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by EA-3167 499 days ago
If anticheat worked then it would be an interesting, perhaps tolerable tradeoff for some. The reality however is that games are absolutely packed with cheaters, there's an international industry in creating cheats for popular games, so what you get is an arms race that as usual only punishes honest users. It's like DRM, pirates don't seem to have much of a problem, but it sure can hurt the rest of us.

Unfortunately both the executives who buy into these things, and the average consumer, are simply too... simple, to understand or appreciate that.

1 comments

> Unfortunately both the executives who buy into these things, and the average consumer, are simply too... simple, to understand or appreciate that.

With all due respect, it’s ironic that you’re calling everyone else simple.

Something doesn’t have to be. 100% effective to be a massive deterrent. Cheat prevention is a game of cat and mouse and anti cheat is one of the levers. Here[0] is an example of a popular game with no anti cheat which was completely ruined by cheaters. Did putting EAC into the game stop every single cheater? No. But it did make the experience better for a significant number of players who were having their games destroyed by cheaters.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/fall-guys-adding-anti-cheat-in-the-n...

The line that stood out for me in that article was: "There is no in-game reporting system." On a somewhat amusing note, I searched for stories about cheating on Fall Guys these days, and one of the first results was... a vendor for cheats. Literally the third result. Another result was a Reddit article from last February talking about the ubiquity of cheaters. There are similar articles in a similar time frame on Steam and elsewhere. TikTok at that same time has collections of videos of them.

While I'm sure that Easy Anti-Cheat is... easier than a reporting system that would require numerous humans working it, I don't think it's the best solution for the player. It's "just enough" at best, and at worst... well see the article we're all commenting under.