The solution existed starting in the late 90s through the early 2010s. You have a server browser with community run servers who are administered by people who play on the server. Admins notice cheating, the cheater gets banned. You find a server that you like and it turns into an ad hoc community.
Of course that doesn't maximize shareholder value the way skill based matchmaking or revenue based matchmaking does. So the incentives are again misaligned between devs and players, so nothing will get solved.
People and the internet have changed since those times. It' not the 90s anymore grandpa.
The majority of players do not want to search for a server to play a game they've paid for, especially without knowing whether the server they join is any good or if they even a a low lag server near them. They just want to start the game, hit play, and have fun with the game.
Also as "fun" as having dick sucking servers for streamer would be (your so called communities), you are forgetting the other side of your so called solution : a server admin would have to manually ban a cheating streamer, essentially calling them out publicly as a cheater to all their rabid fans who believe the streamer simply has godlike aim and knowledge of player positions.
> The solution existed starting in the late 90s through the early 2010s [...] the cheater gets banned.
This attitude also reflects the naivete of the 1990s. You can't ban a person. You can ban an IP, you can ban "all known Tor exit nodes" or "all known VPNs" or "all known public cloud IPs", you can ban whole countries by IPgeo, you can ban anything somebody has to provide to log in (an email address, a phone number, a credit card number, etc.), but these can all be evaded. The only truly effective banning tools are private, invite-only servers or reputation/incentive systems where the cheater loses something really valuable that a ban evasion can't recover.
No. For the vast majority of games, they're either free to play, or less than 20 bucks.
In addition: people pay over $100 per month for these cheats, plus the initial hardware investment. The 60 bucks license doesn't matter. You just hop to another server.
The 60 bucks license doesn't matter. You just hop to another server.
That's the entire point and why community moderation servers work. Why would a hacker keep coming back to a well moderate private server where they only get 5-10 minutes of play time before their account/license get banned when they can instead go to another unmoderated server and not worry about it?
Because the unmoderated servers are full of other cheaters.
Some companies have tried a strategy of quietly shunting cheaters off to cheater ghettoes but the cheaters figure it out pretty quickly. With some limited exceptions, the cheating we're talking about is motivated by a desire to gain an advantage over legitimate, non-cheating players.
The problem with "you don't need to outrun the bear, only to outrun your friend" is that either you or your friend are going to get eaten. All other things being equal, it would be preferable to have a strategy where no one gets eaten.
I mean no... there is always a large portion of players that I would never want to play with in any meaningful way, aka racists, screechers, try hards, toxic, etc.
I'm perfectly content of feed those people to the bear so me and my friends can continue to have a fun and mostly hacker free experience.
No, the question is "why do we even need invasive anti-cheating mechanisms" with the proposed alternative being to simply ban people (of course, bans are still used even with anti-cheat).
Yes, banning a license key (assuming you have an unforgeable proof of license key ownership) is more potent than banning an IP address or email address. There are cross-game mechanisms like Steam VAC bans and Xbox Live account bans which are pretty potent too.
But they can still be evaded. Besides many cheaters simply having the money to buy new things, they can also get them from sites that trade in stolen license keys and accounts.
And then they'll be banned again and again.
There's only a limited amount of IPs available to cheaters, it won't be long before they burn through all of them.
Well, some of them are smart enough not to immediately log back in and spam "I'm the guy you just banned! Ban me again!" in global chat. And the admins, even paid ones working for big corporations, have finite patience and time.
Detecting cheating is not always trivial. Cheat bans often have to happen in waves rather than immediately in order to frustrate the cheaters and obfuscate how they were detected.
Sure, the cheater will eventually run out of IPs. But you might as well save both yourself and the cheaters some time and hassle and just add 0.0.0.0/0 and [::]/0 to your IP banlist right now. You will effectively end up with the same result if you're willing to chase every cheater across the address spectrum.
Spot IP bans aren't totally worthless but they're probably the least effective of the techniques I mentioned.
>And the admins, even paid ones working for big corporations, have finite patience and time.
We're talking community servers here, not corporate ones.
>Sure, the cheater will eventually run out of IPs. But you might as well save both yourself and the cheaters some time and hassle and just add 0.0.0.0/0 and [::]/0 to your IP banlist right now. You will effectively end up with the same result if you're willing to chase every cheater across the address spectrum.
It's not going to end up with 0/0 as the final result. You're assuming that almost any address is available to the cheaters, but that's simply not true. By blocking datacenter IP ranges and Tor exit nodes, you've stopped most of the ways cheaters can easily change their IPs.
