MACRO cheats? No Recoil etc

[Mesai]

That's the sad reality, all these kids and jocks particularly in NA actually believe its their own skill when AA overrides their stick half the time and pulls for them in the right direction. Its sad af and Respawn has normalised it. Their justification is to make it fair for those that not in Controller? Why cant all PC players be forced to use mnk and leave rollers to console then? there no need to narrow the skill gap just because someone isnt good enough or too lazy to improve mnk and like all things abuse AA which in its current state is absolutely broken to a point most if not all of the best mnk has made a switch (Imperialhal). Why make an artificial medium that destroys the skill ceiling and makes a mockery for competitive integrity?

Simple answer - Respawn / EA dont give a toss, all they care about is keeping it popular and making money. Even if it has to appease the masses to maintain cash flow. Money to be made for them and the cheaters/hackers.

It’s funny because, in Apex, AA on PC is stronger than on console (I believe it’s like this in some other games too), to the point where the top pro players mostly run controller, which means that an mnk player would need to be godly just to match them.

Do what you want for casual/quick play but ranked should be stricter.

 

[Felon]

no it doesnt really. can give loads of eg to. cod battlefield

The devs that make games like Battlefield don't care that much about cheaters, because of how their revenue is generated - people buy the game once, and the money is made. They're also not competitive shooters with gigantic tournaments, so there's no real incentive for the devs to care that much, once the game has been sold - and we see this with the insane amount of cheating in Battlefield still present, especially cheats which are very easy to stop.

The devs that make highly competitive games such as CSGO, Valorant, DOTA, LoL etc - absolutely care about cheaters, and spend insane amounts of money stopping them, because those games are free to play for the most part, and also generate huge esports tournaments, so they need to focus on anti-cheat to keep the game as clean as possible.

Community run servers though actually don't have to be that expensive if done right (for some reason the big companies can't seem to get it right) many collectives of players will happily fund their own instances, and the admins given the tools to identify likely cheaters, sure there will be some mad power trip admins, etc.

It's a Friday night in EU-West, and your online game currently has 2.5 million players - how would you begin to design and administer a system of community run servers, at that scale - whilst delivering a consistent, high quality experience?

 

[Rroff]

It's a Friday night in EU-West, and your online game currently has 2.5 million players - how would you begin to design and administer a system of community run servers, at that scale - whilst delivering a consistent, high quality experience?

You seem to be reducing this down to extremes of where it has to be one or the other - people are looking for a vast range of experiences. If the right groundwork is there the community will scale as needed and if the options are there it doesn't matter too much if some community servers are badly run as people will just find somewhere which suits their needs, or even start their own community to provide what they consider a better experience - there is nothing stopping that being part of a wider approaching including matchmaking, etc. as done by games like Quake Live.

 

[Kyo]

It’s funny because, in Apex, AA on PC is stronger than on console (I believe it’s like this in some other games too), to the point where the top pro players mostly run controller, which means that an mnk player would need to be godly just to match them.

Do what you want for casual/quick play but ranked should be stricter.

Its not PC has 0.4 (40% aimbot) where as console has 0.6 (60% aimbot) the slightly stronger aimbot (their logic) is compensate the console inferior hardware and frames. The whole reason everyone on PC is abusing roller is yes its possible to be better on mnk with movement etc but you would need to be at the top of your abilities and its next to impossible to maintain that level for any length of time. Roller will always maintain a very high degree with not nearly as much effort (most play on their couch) and will always way be consistent on mnk. A person with maybe 100 hours on roller can mostly not only complete but exceed someone with 1000 hours on mnk.

If you perfect the use of the roller you will see why people abuse it over mnk. See for yourself.

 

[Felon]

You seem to be reducing this down to extremes of where it has to be one or the other - people are looking for a vast range of experiences.

Well - most of the games being talked about here are massive, games like CSGO, LoL, Valorant, The Finals - the battlefields, cods have hundreds of thousands, or millions of players in games at any point, especially in large regions like the EU, and NA West coast, you critisise the 'big companies' for getting it wrong, (and many of them do).

But you can only solve a technical problem like this, by breaking it down and understanding the fundamental root-cause - and the reality is that with many of these games, there are just too many people for any sort of human beings to be involved at any level with banning cheaters at scale - it just can't be done effectively.

CS:GO's Overwatch system for me, was the best attempt with human intervention, but like I say - 95% of those cases were blatant spinbots, the others VAC got right anyway - so it's just a waste of people's time looking at them, have machines solve that problem.

