[maccard]

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.

[throwaway48476]

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.

[maccard]

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