[TeMPOraL]

The problem in big part stems from the business culture upstream. They're trying to produce a game, but what they're really after is e-sports money. They design multiplayer to be about organized pro play, which brings in all the cheating problems of professional sports, so they end up subjecting every player to e-sports-grade security like those anti-cheat systems, despite 99.9% of the player base not caring about pro play in the first place.

This is the worst possible combination: players are forced to accept first-party invasive rootkits that are disruptive and ineffective, while cheaters still cheat.

IMHO the only sensible solution is to separate out e-sports angle from the game itself. People who want to "go pro" would be free to subject themselves to anti-cheats and drinking verification cans and past some point might as well buy company-authorized computers to play on. Everyone else should just be allowed to play casually and enjoy the game without the anti-cheat nuisance (and a looming threat of false positive).

With main incentive for serious cheating separated out, non-pro players would only have to worry about griefers. Those are a problem too, but they can be dealt with by simpler and less invasive measures than a kernel-level rootkit.

As it is, AAA multiplayer games are basically like if FIFA was to micromanage Town Recreational Leagues and hold them to the World Cup standard, because cheating is a Big Deal so every kid needs to take regular blood tests before the match.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

Nobody wants to play multiplayer (only) games with cheaters. It is that simple.

Esports money...? Micro transactions is the money. Publisher driven esports is advertising.

[TeMPOraL]

Microtransactions are a self-inflicted fuckup. They're like a zombie bite - once you add them in, your game will start to transform into a slot machine wearing the skin of a dead game, and there's fuck all anyone can do to stop it.

> Publisher driven esports is advertising.

Yes, of course. E-sports is advertising. All professional sports are advertising. That's what makes money. Sales of tickets, merch, guides, coverage, etc. A successful sport is a self-sustaining money printing machine. Now, traditional sports are "frozen in time" relative to business timescales; meanwhile, in e-sports, it's entirely possible for a company to introduce a new game and turn it into a worldwide phenomenon over a couple of years, and then keep getting a cut from aforementioned money printer for many more years still, all while trying to introduce a new game to keep the money running.

And it's okay, I honestly don't mind. As far as the advertising-driven economy goes, sports (traditional or otherwise) is one of the more benign fields. The problem I see is the relentless focus on building a game optimized for professional play ruins it for vast majority of players, and I fail to see why companies keep doing it instead of bifurcating the multiplayer aspect into "casual play" and "pro play", allowing for the latter while also letting the former have their fun.

> Nobody wants to play multiplayer (only) games with cheaters.

My point is that most of the cheating comes from structuring the game around pro-play. You get a global ladder, which establishes an ordinal ranking that invites cheaters who just want to score higher for less effort. All those cheaters end up ruining the game for regular people, who don't care that much about the ranking. Most of those cheaters would go away if the ladder was removed - but that ladder is critical to the company and wannabe progamers precisely because the top levels of that ladder are a gateway to pro-level play.

You can't eliminate all cheating - there's always some people who, for whatever reason, enjoy ruining the game for others. Fortunately, such people are a very small fraction of the playerbase, and most of them don't enjoy it enough to bother if you throw some small obstacles their way. It's manageable. Competitive rankings, on the other hand, are something cheaters love much more than regular players, so by adding it, you're basically creating the problem.

This is true for all competitive endeavors - the bigger the reward, the more it attracts competitive players, some of which are going to resort to cheating, and attempts at fighting cheating further ruin things for those who don't care about competing in the first place. And yes, it applies to the market economy too.

[netcoyote]

> My point is that most of the cheating comes from structuring the game around pro-play

I wanted to address the same point txpl did. As someone who's made multiplayer games, I'm stunned that so many players cheat, even when the stakes are low. It's not just the pro-players; it's at every level.

Some are optimizing their experience because they don't have as much time to play as they'd like. Some feel they deserve the enjoyment of winning without the effort. Some justify it with the belief that everyone else is doing it. And the really difficult ones to deal with feel rewarded by behaving badly (anonymously, of course).

So every design decision comes with an evaluation of how players will abuse the system, and there are no easy answers. And that's why you see companies adding (invasive and ineffective) anti-cheat solutions to band-aid the problem that developers were unable to anticipate or solve.

[tpxl]

> My point is that most of the cheating comes from structuring the game around pro-play

This is incorrect. Both selling cheats and cheating are big businesses.

In Escape from Tarkov, cheaters bought the game (50€), cheated to get in-game items, sold in-game items for money, got banned, and bought the game again. It's literally profitable to keep buying a 50€ game after getting banned.

Same happened with Diablo 3 when it had the real money auction house. A mate of mine earned around 10k in 3 months and went through a dozen accounts a week.

Team Fortress 2 basically has no competitive scene, but the casual games are full of cheaters anyway. And you can't even make money through it, unlike the previous two examples.

The bottom line about cheating is, it's relatively easy to prevent with manual moderation. But humans doing stuff dOeSn'T sCaLe, even though banning cheaters that will re-buy the game has a positive RoI.

[yencabulator]

> In Escape from Tarkov, cheaters bought the game (50€), cheated to get in-game items, sold in-game items for money, got banned, and bought the game again. It's literally profitable to keep buying a 50€ game after getting banned.

You can blame in-game microtransactions and the idea that in-game inventory is worth money on that one.