Funny, that's exactly the kind of profound lack of empathy and awareness my ex-wife had. "Do anything you want to prisoners; there's absolutely NO WAY I can possibly imagine being in that position myself" (I find this particularly amusing since she did far more actually illegal stuff like drugs etc in college than I ever dreamed of; but these emotions are always outwardly oriented:).

The whole point of this thread is that these systems are not installed on cheaters in a targeted way. They are installed on everybody's computer. They make far far far more innocent gamers suffer than they punish cheaters. And we've seen time and again that these systems misidentify cheaters badly. Think of all the times your Norton of McAfee misidentified your bit torrent client or your open source utility or your own crypto mining software for malware, and multiply it by a thousand.

This is the real meat. Anti-cheat malware is installed on everyone’s machine. Guilty until proven uninstalled.

Fine, then propose and implement a viable alternative that effectively cuts out 99% of cheating in online games.

Or just don’t? If the game isn’t fun with cheating and the developers can’t do anything about it without malware just don’t play it

Everybody's PC is getting ruined, except the cheaters'

Hilarious. They're just people exercising their freedom. It's their computer, they can hook into the game's code if they want. I bet many of them are themselves hackers, worthy of respect. I bet many of them post here. When I was a kid I remember seeing people in forums who hacked games to make them harder because they played the shit out of it and were bored already.

These corporations? They are merely guests on our systems. Every single thing they think they can do? It's because we allow it. We allow their game to run at all. We refrain from modifying it. Everything they do, it's a privilege and we can revoke it. Ruin their PC? Good luck with that. If people care enough they'll reverse engineer your game and make their own version without all your bullshit.

"Hackers"? No. You are being "hilariously" ignorant about the current state of cheating in online games. The vast, vast majority of cheaters could be described most charitably as script kiddies, and even that is a stretch. They pay monthly subscription fees to cheat makers to get the ability to exercise their "freedom" to grief other players.

Whatever. I guess I never lurked in those circles. The real hackers used to shame them and run them out of forums. Maybe you shouldn't be playing with these skids at all instead of aksing for non-solutions that do nothing but normalize intrusive corporate malware.

I don't fault the skids either. As far as I'm concerned they have as much computer freedom as I do. The only solution is to whitelist the people you play with.

It’s a multi-million dollar business now. Make a cheat, add a paywall, charge people. Lookup “The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov” on YT [1] (nvm, here is link). This is an epidemic not some leet hacker proving he’s master over his domain. It’s kids and young adults paying Mr.X $9.99/mo to see thru walls and auto shoot your dome.

[1] https://youtu.be/p5LfGcDB7Ek

So what. It's literally just a game. Not important enough to sacrifice our freedoms and control for.

People kinda get attached to the media they play. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlIXK2L_180 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRmU91YJFo4

Competitive integrity is one of the things that makes competition fun.

If only false positives didn't occur.