alt Hacker NewsI think that’s a choice people can make for themselves. Thing is, cheating is an existential threat to the entire business model. Games like Valorant rely on a player base that keeps coming back, and a competitive scene where if you work hard, you can move up the ranks and maybe even make money one day. Players quit over cheating. You log in, you play hard and good, but you just can’t win because there are cheaters. These are games you’re trying to be good at… It’s incredibly demoralizing. Happens enough times, and you’ll find a different game not plagued by the same issue. And then your game is dead. You make money off it being a live service, and so maybe your business is dead too.
So it makes a lot of sense for a company releasing a new FPS game centered around competitive gaming to pull out all the stops to prevent that issue.
Now, the bigger question here is why can I play a game like Overwatch 2 on Linux, but not Valorant? Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem? If not, then Valorant should take a look at why their anticheat is just as effective without requiring kernel access.
Replies
> Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem?
Yes, considerably.
One can also look at Counterstrike running on Valve's matchmaking which uses userland cheat detection versus Faceit's kernel level anticheats for the exact same game. It's been incredibly rare for me to run into obvious cheaters on Faceit but I'll often run into cheaters in Valve's matchmaking. It's the same game, the same executables.
> I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves.
Users do not have meaningful choice. On most games that use Anticheat, it is required to play the game. I can’t choose to use a non-anticheat version of games. It’s either submit to it or don’t play. Not much of a meaningful choice.
Overwatch is a bit different though , it's not a pure hitscan fps such as valorant, cs or r6. Cheats in Overwatch are not as useful because the gameplay is different from other fps.