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> Why does this pose an issue in game-hacking? Well.. As we all know, game-hackers go to extreme lengths to achieve their common goal: winning. This is the sad reality of the cat-and-mouse game of game-hacking, as cheaters will not abide by any rules or morals. I feel like this is a flawed basis of assumption and also just a mis-framed situation as a whole. Cheat developers and the people that use them en-masse aren't really the same people. By trying to suspend their narrative on player greed being the enemy, they undermine a point that otherwise has some very practical responses if you don't resort to relative extremism. For one, if exploiting software to win was the ultimate degenerative goal of every video game, I don't think people would want to pay for online experiences. People still buy and play games because they like the intended experience, and while cheating exists it's a one-sided aberration that isn't an obvious by-product of an endless greed for winning. I don't like cheaters, but any businessman will tell you that one person's abuse of a service is no excuse to degrade another customer's experience. For two, this isn't casus-belli on privacy even if it was true. All software can be exploited, but that doesn't justify creating infinitely hostile conditions for a user to run your program. This same line of reasoning, blaming the cheaters and never yourself, could be used to justify any number of nonsense mitigations like forcing players to record themselves with a webcam or plug in proprietary anticheat USB hardware. This is all a very flowery way for a developer to absolve themselves of responsibility for an extreme reaction to a minor issue. For three - it's deflecting the issue onto a conflated group of people that doesn't really exist. The people designing exploits are motivated to do so because they like writing exploits, not because they enjoy cheating. They might sell their software or distribute it to people that do play to cheat, but the cheat designers are rarely motivated by a desire to be at the top of a leaderboard that will boot them off for obvious manipulation. So the entire concept of blaming the players for wanting to win so bad is really just an emotional "we're the poor developers" deflection. They can try to hold the moral high ground all they want, but it ends up feeling like an incensed defense of something that clearly isn't working. |
Are you sure you're not deflecting the issue onto a group of people that doesn't really exist either? I.e. The group of people who are just "hacking to hack" - these people do exist but they are exceptionally rare (w.r.t the likelihood of running into a player using that persons cheat) compared to the ones who are in it for some personal gain, financial or otherwise. Also this group is typically not the one having an oversized negative impact on the game (as always there are exceptional cases - but it's not the norm).
The cheat designers are motivated by money, and their customers are motivated by a desire to be at the top of a leader-board (or to grief, or because they feel "everyone else is doing it so I have to", etc). I'm not sure it makes sense to throw out the entire argument just because a level of indirection is there. If the customers stopped caring about winning at any cost, it follows that most of the cheat developers would have no more motivation to maintain the cheats (at least as publicly available to the masses), because the money would dry up and the work would not be worth it anymore.
RMT is also huge in certain games. For example Escape from Tarkov is infested with cheaters not because they want to get on the leaderboards, but because they want to sell items/services to other players for real money (cheating by proxy basically), and again those players spending real money are doing it to gain an advantage in-game.
It's also important to note that that maintaining a public cheat is _very_ different to maintaining a private one. Basically nobody who is just 'hacking to hack' is going to be publicly maintaining a cheat for a major competitive online game just for the heck of it. Privately for sure, that happens all the time where things are traded/sold between just a handful of people. But nobody is out there maintaining free public cheats for Valorant, Apex, Siege, etc. (or at least not one that puts a meaningful effort into evading anti-cheat, which is sort of the point).
Sometimes the two groups overlap (i.e. an individual might "hack to hack" in their spare time, whilst also contracting for a commercial cheat developer), but if the commercial incentive disappears, so does the most of the negative impact on the game even if that individual continues to cheat personally (because 1 is less than tens of thousands - and the people who were previously buying cheats don't have the skills to replicate it themselves).