That and similar ridiculousness were fairly common.

I actually didn't mind that stuff, it was funny enough to outweigh the irritation of not getting to play a real match. The ones cheating without making it overt were the ones who'd truly ruin a match.

> You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game.

I don't get it, but people do cheat. They cheat in online games, they cheat at board games, they cheat at tabletop RPGs(?! and no, I don't just mean the DM fudging some roles in the name of fun—they have a screen for a reason)

The latter group will often cheat if necessary as winning is the need and the priority. The talented ones usually end up in profitable pursuits like business and poker rooms. The losers (pun intended) will gravitate toward friendly competitions where people have their guard down and cheating is easy. At least that’s what I’ve seen.

The best strategy is to detect these people and ban them because appealing to values won’t work.

If there are gonna be cheaters, I'd rather they do silly shit like that than just be using wallhacks, radar, or aimbots.

People say they "play for fun", but something is not just inherently fun, it's fun for a reason. That might vary from person to person, but you would always find some victory condition, goal, or competitive behavior in there. Even the people complaining in this thread that people are not playing for fun - if they were "playing for fun" as they put it and winning did not matter, then why would it matter that other people are cheating? Shouldn't they just be playing for fun? No, the reality is if you have no chance to ever win or achieve anything, it's not fun for anybody.

So the better question is why don't you just find it fun to test your skill against others? And some people certainly do and get little satisfaction winning games dishonestly, but there is some drive to just win in all of us. In evolutionary terms, practicing and persisting and honing skill would have been extremely valuable. So would deceiving and cheating and playing unfairly to win so it's in all of us to some degree.

That’s the difference. The stakes are way higher in video games. People pour thousands and thousands of hours into these games. They dream of going pro and joining one of the big teams. They dream of winning the big tournament for real money. They dream of having a popular Twitch stream with many thousands of viewers throwing even more money at them.

Most fall far short of those dreams. Instead they throw temper tantrums and rage at their teammates over voice chat. Some get so frustrated about their lack of progress that they search for alternative means. That’s where cheating begins. It’s really no different from sports.

See also this video about why it's considered rude to suck at WoW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU

I wonder if that same analogy applies.

You couldn't "individually experiment" because fundamentally you needed team experimentation; you can't play Reinhardt in isolation, and subjecting your team to experimentation on your own whims leads to toxicity.

I think many people who go down the "I should be able to play what I want and people should adapt to me" don't realize they are being selfish in play style in a game like Overwatch.

Overwatch is a different, less flexible game now, closer to what I think most people thought Overwatch was, and apparently wanted. It is what it is.

To put it another way, the game was unique in combining meaningful teamplay and meaningfully distinct characters. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong to say that's an inherently toxic point in the design space, but it's pretty tragic if that's true, because those both seem like good things that you want a game to have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

For instance, I played a free to play game. The servers just went live and it was the VERY FIRST MATCH of the game. It wasn't soon before one guy on our side was crying because we all sucked. I see this type of behavior everywhere.

Instead, every single game now is optimized for streamers, content creators, and a small "Professional" scene. So now, when a single popular youtuber wants a meme gun, the devs add a powerful slug to the double barrel shotgun and a red dot sight, so that youtuber can make a highlight reel of headshotting people across the map with a damn shotgun while throwing the entire tactical part of the gameplay out the window. The community spends 6 years complaining about a tactic that is basically just spawn camping, and the publisher gives radio silence, but there's a weird, niche tactic using your favorite character in the pro scene that is SLIGHTLY better than random in effectiveness, and you better believe that character is getting a hard nerf.

Now I boot up the game, and if I have a good match where I did better than expected, the system responds to that by putting me in a much harder game, where I'm expected to lose, because that 50% win rate must be ENFORCED. Even if you constantly improve at the game, you just get put in front of more and more talented people, wiping out any joy you might experience from your improvement. Meanwhile, you continually get destroyed by 12 year olds that don't have to cook dinner every night and have plenty of time to hone their skills. These systems are even implemented in """Casual""" game modes, which are then full of pro players on new accounts making youtube highlight reels.

