The only real solution to the cheating problem would be to get rid of automated matching systems and go back to moderated gaming rooms where there is always a human who can decide if they think someone is cheating and boot them.
You do lose a lot of features that way though, such as a reliable global ranking, since it would be easy to create a room with only your friends and allow eachother to rank up quickly.
It's also a huge coordination issue if you want to arrange a game of 50-100 players who aren't all total strangers to eachother.
But the alternative seems to be in stripping the ancient practice of gaming of its social functions and turning it into a faceless slot machine where the only goal is to win enough times to increase a mostly meaningless number on a screen.
I wonder how a controller can viably be used to cheat, and if so, how would rigging an official controller not have the same effect. Additionally, single player games don't have a cheating problem.
Look up Xim, it gives an unfair advantage to console players by allowing a mouse and keyboard input when the developer hasn’t intended so (official APIs exist if they do). Cronus is also especially bad.
It also allows you to effectively nullify recoil through custom scripts uploaded to it. It’s everywhere in multiplayer PvP games on console.
Doesn't the Adaptive Controller basically give you the same thing?
If people want to plug random usb controllers, this doesn't stop them. It just means that Microsoft gets to charge you for the adaptor rather than a 3rd party.
> It also allows you to effectively nullify recoil through custom scripts uploaded to it.
Valve seems to have done a pretty good job dealing with this in their games. Surely there exist more sophisticated anti-cheat mechanisms than "just ban third-party accessories"?
Valve's anticheat is atrocious, Counter-Strike is an absolute cesspool (so much that they've had to separate players who bought the game from players who play the free version), and Team Fortress 2 has had more bots than players for like 10 years now.
This seems like the kind of thing that is repeated so much because some people want to believe it, and most of the time I bet it's people who haven't played a Valve multiplayer game ever.
To be fair -- it's been a couple of years since I played Valve multiplayer games regularly. Has cheating increased at a high rate in the past, say, 3-4 years?
I will say, I think the biggest problem contributing to high levels of cheating is the move away from dedicated servers. I actually find that VAC is historically very effective at catching cheaters, but with a necessary lag between detection and bans -- and that lag used to be handled by server admins.
I'm sure somebody will design the exact same thing with an official controller stripped out with the buttons remapped into a mouse and keyboard with a custom pcb.
There's no way to prevent that from happening with software changes.
You do lose a lot of features that way though, such as a reliable global ranking, since it would be easy to create a room with only your friends and allow eachother to rank up quickly.
It's also a huge coordination issue if you want to arrange a game of 50-100 players who aren't all total strangers to eachother.
But the alternative seems to be in stripping the ancient practice of gaming of its social functions and turning it into a faceless slot machine where the only goal is to win enough times to increase a mostly meaningless number on a screen.