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No, we're talking about games with invasive anti-cheating mechanisms. The proposed alternative was to just have "community servers where cheaters get banned" -- and I responded specifically to the "cheaters get banned" part. Yeah, if you could just ban cheaters forever, all would be well! But you can't, not at scale and not forever, at least. It's an ongoing, sizable problem. You talk about "once or twice [...] a day" when the reality for major games is more like thousands of cheaters each trying thousands of times. A lot of things that work just fine for small groups and niche interests utterly fail to scale to large groups and popular interests. When your scope of vision is the entire game--like it would be for the company making the game--something like "just have the cheaters go bother a different set of players each time they get banned from one server" is not a solution. In fact, it's a terrible practice that could destroy the reputation of your game. Of course, community servers exist and work fine for many (esp. niche/older) games. Also, invasive anti-cheat gets applied even to some games where it's not really needed, and sometimes gets conflated (whether by players or game companies) with invasive DRM. However, the majority of games that have invasive anti-cheat requirements cannot simply remove the requirement, pass off the company's (usually paid!) moderation duties to a bunch of volunteers, and call it a day. Though, that may be an acceptable thing to do at the end of the game's ordinary life, instead of just shutting it down. |
I used to fund, run, and moderate private/community server across many many games. I can tell you from experience, being able to ban someone for even just 5-10 minutes is more than enough to send 99.5% of hackers fleeing to another unmodderated server, aka leaving your server, players, and friends alone to have hacker free fun.