You ban their own home IP address, and what are their options?
1. They get a VPN and don't make it through because that IP is already blocked.
2. They hope their ISP allocates a random IP from a range, so if that works they come back and they instead get a range ban.
3. They get a residential VPN and start burning through those precious IPs.
You don't have to chase cheaters if you're running a server. You ban them once or twice and call it a day.
No, we're talking about games with invasive anti-cheating mechanisms.
The proposed alternative was to just have "community servers where cheaters get banned" -- and I responded specifically to the "cheaters get banned" part. Yeah, if you could just ban cheaters forever, all would be well! But you can't, not at scale and not forever, at least. It's an ongoing, sizable problem.
You talk about "once or twice [...] a day" when the reality for major games is more like thousands of cheaters each trying thousands of times.
A lot of things that work just fine for small groups and niche interests utterly fail to scale to large groups and popular interests. When your scope of vision is the entire game--like it would be for the company making the game--something like "just have the cheaters go bother a different set of players each time they get banned from one server" is not a solution. In fact, it's a terrible practice that could destroy the reputation of your game.
Of course, community servers exist and work fine for many (esp. niche/older) games. Also, invasive anti-cheat gets applied even to some games where it's not really needed, and sometimes gets conflated (whether by players or game companies) with invasive DRM. However, the majority of games that have invasive anti-cheat requirements cannot simply remove the requirement, pass off the company's (usually paid!) moderation duties to a bunch of volunteers, and call it a day. Though, that may be an acceptable thing to do at the end of the game's ordinary life, instead of just shutting it down.
> However, the majority of games that have invasive anti-cheat requirements cannot simply remove the requirement, pass off the company's (usually paid!) moderation duties to a bunch of volunteers, and call it a day.
Bull, they 100% absolutely can do that and their communities would be better off.
> Yeah, if you could just ban cheaters forever, all would be well!
Again the only reason you think this is even necessary is because of giant corporate servers where players have very little to no control over who they play with.
I used to fund, run, and moderate private/community server across many many games. I can tell you from experience, being able to ban someone for even just 5-10 minutes is more than enough to send 99.5% of hackers fleeing to another unmodderated server, aka leaving your server, players, and friends alone to have hacker free fun.
>There's only a limited amount of IPs available to cheaters, it won't be long before they burn through all of them.
No ? Even if it takes 5 minutes to get noticed (which only happens on the most absolutely blatant cases of cheating), rotating through a few VPNs can easily get you a few thousand different IPs. That's over three consecutive days of cheating. And that's just for a single server. In addition, IP bans means that you potentially nuke hundreds of people: between CGNAT & people playing on shared phone connections, a single IP can be allocated many times.
In addition: this kind of maintenance wears down server owners and admins. Every times, it's more time spent banning someone. Every time, it's players on the server making reports while you're not there, and hoping you have tools that allow you to verify it. Every time, it's players leaving your community, because there's a cheater.
>rotating through a few VPNs can easily get you a few thousand different IPs
It's not uncommon to ban all addresses coming from a datacenter, which will stop the majority of VPNs. That leaves significantly fewer addresses from residential VPNs.
>IP bans means that you potentially nuke hundreds of people: between CGNAT & people playing on shared phone connections, a single IP can be allocated many times
Yep. That's collateral damage. A good server would have an appeals process to handle those cases.
Absolutely not. All that's going to happen is that someone is going to try to join your server, be banned for no reason, then put it on their shit list.
I mean no, good players know how and care to get into populated and well moderated servers and absolutely will find the appeals process and get through it. I speak from experience... I funded, ran, and moderated private/community/dedicated servers across many games.
Alternatively people adding servers to "their shit list" are the exact type of players server admins don't want on their servers anyways. Those morons can go play on the unmodderated corporate servers with all the hackers and leave the rest of us in peace.
As someone that was there at the time and also funded and ran many servers myself I can attest that this is and will always be the only real solution to hackers.
But also judging from the other responses you got, the younger gaming community at large have let their brains rot out of their ears and have been thoroughly brainwashed that this can't possibly be a solution.
This ignores that most anti cheat like this started on community run servers. Because players don't want to have a second job as moderators, they just want to play the game.
This is true even in current day community servers. Modded GTA V FiveM had additional anti cheat before it was added to the original game. CS2 community servers Face-IT and ESEA have more anti cheat, not less.
Of course that doesn't maximize shareholder value the way skill based matchmaking or revenue based matchmaking does. So the incentives are again misaligned between devs and players, so nothing will get solved.