dependent upon teamwork, ability usage, positioning, etc.
Cheating is endemic in BR and tactical shooter type games. I remember one f2p game was deleting 50,000 cheater accounts every month.
A key phrase being free to play.
If the developer's winning $20 per cheater detection, and puts in extra resources when there's more cheaters, the equilibrium ends up a lot better.
And even for free games, I could imagine different ways to tie a monetary stake in in exchange for skipping invasive anticheats.
I recently had my faith shattered with I saw someone lock onto an ally through a wall in a kill cam, and I haven't played sense.
Blatant cheaters are bad in some ways, but subtle cheat are far worse imo.
There's no reason that kind of client behavior can't be detected server side.
Detect the mouse moving in a "non-human way"? If it were that easy there'd be no hackers. And even if it where, what about wall hacks?
You can detect with high confidence that a player is aiming at something that shouldn't be visible to them. That goes for both aim bots and wall hacks. The longer they play and the more they do it, the higher the confidence. If you don't want to instaban them because you don't trust the detection enough, use it as a preselection of players to manually review.
Hypervisor anti-cheat is old hat. The current 'state of the art' is either a DMA card that pretends to be a sound or network card but really is constantly reading and writing directly to RAM in the game's memory space.
The other 'state of the art' which is much cheaper, easier, and essentially impossible to detect on a hardware/equipment level, are the AI-based systems that examine the video and generate inputs via USB, emulating controllers or keyboards and mice. It's a huge problem on console right now and can only be detected via server-side analysis.
The real state of the art is single-game machines.
Instead of running the game in some arbitrary computer, you'd require players to buy your dedicated hardware, a black box that runs the game and nothing else.