I have been playing video games since the very first ones. I played the very first FPS, Wolfenstein 3D. I was among the first players to experience FPS PVP when we installed Doom on a dozen or so computers in the college computer lab. I played UO, EQ, Unreal tournament, CS, and almost every single genre defining game since the 80's.
One thing that has remained constant through all this has been cheating. It has existed in varying degrees since PVP competition has existed. Some games are decent and some are really bad. Take PUBg. At the end of last year (2017), they had over 30 million accounts. At the same time, their anticheat had banned over 1.5 million of those (Citation). That's 1 cheater for every 20 players. That's not even taking into account the low profile cheaters that just gain a slight advantage, stay under the radar and never get caught.
As a long time player, you just get a feel for the hack/detection/ban cycle. It's like a tide actually. Someone generates a hack, it gets distributed, the hack detection patches against it, and tons of players disappear. The process then repeats over and over. Fresh after a ban wave, the game is amazing. Just before the ban wave though, it can be unplayable.
So why is it still such a huge problem? Why hasn't the collective game developer community found a solution? There are tons of things that could work, if they were implemented, but they almost never are. There are HID and IP bans, but they are hardly ever used. They can be bypassed, sure. But they take care of a huge amount of lazy "script kiddies". Those kids just want an easy download and most aren't willing to constantly go through the effort to bypass those bans. You can tell the games that use these methods vs ones that don't. It's a shocking difference.
Then you take Korean games. They port over to NA releases and are suddenly flooded with hacks. I was curious and looked into it one day. They get ported over with tons of available exploits. It's almost like they didn't even try. As I found out, that's because of the way Korea deals with hacks. They require an actual ID to make an account on most of their games. They decided to shut that shit down, and they did...
So hacking in Korean games are non existent over there. If they get caught cheating, their ACTUAL ID gets banned. So unless they get a fake ID (also a huge crime), they can get blacklisted for entire groups of games. So they don't even try. Hence when they get ported to another country, they are easy pickings for the cheats and script kiddies.
So why don't US companies follow suit? You already give them your credit card number, so giving a state ID number isn't a privacy issue. If it meant playing a cheater free game, I would GLADLY hand over my ID number. They can't do anything with it anyway except for preventing cheating in an actually effective manner.
Bringing it back to relevance, lets say SC releases with the usual anti-cheat. You would start running into the usual aimbots and wallhacks in the FPS portion. You would find triggerbots and AI in the ship combat. You would likely see them in the usual amounts and it will be a constant frustration for those that don't cheat. If mishandled, SC will take the road that so many other games take and end up with a bad reputation. All of the support and funding that we have put into the dreams of a great game will be ruined in the span of weeks. The game will die regardless of quality. Hackers ruin games. That is an unchangeable fact.
I think it would be absolutely negligent of CIG to make a revolutionary game without also dealing with this issue. It isn't sufficient to just deal with it though. It has to be dealt with in a manner that will SOLVE the issue instead of sweeping it under the rug. I don't want to see any half-hearted attempts like we usually get. These are merely designed to facilitate buying another copy. Hell, PUBg got an extra 1.5 million game sales and counting because they half-assed it.
The usual plan of attack is to hire a third party hack detection (so they can lay blame on them instead of taking responsibility). Then they completely downplay the situation. Forum posts are diverted or deleted. Situations are confronted with denial and misinformation. The real issue is minimized and everyone pretends it's not a problem (especially the cheaters themselves). However, the stark difference between playing the day before the anti-cheat patch and the day after the anti-cheat patch is immense. You suddenly feel like you are fighting on even ground. Hell, in some cases, the day after the ban wave you are absolutely unstoppable. Suddenly the 1-1 K/D that you struggled to keep turns into 2-1 or more. Overnight, you go from an average player to a great one. You start feeling like 1/20 is an understatement.
So what do you think? Do I stand alone in my hatred for cheaters? Has the rest of the PC gaming community just accepted them a fact of life? Do we want to allow this to continue to ruin our gaming experiences? Would you be willing to give up your illusion of anonymity for the sake of finally ending this stupidity by registering accounts to your actual ID?