 

[Rroff]

just too many people for any sort of human beings to be involved at any level with banning cheaters at scale - it just can't be done effectively.

The problem is you and these companies are looking at it as it having to be one solution or the other, with humans it just scales as long as you have the backbone there to connect people together and spin off matchmaking, etc. if necessary. Communities will spin up individually catering for potentially into the 1000s of players each (take City of Heroes Homecoming for example).

 

[~>Dg<~]

The devs that make games like Battlefield don't care that much about cheaters, because of how their revenue is generated - people buy the game once, and the money is made. They're also not competitive shooters with gigantic tournaments, so there's no real incentive for the devs to care that much, once the game has been sold - and we see this with the insane amount of cheating in Battlefield still present, especially cheats which are very easy to stop.

The devs that make highly competitive games such as CSGO, Valorant, DOTA, LoL etc - absolutely care about cheaters, and spend insane amounts of money stopping them, because those games are free to play for the most part, and also generate huge esports tournaments, so they need to focus on anti-cheat to keep the game as clean as possible.



It's a Friday night in EU-West, and your online game currently has 2.5 million players - how would you begin to design and administer a system of community run servers, at that scale - whilst delivering a consistent, high quality experience?

not the devs. they make the games. this comes from above. you dont seem to understand. csgo has massive cheating issues. you literally cant play free its that bad. tournaments competitive got nothing to do with it. i suspect or would wager that most devs do indeed care about cheats but its not upto them.

all the big games have servers monitoring every type of play going. thats how they keep a eye on their game. they know by algorithms whats dodgy or not. its all about cost. this is why some games like csgo for eg charge so you can get a better anticheat experience. tbh i bet if you offered this is other games many others wouldnt mind paying knowing their is better protection.

remember some of these companies are worth multiple billions. they have the money the tech its all down to how much it will cost to make it better and most dont want to pay that out of the potential earnings.

 

[Felon]

The problem is you and these companies are looking at it as it having to be one solution or the other, with humans it just scales as long as you have the backbone there to connect people together and spin off matchmaking, etc.

I want a solution that works for players.

Of all the anti-cheat talks and discussions I went to when working in the industry - the one thing that stood out the most for me was the feeling of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'

When you have a game full of cheaters, the community go absolutely mental and don't let up - and for good reason, some people play these games for a living for large amounts of real money and when they lose to cheaters, we get the full force of it on social media and everywhere else.

Then when we do what's asked - and build a system which works really well at huge cost, most people are happy - but you can't please everyone, there's always some weird subset of people who simply have to complain.

Communities will spin up individually catering for potentially into the 1000s of players each (take City of Heroes Homecoming for example).

I'd be willing to bet that City of Heroes isn't full of people using spinbots, wallhacks, hardware hacks, smurfs and boosters.

all the big games have servers monitoring every type of play going. thats how they keep a eye on their game. they know by algorithms whats dodgy or not.

Very few companies are running anything like this, it's too expensive - games like Apex, Battlefield and COD - there's literally nothing like that - just very basic anti-cheat, which is stupid because many of the cheats in those games can easily be stopped with little effort.

 

[Rroff]

I'd be willing to bet that City of Heroes isn't full of people using spinbots, wallhacks, hardware hacks, smurfs and boosters.

It has its own issues but that is beside the point - if the right backbone is there for communities to build from it scales with demand - there will always be people willing to moderate a server, etc. and communities which cater for different player wants. CoH has a relatively small audience but you've got entities who'll spend 1000s a month and 100s of people supporting it and that will happen again and again as the population size scales up with demand.

Problem is you and those companies are seeing it as having to be one way or another to provide a consistent and high quality experience, but it doesn't. As long as the backbone is there and some limits are defined the players themselves will work out what they want and then matchmaking is there as a fallback.

 

[~>Dg<~]

I want a solution that works for players.

Of all the anti-cheat talks and discussions I went to when working in the industry - the one thing that stood out the most for me was the feeling of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'

When you have a game full of cheaters, the community go absolutely mental and don't let up - and for good reason, some people play these games for a living for large amounts of real money and when they lose to cheaters, we get the full force of it on social media and everywhere else.

Then when we do what's asked - and build a system which works really well at huge cost, most people are happy - but you can't please everyone, there's always some weird subset of people who simply have to complain.



I'd be willing to bet that City of Heroes isn't full of people using spinbots, wallhacks, hardware hacks, smurfs and boosters.



Very few companies are running anything like this, it's too expensive - games like Apex, Battlefield and COD - there's literally nothing like that - just very basic anti-cheat, which is stupid because many of the cheats in those games can easily be stopped with little effort.

you dont know anything then do you. pubg does it. cod does it. apex does. to mention a few.