So yeah, excuse my old man anger, I just literally lived through a better time. Right now it is impossible to sit down with my friends and enjoy a PVP game together, because casual multiplayer has been thrown to the wolves, often in service to memes.

Even games that did have a global list of servers, one wouldn't necessarily always play on random servers, but have some favorite servers (often ping-based, which means geographically local, to some degree) and play on those.

Using Counter-Strike as an example: no matchmaking system - relied upon community hosted servers offering a wide range of game modes (official and community created). More competitive matches (pick-up games) were often found via IRC.

Now I dunno...

Persistent servers mean they can have distinct cultures and you get your favourite servers and start to notice the regular players. This doesn't happen with matchmaking so much.

And I think the point about the 50% win rate is important - I am a person and my mood and skill varies day by day, but ranking stats are measuring the account not the player. Some days I wanted to stomp noobs, some days I wanted a challenge, and some days I wanted to turn my brain off and run fy_iceworld. You could also change your name at will if you were worried about your reputation due to any of the above.

The way my friend plays Rainbow Six Siege gets him killed every single time without fail. But following "the meta" is really not fun for him. Instead of being able to find a community where we can play with people who might not be as bad at the game as us but are interested in everyone having fun, he gets thrown into the same generic "Casual" pool as everyone else, including kids who play 24/7 and streamers on smurf accounts building a highlight reel. There's no room for playing around, for trying different things, for just playing unoptimally. If you do anything not in "The meta", then you lose, repeatedly, and then the system forces you against literal children to ensure you win often enough to keep that 50% winrate.

Like I said: In the past I could choose when I wanted to have fun, be lighthearted, and screw around by joining more casual servers. Then if I wanted to be competitive, I could join a more serious server, with more strict rules and systems, and play against both people much better than me, and much worse than me at the same time.

Now you have no choice, because everyone is in the same pool, so if you don't play "the meta" or do something nonstandard to have fun, you will be crushed, and then placed against terrible kids, and then placed against really good kids, over and over again. There's no room for casual gameplay because the "casual" section of matchmaking isn't casual.

The most fun we ever had playing Siege was getting a group of 8 people together to play "custom" games. The variability of skill was a huge and important part of the experience. We knew we had to carefully balance the teams for things to not be absurd, and we knew that playing "the meta" wasn't the best strategy in this case because you couldn't assume your teammates to play like perfect robots, giving you the freedom to try different strategies. This is also why people get so damn angry when you don't follow the meta and play like a perfect robot who has memorized all the strats, because if you don't, your team will most certainly lose. You could enjoy games you were bad at in 2001, because game design wasn't so aggressive about "perfect matchmaking" and "perfect competitiveness". I don't want my fun afternoon game to be a damn esport.

What you really want is win rate distribution over difficulty level.

that's exactly why casual multiplayer lobbies suck, it's a 'Find Now' magic button with no data other than your previous games, rather than a lobby where I , an expert, can join "Experts Lobby #3030", create a small friend network on that server, enjoy repeat sessions, etc.

Yes, they tried to fix the social aspect with friend lists/etc, but they also got rid of the homeopathic solution of user self determination for the sake of making the game more onboard-able for novices and casual players.

I say '... the game' a few times, you can apply these ideas to practically any modern multiplayer game out there nowadays that's even a bit popular.

I hate the games I lose because there is usually (9 times out of 10) nothing I can do to affect the outcome.

I hate the games I win because the win mostly comes down to how bad the other team is, or a superstar on my team, and I was mostly a spectator.

The games I enjoy are where it is a hard fought battle with decent teamwork that pushes me to my limits and beyond, and in those cases I don't care if I win or lose.

I've had 20 game winning streaks, 20 game losing streaks. Between the match making, smurf accounts, and weird balancing issues, it's very hard to know what is dictating the outcome. The psychology is so destructive if you place any value on the outcome.

But overall, it's still possible to have a lot of fun and great matches enough of the time that it is still worth playing.

I'm around low diamond, which is definitely my skill ceiling. It relatively easy for me to assess higher diamonds and masters. It's also easy to asses plat players. Anything below plat looks very similar to me.

Nearly every one of those matches I ended the game with the best stats and still lost horribly.

