So you would let cheaters win? What a weird take. Small amount of people wants to ruin game for everyone > the solution shouldn't be abandoning online games
There are more effective ways to deal with cheaters than using anti-cheat systems that degrade system security and performance by hooking into the OS kernel. Also, in many games, anti-cheat is anti-user, because the games are /not/ online multiplayer, which means the only thing the user is "cheating" is themselves.
I don't cheat in most games, but there are a lot of games that are pretty grindy in genres I otherwise enjoy for the story, and I want to just get through it because I have a job, family, kids, and other hobbies and friends to keep up with, but I still enjoy gaming. I no longer have the ability or time to spend 200+ hours to get all aspects of a game story completed. Meanwhile, there are other games I could cheat in I would never do, because the difficulty of them is the point (Dark Souls).
Cheating in online games, especially competitive online games, is a real problem. But another piece of the problem is that this genre is dominated by "free" games which have cash shops, microtransactions, and extremely aggressive anti-cheat software, all of which are anti-user.
What GP meant was "Don't buy games with client-side anti-cheat". For any given method of cheating, either it will be detectable from the server, or it won't be detectable even from the client (e.g., <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...>).
Devs can do whatever they want server side. Leave the client machine alone. But also, at the end of the day, they're just games. I think we started taking things a bit too seriously.
I don't cheat in most games, but there are a lot of games that are pretty grindy in genres I otherwise enjoy for the story, and I want to just get through it because I have a job, family, kids, and other hobbies and friends to keep up with, but I still enjoy gaming. I no longer have the ability or time to spend 200+ hours to get all aspects of a game story completed. Meanwhile, there are other games I could cheat in I would never do, because the difficulty of them is the point (Dark Souls).
Cheating in online games, especially competitive online games, is a real problem. But another piece of the problem is that this genre is dominated by "free" games which have cash shops, microtransactions, and extremely aggressive anti-cheat software, all of which are anti-user.