 

[Felon]

you dont know anything then do you. pubg does it. cod does it. apex does.

No they don't, they do literally nothing.

(which is why these games are crawling with rage-hackers, which are very easy to prevent)

When you work in the industry, you learn a lot about how these things work, what's possible - who's doing what and how. And I worked for many years in the Esports industry, and still do indirectly.

It has its own issues but that is beside the point - if the right backbone is there for communities to build from it scales with demand - there will always be people willing to moderate a server, etc. and communities which cater for different player wants. CoH has a relatively small audience but you've got entities who'll spend 1000s a month and 100s of people supporting it and that will happen again and again as the population size scales up with demand.

I mean, if you're a 'large' company, like EA or Blizzard or something, and you release a large multiplayer game, on crunch day - you're looking at several million people all playing at once, literally 0 to 5 million in the space of a few hours, your idea of community run servers and people 'jumping in' to help, will never ever work.

Of course it'll work on a very small scale, (thousands) but once you scale up to millions - you need automation, data science and AI - you'll have to take it from me, there's no other way to be effective, because I've been there - I've done it, I've seen it get built, implemented and watched it work.

Any other system, or system that relies on manual human beings reviewing and checking things is going to be a drop in the ocean, when it comes down to actual effectiveness.

 

[Rroff]

I mean, if you're a 'large' company, like EA or Blizzard or something, and you release a large multiplayer game, on crunch day - you're looking at several million people all playing at once, your idea of community run servers and people 'jumping in' to help, will never ever work.

Of course it'll work on a very small scale, (thousands) but once you scale up to millions - you need automation, data science and AI - you'll have to take it from me, there's no other way to be effective.

Any other system is going to be a drop in the ocean, when it comes down to actual effectiveness.

Yes day 1 is going to be different, it always is, unless you enlist the community at large in a campaign up to launch with beta testing to ready a significant community offering for launch. But it grows from there and quickly. Almost everyone is finding their feet on day 1 things will change from there. Which is why you need to embrace more than one approach rather than see the solution as being in one thing or another in black and white.

 

[~>Dg<~]

No they don't, they do literally nothing.

(which is why these games are crawling with rage-hackers, which are very easy to prevent)

When you work in the industry, you learn a lot about how these things work, what's possible - who's doing what and how. And I worked for many years in the Esports industry, and still do indirectly.



I mean, if you're a 'large' company, like EA or Blizzard or something, and you release a large multiplayer game, on crunch day - you're looking at several million people all playing at once, literally 0 to 5 million in the space of a few hours, your idea of community run servers and people 'jumping in' to help, will never ever work.

Of course it'll work on a very small scale, (thousands) but once you scale up to millions - you need automation, data science and AI - you'll have to take it from me, there's no other way to be effective, because I've been there - I've done it, I've seen it get built, implemented and watched it work.

Any other system, or system that relies on manual human beings reviewing and checking things is going to be a drop in the ocean, when it comes down to actual effectiveness.

they monitor with algorithms . they know whats happening. cod does it. pubg does it. apex does it. to name but a few they even done articles about it . how do you think they guage what people want its based on what they do which is monitored. theres been websites doing it for god knows how long in multiple games.

 

[Grim5]

New monitors with AI 'radar' for enemy detection

MSI's AI-powered gaming monitor helps you cheat at 'League of Legends,' looks great doing it

MSI's MEG 321URX QD-OLED uses built-in AI to flag enemy positions for you.

www.tomshardware.com

And it's undetectable lmao - it's software that runs on the monitor as a post processing effect completely outside Windows, impossible to detect

 

[Felon]

Yes day 1 is going to be different, it always is, unless you enlist the community at large in a campaign up to launch with beta testing to ready a significant community offering for launch. But it grows from there and quickly.

Picture the scene - you get asked to go into a meeting, 'how do we tackle anti-cheat?'

"We should elist the community at large in a campaign to launch with beta testing, to ready a significant community offering for launch"

"Okay - how's that going to work, with 3 million toxic, raging 14 year old kids, who just want to 'get gud'? - (the majority of our playerbase)"



You see the problem?

they monitor with algorithms . they know whats happening. cod does it. pubg does it. apex does it. to name but a few they even done articles about it . how do you think they guage what people want its based on what they do which is monitored. theres been websites doing it for god knows how long in multiple games.

That doesn't mean squat to be honest, just hyperbole.

'they run algorithms' what algorithms? algorithms that do what? that's just a load of fluff.

