Kai Thomas (Tiger)

My take on cheating in multiplayer games right now: There are so many people playing multiplayer games that want to perform in them that have money to spend, which has created a multi-million dollar industry. The players' demand created the industry. Many want to win, and can easily rationalize it. They know it's wrong, but they don't care, winning is subjectively fun to them for 100s of different reasons. 150€/month for an undetected cheat is worth it to many of them. The average gamer's suggestions "IPBAN" "HWBAN" etc. were easily bypassed by cheats 10 years ago (or more). Nothing that 99.9% of laymen can think of will be a valid solution against cheats. The level of sophistication in cheats are on the level where the most advanced kernel level anti-cheats are now bypassed through hardware emulating hardware (like a fake mouse that is seen by the system as an actual mouse, but is actually a hardware cheat). These types of cheats were used to bypass Valorant AC for example. Many of the better cheats aren't visible on any screen recording software/monitor, and they aren't even run in the same memory space that the main OS is using, but interacts through other spaces, and piggybacks through drivers/windows services. (You can (for example) use a webcam & mouse combo that use external software that reads the computer screen and automatically moves the mouse & triggers it when the webcam detects a head of a player model.) While anti-cheats developers are also improving, and using more advanced AI-driven (learning) systems, these methods are also being used by cheat-developers. At a fundamental level, we continue to see: AC-makes an advancement, followed by a new bypass. The length of time between AC to subscription services bypassing that detection are shorter. While the often suggested method to "simply" base anti-cheats from player stats are harder to accomplish, because methods exists to simulate the stats of the best players and stay within what is an humanly achievable interval. Meaning: the cheats can "dumb" themselves down to peak human level performance. The combination of data, AI-driven detection methods, research on how cheats work, and counters to their counters is what is being done currently. It's an ongoing struggle that will keep on going down repeatedly until: a) Legislation takes cheating and cheat development seriously (only select countries are making progress on this). Given how much money and resources are spent by these big companies to counteract this, I believe it's a matter of time before it will become more commonplace. Perhaps also identification needs to become a part of at least esports/competitive gaming. b) Game developers might need to take a strong stance when it comes to dealing with cheaters that might hurt SOME who play fairly (there will never be a 100% foolproof anti-cheat). For instance, already back when I used BattlEye for my ARMA2-servers, I could choose to automatically ban a new player who had a previous VAC-ban for another game. I'm not saying that your cheat on Half-Life multiplayer 25 years ago needs to permaban you from every future game, but if your Steam-history has a cheat-history, also, if your Steam account was created yesterday, maybe you won't get matched with someone with a spotless account? [obviously does not apply to games not on steam, just a way to legitimize via Steam]. Right now a lot of gaming companies are (for good reason) hesitant to take strong stances against this out of fear for false-positive backlash, but they're at the same time taking a lot of flak for not doing enough. c) The ability to spectate and to create player reports from spectator-mode could be more common. Yes, this can't be used for every game (as many competitive multiplayer games would be ruined from instantaneous info on opposing teams/allegiance) - but it certainly could help. While recording stuff like this from every participating angle, and having the ability to see it from every POV is very demanding, using it on high-level events certainly is possible. Because multiplayer gaming is hear to stay, and because it continues to grow, it will (or maybe it already has?) come to a critical mass where something has to give. People are abandoning (some) multiplayer games because they feel they cannot trust the anti-cheats or the measures taken against cheaters. It's a tough situation. However, no one should be naïve enough or maintain an illusion that "cheaters should just stop cheating". This will never happen. If anything, the number of cheaters is more likely to increase alongside the expanding multiplayer games industry as long as the consequences for cheating aren't a negative enough deterrence. The only significant deterrances available are: * Personal identity bans. (Your identity is required to your in-game account) * Multi-game platform (ie. Steam) level account bans & trust-scores (e.g. new multi-game platform accounts have automatically lower trust-scores) * Legal consequences (fines for cheaters, class-action lawsuits against cheat-devs)