My favorite though were the team mates that threw at the start of the match or when my team would decide they would rather argue than play the game. Such a toxic experience of a game. Having one amazing match of great fun and teamplay just wasn't worth the 2-5 matches of absolute toxicity.

When playing quickmatch there were certain heroes that you could play and force a win (assuming the map didn't fck you over). For me those heroes were murky and the lost vikings (and usually abathur). My TLV winrate was over 70% because I could just soak and PVE my team to a 2+ level advantage fairly quickly. Murky was a similar experience but I could also assassinate enemy heroes fairly easily.

Sadly those were the only heroes I played that consistently made me feel like I was effecting the outcome of the match. Getting +30 kills as valeera with no deaths and still losing cause you can't get your team to do any objectives is just infuriating..

Winning is generally fun, but the interesting bit about using Fun as a guiding light in matchmaking design is that its a non-zero-sum game. Losing teams can also have fun. Maybe not as often, depending on the game and such, but its definitely a number larger than 50%.

I know this seems reductive and whatever, but I think its a really critical discussion that the gaming industry isn't having. Skill-based matchmaking and ELO are pretty tuned-in to, well, "skill" (whatever that means in modern gaming), such that you're pinned at that 50% rate to the best of the system's ability. Some would argue that this pinning actually results in less fun games, for two extremely valid reasons:

1) If the system is constantly adjusting to keep your win rate at 50%, you never have the opportunity to see yourself improve through the metric of your win rate. This effect is especially pronounced in games like Call of Duty, where the metric we're talking about is really something more like your KDR; if the system is engineered to constantly keep your KDR at 1.0, there's startlingly few metrics to judge your own performance by. Many games have tried to address this through the award of opaque ranks and badges; weirdly, Call of Duty doesn't, but some games do. In other words, your ability to feel like you're getting better is replaced by being told that you're getting better; many would agree that while it can feel good in the moment to get that badge, its less satisfying in the long-run.

2) A perfectly balanced skill-based match making system would reasonably want to keep every player's win-rate at 50%, over a long period of time (or, KDR at 1.0, or in Apex a win rate of 5%, or whatever is balanced for that game). But that isn't necessarily what happens over short periods of time; and players experience games in the moment, players aren't statistical databases of their entire gaming history with some title. Thus its normal to ask not just the win rate, but the standard deviation of that win rate. People play the lottery, and find it fun, for a very real psychological reason: fun can have an outsized impact relative to the odds of some game if the game has an abnormally high/unfair standard deviation of expected success. If you paid $1 for a lottery ticket, and you were guaranteed to the best of the system's ability to win $2 every 2 lottery tickets, no one would have fun playing the lottery (and the system wouldn't make any money, but that's beside the point). Yet; this is how SBMM is quite literally designed; to reduce the standard deviation of your performance as much as possible. Variety is the spice of life, as they say; but the better and more consistent SBMM systems get, the less spice the matches you play tend to have. Put another way; "popping off" for a game is supposed to be a fun, rewarding experience; but players are now universally trained to know that the system will actually punish you for being abnormally good in a match, by placing you against better players next game.

My overall point being: there's a gulf of difference between "players have to have an average aggregate win rate of 50%" and "all players should have an individual win rate of 50%", and systems which try to guarantee the latter can actually be less fun.

I also find it interesting to think about an ELO system which tries to operationalize the concept of Fun, to try and guarantee a Fun game for as many players as possible. What would that look like? Most simplistically, and probably ineffectually: ask players after the match "did you have fun?" A player's performance in the game influences their own skill rating; but a player's response to this question would instead influence every other player's "fun rating"; asserting whether or not the competitors (and teammates) were fun to play with; as well as signaling internal metrics to the development team for tuning of things like map, weapon, and game design.

[1] https://www.365chess.com/players/Garry_Kasparov

But for my own psychological health, just telling the matchmaker how I felt about the match would go a long way to taking the bite off a bad experience.

Another lost opportunity due to a corporation being more concerned about the next quarterly reports than anything else..

Sometimes I had more fun losing but those were exceedingly rare cases that generally involved a friend or two in the group.

