this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
691 points (94.5% liked)
Technology
73967 readers
4658 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, one of the big reasons multiplayer sucks now is because of cheaters. You wanna cheat in a single-player game? I couldn't give less of a shit. But giving yourself an unfair advantage while playing against other people is pathetic and ruins the game for everyone...
Yup. For me it is Lethal Company. While we run from tbe monsters in fear for our lives they have god mode, etc. Which simply ruins the cooperative aspect and just the entire game for everyone involved. Why even play? I guess they enjoy seeing people reaxt to their hacks but I dont give them anything, simply quit immediately as soon as I find out.
I totally agree.
I agree so much, that I’m always upset when I see comments on a post about anti-cheat software that only focus on the downsides of needing it. They never acknowledge the need.
The benefit of an anticheat can be replaced by an old-fashioned kick vote system. The downside of an anticheat is that I'd need to install Windows and a rootkit on my computer to play some games. Not a problem till a younger relative is over and you have to explain how your gaming PC won't run Fortnite or GTA Online for security and ideology reasons.
Passworded rooms then! Even in games where you play on a centralized server, it's sometimew possible to have passworded matches. GunZ online comes to mind. I think that game had passworded mqtches. TBF that game had anticheat too, but it never really worked properly. Client side anticheat doesn't work because someone will always bypass it somehow, and then the server doesn't know that funny things are happening. And server side anti cheat is going to decrease server performance because you have to track more things in the server and trust the clients less.
That doesn't scale to larger games. Rust, for instance, has servers with many hundreds of players (and a huge cheating problem). MMOs will have thousands (and constantly fight bots). The nature of massive, real-time games makes self-policing solutions like votekick or manual whitelists infeasible. Manually investigating user reports is slow. And you pointed out the problems with different kinds of anticheat.
It's easy to see the allure of root-level monitoring, with all that in mind. Both for developers and players oblivious to or willing to accept the risk. Of course, it also isn't a silver bullet...
I’m aware of situations in games where kick vote does not work, because they hacked that too. This is possible in some situations where the networking is P2P without an authoritative server.
At which point you can't even have a truly functional anticheat because any client side anticheat, no matter how invasive, can be defeated.
They still make a big impact on culture and social norms surrounding cheating. But you’re right. There is no fool proof anti-cheat. Software or hardware. Server side authoritative or Peer to Peer. Even with streaming only (Stadia/GeForce Now). None of them are perfect.
It’s all about mitigation and not having a free for all.
Especially since a lot of games are live service, and banning a regular player who buys cosmetics left and right for bad behavior is detrimental to profits. It's not about making sure everyone has a good time anymore, it's about "Getting those couple of whales to keep paying."
Anticheat became a necessity because too many games decided to remove the ability for players to host their own servers. This sucks a lot when people get some games that have SP/MP but never really bother with the MP part
There's also the problem that most anticheat software will only stop the laziest cheaters, usually the ones that aren't willing to pay for the cheating software. There are a bunch of cheat-focused forums and creating the software can be profitable.
Exactly. I never cheat in MP games, but I use guides and whatnot in SP fairly often.
If you're cheating in MP, just don't play MP.
Trolls & Cheaters & Just downright punk behaviour is something I don't tolerate in MultiPlayer
Which is why I opt for more Role-playing games like Space station 13 & Barotrauma (Not saying that there's no crappy behaviour there, it's just that those games are high-ceiling & there are less instances)
It’s really rampant, especially in games that have aim assist and controllers/controller support on PC. It’s so insanely obvious when someone is using an aim assist device…i.e. no bullet spread on a small automatic gun and hitting like a laser beam at 60 meters vs someone without has a ton of missed shots at that range. Their KDR is magnitudes of order different. They ruin a match. Unfortunately looking to get them banned doesn’t do anything, seeing as using game features buil-in by the devs is a big gray area. It’s not an aimbot or ESP, it’s using and abusing the provided aim assist.
This ^
If I'm playing by myself I'll use cheats if I feel like it, like messing around, or if I wanna get that ONE unlock that I've been trying at for months now and I just wanna be done with it....
But in an online game lad? There's no glory in ruining other people's fun.