Or maybe just let the community run the "servers" so they can self moderate? no anti-cheat necesary then. maybe i just miss the good old days. edit: this comment by @PuddleOfKittens captures my...
Or maybe just let the community run the "servers" so they can self moderate? no anti-cheat necesary then.
maybe i just miss the good old days.
edit: this comment by @PuddleOfKittens captures my feelings about this a lot better than my hot take
I fully agree. I am just reminded of playing on some private servers in the old days. Cheating back then was also a problem. But on one particular server, a regular player was a bigger problem...
I fully agree.
I am just reminded of playing on some private servers in the old days. Cheating back then was also a problem. But on one particular server, a regular player was a bigger problem because they went around accusing about half the people of cheating every match. Going as far as posting screen captures and clips as "proof" on the server forum.
I got so annoyed by them that one match I just spend time recording them doing inane stuff, then making a satire post on the forums with the title "I think <annoying player> is cheating for no other reason than that they are a decent player, video proof included". In the post I linked to the video saying something like "video proof that they are doing normal stuff, but I am still going to say they cheat".
Of course, they didn't get the hint and thought I was actually accusing them of cheating instead of holding up a mirror. A lot of other players did get a good laugh out of it though :)
As someone who was around for the good old days, old-school servers have many, many blind spots. Public servers that allow for hop-in, hop-out play are a good fit for game modes that scale...
As someone who was around for the good old days, old-school servers have many, many blind spots.
Public servers that allow for hop-in, hop-out play are a good fit for game modes that scale gracefully to ridiculous playercounts. They're not so great for modes designed for limited playercounts, or modes where the length of time between staying dead and round finish is long.
Most servers only ran a very limited subset of levels and game modes. If you actually wanted to play most of the content you paid for, you were usually out of luck.
The longer a game was out, the more the game tended to be taken over by serverside mods. There were doubtless many examples that added to the experience, but more often than not these mods would add janky game features and progression systems that made the game totally unbalanced, annoying sound effects you couldn't turn off, and poorly thought out voting systems that contributed to the lack of map and game mode variety as you'd see people vote for the same 3-4 maps over and over again.
If your favorite servers are full, you either have to brave the server list and find another server running what you want to play or sit at the server screen waiting for a free slot.
If your favorite servers are empty, you either have to brave the server list and try another server, or you jump into the empty server, hoping against hope that you are soon joined by another player. Given that most players sorted the server list by number of players, you could be waiting a very, very long time.
Public servers could be good...or they could be run by the worst people imaginable. Offering perks like cosmetics or administrative access for payment wasn't uncommon, and that was assuming the admin wasn't cheating, oblivious to cheating players on their server, unilaterally kicking you for performing too well, or unilaterally kicking you because they were being powertripping jerks.
Playing on a server with a buddy was incredibly difficult. Aside from the above issues with full and empty servers, if you were playing a team game you almost certainly didn't get put on the same team, so you had to wait until the teams were unbalanced and then teamswap.
Want to play a private match with a group of friends using your own preferred settings? Hope you know the arcana involved with setting up a dedicated server.
Granted, there were positives to the model, and I do believe that server browsers are good for games with low populations, but matchmaking didn't become the default multiplayer approach for no reason.
That is precisely my “hot take” too. Cheating is only a problem because the stakes are high, with global ladders and “prestige” tied to it. Smaller server/lobbies can self-moderate way more...
That is precisely my “hot take” too.
Cheating is only a problem because the stakes are high, with global ladders and “prestige” tied to it.
Smaller server/lobbies can self-moderate way more effectively and the incentive to cheat is lower as well.
That’s seems like rose tinted glasses. There were a lot of hackers in the old cs lobby days. Also, it’s just not how BRs work. You need a lot of players for BR, and most of them will die in the...
That’s seems like rose tinted glasses. There were a lot of hackers in the old cs lobby days.
Also, it’s just not how BRs work. You need a lot of players for BR, and most of them will die in the first few minutes. In a lobby system, most players by definition will spend all of their time doing nothing but being dead. It works as is because you die and can immediately go back to matchmaking.
I play a lot of DayZ. The good community servers have almost no hackers (I can recall one encounter over hundreds of hours on a particular community server). It also helps that there's not...
I play a lot of DayZ. The good community servers have almost no hackers (I can recall one encounter over hundreds of hours on a particular community server). It also helps that there's not competitive MMR. But there are items that can take many hours to acquire and are easy to lose if you're not good enough.
That you know of. Now, I doubt this exists for DayZ but AFAIK the big FPS games have hacks that avoid server side AI ban detection by snapping the reticle to head etc. in ways that conform to...
The good community servers have almost no hackers
That you know of.
Now, I doubt this exists for DayZ but AFAIK the big FPS games have hacks that avoid server side AI ban detection by snapping the reticle to head etc. in ways that conform to human limits such that they don't stand out when evaluating user telemetry. That kind of stuff is never going to be caught by server admins.