I still played the game chasing those rare highs where I actually enjoyed the experience. After losing 30something games in row spread out over a week of nightly playing I just rage quit. Even today years later the game's MM still pisses me off. Mostly because I found the game play mechanics to be fun and I miss the experience of the good games.

I did a Quake mod a bit like that, infinite rockets with massive explosive damage that did very little to your health but blew you right across the map. You could take about four or five direct hits from a rocket if you were pinned somewhere but mostly you'd take falling damage from bouncing the hell off the skybox.

Yes, it was stupid.

Yes, it was more-or-less unplayable.

Yes, it was as fun as it sounds.

I should resurrect that, if I can still find the code.

I don’t understand the part about 12 years old. The game naturally shifts you towards players of your level. If you get destroyed, next game will be easier. Seems like you somehow feel entitled to winning.

Sorry but I think you might indeed be that guy. You are basically complaining that you don’t want to compete. You can play a solo game if that’s the case. They are perfectly good fun.

Well, yes. If you spend hours and hours playing the game, I can imagine that at some point you feel like you should be getting better than most people.

This was definitely true for dedicated servers anyway.

I'm sure they feel the same way.

I personally like matchmaking, but I get it. Sometimes I want to play people who are way, way better than me and “suck”. Like I used to.

The situation that you described is so incredibly uncommon that publishers will never specifically address it. This isn't good, but the general (instead of specific) approach of "getting rid of skill-based matchmaking" has so many more downsides that that's going going to happen either (and it would be very bad).

The only way you could implement this feature in a fair way (for both teams) is if you allowed an "MMR boost" when your entire team is a single party. And that would be fair! I'd support that feature, even if I never use it.

So basically you are complaining that you don’t get to connect and smash opponents weaker than you and instead are faced with even competition?

Unless you derive an unhealthy pleasure in bullying people who pose no challenge to you, that’s seem like a net improvement. Facing no opposition is just plain boring.

Honestly, my already fairly low opinion of the average online video game player is not really being improved by our current discussion.

Otherwise, you're just doing what the previous generation did mocking people with their 'nintendos' because the problem is not relatable.

I have little interest in "serious" competitive video games. Most of them are not very fun to me. Plus, to put it bluntly, everytime I tried, they were shockful of abusive idiots regardless of the proefficiency level. Still, I don't remember finding the matchmaking particularly painful.

In the past you’d know you were getting better because you’d start winning more often than losing. Conversely, you’d know you needed to get better when you were still mostly losing. This was all in games with a completely level playing field, so the only differentiator was skill (for me those games are tiberian sun, gta 2, warcraft 3 or unreal tournament).

This was, fun? I’d look up to the people that could defeat me.

Then the new generation of games, where you literally got advantages as you played more (Call of Duty MW2) things became crazy, because you’d need to play against people that had wildly different advantages. Matchmaking often isn’t very impressive, and you get matched with people much stronger than you.

Now, you just boot up the game, drop a few hundred 100’s of dollars, and start whacking noobs.

Usually there are ways to play besides the ladder, if you can find players willing to lose much more than 50% of their games against you. But for understandable reasons, those are hard to find. So people make new accounts and start at the bottom of the ladder again instead. (In many games, the publisher makes money off that, so they don't fight it too strenuously).

(alternatively, in extremely snowbally games like League of Legends, that's an argument for fixing the game balance such that wins and losses feel less like stomps)

From my experience in overwatch, the system tends to favor win and loss streaks instead. You'll get 4-5 wins in a row, where the enemy team had no chance. Then 4-5 losses where your team was hopelessly outclassed. Maybe you'll get a couple of games that are close and feel fair. But not many.

No, the system puts you in an easier/harder game, where you're expected to play _with and against_ people of your skill level (including if you want to play strictly meta or if you want to play with only one hand or whatever).

I've been playing one of the most popular (for PC anyway) online game for 10+ years now and it only has skill-based matchmaking, in both ranked and casual mode. While plenty of people rail against the fairness of its matchmaking, I've rarely heard anything against the concept of skill-based matchmaking. It's the only kind of matchmaking that makes any sense to me. Why would I want to play against people that are way better/worse than me where I have no chance to have a good game either way?

