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by account199494 601 days ago
The problem with anti cheat is that is doesn't even work. Play any game with anti cheat and you will still be flooded by hackers.
7 comments

Working isn't binary. Anticheat definitely catches some cheaters. It definitely misses some cheaters too.p

The worst case scenario is the TF2 catbot scenario, which anticheat seems to stop.

Counterpoint, play any game without anticheat and realize just how much worse it can be. (and before someone says it, custom servers with dedicated admins doesn't scale and tends to cause lots of petty drama)
It does stop some classes of hacks, ups the effort considerably as you hack needs to be in kernel or with hardware. But its pretty much impossible to stop on x86/windows PCs.
People pay for cheats. Companies are built arround cheat making. That now you need hardware to cheat is a bussines oportunity for some.
Yep, even up to hundreds of dollars a month.
If the hack has to be in kernel, it will be in kernel, so what's the point anyway.
Doing something to protect the integrity of the competitive game they have? Compared to others Riot is somewhat successful at least.

There are plenty of games that do not require anti cheat but they aren't going to be the type that uses skill based matchmaking.

Dota and CS don't have kernel anticheat and they are as competitive as LoL or Valorant.
And CS is completely overrun with cheaters. I don't play Dota like games but afaik they all have effective obfuscation, so ESP/wallhack like cheats aren't effective. But they have some auto aim cheats for abilities.
CS and Dota are not overrun by cheaters, millions of people play those games every day with no problem.
Everybody is "doing something". It's a question of what is something. Account-banning people after proven cheating is also something. I would imagine a competitive game with a skill-based match-making, especially a successful one can do that.

Asking people to swear to not cheat in ToS is also something. Only installing the game on the proper trusted computing or doing server-side anticheat is something too.

The issue is with the company deciding to disregard customers concerns about security and privacy to get this something for cheap from a third-party vendor.

If we must pick just one problem I'd say it's that the techniques that we develop for anti cheat will later be used by authoritarian regimes to turn our devices into weapons against those of us foolish enough to dissent.
all it really does in practice is produce a market for paid cheats.

if it's a pain in the ass to stay ahead of the anti-cheats, then people with the skills to do so will expect (and receive) payment from those wishing to cheat.

It does force me to learn more about computers to bypass it though.
Because you don“t understand anti-cheat in the first place, the goal is not to stop 100% of cheats, it's impossible.