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by Sakos 684 days ago
> perverse incentives from a very small subset of users

This is to the benefit of everybody now and in the future. It doesn't matter if only an insignificant fraction of people recognize the importance.

2 comments

I'm not so optimistic. These are just games at the end of the day, and much bigger issues have had friction even if it's for the benefit of everyone.

>It doesn't matter if only an insignificant fraction of people recognize the importance.

that's literally how petitions work. If not enough people care, it doesn't even get looked at by Parliment. The first pass of this didn't look too hot.

I have no idea how you misinterpreted my comment so badly.
The perverse incentives are people who cheat in multiplayer games. Like it or not, multiplayer games live and breathe on how well they handle this problem. A single cheater in a BR game can ruin the game for 100 people.
Cheating is a social signaling problem disguised as a technical problem.
The problem is that the desired outcome of the cheater in a multiplayer game is to ruin the experience for others. It's a game of cat and mouse, don't get me wrong, but that doesn't mean that because it's technically impossible to stop all cheating that no efforts should be made. Distilling everything down to "open good closed bad" doesn't help anything, as the reality is it's far more nuanced than that.
Lately successful anti cheating programs have separate matchmaking for cheaters instead of using technical measures to try to stop cheating which will always be bypassed.
By your own measure that's a technical measure that can be bypassed. It also doesn't work, to the best of my knowledge. Here's [0] a thread from a game that tried this, and ultimately went back to using anticheat.

> instead of using technical measures to try to stop cheating which will always be bypassed.

The word "stop" implies that it can be completely eliminated - it can't. But the impact of the cheaters on the rest of the game can be reduced. If you have client side hit detection and no server validation, your game will be unplayable pretty much immediately. If you only offer your game over streaming services, people will use external input devices to give them an advantage. But, the number of people who are willing to buy a Cronus Zen is significantly smaller than the number of people who are willing to download a dll and put it in the folder next to their game.

[0] https://x.com/FallGuysGame/status/1305486783858302976