alt Hacker NewsThese things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
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> These things do not prevent cheating at all.
I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.
That sounds like it does prevent cheating? But maybe doesn’t prevent ALL cheats. Or do you mean they work so poorly that it doesn’t make any difference at all?
Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
> These things do not prevent cheating at all.
Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"
They do prevent some cheating methods on Window, like blocking other processes from reading/writing game process memory.
That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating. Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now, we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort isn't free. Now, people have to pay for cheats. Guess what? Visa doesn't want to handle payment processing for your hacks & cheats business. So now you're using sketchy payment processors based out of a third-world country. Guess what else? People will create fake hacks & cheats websites that use those same payment processors, and will just take people's money and never deliver the cheats. You get to try to differentiate yourself from literal scammers, how are you going to do that? You can't put the Visa logo on your website. Because you're legit, and you don't want to get sued. Then, the anti-cheat adds heuristic detection for cheat processes. The anti-cheat company BUYS the cheats and reverse-engineers them and improves the heuristics. then the game company makes everyone sign up with a phone number, and permabans that phone number when they're caught cheating. Now some gamers don't want to risk getting banned. Saying that these factors simply don't exist or are insignificant is certainly one of the opinions of all time.