Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

> These things do not prevent cheating at all.

I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.

Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.

View on HN

I don't think that analogy holds because the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.

The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.

No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the number of people doing it peaked last decade.

Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough cheating (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry around in secrecy and guard their implementations until the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with good anti-cheat.

Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.

Piracy didn’t go anywhere, it got corporate sponsorship.

Having some anti-cheat is better than no anti-cheat but my point is it’s not a shield. It’s a cheese grater.

> the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.

I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and the environment (in the form of car size growth)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com