Linux is now the best gaming system.
When it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS a...
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Not the case in my experience. Nobody is backing out from server-side checks and nobody is spending a ton of money either developing or purchasing anticheat to appease "non-technical stakeholders", such as they are. Technical directors and technical leads exist. You won't convince a random executive with a grumpy engineer in the room saying things are a waste of money. And that's assuming your decisionmakers are "non-technical" in the first place. Plenty of studio heads came from engineering.
Game developers have metrics for cheating, they're not making it up, and as far as I can tell you get better results on PC by doing both than just one. Worse, when you don't have tight enough anticheat players can feel it, too, which is ultimately the only thing that matters.
As I was telling someone below, the goal of anticheat isn't to fully secure the game. No game is fully secure. But it matters to make abuse onerous because it's a very different experience to go from multiple cheaters a game to a cheater every multiple games. Trivial cheating that average players can access is a dealbreaker.
Not the case in my experience. Nobody is backing out from server-side checks and nobody is spending a ton of money either developing or purchasing anticheat to appease “non-technical stakeholders”, such as they are.
Riot Games is a perfect case study where this exact thing happened, IMO.
League of Legends had millions of MAU and a near zero incidence of cheating, for a ~13-14 year span. They implemented root-level AC for their next game, Valorant, and they ran into aimbot problems within weeks. Root-level AC was rolled out for League a few years later, despite vocal objections from their developers, several of whom were vocally against the move on r/leagueoflinux.
Overwatch is another example of a super-popular game that manages to stay cheater-free using only heuristics and player reports. They’re doing dramatically better at stamping out cheaters than Valorant, CoD, and other comparable games that include root-level AC.
Are there any counterexamples where you've seen a game struggling with cheaters fix the issue with root-level AC? I can't think of any, but maybe my gaming pool is just too narrow.
Riot games is not a game. You're saying LoL had "zero incidence of cheating"? That is... a bold claim. Ditto for Overwatch.
Your sample is both narrow and inaccurate.
According to Riot's own stats, the number of detected cheaters in ranked matches doubled after they rolled out their root-level AC for League (1/400 matches -> 1/200 matches):
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-removing-cheaters-from-lol/
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/
The article you cited does not support what you claim. League had a bot problem, not a cheating problem. The bots played against each other, and not against humans. This is because they were extraordinarily bad; they ran out of base and died, just to claim credit for having “played” games so the account could unlock new characters.
I spoke of Riot Games because I was comparing Leauge with their other game, Valorant.
Okay, that's an actually useful response to maybe help bridge the gap between what each of us is saying.
You see cheating as only players using the game's mechanics to gain an unfair competitive advantage over each other. I'm using it in the wider but perhaps more industry-standard way where it includes... well, basically any hostile usage that breaks the rules.
So yeah, farming and botting absolutely count from my perspective.
I do think maybe "security" is a better term to include both and "cheating" works better the way you're using it, because I do see how the average user would primarily be concerned with visible cheating that is immediately annoying and feel that "hey, people paying bot farms to buy grind eventually hurt everybody" is more of a deflection from a monetization argument than a gameplay argument, particularly in a grindy free to play thing like LoL.
But maybe you can meet me in the middle there and acknolwedge that for the devs those are both security issues they want to plug. Especially if beyond somebody selling crap to their players instead of them and costing them revenue they also add to their backend costs on top of that. And extra especially if it's wrecking some sort of in-game economy, leaderboards or infringing on legal regulations.
The Overwatch example, which you've conspicuously not mentioned, still works even with the added context, though.
Yeah, I totally agree with that framing.
Overwatch definitely has its high-level cheaters, but the reason for that article is their ban wave model that Blizzard carried over from WoW: they often wait a few days/weeks before nuking an account. This approach means it's possible for trolls to hack their way to high levels of the ranked ladder for a brief window, but those accounts are effectively canned in the long run. The upside is that cheaters have a much harder time figuring out why they're getting flagged.
I quit playing after Blitzchung (2019), so OW2 may have a totally different scene going on due to switching from P2P -> F2P, but I only ran into a single aimbotter in the span of several hundred games. I still have friends who play though, and haven't heard many complaints. A more recent reddit thread seems to agree too, e.g.:
Been playing for many years, and my roommate can agree with me. Probably the FPS game with the least amount of cheaters I've come across.
Blizzard did something right with the anti cheat.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/xwk02o/how_is_the_anti_cheat_in_this_game/ir6x5k7/