[jsheard]

Some kinds of cheating can be mitigated that way, but it can't really stop cheats which just play the game more optimally than the user is able to, using the same inputs and outputs that a legit player would use. Aim assistance in shooters, automatic parries in fighting games, economy-breaking levels of automation in MMOs, and so on.

There's also practical limits to how much data you can filter out in complex 3D games, both due to performance constraints, and because culling information too perfectly can cause things to pop into existence too late under real-world network latency. The effectiveness of ESP cheats can be reduced, but not eliminated in practice.

[nkrisc]

You could probably detect those kinds of cheats heuristically on the server. There are limits to human ability. It’ll take more time to catch the cheaters, but I’m sure it’s possible.

This player is posting 30 auctions per second. Bot.

This player is turning at a rate of 500 radians per second to make perfect headshots. Bot.

[pityJuke]

this is already running in production for Counter-Strike since 2018 [0][1].

to be honest, it isn’t particularly good - all serious CS2 games operate on a third party provider with a kernel-level anti-cheat. also, the cs2 update banned people for spinning their mouse too fast [2].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/5u2xly/eli...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwU_ejDNC0s

[Hikikomori]

Aimbots will just add delay and variance then. Guess its a bit fairer but if they're better than shroud level then it's still not great.

[jsheard]

Which they do already, because slamming all of the aimbot settings to max is a fast track to getting mass reported and escalated to human review, which will immediately see what's going on. Any cheater with an ounce of desire to preserve their account is going to try and maintain the pretense that they're just very skilled, not impossibly skilled.

[cortesoft]

The cheat could just be tuned to play at the level of the best humans.

[soloridindan]

I think anything that relies on reflex alone is flawed design. You can design around this, by for example in Dota2 it doesen't matter how fast you click an entity, because the turnrate of your character is limited, so a person clicking reasonably fast and a bot clicking in 0.01ms both arrive there at the same time. Precision also doesn't matter, because a player can click the icon of the enemy instead of trying to match the pixels on screen. MMO scripts that use information already given by the game just seem like the MMO should invest in UX instead of trying to ban people for using the tools the game already gives them.

[Levitz]

>for example in Dota2 it doesen't matter how fast you click an entity, because the turnrate of your character is limited, so a person clicking reasonably fast and a bot clicking in 0.01ms both arrive there at the same time. Precision also doesn't matter, because a player can click the icon of the enemy instead of trying to match the pixels on screen.

Even with turnrate, reaction time is very relevant. Reaction time allows you to silence enemies midcast, or to pop a shield, or a BKB, or some other instant measure. Turnrate doesn't mean reaction time doesn't matter, it means the direction you are facing matters.

As for precision, yes it does matter, ask any Phoenix player who gets hexed mid-flight.

People cheat in Dota in these very terms, it's absurd to argue it doesn't matter.

[vkou]

Unless DOTA2 is running at a ~3 tick rate (Which it's not), even taking account processing delays and action batching, a bot will always have faster reaction times than an actual player. It will also never misclick.

This problem is magnified in a shooter game, which would be unplayable with that kind of batching, but where a cheater with an aimbot is actually impossible for a legitimate player to beat.

[soloridindan]

After you click, the character will begin to turn, which can take several hundred ms. A delta of couple ms compared to the time it takes to turn is completely negligible and even an inch better positioning of a character, or having a character with items or stats that makes them turn faster (because picks are asymmetric) will make several magnitudes more of an impact.

If your game allows your sights to just teleport on people's heads and take that as the winning condition then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy even from a shooter

[komali2]

> If your game allows your sights to just teleport on people's heads and take that as the winning condition then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy even from a shooter

This is interesting, because I feel like the fundamental gameplay of an fps is players exposing themselves to each other's field of view, and then trying to click the other's head first. Skill is a measure of map knowledge (so you can try to expose yourself to a possible field of view but not where the enemy is actually looking at that moment) and speed of clicking head.

How would you design FPSs to remove this "bad game design?"

[DJBunnies]

> How would you design FPSs to remove this "bad game design?"

I think we just need to accept that bots will always be better at reaction based KPIs & abusing "knowing" too much game state, we should just remove those conditions.

1) Move most of the application logic to the server, the client should be a fairly dumb terminal that knows how to render and accept inputs, and only receives the state that it needs. No more spying issues.

2) Just give everybody auto aim & immediate/auto controlled firing, etc. No more aim bot issues.

3) Improve the quality of gameplay around the types of interactions which bots are bad at. Decision making, strategy, communication, execution, adaptation.

[vanviegen]

Sure, feel free to make an entirely different type of game that's not as vulnerable to cheating.

But some people just want to play competitive fps shooters. And currently obnoxious anticheat toolkits are the way to provide that, unfortunately.

[nerdsniper]

> No more spying issues.

This isn't possible. And this explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFw4F2AyaP4

We can only minimize the amount of extra information given to the client, not eliminate it. And at high enough skill levels, even 1-2ms of extra information will always be actionable, even by humans (not just bots).

[Hikikomori]

>just give everyone aimbots, no more aimbots issues

[jpadkins]

what if more people want to play an action shooter game, and not a slow strategy game?

[Hikikomori]

>If your game allows your sights to just teleport on people's heads and take that as the winning condition then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy even from a shooter

From the servers perspective you always kinda do that for fast movements as the client send rate usually isn't more than 60hz.

[bluecalm]

There is rampant cheating in online chess and poker as well, you know? You can have an opinion about what constitutes a better game for humans: should it be about making better decisions, arriving at them faster or being fast and precise with your mouse but the reality is bots/assistance can make you unplayable in all of those domains.