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by def_true_false 2898 days ago
Or you could design the game mechanics so that client-side cheating offers little advantage... but that would probably require doing more than ripping off a popular mod of another game.
3 comments

That's literally impossible. The entire point of the game is to have client-side input and for that input to be generated by a human and not a computer. There's no way to move that to a server.
I’m pretty sure their comment only really existed to dismiss LoL as a “copy of a popular mod”.
I'm merely saying that they could have avoided some of the issues if they designed a new game from scratch.
These problems are inherent to nature of being in the real-time PvP genre.

And AFAIK LoL was designed from scratch, it's Dota that actually based on the code of the WoW mod. Not that it matters today, that code is long gone.

I wasn't talking about the code.

Btw, you are thinking of Aeon of Strife (Starcraft mod). World of Warcraft hasn't even been released back then.

He's thinking of DotA, the Warcraft mod.
> Or you could design the game mechanics so that client-side cheating offers little advantage

Not possible in any sort of real-time game that involves reacting quickly to what your opponent does, or a game where user input precision is paramount.

I mean, that idea basically eliminates all first-person shooters, where aimbots run rampant.

> I mean, that idea basically eliminates all first-person shooters, where aimbots run rampant.

Indeed, mechanics that reward mechanical skill are more susceptible to abuse.

From the article:

> For example, some common techniques we see include helping players dodge skillshots, zoom out farther than they normally could, or perform perfectly executed combos to smash their opponents’ faces.

Scripting perfect combos can be mitigated by introducing more delay (i.e. backswing after using abilities/attacking), zooming out by giving the client less information about the game state. I can't think of anything that helps with dodging and skillshots.

Aside from strategy/RTS games, I'm not sure if thats even possible? How does is ripping off a popular mod relevant here?
And even in strategy/RTS games, I can imagine a client side rendering hack that removes the fog of war for instance.
That would assume the server is sharing the knowledge of other players through the fog of war.
You'd probably need at least some so that you don't lag every time the fog changes.
Increasing the server tick rate would help with that. AFAIK Starcraft, Dota2 and LoL all use 30Hz. FPS games usually use higher tickrates. Some fighting games enforce a constant amount of (input and network) lag to make the connection quality unimportant (up to a point).
Unfortunately there's a lot of jitter in real world environments, so you can't really rely on that. : \