I think it really helps that the game is rogue-lite. There's less incentive to cheat. Everything resets when you die. In Tarkov you have your stash. In CS you have your MMR. In DayZ there is...
I think it really helps that the game is rogue-lite. There's less incentive to cheat. Everything resets when you die. In Tarkov you have your stash. In CS you have your MMR. In DayZ there is nothing except what you can carry. It's mostly about having a good time and not about racking up kills.
I think the reliance on large servers to minimize dead time a weakness/poor game design of a BR. If your only option is to join a new match, it will either end up with friends being split up or...
I think the reliance on large servers to minimize dead time a weakness/poor game design of a BR. If your only option is to join a new match, it will either end up with friends being split up or waiting around for each other. Also, as the game's popularity declines, the experience declines dramatically.
It is what it is. It's both a plus and a minus of the genre, but it's neither inherently worse nor better than any other model. It's just what makes it different. A lot of what people like about...
It is what it is. It's both a plus and a minus of the genre, but it's neither inherently worse nor better than any other model. It's just what makes it different. A lot of what people like about BRs is that ephemerality - it's like a mix between an open lobby and 5v5 competitive matchmaking.
The funny thing is that BR games don't even benefit that much from skill-based matchmaking. If every player is equally as good as you, that means you're going to die in 50% of engagements. Which...
The funny thing is that BR games don't even benefit that much from skill-based matchmaking.
If every player is equally as good as you, that means you're going to die in 50% of engagements. Which is going to be massively unfun.
At least from what I've seen in Fortnite (mostly cross-platform squads), there's a huge disparity in matches, ranging from "can't hit me with a shotgun when I'm standing still 10ft away" to "can snipe me from 2/3 across the map".
I sort of quit Counter Strike when the privately hosted lobbies were dead. They were still around, just very few actually managed well or interesting enough. It solves so much but it can't be...
I sort of quit Counter Strike when the privately hosted lobbies were dead. They were still around, just very few actually managed well or interesting enough.
It solves so much but it can't be monetized well so it totally makes sense they're gone.
What exactly do you mean by privately hosted lobbies? You can still host LAN/private games with friends, and you can even create a private matchmaking queue with a shared code as access (which in...
What exactly do you mean by privately hosted lobbies?
You can still host LAN/private games with friends, and you can even create a private matchmaking queue with a shared code as access (which in theory could be used by a community to soft ban suspicious players).
Ofc these games won't affect your rating or give xp for drops, but who cares.
By default, Counter Strike had hosted lobbies rather than matchmaking. Matchmaking came much later, or through ESEA, but wasn't the main method of joining games. I haven't tried CS2 yet, but...
By default, Counter Strike had hosted lobbies rather than matchmaking. Matchmaking came much later, or through ESEA, but wasn't the main method of joining games. I haven't tried CS2 yet, but almost all servers I'd join on CSGO ultimately met their end. Either through reduced player count or rampant cheating. In fact, a lot of these lobbies are specifically for cheater versus cheater modes.
While it still exists, it's a shell of its former self. Entire communities were made on surf maps, or clan servers. Matchmaking is turning it into a one and done, where your teammates might as well be NPCs that you'll never see again after the match is done.
I know I'm "back in the day"ing, but matchmaking truly changed the environment. And in my opinion, for the worse.
I'll quote my reply from the other thread: It would be fine for me, because I don't really play overly competitive games but it would be a bitter pill to swallow for many imo.
I'll quote my reply from the other thread:
Cheating is also a lot more sophisticated and widespread but this is probably the best option.
That said, it basically involves just living with cheaters being in every game. Server admins can kick rage hackers pretty easily but anyone who does not want to be caught won't be. If cheat developers can develop cheats that avoid AI detection by mimicking the limits of human cognitive/motor function, some unpaid server admin doesn't really have a chance at making a dent in the cheating population.
It would be fine for me, because I don't really play overly competitive games but it would be a bitter pill to swallow for many imo.
See, here's the other thing. That's why they invented votekick. Did it suck if you got voted out just for legit play? Yea. But it was also a badge of honor. Oh, and with skill-based matchmaking,...
See, here's the other thing. That's why they invented votekick. Did it suck if you got voted out just for legit play? Yea. But it was also a badge of honor.
Oh, and with skill-based matchmaking, that problem solves itself.
You don't. The sorting hat of kicks and bans takes care of it. And its kind of awesome. Because you might be getting absolutely steamrolled, but if you can get one solid kill against the person...
You don't. The sorting hat of kicks and bans takes care of it.
And its kind of awesome. Because you might be getting absolutely steamrolled, but if you can get one solid kill against the person dominating the leaderboard, it feels better than winning a battle royale.
I don't see how kicks and bans create balanced matches. That is just a mechanism to keep out the riffraff. Skill-based matchmaking is about assembling lobbies of players of a similar skill level....
