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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

> Cheaters are by definition anomalies

So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…

When you have enough randomly distributed variables, by the law of big numbers some of them will be anomalous by pure chance. You can't just look at any statistical anomaly and declare it must mean something without investigating further.

In science, looking at a huge number of variables and trying to find one or two statistically significant variables so you can publish a paper is called p hacking. This is why there are so many dubious and often even contradictory "health condition linked to X" articles.

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> So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…

They will all cluster in very different latent spaces.

You don't automatically ban anomalies, you classify them. Once you have the data and a set of known cheaters you ask the model who else looks like the known cheaters.

Online games are in a position to collect a lot of data and to also actively probe players for more specific data such as their reactions to stimuli only cheaters should see.

Valve has already tried this with VACNET if I am not mistaken. Judging by how big the cheating problem still is, they were not very successful.

The "cheating" problem is overblown.

If all you do is read Reddit threads all day, you'd think the game is unplayable. Although if you actually play the game, the problem is far less extreme than it is made out to be.

Source: 10,000 hours in CSGO/CS2.

For competitive gaming this becomes a problem.

But a good way of solving this in community managed multiplayer games is this: if a player is extremely good to the point where it’s destroying the fun of every other player: just kick them out.

Unfair if they weren’t cheating? Sure. But they can go play against better players elsewhere. Dominating 63 other players and ruining their day isn’t a right. You don’t need to prove beyond reasonable doubt they’re cheating if you treat this as community moderation.

> Dominating 63 other players and ruining their day isn’t a right.

it is, if you're not cheating and is in fact just that good. That's called competitive sports, which participants voluntarily engage in.

Why do you feel someone has a right to play anywhere?

If a community manages a server, it’s basically private property. And community managed servers are always superior to official publisher-managed servers. Anticheat - or just crowd management - is done hands on in the server rather than automated, async, centralized.

Buying the game might mean you have a ”right” to play it, but not on my server you don’t.

It's like if Nikola Jokic showed up to your local court every day and consistent beat you day after day. You'd eventually give up because it's not fun anymore.

People who engage in competitive sports all agree to it. Most people want to play for fun. They have a natural right to do so.

Bad example; he'd rather be with his horses

Then you are kicking full-time streamers like Stodeh, tanking your chances your game has any kind of success.

”Your game”? It’s a publisher making a game. If I’m kicking someone off my server I’m not asking EA/Ubisoft etc.

I’m talking about normal old fashioned server administration now, I.e people hosting/renting their game infra and doing the administration: making rules, enforcing the rules by kicking and banning, charging fees either for vip status meaning no queuing etc, or even to play at all.

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