While my friends no longer play it regularly, when they used to play we'd just... play however we wanted in casual mode. Why does it matter if some people are better/worse or meta/casual? You can play the most random stuff you want and you eventually get matched against people of your skill level. Or if you don't enjoy the current match for whatever reason (winning/losing too much, or trying too much/little), just go next and let matchmaking do its thing until you get games at your level, wherever that level happens to be.

If anything, your complaints sound to me like the developers care too little (rather than too much) about competitive balance/integrity across the entire playerbase.

Then game companies took total control, made you play on their servers and introduced all these problems.

Well, when you're on a 5-person team on Counterstrike and your fifth player doesn't want to buy guns and even try to complete the objective, they just want to run around and knife chickens and hide in corners the whole game, it can be a little frustrating to the other 4 players.

Like, I get its casual, and you shouldn't necessarily expect everyone to always try as hard as they possibly can to win, but when one person not even trying to do the objective of the game it sours the experience for the other four.

But this is kind of true of any team-based game. Imagine playing Spades or Rummy where your teammate is just always purposefully playing junk and never even trying to play their hand properly. You're probably going to have a frustrated time in that game.

In causal its definitely forgivable to make mistakes and try something different, but if you're just in a casual match to sniff the proverbial flowers in the game you end up ruining the experience for your teammates. Ultimately in a team based match-made game all players really should at least try and observe the objectives of the match to some level, at least in my opinion.

Whenever you have a sentence that has 'these days' and is describing human behavior, just leave off these days.

Humans have been cheating pieces of shit throughout history, especially when they are in a position where there is no recourse from the other parties in the transaction.

Being that humans have been cheaters in one way or another in significant numbers. For example modern infidelity figures are around 25% based on surveys. Somehow I just don't think your statement here is backed up by observation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

"It's just a game" is a lame excuse. A game is using real time.

And you know what would be especially satisfying to do against these pathetic losers? Cheating against them and watch them rage.

Seriously, I don't think the "man children" and the people complaining about them are all that different. You were clearly not engaged in traditionally approved adult activities either, if you were there for the very first matches of a competitive computer game.

The only positive thing is maybe gamers will push for more local multiplayer options.

I'm surprised ran into cheating. Perhaps the game supported cross play with insecure platforms?

I also will never knowingly permit a program to run on my computer that performs remote attestation or otherwise uses my hardware against me. Neither will I accept opaque anti-cheat kernel modules. I don't want anything to do with malicious anti-user software.

You are getting into the territory of botting or letting other people play on your account than regular cheeting like what is described in this article.

>or otherwise uses my hardware against me

Proving the current state of your system isn't using your hardware against you. It is showing that your system is secure against cheats.

>Neither will I accept opaque anti-cheat kernel modules

If they aren't opaque they will be instantly bypassed

>I don't want anything to do with malicious anti-user software.

Cheats are antiuser software that can kill an entire game. Software that combats this threat is prouser.

> Proving the current state of your system isn't using your hardware against you. It is showing that your system is secure against cheats.

Complete doublespeak. It is using your hardware against you such that you will be denied service if the operating state of your system isn't to the service operator's liking. I want nothing to do with it outside of employer controlled devices being validated by the employer or my own devices being validated in such a manner by me.

> > Neither will I accept opaque anti-cheat kernel modules

> If they aren't opaque they will be instantly bypassed

Makes no difference to me. There aren't going anywhere near my kernel and I strongly recommend that other people take the same stance. The developers of such modules (and more generally just all software developers) are inherently untrustworthy as has been demonstrated on a number of occasions.

> Cheats are antiuser software that can kill an entire game. Software that combats this threat is prouser.

Cheats take advantage of buggy or poorly designed software. Software that combats that is pro-bad-developer. If it commandeers my machine in the process then it is decidedly anti-user. Write better software. Don't share state with clients if it's supposed to be hidden.

It's up to the game's developer whether they allow you to join. Either you have hardware that can prove something the developer thinks is trustworthy or you just can't prove your system is trustworthy. Nothing is working against you. Either the developer trusts your hardware or they don't.