You don't. The sorting hat of kicks and bans takes care of it.
I don't see how kicks and bans create balanced matches. That is just a mechanism to keep out the riffraff.
Skill-based matchmaking is about assembling lobbies of players of a similar skill level. It's a fundamental component of the design of many modern competitive shooters, and there are many such games that I would never want to play without it.
And yes, I do remember "the good old days" of community hosted servers. Different approaches to multiplayer work better for different kinds of games. There is no magic "one size fits all" solution here. That's why the Battlefield games still offer a server browser while Overwatch uses matchmaking.
PuddleOfKittens explained it better here, but in essence I was rejecting the premise of skill-based matchmaking entirely. That users/admins would kick or ban people that were unfun to play with,...
PuddleOfKittens explained it better here, but in essence I was rejecting the premise of skill-based matchmaking entirely. That users/admins would kick or ban people that were unfun to play with, regardless of skill disparity.
You're correct that different approaches work better for different games, but the majority of multiplayer games (especially big-studio titles) have abandoned player-run servers.
Unfortunately, this was kind of inevitable when Epic made EAC available but refused to enable it for Fortnite. It was clear that they didn't trust the implementation and didn't particularly care...
Unfortunately, this was kind of inevitable when Epic made EAC available but refused to enable it for Fortnite. It was clear that they didn't trust the implementation and didn't particularly care about making it more than a nerfed version of the Windows version.
As far as user-mode AC goes, CS:GO used to have a good reputation for their anti-cheating measures but seem to have completely lost it on the move to CS2. Overwatch (the game, not the CS review program) seems to be a better example currently; I can't recall seeing cheaters at all, although it might be biased by the fact that various abilities can counter good aim.
People say that cheaters just turn to subtle cheats, with mouse corrections that are realistic and inaccurate enough to mimic human movements. But personally, if a cheater's aim is weak enough that I don't even suspect they're cheating, it doesn't really ruin my experience. MMR will just place them in lobbies where their "enhanced" aim is completely normal, so they're kind of playing themselves.
The problem is that there is a massive chasm between "average player aim" and "pro player aim" and it takes thousands of hours of practice to cross it. What look like normal tracking or flick...
But personally, if a cheater's aim is weak enough that I don't even suspect they're cheating, it doesn't really ruin my experience.
The problem is that there is a massive chasm between "average player aim" and "pro player aim" and it takes thousands of hours of practice to cross it. What look like normal tracking or flick shots for a pro Overwatch or Counter-Strike player can look indistinguishable from cheating to a low ranked player. There's a lot of space in the middle there for cheaters to occupy.
Often the best indication that someone is cheating is not the specifics of their aim, but rather a bizarre disparity between their aiming skill and other factors like game sense.
I don't ever remember CS:GO having a good reputation for VAC, but maybe it's better than CS2 (I've never played CS2). There were certainly cheaters and VAC waves and then logging on to confirm my...
I don't ever remember CS:GO having a good reputation for VAC, but maybe it's better than CS2 (I've never played CS2). There were certainly cheaters and VAC waves and then logging on to confirm my suspicions that someone in my games had been banned, I remember that. But the ban waves came every once in a while, so between them, there were plenty of cheaters. And plenty of cheaters soon after a ban wave.
My bet is that we see Steam transition the deck OS to some sort of locked down and completely signed version of Linux in the future. That would be step one to creating a kernel anti-cheat on...
My bet is that we see Steam transition the deck OS to some sort of locked down and completely signed version of Linux in the future. That would be step one to creating a kernel anti-cheat on Linux. Otherwise long term it’s hard to see big multiplayer FPS titles staying on Linux.
A signed version of Linux wouldn't be that much better, if the concern is transparency - Linux's source code won't disappear and the entire point of anti-cheat is creating a TPM via obscurity.
A signed version of Linux wouldn't be that much better, if the concern is transparency - Linux's source code won't disappear and the entire point of anti-cheat is creating a TPM via obscurity.
Being able to reliably verify that you're running a Steam Deck, as well as being able to reliably ban a particular Steam Deck, would still be a good thing, at least from the anti-cheat's perspective.
Being able to reliably verify that you're running a Steam Deck, as well as being able to reliably ban a particular Steam Deck, would still be a good thing, at least from the anti-cheat's perspective.
Well I think the anti cheat on Linux would need to be a proprietary kernel module but it would also need a system where the kernel, modules, and associated system libraries are signed by someone...
Well I think the anti cheat on Linux would need to be a proprietary kernel module but it would also need a system where the kernel, modules, and associated system libraries are signed by someone like Valve.
Seems like it was a thoughtful decision, and the reasoning makes sense. Cheating is the bane of multiplayer FPS on PC, so sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I think this decision is very...
Seems like it was a thoughtful decision, and the reasoning makes sense. Cheating is the bane of multiplayer FPS on PC, so sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I think this decision is very reasonable.
