Well if cheating is going to make the game almost unplayable the outcome is pretty much the same as you deciding to never install it in the first place due to disliking anticheat systems. So I don't really see the problem.
Obviously, you haven't been in a position where you had to patch the anti-cheat solution yourself in order to play the game you paid for.
Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?)
[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely.
But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem?
If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm?
Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
> If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
There is a difference in skill level distribution. If everyone playing at a highly skilled player level, then it's simply not fun and doesn't provide an opportunity to get better.
Anyways, playing with cheaters isn't fun and if you want to play without them then you need anti-cheat and/or game to not be free.
But not everyone is cheating. There will always be enough players that even if you just match players based on their skill level, you'll always have someone at your own level to play with.
In fact, I'd like to see the same bots developed by cheaters be used for NPCs as well.
I don't think it would be very hard to develop AI bots which can "see" through walls or one shot snipe you from 200 meters away while you're running. Why would anyone want that, though?
It's irrelevant. I play a lot of destiny 2 and the trials were extremely annoying before anti-cheat.
Imagine you're one win away from going flawless (7 consecutive wins) and some asshole jumps in the air and headshots your entire team in as fast as the gun allows it.
That's not fun. That means you have to start over. You get lucky if you only get cheater(s) in your first game, so there isn't any progress lost.
This resulted in a very shallow matchmaking pool with large skill gaps because casuals and mid-tiers didn't want to deal with this bullshit.
Uhm, yes, I think it is a problem because unfairly losing isn't as fun as fairly losing or fairly winning. Ignorance about the fairness of a game may work in a few instances but would not scale.
You don't have to reach pro levels, it often only takes small assists to turn a balanced game on its head, ruining someone's experience with a game. Repeat often enough and the userbase will leave, feeling cheated or at least demoralised for being unable to compete or improve.
And allowing machine-assists, thus leveling the playing field, turns the game into a completely different one that is (imho) drastically less fun whoever may not be interested in (or may be unable to) running/coding their bot.
Why would you be unable to compete? The matchmaking system will still put you against users on a similar level to yourself. Whether they're your level through cheats or natively doesn't matter.
A player playing cs go at 1280×720 at 30 ps on a ball mouse will always loose to one on playing at 2560×1440 240fps with a high-quality mouse.
Now there's one more dimension of unfairness. But who cares? You're still going to be winning ~51% of the time, that's why matchmaking systems exist.
> Now there's one more dimension of unfairness. But who cares? You're still going to be winning ~51% of the time, that's why matchmaking systems exist
No. That's not how it's going to work. You'll lose 100% games against cheaters Elo and then win 80% (or similar) against lower-level players you get matched against because your Elo goes down due to cheaters. Overall yeah, you might end up with a 50% win rate but that doesn't really matter.
Of course that would be more pronounced in RTS or other 1v1 or team games with small number of players (then again nobody would play them anymore because it would just be waste of time, when you're matched against a cheater because you'll be forced to waste X min before you figure that out).
Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.