Yet another nail in the coffin of client-side anti-cheat. If you’re seriously affected by people using these kinds of cheats on their PCs (this one requires specialised hardware) then no amount of client-side anti-cheat is going to make a difference anyway.
Or rather, just another reason to never play online multiplayer games. The past 20 years or so has been the worst era of gaming, with games-as-interactive-art being replaced by cynical live service cash grabs, games calling home, racist teenagers, obligatory always on voice chat, and now this whole cheat-anti-cheat bullshit.
They could always bring back paid in game mods, spend money on ppl actively checking games for cheaters and banning them, but nah then theyd make slightly less
Its already made a difference there is no debating that it does reduce cheaters. If you force people to buy specialised hardware to cheat less people will do it. Cheaters dont need to be 0 for it to be worth it. All you need is for players to not regularly run into cheaters and perceive there to be competitive integrity inthier online games.
The debate is that it’s far less effective than server-side anti-cheat, but that costs more money to operate so they’d rather inconvenience their users and invade their privacy in the process.
Fair to say you can never prevent false positives entirely, but you can get asymptotically close. Server-side is the way to go even if it’ll never be perfect.
Ironically, League of Legends was formerly one of the crowning examples of a competitive game that effectively managed cheats without aggressive client-side AC. In >5000 hours of gameplay, I saw one probable cass scripter and maybe one person scripting dodges on Vayne.
I don’t know if they managed cheaters well, but it’s one of those games where the presence of cheaters really doesn’t affect how enjoyable the game is unless you’re at the very top. I don’t understand why they had to impose the anti-cheats on everyone equally.
I would guess that type of game is much easier to do more comprehensive anti cheat for then the kind I was thinking of(i.e shooters) but I can’t be sure as I’ve never worked on one.
The prime thing that I think makes it easier is that the game has a clear “no you cannot see or hear this person at all” state.
Yeah, shooters are definitely harder but not impossible. Some games are starting to implement occlusion culling (i.e. the vision detection strategy you’re describing), but that’s impossible or hard to pull off in certain contexts.
Overwatch 1 is probably the best case study in that genre: while it absolutely had cheaters, their player report system took action pretty fast, and anyone banned had to pay $30 for a new account. In practice, that was a strong enough deterrent to keep people from doing anything game-breaking that ruined the fun for other players.
It does become basically impossible if there aren’t strict limits on the art and level though(i.e ensuring walls or other blockers do not have small openings in them). Especially if you also want to use bushes as a thing to normally block sight as well. Though even then it’s still less effective then people think as you still need to replicate players not yet visible but could be if the local player moved a bit.
Let’s also not forget that you still need to deal with replicating things such as footsteps sounds through walls. Even if you replicate those as individual sound events instead of part of a replicated character that still gives a cheater enough information to know someone is there.
Yet another nail in the coffin of client-side anti-cheat. If you’re seriously affected by people using these kinds of cheats on their PCs (this one requires specialised hardware) then no amount of client-side anti-cheat is going to make a difference anyway.
Or rather, just another reason to never play online multiplayer games. The past 20 years or so has been the worst era of gaming, with games-as-interactive-art being replaced by cynical live service cash grabs, games calling home, racist teenagers, obligatory always on voice chat, and now this whole cheat-anti-cheat bullshit.
They could always bring back paid in game mods, spend money on ppl actively checking games for cheaters and banning them, but nah then theyd make slightly less
Its already made a difference there is no debating that it does reduce cheaters. If you force people to buy specialised hardware to cheat less people will do it. Cheaters dont need to be 0 for it to be worth it. All you need is for players to not regularly run into cheaters and perceive there to be competitive integrity inthier online games.
The debate is that it’s far less effective than server-side anti-cheat, but that costs more money to operate so they’d rather inconvenience their users and invade their privacy in the process.
What’s a good server side anti cheat for comparison?
Well the most popular cheats can’t properly* be detected on server side so I guess nothing can be done then.
(* some of those you can use metrics to guess but tuning that to catch all cheaters but never any real players is impossible)
Fair to say you can never prevent false positives entirely, but you can get asymptotically close. Server-side is the way to go even if it’ll never be perfect.
Ironically, League of Legends was formerly one of the crowning examples of a competitive game that effectively managed cheats without aggressive client-side AC. In >5000 hours of gameplay, I saw one probable cass scripter and maybe one person scripting dodges on Vayne.
I don’t know if they managed cheaters well, but it’s one of those games where the presence of cheaters really doesn’t affect how enjoyable the game is unless you’re at the very top. I don’t understand why they had to impose the anti-cheats on everyone equally.
League of legends didnt effectively manage cheats at all.
I would guess that type of game is much easier to do more comprehensive anti cheat for then the kind I was thinking of(i.e shooters) but I can’t be sure as I’ve never worked on one. The prime thing that I think makes it easier is that the game has a clear “no you cannot see or hear this person at all” state.
Yeah, shooters are definitely harder but not impossible. Some games are starting to implement occlusion culling (i.e. the vision detection strategy you’re describing), but that’s impossible or hard to pull off in certain contexts.
Overwatch 1 is probably the best case study in that genre: while it absolutely had cheaters, their player report system took action pretty fast, and anyone banned had to pay $30 for a new account. In practice, that was a strong enough deterrent to keep people from doing anything game-breaking that ruined the fun for other players.
It does become basically impossible if there aren’t strict limits on the art and level though(i.e ensuring walls or other blockers do not have small openings in them). Especially if you also want to use bushes as a thing to normally block sight as well. Though even then it’s still less effective then people think as you still need to replicate players not yet visible but could be if the local player moved a bit.
Let’s also not forget that you still need to deal with replicating things such as footsteps sounds through walls. Even if you replicate those as individual sound events instead of part of a replicated character that still gives a cheater enough information to know someone is there.