>Cheats take advantage of buggy or poorly designed software.

No, they take advantage of a poor security model. If your security model lets random processes read out the location of all of the players is that the game coded poorly or the operating systems fault for letting a cheat read that information? Being able to trust the code that the client in running instead of just the code that the server is running is powerful. It makes developing a secure system easier since it allows you to trust more.

If you can modify sytem memory its trivial to bypass any checks the anticheat has. To the point where you simply modify the anti cheat in memory to say 'sure i've done all those checks'.

This is not true. If a process can read and write to another processes memory, it doesn't matter how well written it is, its possible to cheat.

If you run your computer in a VM, you can do it from outside the OS, so that the OS itself doesn't even know its going on.

That would also solve the issue of the game dev pulling the plug on the multiplayer mode a few years after release...

It takes a minimal amount of study, training, effort to be a perfect tic tac toe player. If you put a small amount of effort into it, you can get skilled enough at tic tac toe to never make any mistakes, to never end up with a result less than a draw. No amount of improvement will ever give you a better result.

Not so with nearly any online game, especially one with as high a skill ceiling as Dota2. You can always get better, there's always room for improvement, there's always someone better than you. If you could get just a little bit better, you will win more games, no matter how good you are.

One time there was a blatant hacker on the Markov server in the original PlanetSide (a TR player with a name like iIiIiIiiIiii) that was using some sort of time/speed hack to move and shoot at some large multiple of normal.

They were having a lot of fun camping inside towers to kill people spawning there, so I managed to camp out in one before they arrived and held a good corner with my trusty bolt driver (sniper rifle). I managed to pop them once on their way up the tower, and I think they were moving so fast that they didn't realize it'd happened until they got to the top. Just enough time to reload and switch angles for them to come back down.

I know the hacker was there to enjoy ruining fun for others, but they gifted me what was unambiguously the most exhilarating, triumphant, and memorable of the 25K+ bolt driver and 40K+ total kills I recorded.

A really smart SBMM would solve both problems. One that not only prevents players from artificially dropping rank, but also hiding their skill and maintaining a lower rank; and perhaps instead of an ELO, also matches players with similar play-styles. Because then cheaters will quickly end up in a rank with other cheaters, and won’t be able to leave unless they buy another copy of the game.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

I'm a gamer but I don't think that they're meant to be taken seriously.

...but admittedly i've been turned sour by a few purchases recently in that genre .. so i'm probably just axe-grinding ;)

An example is Tekken where I play as Lei Wulong. He's extremely uncharacteristic and idiosyncratic, to the point that if you fight actual Lei players -- it's immediately obvious that bots don't play the same. One of my friends (a newer fighting game player) particularly hates my playstyle and tried to scrim against Lei bots to practice, but instantly realized they play nothing like me or any other Lei. Lei is a rare character to play. So he had to just keep scrimming, really.

Many fighting games also have literal handicap mechanics that might be seen as equivalent to cheating in some capacity, but for the same reasons, it doesn't matter. They are often there to level the playing field, which is considered fair. Basic Combos in Tekken allow even the simplest of players to pull off powerful moves like Wind God Fist, but it doesn't matter how easy Wind God Fist is, I can and will still beat them even with that handicap, with no special moves of my own, because I can just read their attacks and respond and punish all of them and set them up and bait them endlessly.

That said cheating does happen but often it's the last thing on my mind. Bullshit characters that are unbalanced is where all the complaints go. ;)

TL;DR Humans have distinct fighting styles, and fighting games are largely mind games once you get into them. Cheats that are subtle enough to avoid detection can often easily be outplayed because of it.

Fellow Tekken player here (since 1994 in the arcade even have a full-size arcade stick so the play feels similar). You're right that most of the practice bots don't fight anything like humans. You can, for lack of a better word, "bully" them by executing short combos and pushing them to stay on defense by advancing and they're usually terrible at take down reversals (the consistent exception is King). This tactic fails against a skilled human player who will jump, dash, side-step, or even slip in a low kick. Humans will also make you chase them around the arena when they're low on health.

https://github.com/altf4/SmashBot

hard to spot because it doesnt give as big advantage due to game mechanics/dynamics.