Respawn really tried their best at having linux support, but in the end, sometimes things just aren't possible.
Just to echo what stu2b50 is saying, the cheating situation is really god awful in CS2. Most of the player base has been begging valve for kernel level anticheat, but they're not going to get it...
Just to echo what stu2b50 is saying, the cheating situation is really god awful in CS2. Most of the player base has been begging valve for kernel level anticheat, but they're not going to get it because of the steam deck, which runs linux. FACEIT is so popular mostly because of that issue.
I understand that kernel anticheat is a bitter pill to swallow, and it would be great if less obtrusive, server side methods were as, or more effective, but they really just aren't. Kernel anticheat isn't a panacea; cheating still happens in games that implement them, but it significantly raises the barrier for cheat developers, which means cheats become much more expensive to develop and purchase, and thus less prevalent in those games.
I didn't experience any cheaters last time I played CS2, but I haven't played in a few months and also maybe the problem is larger on other continents. Do you actually have any hard evidence that...
I didn't experience any cheaters last time I played CS2, but I haven't played in a few months and also maybe the problem is larger on other continents.
Do you actually have any hard evidence that kernel-level anticheat makes a big difference? Besides "Valorant has feature X, Valorant is better than CS2 at this, therefore if CS2 has feature X then CS2 will be better like Valorant is".
An alternative explanation is that maybe Valorant is harder to hack because it's far newer code (and thus cheaters have had less time to document it), with an engine built around newer anticheat concepts than CSGO was in ~2011, with a smaller playerbase that is therefore less lucrative to write cheats for.
Kernel anticheat isn't a bitter pill for me to swallow, though - I'm running Linux, every game with kernel-level anticheat just means I outright can't play it. So, cards on the table, I'll get completely shafted again so I'm pretty militantly against it, personally.
What really bugs me is that the discussion is so narrow - nobody seems to talk about social solutions. The cause of cheaters is ultimately the current matchmaking paradigm, i.e. complete strangers on un-owned admin-less servers. Those are some harsh constraints on future solutions, and aren't even fundamental to the problem of balanced matches. Nobody talks about matchmaking paradigms, everyone talks about kernel-level anticheats.
The real problem here is symmetry. An insistence that every match be 5v5 with equal resources on each team and also balanced, which then requires both teams be the same collective skill level, which then requires a large player pool to keep queue-times reasonably low.
Large player pool requirements means games are ride-or-die on being 10k-concurrent-player successes which requires large marketing budgets and blandly safe design choices, not to mention millions of dollars to pay for the ongoing anticheat teams and matchmaking servers. This is awful, even without considering anticheat.
(There are also more straightforward solutions to anticheat, like doing a Korea and requiring a govt ID card to sign up,then fining cheaters in-person. Cheap and effective, but socially contentious when we can "just" force everyone to install a rootkit from EA/Ubisoft/etc on their computer.)
If it's really such a concern, just don't let people play in for-money matches on Linux. They can obviously tell the OS, so just put the Linux people together first, the same way they cluster...
If it's really such a concern, just don't let people play in for-money matches on Linux. They can obviously tell the OS, so just put the Linux people together first, the same way they cluster console and PC users separately.
The funny thing is that outside of Fortinite, I don't have a vested interest. It's just that I hate forced OS hemogeny under the premise of "security".
I'm pretty sure pro CS tournaments already have dedicated PCs not owned by the competitors, which means it doesn't even matter what the OS is, outside of configuration settings. That's really...
If it's really such a concern, just don't let people play in for-money matches on Linux.
I'm pretty sure pro CS tournaments already have dedicated PCs not owned by the competitors, which means it doesn't even matter what the OS is, outside of configuration settings. That's really missing the point though - cheats matter for the average player, because playing against aimbotters sucks. And outside of the pro CS tournaments, even if there is a money prize, it's not actually about the money, it's about the winning.
The point is though, theoretically skill-based matchmaking takes care of the aimbot problem over time anyway. And if 'Linux has so many cheaters' is real, lumping all the Linux players together...
The point is though, theoretically skill-based matchmaking takes care of the aimbot problem over time anyway. And if 'Linux has so many cheaters' is real, lumping all the Linux players together also solves the problem.
I'm betting there is a far higher percieved number of aimbots than reality though. Aim in FPS is transferable in a way that gamesense is not. There a lot of us who have really good aim, but shit MMR in CS because we're bad at most other aspects of the game.
I think we could almost eliminate cheating by simply offering a dev-tuned aim assist, the way they do for console players. That'll let devs put them in a silent matchmaking sorting hat while eliminating most of the market for cheat sellers.
By fine tuning the aim assist to be 'just barely good enough' it chould actually increase the fun level across the board by eliminating the bottom-tier, while still leaving room for human improvement.
I don't have hard evidence besides what the gaming companies themselves have released on it. Riot has released some pretty compelling...
