MACRO cheats? No Recoil etc

[Felon]

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

That sounds bad.

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.

That doesn't solve the problem though, your game is still going to be full of cheaters.

All you're doing is distributing them around, so most of them are in the 'low tier' but all you're doing is mixing them in with new players - which will kill your game from the start.

This is why automation and machine based anti-cheat has been so overwhelmingly successful, because it provides a consistent experience.

 

[Rroff]

That doesn't solve the problem though, your game is still going to be full of cheaters.

All you're doing is distributing them around, so most of them are in the 'low tier' but all you're doing is mixing them in with new players - which will kill your game from the start.

Full of cheaters doesn't matter if people have spaces they can get away from them and they will be quickly removed from, at least the ones disruptive enough to be noticed.

The new player experience is something which many developers either overlook or become distanced from the realities of, and the initial experience of encountering cheaters can result in someone leaving before they've found their way into better parts of the game, if that aspect isn't addressed, but it can be - as I've said you don't have to reduce this down to one system or the other - also increasingly new players would come in via communities introduced by friends, etc. already playing the game rather than naively into the game.

 

[Felon]

Full of cheaters doesn't matter if people have spaces they can get away from them and they will be quickly removed from, at least the ones disruptive enough to be noticed.

It's always going to matter - you realise that if you're not detecting all of the cheaters, in a game with millions of players - they'll find and infect every area and safe-space of your game in the first week.

How are you going to quickly remove them, when you're getting 40k blatant cheaters being reported every 5 days? who's going to do that work and how are you going to measure whether or not it's working?

 

[Rroff]

It's always going to matter - you realise that if you're not detecting all of the cheaters, in a game with millions of players - they'll find and infect every area and safe-space of your game in the first week.

How are you going to quickly remove them, when you're getting 40k blatant cheaters being reported every 5 days? who's going to do that work and how are you going to measure whether or not it's working?

That is entirely the point of the system I'm talking about - it provides a barrier to them being able to infect every area and safe-space of the game, they are removed at scale from community managed spaces - and those spaces grow (or shrink) with demand naturally.

EDIT: Also it doesn't mean you forgo some of the systems you've talked about so as to manage the experience - as I said this doesn't have to be one approach or the other as you seem to think, you can embrace the best bits from a variety of approaches.

 

[Felon]

That is entirely the point of the system I'm talking about - it provides a barrier to them being able to infect every area and safe-space of the game, they are removed at scale from community managed spaces - and those spaces grow (or shrink) with demand naturally.

How though?

How on earth do you do that, manually, in a game with millions of players? How do you successfully differentiate the 'good players' from the 'bad players', from the 'rage-hackers' ?

 

[Rroff]

How though?

How on earth do you do that, manually, in a game with millions of players? How do you successfully differentiate the 'good players' from the 'bad players', from the 'rage-hackers' ?

I don't think I can explain it to you - you can only see it in terms of having to be one of 2 fixed ways and can't see that certain things don't have to be the way you think of them - such as the new player experience having to be either one of unmanaged or managed in a very specific way.

 

[Felon]

I don't think I can explain it to you - you can only see it in terms of having to be one of 2 fixed ways and can't see that certain things don't have to be the way you think of them - such as the new player experience having to be either one of unmanaged or managed in a very specific way.

If you can't explain it - you don't understand it.

I understand exactly what you're saying conceptually - there's just a gigantic black hole in the middle of your idea, and that's the mechanism for how it's actually delivered and the mechanics of how it actually works.

 

[Rroff]

If you can't explain it - you don't understand it.

I understand exactly what you're saying conceptually - there's just a gigantic black hole in the middle of your idea, and that's the mechanism for how it's actually delivered and the mechanics of how it actually works.

I can explain it - I just don't think I can explain it in a way that will make sense to you. The system has worked for years it was just deprecated by many of the bigger companies as gaming took off to mass mainstream audiences in favour of a lower effort alternative and has never been integrated at scale with more modern systems but that isn't because it can't be, it is because of a lack of interest.

EDIT: Battlefield 4 to some extent operated a system like that, they just didn't embrace the full extent of it to make it entirely successful and backed away from it with subsequent releases seemingly out of a desire to tighten their grip and reduce resourcing to a minimum.