Majority of cheaters that I've met were when I've been leveling new account

Also:

Today on HN we complain about cheaters

Tomorrow we will complain about rootkit from anti-cheat software and someone will argue that server-side should be enough :)

Missions are arranged into five difficulty levels ("Hazard 1", a.k.a "Haz1", the easiest, through "Haz5"). I've found that, when playing with random people, Haz2 or Haz3 gets you a good combination of players. Of course there are toxic players, but the proportion of them (that is, the number of toxic players as a percentage of the playerbase online at any given time) is low.

I think Haz4—more difficult than Haz3 but not Haz5—has a higher chance of toxic players. I avoid Haz5 as it's _extremely_ difficult for my skill level, but I understand the players who regularly do Haz5 missions are good folk.

If you play DRG on Steam, and you ever see me online (http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaliforniaKarl/), feel free to ping me for a mission!

For some reason, some players spend 3 figures at RMT sites for weapons that can few-shot the server-wide event bosses. There's no in-game benefit for this. The boss events are designed to entertain a half dozen to dozen players for 5 - 15 minutes. Insta death for the boss just means everyone has to wait longer for the next event.

Other players use a glitch in the game that lets them blanket the event zone with white explosions, so no players (including themselves) can see the event. The only recourse is to switch servers or just leave the event.

This phenomenon is interesting enough to have been researched:

"Results support the relationship between self-determination theory need satisfaction and enjoyment, and indicate that griefers enjoy their gameplay style as much as community-based players, despite the antisocial nature of the gameplay style resulting in differing levels of need satisfaction."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282197704_The_enjoy...

The few people you saw cheating were probably frustrated enough with the game they decided burn their accounts and ticked enough boxes in their cheat menus to let them go out with a bang. It may of course be that you are particularly good at spotting cheats and Halo Infinite is just blessed to be relatively cheater-free. (I've not played it.) But I'd expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more games to have cheaters than your estimate.

Whether they’re actually that good is immaterial.

When they go beyond what a good player could do is where it gets problematic.

The human connection matters, even to cheaters. Cheating against the computer isn't very satisfying.

I enjoy cs go, and I can't recognize a difference with good aim and aimbot. So there is no difference with a cheater or a smurf for me.

Probably why competitive fps games are at the top of the list for cheat makers.

They are hard to detect by eye and can be easily made to look human-like.

I honestly expect many of the people who go "nah I'm just that good" even in this thread are actually cheating. That smirk wouldn't feel any less good if you were cheating, in fact it'd be one more thing to smirk about.

This, players that are actually good don't feel the need to brag about it on hacker news.

It is a badge of honor, not a hassle.

Guess what happened.

The kids these days don't know what normal pings looked like back in the day.

Nobody banned me. But yes players accused me of cheating of course. Back then I also didn't know what "netcode" is. Now in hindsight I know that the game gave an unfair advantage to players with high ping. Probably in order to make the game playable with internet connections common at the time. Blame Valve ;)

No cheating involved. Best ping I ever had at those times was 120-150ms IIRC. On that particular server it was more past 300.

Boy those were the times.

Not sure how you think you could get that from actually cheating.

We all know cheating is a problem in online games, so it wasn't an unreasonable belief. It's certainly possible to play chess at Magnus Carlsen's level, but if I play against someone random online and they play at that level, then of course my default assumption is going to be that they're cheating, not that they're Magnus Carlsen.

Valve in their "infinite wisdom" decided to funnel the bulk of players into a matchmaking style multiplayer system, while relegating decades of player-run (and previously Valve run) dedicated servers to a "Community" tab that opens the old school server browser

Consequently the game has been absolutely infested and overrun with bots for the last couple years. They all play Sniper and aimbot instant headshot players on the enemy team, they're also programmed to steal a players username and steam avatar (because there is no throttling on changing that information live, even when connected to a game server)

Consequently the paranoia of most players means that even if you're just a "good sniper" (as someone with about 8,000 hours in the game over the last ~14 years) you'll almost immediately be the subject of a votekick. To which you have to get on microphone and plead "I'M HUMAN, I'M HUMAN!" and hope players don't automatically just vote to remove you

In a few months even this won't be good enough.