I don't have hard evidence besides what the gaming companies themselves have released on it.
Riot has released some pretty compelling https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/ on the results of enabling vanguard on league of legends. Independently verifiable data is going to be close to non-existent in this area, because the specific usage data and implimentaton details of anti cheat measures are some of the most closely guarded IP in the games industry.
Anecdotally, if you compare the prevelence of cheaters in riot's games versus just about any other popular competitive games, even ones released after league/valorant, you can tell a difference.
Also, you can look for yourself to try to find working valorant cheats versus CS:GO cheats. The cheaters themselves are saying on their forums how much more expensive and hard to find valorant cheats are.
A lot of people have said that riot's approach is "lazy", as if it's somehow the easy way out, but it's really quite the opposite. Riot made massive investments in anti cheat, and are far more effective at it because of those investments. It sucks that that effectiveness comes at the price of invasiveness and compatibility, but fundamentally, this is an inevitable result of the principle that if you don't control the endpoints, you cannot guarantee that they're doing what they say they are.
I wish there were a better way around this, but there really doesn't seem to be. Valve made a noble effort, but a lot of people seem to view "AI" as some sort of magic dust that can divine the difference between legitimate player actions and cheating, but it really cannot in a reliable way.
It also means the consequences of cheats getting caught are often bigger: You have to have significant expertise to make the cheats, you spend a lot of time developing the cheat, if what the cheat...
It also means the consequences of cheats getting caught are often bigger:
You have to have significant expertise to make the cheats, you spend a lot of time developing the cheat, if what the cheat exploits is patched you have to repeat some of this more demanding stuff.
The business case for cheats often just falls apart in addition to the stronger protections against many of the potential cheats themselves.
It’s really not fine. The amount of cheaters in CS2 is abysmal compared to valorant, and it’s really noticeable since the two games share so many elements. It’s one of the biggest complaints about...
It’s really not fine. The amount of cheaters in CS2 is abysmal compared to valorant, and it’s really noticeable since the two games share so many elements.
It’s one of the biggest complaints about the games anywhere you look.
*Multiplayer gaming coffin Singleplayer games keep working great, and in that sense Linux gaming is very much alive (which perfectly fits my interests since I only play singleplayer games anyway)....
*Multiplayer gaming coffin
Singleplayer games keep working great, and in that sense Linux gaming is very much alive (which perfectly fits my interests since I only play singleplayer games anyway).
I'm really glad how gaming on Linux developed in the past nine years.
Yeah, it's gone from an expectation that a game won't work, (looking at my collection of Loki games CDs), to an expectation that they will. Playing everything from Monster Hunter Rise, World and...
Yeah, it's gone from an expectation that a game won't work, (looking at my collection of Loki games CDs), to an expectation that they will.
Playing everything from Monster Hunter Rise, World and Wilds, to Lies Of P, all the Souls games, all my favourites right there on my Linux installation. Haven't run Windows in over 10 years.
I too give not one fig for competitive multi player, though I do worry that games will slowly creep towards implementing spiteful incompatibilities, and that right now, we might have passed the peak for compatibility, and we're starting to go down hill.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto...
we've identified Linux OS
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is a terrible name. The point of a name is to be a memorable reference, and people have a hard enough understanding of what an OS is, let alone WTF "GNU/Linux" means. You have to...
GNU/Linux is a terrible name. The point of a name is to be a memorable reference, and people have a hard enough understanding of what an OS is, let alone WTF "GNU/Linux" means. You have to explain:
What GNU is
What Linux is
What GNU/Linux is
People already forgot the name so you need to repeat it, because it's not very memorable and 4 syllables with 3 unthematic words
What Linux isn't - people already use the phrase "Linux OS", you need to clarify that your pet definition of the term is separate from others' definitions.
For a political advocacy group, the FSF really suck at effective communication.
In summary: we should all use the name "Linux" because names are functional items. Anyone who disagrees: fight me.
See also "free software". You know very well that most people will read that as "zero cost software" because that's by far the most common way for English speakers to use "free" applied to an...
For a political advocacy group, the FSF really suck at effective communication.
See also "free software".
You know very well that most people will read that as "zero cost software" because that's by far the most common way for English speakers to use "free" applied to an inanimate thing.
Or maybe just let the community run the "servers" so they can self moderate? no anti-cheat necesary then.
maybe i just miss the good old days.
edit: this comment by @PuddleOfKittens captures my feelings about this a lot better than my hot take
https://tildes.net/~games/1jsd/apex_legends_dev_team_update_linux_and_anti_cheat#comment-dzen
I fully agree.
I am just reminded of playing on some private servers in the old days. Cheating back then was also a problem. But on one particular server, a regular player was a bigger problem because they went around accusing about half the people of cheating every match. Going as far as posting screen captures and clips as "proof" on the server forum.
