It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.

It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating.

I think there's a few reasons for this:

1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently.

2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games usually have several spectators.

You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way.

Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior.

3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in every game. The entire community has access to all the recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and everyone can see what happened.

4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating. There are official moderators that do the banning, but also volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official moderators have an easier job.

I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well

I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.

I don't need gaming that much.

And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud service.

Most games will share all the data with every client which makes it trivial to display positions of every enemy on the map. It's just convenient for developers.

In games like Tarkov, once you spawn in, your client gets all the information that possible - positions of players, their names, equipment, contents of every single container on the map.

Tarkov is not the best example, because the netcode is terrible, and the architecure is a joke - you can loot everything on the map with a keystroke, and kill anyone with another, but other games are not better.

Even in Valorant, which makes an extra effort to only send data relevant to the player - ie. data about player that you are about to see - you can use that to see around the corners.

It might only be a few percent of overall users. But a few percent of a billion $ is a couple of tens of millions. That's a steep price to pay for anti-cheat code.

I don’t want any cheaters in my games. I don’t care if a rootkit is required. Riot has a kernel level anti-cheat and it’s _really_ good. It’s so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even trying. This is the dream for anyone who wants fair games.

I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas, no more Windows for me.

I cannot stress enough how much I do not give a shit about anti-cheat, and how thoroughly fed up I am with poorly conceived and ill executed malware being installed on my computer, holding games I own hostage in the name of stopping cheaters that I don’t care about it.

Anti-cheat should be opt-in.

And if nothing works you can always build a robot pushing mouse, buttons, etc.

Of course you can raise the bar, but if anything has been shown it's that cheating is not something that anyone has been able to prevent yet.

In many situations you can also interfere on the packet level. Of course maybe you need to extract some key, but in many situations that's not exactly hard. And then you can hook something into network.