 

[Felon]

I can explain it - I just don't think I can explain it in a way that will make sense to you.

If you can't explain something in a simple way that's understandable, you don't understand it yourself.

What you're essentially saying is fine conceptually, what you haven't done is explain the 'how' which is most important part.

 

[Rroff]

If you can't explain something in a simple way that's understandable, you don't understand it yourself.

What you're essentially saying is fine conceptually, what you haven't done is explain the 'how' which is most important part.

I have explained it a few times, you aren't capable of seeing what I'm talking about no matter how I explain it. Every time your response for any aspect of it is seeing it as having to be one of 2 fixed outcomes when it doesn't have to be. Every single reply you've said it has to be manually or has to be system managed - it doesn't - you can utilise both and scale them as required. You don't have a situation where you are manually trying to deal with 40K cheaters a day because the combination of systems naturally manages them so that eventuality doesn't happen.

 

[Felon]

I have explained it a few times, you aren't capable of seeing what I'm talking about no matter how I explain it. Every time your response for any aspect of it is seeing it as having to be one of 2 fixed outcomes when it doesn't have to be.

I'm not capable of filling in the gigantic holes in your idea by myself, no.

Knowing the 'why' or 'how' behind something is very important, you have a tendency to gloss over hugely important elements which need to be explained - and I don't think you can explain them, because you haven't thought your idea through very well, otherwise I'd have understood how it works - because that's my day job.

 

[Rroff]

I'm not capable of filling in the gigantic holes in your idea by myself, no.

Knowing the 'why' or 'how' behind something is very important, you have a tendency to gloss over hugely important elements which need to be explained - and I don't think you can explain them, because you haven't thought your idea through very well, otherwise I'd have understood how it works - because that's my day job.

There aren't gigantic holes in my idea - only you seeing them due to the limits of your thinking.

Knowing the 'why' or 'how' behind something is very important, you have a tendency to gloss over hugely important elements which need to be explained - and I don't think you can explain them, because you haven't thought your idea through very well, otherwise I'd have understood how it works - because that's my day job.

I find it concerning I'd have to spell out some of the stuff I've glossed over a bit to you given that these things have been fundamental aspects of the backed of multiplayer games for decades and nothing I'm saying is controversial to that.

 

[Felon]

There aren't gigantic holes in my idea - only you seeing them due to the limits of your thinking.

If your a systems designer, you need to be able to articulate your ideas clearly and fairly, when explaining how a system or proposed system works, or will work - blaming your audience when they don't understand it, or ask questions you can't answer - looks bad and is down to your shortcoming in understanding the subject you're talking about.

All you've really done, is argue yourself into a corner you can't recover from, in response to a simply question of 'how will it work?"

 

[Rroff]

If your a systems designer, you need to be able to articulate your ideas clearly and fairly, when explaining how a system or proposed system works, or will work - blaming your audience when they don't understand it, or ask questions you can't answer - looks bad and is down to your shortcoming in understanding the subject you're talking about.

All you've really done, is argue yourself into a corner you can't recover from, in response to a simply question of 'how will it work?"

Everything about how it works is in my posts in this thread - I can repeat myself if you want... sure I've not spelt all of it out but it shouldn't need doing to someone with experience in the field.

 

[Felon]

I can repeat myself if you want.

So you have your several million players in your game, how do you measure or differentiate between the good players, bad players, rage-hackers, Smurfs, boosters and so on, using a community based approach?

What actual mechanism do you use? how does it work - lets say, for a baseline of 40k reports every 5 days, how can it do this in a fair way that preserves player experience across the board?

 

[Rroff]

So you have your several million players in your game, how do you measure or differentiate between the good players, bad players, rage-hackers, Smurfs, boosters and so on, using a community based approach?

What actual mechanism do you use? how does it work - lets say, for a baseline of 40k reports every 5 days, how can it do this in a fair way that preserves player experience across the board?