I got so annoyed by them that one match I just spend time recording them doing inane stuff, then making a satire post on the forums with the title "I think <annoying player> is cheating for no other reason than that they are a decent player, video proof included". In the post I linked to the video saying something like "video proof that they are doing normal stuff, but I am still going to say they cheat".
Of course, they didn't get the hint and thought I was actually accusing them of cheating instead of holding up a mirror. A lot of other players did get a good laugh out of it though :)
As someone who was around for the good old days, old-school servers have many, many blind spots.
Granted, there were positives to the model, and I do believe that server browsers are good for games with low populations, but matchmaking didn't become the default multiplayer approach for no reason.
That is precisely my “hot take” too.
Cheating is only a problem because the stakes are high, with global ladders and “prestige” tied to it.
Smaller server/lobbies can self-moderate way more effectively and the incentive to cheat is lower as well.
That’s seems like rose tinted glasses. There were a lot of hackers in the old cs lobby days.
Also, it’s just not how BRs work. You need a lot of players for BR, and most of them will die in the first few minutes. In a lobby system, most players by definition will spend all of their time doing nothing but being dead. It works as is because you die and can immediately go back to matchmaking.
I play a lot of DayZ. The good community servers have almost no hackers (I can recall one encounter over hundreds of hours on a particular community server). It also helps that there's not competitive MMR. But there are items that can take many hours to acquire and are easy to lose if you're not good enough.
That you know of.
Now, I doubt this exists for DayZ but AFAIK the big FPS games have hacks that avoid server side AI ban detection by snapping the reticle to head etc. in ways that conform to human limits such that they don't stand out when evaluating user telemetry. That kind of stuff is never going to be caught by server admins.
I think it really helps that the game is rogue-lite. There's less incentive to cheat. Everything resets when you die. In Tarkov you have your stash. In CS you have your MMR. In DayZ there is nothing except what you can carry. It's mostly about having a good time and not about racking up kills.
I think the reliance on large servers to minimize dead time a weakness/poor game design of a BR. If your only option is to join a new match, it will either end up with friends being split up or waiting around for each other. Also, as the game's popularity declines, the experience declines dramatically.
It is what it is. It's both a plus and a minus of the genre, but it's neither inherently worse nor better than any other model. It's just what makes it different. A lot of what people like about BRs is that ephemerality - it's like a mix between an open lobby and 5v5 competitive matchmaking.
The funny thing is that BR games don't even benefit that much from skill-based matchmaking.
If every player is equally as good as you, that means you're going to die in 50% of engagements. Which is going to be massively unfun.
At least from what I've seen in Fortnite (mostly cross-platform squads), there's a huge disparity in matches, ranging from "can't hit me with a shotgun when I'm standing still 10ft away" to "can snipe me from 2/3 across the map".
I sort of quit Counter Strike when the privately hosted lobbies were dead. They were still around, just very few actually managed well or interesting enough.
It solves so much but it can't be monetized well so it totally makes sense they're gone.
What exactly do you mean by privately hosted lobbies?
You can still host LAN/private games with friends, and you can even create a private matchmaking queue with a shared code as access (which in theory could be used by a community to soft ban suspicious players).
Ofc these games won't affect your rating or give xp for drops, but who cares.
By default, Counter Strike had hosted lobbies rather than matchmaking. Matchmaking came much later, or through ESEA, but wasn't the main method of joining games. I haven't tried CS2 yet, but almost all servers I'd join on CSGO ultimately met their end. Either through reduced player count or rampant cheating. In fact, a lot of these lobbies are specifically for cheater versus cheater modes.
While it still exists, it's a shell of its former self. Entire communities were made on surf maps, or clan servers. Matchmaking is turning it into a one and done, where your teammates might as well be NPCs that you'll never see again after the match is done.
I know I'm "back in the day"ing, but matchmaking truly changed the environment. And in my opinion, for the worse.
I'll quote my reply from the other thread:
It would be fine for me, because I don't really play overly competitive games but it would be a bitter pill to swallow for many imo.
See, here's the other thing. That's why they invented votekick. Did it suck if you got voted out just for legit play? Yea. But it was also a badge of honor.
Oh, and with skill-based matchmaking, that problem solves itself.
How would you make this work with skill-based matchmaking?
You don't. The sorting hat of kicks and bans takes care of it.
And its kind of awesome. Because you might be getting absolutely steamrolled, but if you can get one solid kill against the person dominating the leaderboard, it feels better than winning a battle royale.
I don't see how kicks and bans create balanced matches. That is just a mechanism to keep out the riffraff.
Skill-based matchmaking is about assembling lobbies of players of a similar skill level. It's a fundamental component of the design of many modern competitive shooters, and there are many such games that I would never want to play without it.
And yes, I do remember "the good old days" of community hosted servers. Different approaches to multiplayer work better for different kinds of games. There is no magic "one size fits all" solution here. That's why the Battlefield games still offer a server browser while Overwatch uses matchmaking.