TLDR: I fucking HATE hackers and script kiddies. They have, in some cases, single-handedly ruined games and continue ruining them to this day. This needs a real attempt to solve the issue instead of half-assing it like normal developers.
One thing that has remained constant through all this has been cheating. It has existed in varying degrees since PVP competition has existed. Some games are decent and some are really bad. Take PUBg. At the end of last year (2017), they had over 30 million accounts. At the same time, their anticheat had banned over 1.5 million of those (Citation). That's 1 cheater for every 20 players. That's not even taking into account the low profile cheaters that just gain a slight advantage, stay under the radar and never get caught.
As a long time player, you just get a feel for the hack/detection/ban cycle. It's like a tide actually. Someone generates a hack, it gets distributed, the hack detection patches against it, and tons of players disappear. The process then repeats over and over. Fresh after a ban wave, the game is amazing. Just before the ban wave though, it can be unplayable.
So why is it still such a huge problem? Why hasn't the collective game developer community found a solution? There are tons of things that could work, if they were implemented, but they almost never are. There are HID and IP bans, but they are hardly ever used. They can be bypassed, sure. But they take care of a huge amount of lazy "script kiddies". Those kids just want an easy download and most aren't willing to constantly go through the effort to bypass those bans. You can tell the games that use these methods vs ones that don't. It's a shocking difference.
Then you take Korean games. They port over to NA releases and are suddenly flooded with hacks. I was curious and looked into it one day. They get ported over with tons of available exploits. It's almost like they didn't even try. As I found out, that's because of the way Korea deals with hacks. They require an actual ID to make an account on most of their games. They decided to shut that shit down, and they did...
So hacking in Korean games are non existent over there. If they get caught cheating, their ACTUAL ID gets banned. So unless they get a fake ID (also a huge crime), they can get blacklisted for entire groups of games. So they don't even try. Hence when they get ported to another country, they are easy pickings for the cheats and script kiddies.
So why don't US companies follow suit? You already give them your credit card number, so giving a state ID number isn't a privacy issue. If it meant playing a cheater free game, I would GLADLY hand over my ID number. They can't do anything with it anyway except for preventing cheating in an actually effective manner.
Bringing it back to relevance, lets say SC releases with the usual anti-cheat. You would start running into the usual aimbots and wallhacks in the FPS portion. You would find triggerbots and AI in the ship combat. You would likely see them in the usual amounts and it will be a constant frustration for those that don't cheat. If mishandled, SC will take the road that so many other games take and end up with a bad reputation. All of the support and funding that we have put into the dreams of a great game will be ruined in the span of weeks. The game will die regardless of quality. Hackers ruin games. That is an unchangeable fact.
I think it would be absolutely negligent of CIG to make a revolutionary game without also dealing with this issue. It isn't sufficient to just deal with it though. It has to be dealt with in a manner that will SOLVE the issue instead of sweeping it under the rug. I don't want to see any half-hearted attempts like we usually get. These are merely designed to facilitate buying another copy. Hell, PUBg got an extra 1.5 million game sales and counting because they half-assed it.
The usual plan of attack is to hire a third party hack detection (so they can lay blame on them instead of taking responsibility). Then they completely downplay the situation. Forum posts are diverted or deleted. Situations are confronted with denial and misinformation. The real issue is minimized and everyone pretends it's not a problem (especially the cheaters themselves). However, the stark difference between playing the day before the anti-cheat patch and the day after the anti-cheat patch is immense. You suddenly feel like you are fighting on even ground. Hell, in some cases, the day after the ban wave you are absolutely unstoppable. Suddenly the 1-1 K/D that you struggled to keep turns into 2-1 or more. Overnight, you go from an average player to a great one. You start feeling like 1/20 is an understatement.
So what do you think? Do I stand alone in my hatred for cheaters? Has the rest of the PC gaming community just accepted them a fact of life? Do we want to allow this to continue to ruin our gaming experiences? Would you be willing to give up your illusion of anonymity for the sake of finally ending this stupidity by registering accounts to your actual ID?
TLDR: I fucking HATE hackers and script kiddies. They have, in some cases, single-handedly ruined games and continue ruining them to this day. This needs a real attempt to solve the issue instead of half-assing it like normal developers.
