[c-c-c-c-c]

Why would it make life hard for game devs. If you buy a game you own it and can do whatever you like. If you create a mmo game then you cant blindly trust client data and no malice is implied in this post. This is really a non issue and a great way for people to get into programming and hacking.

[bartwe]

Devs will get bad reviews, bad press, support requests and demands for anti cheat. While there are designs that are more robust against this, this is adding increased challenges and costs at no true advantage to the dev.

[meheleventyone]

Hi! I'm a game developer that has been making online games for a bit over fifteen years.

This is a touch overwrought. If you make an online game people cheating at it and dealing with them is the cost of doing business. The people that the developers need to worry about aren't some random person learning to reverse their code and messing about but the companies that exist to do this for profit. A casual search shows that Among Us already has a burgeoning sector for this.

Further these public investigations are a great way for developers to see how people can reverse their game and fix the issues.

[pfisch]

A lot of the cheaters I have dealt with just distribute hacked apks for free. They make them with programs like this.

It forces us to make changes to the games that make them less performant, or with a bunch of delays for server checks. That degrades the quality of the game for all the real users.

[meheleventyone]

Yup it’s a pain but dealing with cheaters is the cost of doing business. I’m well aware of the annoyance and additional complexity that removing cheating opportunities takes. Thanks for writing something less inflammatory than the comment you started off with.

[pfisch]

It is a pain, but ultimately the users suffer. Dev time goes to this nonsense, and it also forces the game to literally run slower, especially for server side validating things like inventory.

No one should be releasing tools for the express purpose of simplifying the process of making these hacks. It has no real upside, and hurts a lot of people for no reason.

[meheleventyone]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Security through obscurity is a terrible long term plan. Yes in a perfect world it would be lovely to be able to trust clients more. Even more so outside of games where the stakes are often higher. Sadly we don't live there.

[mschuster91]

> While there are designs that are more robust against this, this is adding increased challenges and costs at no true advantage to the dev.

Games where the authority of in-game state rests at the client instead of the server (e.g. ammo count, health) have no right to complain about people abusing this.

The elephant in the room however is "wallhacks" and other mods (e.g. aimbots) that expose or act upon global state that is supposed to be unknown to the player. Essentially, the only way these can be prevented is by running the game in a fully trusted and attested environment - but that is impossible to achieve outside of professional leagues with organizer-provided gaming rigs.

All attempts to come even near to this goal that are available for the consumer market however have big, big issues attached to them - they're often enough slowing down the game, are ripping up security and privacy holes, prevent compatibility with FOSS environments such as WINE, and there are almost routine reports of people getting banhammered without meaningful recourse due to some AI mis-flagging stuff.