this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Amazing video! I like how it explores the history of cheating and how anti-cheat software hasn't gotten rid of cheaters, but only made them less obvious.
Wall hacking is obvious to other players, but a program that pulls the trigger when crosshairs are over an enemy isn't. That leads to people thinking that cheating doesn't exist because nobody is flying around the map only getting headshots. People are willing to install this rootkit to their machine because their lobbies don't have cheaters. But they still do. It's that their lobbies don't have obvious cheaters.
Also an interesting point that Riot has done little to deal with smurfs in their games. Now players are more likely to think they got matched with a smurf rather than a cheater.
From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I've observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.
The only way to stop it is to stop letting people play with strangers and to go back to local LAN sessions, or for games to be private only with temporary invite codes that have to be shared manually, with a maximum number of users allowed.
Online anonymity really has ultimately harmed us as a species and conferred little if any benefit.
There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I'm with you on it being inevitable. There's no way to truly stop it.
I'm a fan of projectile-based objective-based shooters like Tribes. It's a shame they are not more popular. Just the nature of the game design makes aimbots nearly useless.