[Brybry]

I don't fully agree with the 1 and 2 dichotomy. For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.

On dedicated servers we had a self-policing community with a smaller pool of more regular players and cheaters were less of an issue. Sure, some innocents got banned and less blatant cheaters slipped through but the main issue of cheaters is when they destroy fun for everyone else.

So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.

Then when people get banned (or probably better, shadowbanned/low priority queued) by player reports or weaker anti-cheat they can't easily ban evade. But of course then there is the issue of incentivizing identity theft.

And I don't think giving a gaming company my PII is any better than giving them root on my machine. But that seems more like an implementation issue.

[vel0city]

> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.

I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.

And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.

Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.

[ThatPlayer]

Except most anti-cheats started on dedicated servers because it turns out most people are not interested in policing other players.

Punkbuster was developed for Team Fortress Classic, even getting officially added to Quake 3 Arena. BattleEye for Battlefield games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft 1 ICCUP 3rd party servers having an anti-cheat they called 'anti-hack'.

You can still see this today with modern dedicated servers in CS2: Face-It and ESEA have additional anti-cheat, not less. Even modded 3rd party server FiveM for GTAV has their own anti-cheat called adhesive.

[Brybry]

I would argue a lot of the early anti-cheat was just as much about giving admins and communities better tools to police themselves as it was about automated cheat detection.

Like here's 2006 Punkbuster for Battlefield 2 (BEye might have been made for BF:V but Punkbuster was what I remember being used by servers). [1]

It automatically kicked on cheat detection but it didn't ban. It provided logs for admins to use for bans. It provided a way for admins to give community players the power to kick. It provided a player GUID based on CD key. It provided an online identity verification/registration system (though I don't remember anyone using this). It let admins take screenshots of players' screens.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060515160425/http://www.evenba...

[Sohcahtoa82]

> So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.

If you think the hate for anti-cheat is bad, just wait until you see the hate for identity verification.

I'm actually rather blown away that you would even suggest it.