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I don't think cloud-gaming prevents you from writing an aimbot. Enemies are often visually distinctive (for example, Overwatch outlines them in red), so you can look at the video stream and move the mouse to their head, and synthesize a click when the crosshair is in the right place. I almost want to write one of these that looks at Twitch streams to figure out how common the "no-reg" that streamers complain about actually happens. (Or, if I were the game company, I would write one of these to figure out if there's a bug in the netcode, or people just aren't really as good as they think they are. I have a theory, but data is better than a theory.) To eliminate cheating, I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management, which is harder to write a cheat for. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the new heroes in Overwatch have projectile-based weapons instead of hitscan weapons -- even if you're cheating with a projectile, you're not guaranteed to hit the shot. The enemy can just move out of the way. (Of course, a "move out of the way" bot could be written, which would be a lot more insidious and harder to detect. Overwatch streamers accuse everyone that hits a hitscan shot of cheating, but nobody has ever accused someone of moving out of the way of cheating. There is enough spam in the game that eventually you'll kill the enemy; writing a cheat that kills enemies more quickly will get you better results than a cheat that lets you live longer.) There is also a lot of low-hanging fruit where the client is trusted when it doesn't need to be. Hearthstone had a combo where people could generate infinite copies of a card ("SN1P-SN4P Warlock"), but the animations on the client limited the number that could actually be played in a turn. This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client. So people hacked their client to skip animations. This would be fixed with a thin client, but it's also possible to fix with 100% certainty on the traditional fat client. Just calculate how long the animations take on the server side, and reject client updates after the server thinks the turn is over. Add a few seconds of slop for people playing on 2G networks. |
This isn't true for a number of reasons:
1. Good players are exceptionally good. In pro gaming you'll hear the term "pixel shot" because someone fired at essentially one pixel. The shooter is holding an angle where they know that a change of one pixel is someone running by. That sort of thing; and
2. If you watch any streams you'll see aimbots from cheaters (eg when the streamer gets killed and spectates who killed them) and it's pretty funny to see just how blatant aimbots are, like shooting through bushes that don't block bullets but have no visible indication of an enemy.
But I agree with other comments: I think cloud gaming is 100% never going to be relevant for competitive esports (of this kind) because of latency. That's not a technology problem. It's a physics problem.
> I think games have to move away from the mechanical aim aspect and focus more on ability management,
It's interesting that you bring that up. That's actually a criticism a lot of people have of games like Overwatch (that you mention) in that it's not about gun play but ability management. That's actually seen as a negative by many. Riot Games apparently has made a deliberate design decision to focus more on gun play than ability management in Valorant, as just one example.
> This is how the combo was balanced; not by a hard limit on resources, but by timers on the client.
This is surprisingly common actually. Timers on many games are really just approximated with frame rates. Good players will do better at a game if they can get 200fps over those that get 100fps.
An example of this is the much-beleaguered Fallout 76. Bethesda games use this pervasively and, at least for awhile, Fallout 76 had a cap put in place of 63fps to avoid some of the benefits high frame rates gave players (eg faster movement), such that I took to calling it Fallout 63.