 

[Rroff]

Picture the scene - you get asked to go into a meeting, 'how do we tackle anti-cheat?'

"We should elist the community at large in a campaign to launch with beta testing, to ready a significant community offering for launch"

"Okay - how's that going to work, with 3 million toxic, raging 14 year old kids, who just want to 'get gud'? - (the majority of our playerbase)"



You see the problem?

No I don't see the problem.

I'm not talking from a position of inexperience - I was a co-founding member of https://gspreviews.com/escapedturkey-com (sadly no longer exists after the owner sold the company) which in the early 2000s was one of the larger game hosting companies in North America, possibly the largest for awhile, and we supported quite a few new game launches directly with the publishers.

 

[Felon]

No I don't see the problem.

Think it through:

How are you going to manage the required number of community members to run this, for a game that's going to have several million players, in a competitive setting, across 100k-200k servers, globally across 8x regions?

 

[Rroff]

Think it through:

How are you going to manage the required number of community members to run this, for a game that's going to have several million players, in a competitive setting, across 100k-200k servers, globally across 8x regions?

As I said you are thinking this as having to be one solution or another, it doesn't. You also don't need to be actively managing community members - build the backbone product and define the limits they can operate within and you can leave it to the community to grow, and it will quickly. The more legitimate players will start to coalesce into regular groups where those players looking for a higher quality experience will find their way to, this can feed into a higher level competitive scene which will be more compartmentalised than the lower levels and operate to a different approach again if necessary.

EDIT: The bigger problem here really is that the studio/publisher execs typically are businessmen through and through these days and just want a one cut and dried solution.

 

[Felon]

As I said you are thinking this as having to be one solution or another, it doesn't.

I'm thinking we need something that works...

build the backbone product and define the limits they can operate within and you can leave it to the community to grow, and it will quickly. The more legitimate players will start to coalesce into regular groups where those players looking for a higher quality experience will find their way to, this can feed into a higher level competitive scene which will be more compartmentalised than the lower levels and operate to a different approach again if necessary.

This is a terrible idea, because it creates a two-tier inconsistent system where some players get a good experience, and others (beginners or new players) have a terrible experience, because they have to work their way to the 'top' to get away from all of the spinbots and rage-hackers.

And to be fair, this (or similar system) has already been tried and ultimately failed, CSGO overwatch - where high ranked competitive players review suspected cheaters and ban them on the spot, now defunct and has been replaced with automation AFAIK.

The first problem is - the level of cheating in these games is through the roof, the system gets completely overwhelmed - you don't have enough people available to review and 'community police' the cheaters, in some cases it's tens of thousands per week.

The second problem, is the vast majority (90%) of the cheaters - can easily be banned with automation, so why waste time and money on a gigantic team of humans (and it would have to be gigantic) to manually check everything, when you can easily give that job to a machine?

 

[Rroff]

I'm thinking we need something that works...



This is a terrible idea, because it creates a two-tier inconsistent system where some players get a good experience, and others (beginners or new players) have a terrible experience.

And to be fair, this (or similar system) has already been tried and ultimately failed, CSGO overwatch - where high ranked competitive players review suspected cheaters and ban them on the spot, now defunct and has been replaced with automation AFAIK.

The first problem is - the level of cheating in these games is through the roof, the system gets completely overwhelmed - you don't have enough people available to review and 'community police' the cheaters, any system is swamped with the volume of offenders - you can't have enough people willing to sit through and review all of the cases, in some cases it's tens of thousands per week.

The second problem, is the vast majority (90%) of the cheaters - can easily be banned with automation, so why waste time and money on a gigantic team of humans (and it would have to be gigantic) to manually check everything, when you can easily give that job to a machine?

It creates a many tiered system, but it gives players the experience they want, or deserve.

It is nothing like a system where high ranked competitive players, or anyone in the community, has the ability to outright ban a player, but does mean disruptive players can be removed from individual communities.

The system naturally evolves to where players who just want a clean, more fun than ultra competitive, gaming experience have their own space, those more competitive have their own space and those cheating tend to effectively end up shadow banned, a situation current machine systems do not enable, some players can be disruptive not just from cheating but in other ways as well which machine systems won't catch on to.

Problem is you are persistently seeing this as having to be one solution or the other - not how you can use the strengths of the different systems without necessarily having to have everything including the negatives of that system.

EDIT: The experience with many newer games that try to do what you say is just horrible, one of the reasons I've gravitated away from multiplayer FPS to playing stuff like The Division (coop/PVE), etc. or older games where decent community run servers are still active enough.