You won't find any companies with competitive online games that turn a blind eye to cheating. If you consider a game with a cheater as being ruined for the other players, a very small number of cheaters can ruin games for a large portion of the players.

For a rough example of how the math works, let's say we have a game that is 5v5. If we have 100 players, 1 player cheating, and everyone plays once you end up with 9 players having their game ruined. That's 9% of players impacted by having 1% of the players cheating.

> You won't find any companies with competitive online games that turn a blind eye to cheating.

My experience is a little different: if I buy enough in game shizzle (be it free to play or games like WoW with a buildin store), I get away with murder.

> For a rough example of how the math works[...]

IMHO You are right about the math, but use the wrong parameters. Many game companies that accept additional currency actually allow their moneymakers to "bend the rules". No hard data, just my individual observations while using "tools" in different settings.

I'm not suggesting they tolerate it completely. Just that they make the game slightly "cheatable" then counteract it enough for there to be a known controversy.

No one is intentionally making it possible to cheat in their games. Cheaters and cheat detection/prevention are in a constant arms race. You can't just allow a little cheating. The people that develop cheats will share them and those cheats become more widespread.

Your whole argument is also based on the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity. This is incorrect. If your game gets a reputation for being full of cheaters then people will leave your game and probably not come back. If the first time you hear about a game, all you hear is that it is full of cheaters are you going to head out to the store to buy a copy?

How is it different than today? The game is slightly cheatable (scripters exist) and they are counterating it and getting some publicity out of it.

Being so good at anti-cheat that there is nothing to talk about seems like something so far away it's not worth thinking about.

But that said, I doubt the gains from allow "controversy" around cheating would outweigh the benefit of not having any cheating in the game. Not having cheaters is it's own talking point. Withing the competitive gaming community, cheating is already a major talking point and having little to no cheating is already a major selling feature.

That seems like a good "wonder", definitely not deserving of downvotes.

I'm pretty sure I want to play games in which there is no cheating though.

You could do handicapping, so in an FPS rather than allowing wallhack lower players get a call from control "someone is closing on your position [from the North"]". Or new players are 'fresh' and can move faster. You need to weight it very carefully though.

Yeah the downvote has become the "disagree" button sadly. I remember playing GTA-V on PS3 and early on people figured out some sort of (seemingly) underflow attack where they got billions of in-game cash, traded and gave it away, and were eventually wrangled in by the mods. I wasn't harmed by this, I thought it was ingenious of whoever found it, and got a good chuckle at the moral judgements the pregame messages displayed, for a game whose theme is utter debauchery. Other "cheats" where people found holes in solid objects and glitched to hiding places were pretty clever too.

I think cheating is kind of funny as long as it's not widespread or required to play the game enjoyably. I think anyone who gets offended about it is taking their video games way too seriously

I'll go on the record that I downvoted because I'm so tired of the constant drone of comments suggesting self-sabotage as a would-be dark pattern. If someone actually put a lot of effort into developing the idea, that might be interesting, but I just don't feel like "What if you shoot yourself in the foot for the publicity?" by itself is a substantial comment. It's a fill-in-the-blanks theory so unlinked to any particular phenomenon that it gets applied to everything.

For another example, somebody yesterday suggested that Amazon intentionally broke their website on Prime Day for the publicity. I downvoted that too. I do disagree, but more than that, I just don't think they add anything.

So you're not disputing that dark patterns are useful and effective, just that you don't like hearing them pointed out?

I don't know how you could possibly get that from "I'm so tired of the constant drone of comments suggesting self-sabotage as a would-be dark pattern." What I'm saying is that without a lot more development, there's nothing to suggest that this putative dark pattern actually exists. There is no reason to believe that self-sabotage is a beneficial act, but people constantly suggest it as one based on some magical thinking around "publicity." It has more in common with a conspiracy theory than anything else.

It's done all the time in the entertainment industry so it wouldn't be surprising to see it leveraged here. And even if its not being employed overtly, another way of interpreting my message is that these companies receive a net positive just by being in the "controversy" whether they intended to or not.

I have heard a lot more about the PS4 platform from all the clever hacks people have come up with than I have about the 360 or xbone, and if I were to buy a console it would likely be a PS4.

You're comparing things in a single player game to things in a highly competitive multiplayer game. Not the same at all.

GTA V's online mod is the reason why it's still on 5th place by current users in Steam. R* is selling virtual cash for it, so this type of cheating is hitting their revenue.

Cheating is incredibly toxic in the community, even a whiff of it and people start labeling each other scripters etc. Riot does a lot of work to make their community suck less, lots of player leave or drop engagement because the community is toxic. With that in mind I'd imagine the optimal amount of cheating is less than what they can achieve.

We must have encountered very different online games and communities. Plenty of MMO's seem to have survived well known and endemic cheating without any additional toxicity in the community. No more toxic than the fake outrage when someone loses a loot roll in a dungeon or a pvp round. The "communities" and games usually seem brimming over with toxin with or without cheating. It's a good part of why I now avoid anything multiplayer.

Few seemed to actually care if the srever's elite guilds were using no wall hacks to get loot or someone was running with 6 chars receiving identical input, or botting their dailies overnight.

The toxicity comes from the focus on competition and the lack of repercussion when misbehaving. A guild kicks you out if your negativity annoys too many or the wrong members, whereas matchmaking has an infinite supply of teammates to abuse.

I agree with you that adding cheating to the cocktail of toxicity would probably not be significant enough to lose a large group of players. However cheating may yield a competitive advantage too large to be overlooked by the players.

Quite.

Personally I used to get more annoyed by queuing for a matchup and someone dropping so we're in a team one short, or by poor matching than cheating which was usually more of an eye-roll moment for me.

Resolution would have required GMs using a (temporary) ban hammer to bring some repercussion to all the toxic reports in the chat logs, not just headline anti-cheat sweeps and very rarely during tournaments. The resulting toxic anarchy seemed the obvious and inevitable result of games ignoring just about every behaviour. Which is why I voted by removing my wallet. :)

See you removed your wallet though, they'd rather you didn't remove your wallet at all, they'd rather you vote by reporting toxic players and keep your wallet around. ;)

Blizzard is famous for a variation of this.

They will spend a few weeks/months detecting cheaters, but do nothing.

Then, they will ban many users of a given cheat at the same time. This creates press, which helps the message of "you will be banned if you cheat" spread further than if they had immediately banned each offender.

I'm not sure Blizzard does ban-waves for press. From what I've heard, they (and many other developers) ban in waves so it's harder for cheaters to establish causality. "I did this thing and got banned, therefore avoid doing this thing."

I am skeptical that anyone has ever played a game because they were just curious to see who is cheating today.

In CS:GO, if you play a lot of the non-rotation maps (hostage etc,) and are high MMR you will quickly learn who is cheating. Many of them are the same people on many accounts, and you will learn who they are quickly. Personal experience.

Back in the day I would occasionally play counterstrike on low reputation servers to see all the cheaters. It was amusing for about 5 minutes.

No.

It's bad enough that cheaters, after getting banned, will come to the game forums or reddit and make a ton of noise about getting banned "for no reason". All too often, you'll have a few people (though most of them probably on puppet accounts) that jump on the post and spread lies about Riot banning people for insignificant infractions, when the real cause was cheating.

No. Because potential players are not just hearing about the game, but how it's broken and unfun because of cheaters.