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thisweekinvideogames.com

An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important information for a lot of people, especially if you’re looking for an off-ramp from Windows and still want to play some of the most popular live service titles.

  • arc99@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    10 hours ago

    There is nothing worse than playing multiplayer and having somebody who is cheating. Viable and promising games have been ruined by people cheating.

    But I don’t see an easy way around the issue but these are the usual solutions:

    1. Reporting mechanism and admins able to observe cheaters and impose heavy penalties / permabans
    2. Add anticheat on server side that detect for cheating (e.g. measuring % hit rates / headshots)
    3. Anti cheat software on client that looks for common cheat hacks
    4. Stream everything. It’s all hosted on the server, nobody installs anything, limiting ways to cheat.
    5. Disincentivize cheating by not acknowledging people doing it in any way - no rare loot, no leaderboards, no material gain
    6. Make it a 3rd party problem - release the server or sell hosting and make it somebody else’s problem to police the servers (e.g. Rust / Minecraft servers)

    Personally I’d prefer that multiplayer games obtain consent to install anti cheat and should certify through auditing that the anticheat software is inactive and nonintrusive when the game is not running. Perhaps operating systems could even provide hooks and hard guarantees that this is the case.

    • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 hours ago
      1. Covered on steam with game bans, which can be handed by server admins
      2. Would be nice to see ngl. Whats not humanly possible should result in a game ban.
      3. Covered on steam by VAC, automated system checking for cheat signatures in user memory space
      4. Hard to do and not realistically feasible for the majority of people, screen capture with per pixel analysis tools would still work but thats not that big of an issue
      5. VAC and game bans also ban you from community features including trading your inventory, afaik you phone number and all accounts associated with it are banned