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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of anti cheats, but I do like to play video games online and I want to be able to play fair games without cheaters. I am not sure what other options there are.

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I remember playing online games in the 90s and early 2000s without lots of cheaters. It was easy: if we thought they were cheating we banned them from our server.

Rust players (the game, not the language) have discovered what CS players knew back in the day - the best anti cheat is an active admin. Although Rust has much better tools than CS server admins had back in the day - we essentially had to guess, and deal with the blowback if we were wrong.

At some point, admins started to ban me pretty often, accusing me that I use wall hack (I don't), so I stopped to play online years ago. I started to play online again two weeks ago, I cap my system (I hide my cursor, I cap my framerate at 60fps, I use a submachine gun) to have more fun, but other players are trying to ban me anyway when I kill 4 enemies in 2 seconds.

Obvious cheats like spinbots spinning like crazy aren’t the only form of cheating, many cheats are more subtle and you may not realize as a player in the game, or an admin. Just look at the occasional streamer caught cheating — it’s not even obvious with tons of people watching their first person POV streams.

If we couldn’t tell they were cheating, than they weren’t ruining the experience. They didn’t gain anything from cheating on our server. There was no ranking or prize for being good.

Except lots of people like rankings and matchmaking with similarly skilled players, and people like winning too, so completely removing the incentive to cheat is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So, in a matchmaking system, the cheaters filter themselves into a cohort of other cheaters and players who are on even ground without cheating.

On the other hand, you have issues like smurfers who cause the same disruption without actually running any cheat software.

Ultimately your problem is uneven matchmaking and the perception of cheating, not cheating itself.

I really enjoy matchmaking games, though... being able to immediately find a game against someone of similar skill as you is a huge factor in enjoyment. I don't want to give that up.

Plenty of server admins even back then thought that wouldn't scale, and it hasn't. Anti-cheats like BattlEye and Easy Anti Cheat started as community developed anti-cheats. Even Starcraft 1 ICCUP (3rd party Battle.net clone) had additional "anti-hack". Counter-Strike still has 3rd party servers with ESEA/FaceIT. They have additional anti-cheat, not less.

Especially with gaming becoming mainstream compared to early 2000s. The majority of players are now casual gamers who are not interested in a job as a server admin/hoster.

> I am not sure what other options there are.

Unironically, Cloud gaming. Stadia had a terrible business model, but the tech worked. Microsoft's XCloud together with GamePass could be a winning ticket for that. (I think there's also GeForce Now)

Of course, that wouldn't prevent anyone from capturing the screen, running image recognition software on the screen and sending USB Controller inputs to create an Aim Bot, but then again, that's not something anti-cheat software can stop these days anyway.

Cloud gaming will never be good enough for competitive FPS or racing, the latency will never be overcome, it's just physics. And if you want to do 300-400FPS, like most high-level players in CS2 do, local hardware is the only solution.

Ironically, cloud gaming is the perfect solution for single-player game, where input lag and high FPS doesn't matter much.

That aimbot would be significantly harder to implement than current ones though, the good aimbots are not generally scanning the framebuffer for heads to click, they are using the game data directly. If they do use frame scanning, it's usually with the aid of a texture swap, which also wouldn't be possible here.

YOLO will work just fine.

A locked down system, possibly including remote attestation if things get real bad, is the only realistic solution aside from game streaming which removes the hardware from the user's control altogether.

The freedom afforded in personal computing by Windows and Linux is fundamentally mutually exclusive to the security that multiplayer game operators and proper players legitimately need.

It's why game consoles and mobile gaming are the core gaming platforms. Note how Sony and Microsoft blacklist consoles suspected to be used by cheaters, and how games (and also banking) absolutely hate rooted smartphones because it breaks the assumption of a locked down and secured system.

Consoles have a lot fewer cheaters.

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