Having said that I've run into plenty of "hackers" and cheaters over my decades of online play. I steer clear of certain types of games as the player base seems more inclined to cheat.

Found an old screenshot of Counterstrike after I got auto balanced.

https://i.imgur.com/AUFE0zo.jpg

If you get good enough to reliably point your weapon at their head (before they do it to you), you are basically invincible.

It basically makes the game unplayable, because you have following 2 options: 1) play normally and get killed constantly which is frustrating 2) train to exploit this mechanic, which makes no sense

And when you get to learning those parts of the game, you always end up sitting down and drilling a small part of the technique for hours over the course of a few sessions, because that's the only way to get the right muscle memory.

It's unavoidable wherever games are doing abstract things: mouse/stick/button inputs are meaningful because of the context, not because they are the actual action being performed.

When I want a game that feels fully connected, I play pinball. Virtual games get close(and work great on a phone) but real ones let you nudge the machine finely.

I guess you can learn how to anticipate the deviation as long as it's static and dependent on your movement speed (e.g. not random), but that's still good right? It's a skill thing, not a luck one.

you basically move forward and if you see something you want to shoot, you move backward for a fraction of a second. that will cancel the forward acceleration vector much faster.

also another strategy is to find a place covered by a wall, and move left/right quickly. when moving from left to right, there will be a point when the acceleration vector is 0, and that is the moment to shoot.

In high school some of us would play duke nukem 3d after classes were over. I would have to handicap myself with various restrictions to make it fair for the others. At the time I did not have a computer that could handle Duke nukem so the only playtime I got was at school.

As in, maybe people are often wrong when accusing cheaters, but with numbers like this they’re often correct too!

It used to be script kiddies with aimbots downloaded from somewhere, nowadays it's cheat developers making hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month from renting cheats or selling carry services.

There's your problem right there.

I've played many competitive games over the years, many to a decent level in the top 5-10%. Thousands of hours of play.

Cheating is almost non-existent.

I've been accused of cheating though, especially in CS:Go + Overwatch, when I wasn't even that good. I couldn't hold a torch to professional players.

I've seen orders of magnitude a more complaints about cheaters in chat, than I've ever seen actual dodgy behaviour.

Sometimes you're just on a streak, or lucky.

You're just bad at losing.

Wall hacks are another common hack; getting information that the game client has but that you aren't supposed to know. I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls.

All in all, I don't see cheating as ruining gaming as a whole. Game designers will design games that are more difficult to cheat at, and hopefully there will be less cheaters ruining your matches. I would definitely play the can-see-behind-walls-and-aim-doesn't-matter FPS!

  "I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls."

I have run into cheaters but most games are fine, sometimes you even manage to kill a cheater, fun times.

All sports are like this. Welcome to Earth. Sorry.

Game publishers won't allow this again because it they can't "control" it and it won't make them money. Fortunately, opensource games still exist :D

Mostly because actually spotting cheaters takes a lot of game knowledge and experience. In FPS games anyone can spot a spinbot, but how you can be sure that someone uses wallhack? or aimbot that just slightly corrects the aim?

Without proper game knowledge you wouldn't be able to distinguish a wallhack from someone listening to footsteps, having info from teammates, and having a good map awareness.

It is very easy to cry 'cheater', especially without any actual proof. Without knowledge that, for example in CS: spray patterns exist, even someone correcting them would look like a cheater to a newbie.

I spent about 300 hours lately playing new COD, and there was only one case where i suspected someone of cheating. One.

And i do play a lot of FPS, and played them for good 25+ years.

It would seem like players had good map awareness, and would be really hard to spot.

Personally, I'm mostly referring to Tarkov. I don't play anymore. I used to love it and try to convince my friends to get it, but that was years ago. I only play the single player mod on top of it now.

I've generally moved on to single-player and coop games now. Everything else is excruciating. And part of that is that I have less free time, so wasting it on being angrily competitive and anxious just isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't have time to be on-par with sweatlords.