PuddleOfKittens explained it better here, but in essence I was rejecting the premise of skill-based matchmaking entirely. That users/admins would kick or ban people that were unfun to play with, regardless of skill disparity.
You're correct that different approaches work better for different games, but the majority of multiplayer games (especially big-studio titles) have abandoned player-run servers.
Unfortunately, this was kind of inevitable when Epic made EAC available but refused to enable it for Fortnite. It was clear that they didn't trust the implementation and didn't particularly care about making it more than a nerfed version of the Windows version.
As far as user-mode AC goes, CS:GO used to have a good reputation for their anti-cheating measures but seem to have completely lost it on the move to CS2. Overwatch (the game, not the CS review program) seems to be a better example currently; I can't recall seeing cheaters at all, although it might be biased by the fact that various abilities can counter good aim.
People say that cheaters just turn to subtle cheats, with mouse corrections that are realistic and inaccurate enough to mimic human movements. But personally, if a cheater's aim is weak enough that I don't even suspect they're cheating, it doesn't really ruin my experience. MMR will just place them in lobbies where their "enhanced" aim is completely normal, so they're kind of playing themselves.
The problem is that there is a massive chasm between "average player aim" and "pro player aim" and it takes thousands of hours of practice to cross it. What look like normal tracking or flick shots for a pro Overwatch or Counter-Strike player can look indistinguishable from cheating to a low ranked player. There's a lot of space in the middle there for cheaters to occupy.
Often the best indication that someone is cheating is not the specifics of their aim, but rather a bizarre disparity between their aiming skill and other factors like game sense.
I don't ever remember CS:GO having a good reputation for VAC, but maybe it's better than CS2 (I've never played CS2). There were certainly cheaters and VAC waves and then logging on to confirm my suspicions that someone in my games had been banned, I remember that. But the ban waves came every once in a while, so between them, there were plenty of cheaters. And plenty of cheaters soon after a ban wave.
My bet is that we see Steam transition the deck OS to some sort of locked down and completely signed version of Linux in the future. That would be step one to creating a kernel anti-cheat on Linux. Otherwise long term it’s hard to see big multiplayer FPS titles staying on Linux.
A signed version of Linux wouldn't be that much better, if the concern is transparency - Linux's source code won't disappear and the entire point of anti-cheat is creating a TPM via obscurity.
Being able to reliably verify that you're running a Steam Deck, as well as being able to reliably ban a particular Steam Deck, would still be a good thing, at least from the anti-cheat's perspective.
Well I think the anti cheat on Linux would need to be a proprietary kernel module but it would also need a system where the kernel, modules, and associated system libraries are signed by someone like Valve.
Seems like it was a thoughtful decision, and the reasoning makes sense. Cheating is the bane of multiplayer FPS on PC, so sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I think this decision is very reasonable.
Respawn really tried their best at having linux support, but in the end, sometimes things just aren't possible.
But it literally is possible - Valve does it just fine with CS2.
Just to echo what stu2b50 is saying, the cheating situation is really god awful in CS2. Most of the player base has been begging valve for kernel level anticheat, but they're not going to get it because of the steam deck, which runs linux. FACEIT is so popular mostly because of that issue.
I understand that kernel anticheat is a bitter pill to swallow, and it would be great if less obtrusive, server side methods were as, or more effective, but they really just aren't. Kernel anticheat isn't a panacea; cheating still happens in games that implement them, but it significantly raises the barrier for cheat developers, which means cheats become much more expensive to develop and purchase, and thus less prevalent in those games.
I didn't experience any cheaters last time I played CS2, but I haven't played in a few months and also maybe the problem is larger on other continents.
Do you actually have any hard evidence that kernel-level anticheat makes a big difference? Besides "Valorant has feature X, Valorant is better than CS2 at this, therefore if CS2 has feature X then CS2 will be better like Valorant is".
An alternative explanation is that maybe Valorant is harder to hack because it's far newer code (and thus cheaters have had less time to document it), with an engine built around newer anticheat concepts than CSGO was in ~2011, with a smaller playerbase that is therefore less lucrative to write cheats for.
Kernel anticheat isn't a bitter pill for me to swallow, though - I'm running Linux, every game with kernel-level anticheat just means I outright can't play it. So, cards on the table, I'll get completely shafted again so I'm pretty militantly against it, personally.
What really bugs me is that the discussion is so narrow - nobody seems to talk about social solutions. The cause of cheaters is ultimately the current matchmaking paradigm, i.e. complete strangers on un-owned admin-less servers. Those are some harsh constraints on future solutions, and aren't even fundamental to the problem of balanced matches. Nobody talks about matchmaking paradigms, everyone talks about kernel-level anticheats.
The real problem here is symmetry. An insistence that every match be 5v5 with equal resources on each team and also balanced, which then requires both teams be the same collective skill level, which then requires a large player pool to keep queue-times reasonably low.