That is what I'm saying - when you are blending these systems you don't have a problem with trying to differentiate between the good players, bad players, smurfs, etc. at the scale you are talking, by having these systems of moving players into community groups you aren't generating 40K cheat reports every 5 days. You are stuck in the thinking that this has to be entirely manual or entirely system operated. Things like boosting, etc. might still go on at some levels of the game but will naturally run into obstacles beyond a certain point.

It might take a little while to settle post launch, but players will find their way into these communities - it is how it has always happened and once there their encounters with cheaters is much reduced as they are more often playing against like minded players than indiscriminately encountering players from throughout the game. There is never a shortage of people willing to start and manage communities or moderators to support that, gatekeeping those communities, and it will scale with the demand, it just needs developers to support them with the barebones product to build on top, some defined limitations (within the backed of the provisioning) so as to ensure a certain minimum standards and the tools to support that such as being able to spectate and see stats for players within a defined community, etc. that doesn't mean you can't also have matchmaking and so on to bring players together as well or other systems indicating whether players might be cheating. This isn't just about cheating though but all forms of disruption some of which might not be possible to detect with analysis.

Yes as you move into more competitive parts of the game it becomes a bit more challenging but you've now developed a community which will aid in funnelling the worst of it away before it gets to that point instead of having to tackle it as a huge crunch. Obviously the nature of some newer games make that a bit more challenging but it isn't like the same principles can't be adapted and used in ways over different types of games.

EDIT: I think some of the level the community can be leveraged is somewhat hidden here by the approaches in recent years by publishers which has tended to marginalise it, there used to be an incredible level of it back in the day that maybe isn't being appreciated by developers newer to the game.

 

[Felon]

That is what I'm saying - when you are blending these systems you don't have a problem with trying to differentiate between the good players, bad players, smurfs, etc. at the scale you are talking, by having these systems of moving players into community groups you aren't generating 40K cheat reports every 5 days.

'blending these systems'

Are you going to spend a large amount of money on automation and data science, and then build a second system which also relies on humans to manually check, and presumably manage all of these community groups, all at once?

I think some of the level the community can be leveraged is somewhat hidden here by the approaches in recent years by publishers which has tended to marginalise it, there used to be an incredible level of it back in the day that maybe isn't being appreciated by developers newer to the game.

The main reason the community led approach failed, was because it doesn't scale - it's exactly what I said about CSGO Overwatch, you can never get enough people from the community (which is how Overwatch worked) to review the reported cheaters.

Any system that relies on humans is overwhelmed, because nobody really wants to sit there for hours on end watching videos of blatant aimbots - when you can have machines do that job better for cheaper.

 

[Rroff]

'blending these systems'

Are you going to spend a large amount of money on automation and data science, and then build a second system which also relies on humans to manually check, and presumably manage all of these community groups, all at once?



The main reason the community led approach failed, was because it doesn't scale - it's exactly what I said about CSGO Overwatch, you can never get enough people from the community (which is how Overwatch worked) to review the reported cheaters.

Any system that relies on humans is overwhelmed, because nobody really wants to sit there for hours on end watching videos of blatant aimbots - when you can have machines do that job better for cheaper.

You aren't paying attention to what I'm saying at all - I'm not talking about a system which requires people sitting there for hours on end reviewing playback replacing stat analysis. Also by increasing the amount that like minded players are interacting with each other you reduce the amount they are encountering cheaters, reducing the amount of reports substantially.

 

[ColdAsIce]

Used to help run a private Arma 2 Wasteland server. Spent hours of my own time going through the server logs to spot players trying to execute scripts etc (Unforunate side effect of how easy Arma 2 is to mod) Also had the ability to spectate any player on the server. Allowed me to easily pick up on dodgy plays or rage hacking / speed hacking etc.

I absolutely think allowing private servers that could be run by a small / medium size community that is invite only. Even for the battle royal community. You would still get hackers but they would be caught within minutes / the same day.

 

[Felon]

You aren't paying attention to what I'm saying at all - I'm not talking about a system which requires people sitting there for hours on end reviewing playback replacing stat analysis

Ok - how are you doing it? You said 'blending systems' what systems are you blending?

Also by increasing the amount that like minded players are interacting with each other you reduce the amount they are encountering cheaters, reducing the amount of reports substantially.

This problem has been successfully solved already, with automation.