Large player pool requirements means games are ride-or-die on being 10k-concurrent-player successes which requires large marketing budgets and blandly safe design choices, not to mention millions of dollars to pay for the ongoing anticheat teams and matchmaking servers. This is awful, even without considering anticheat.
(There are also more straightforward solutions to anticheat, like doing a Korea and requiring a govt ID card to sign up,then fining cheaters in-person. Cheap and effective, but socially contentious when we can "just" force everyone to install a rootkit from EA/Ubisoft/etc on their computer.)
If it's really such a concern, just don't let people play in for-money matches on Linux. They can obviously tell the OS, so just put the Linux people together first, the same way they cluster console and PC users separately.
The funny thing is that outside of Fortinite, I don't have a vested interest. It's just that I hate forced OS hemogeny under the premise of "security".
I'm pretty sure pro CS tournaments already have dedicated PCs not owned by the competitors, which means it doesn't even matter what the OS is, outside of configuration settings. That's really missing the point though - cheats matter for the average player, because playing against aimbotters sucks. And outside of the pro CS tournaments, even if there is a money prize, it's not actually about the money, it's about the winning.
The point is though, theoretically skill-based matchmaking takes care of the aimbot problem over time anyway. And if 'Linux has so many cheaters' is real, lumping all the Linux players together also solves the problem.
I'm betting there is a far higher percieved number of aimbots than reality though. Aim in FPS is transferable in a way that gamesense is not. There a lot of us who have really good aim, but shit MMR in CS because we're bad at most other aspects of the game.
I think we could almost eliminate cheating by simply offering a dev-tuned aim assist, the way they do for console players. That'll let devs put them in a silent matchmaking sorting hat while eliminating most of the market for cheat sellers.
By fine tuning the aim assist to be 'just barely good enough' it chould actually increase the fun level across the board by eliminating the bottom-tier, while still leaving room for human improvement.
I don't have hard evidence besides what the gaming companies themselves have released on it.
Riot has released some pretty compelling https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/ on the results of enabling vanguard on league of legends. Independently verifiable data is going to be close to non-existent in this area, because the specific usage data and implimentaton details of anti cheat measures are some of the most closely guarded IP in the games industry.
Anecdotally, if you compare the prevelence of cheaters in riot's games versus just about any other popular competitive games, even ones released after league/valorant, you can tell a difference.
Also, you can look for yourself to try to find working valorant cheats versus CS:GO cheats. The cheaters themselves are saying on their forums how much more expensive and hard to find valorant cheats are.
A lot of people have said that riot's approach is "lazy", as if it's somehow the easy way out, but it's really quite the opposite. Riot made massive investments in anti cheat, and are far more effective at it because of those investments. It sucks that that effectiveness comes at the price of invasiveness and compatibility, but fundamentally, this is an inevitable result of the principle that if you don't control the endpoints, you cannot guarantee that they're doing what they say they are.
I wish there were a better way around this, but there really doesn't seem to be. Valve made a noble effort, but a lot of people seem to view "AI" as some sort of magic dust that can divine the difference between legitimate player actions and cheating, but it really cannot in a reliable way.
It also means the consequences of cheats getting caught are often bigger:
The business case for cheats often just falls apart in addition to the stronger protections against many of the potential cheats themselves.
It’s really not fine. The amount of cheaters in CS2 is abysmal compared to valorant, and it’s really noticeable since the two games share so many elements.
It’s one of the biggest complaints about the games anywhere you look.
Another nail in the Linux gaming coffin. For all the work valve does these huge corpos still manage to light Linux on fire.
*Multiplayer gaming coffin
Singleplayer games keep working great, and in that sense Linux gaming is very much alive (which perfectly fits my interests since I only play singleplayer games anyway).
I'm really glad how gaming on Linux developed in the past nine years.
Yeah, it's gone from an expectation that a game won't work, (looking at my collection of Loki games CDs), to an expectation that they will.
Playing everything from Monster Hunter Rise, World and Wilds, to Lies Of P, all the Souls games, all my favourites right there on my Linux installation. Haven't run Windows in over 10 years.
I too give not one fig for competitive multi player, though I do worry that games will slowly creep towards implementing spiteful incompatibilities, and that right now, we might have passed the peak for compatibility, and we're starting to go down hill.
I hope I'm wrong.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Amusingly,
RMS apparently never said this.
GNU/Linux is a terrible name. The point of a name is to be a memorable reference, and people have a hard enough understanding of what an OS is, let alone WTF "GNU/Linux" means. You have to explain:
For a political advocacy group, the FSF really suck at effective communication.
In summary: we should all use the name "Linux" because names are functional items. Anyone who disagrees: fight me.
See also "free software".
You know very well that most people will read that as "zero cost software" because that's by far the most common way for English speakers to use "free" applied to an inanimate thing.
I find his actual reply even funnier tbh.