Honestly I think the fix for cheating in gaming is well beyond the purview of actual devs at this point, it's a demographic issue.
Selling cheats is so profitable now, especially for the big games, that the cheat developers are very motivated these days. It seems the only way to truly stop third party interference is to have a combination of draconian, system hijacking anti-cheat software and netcode designed from the get-go around being ironclad against interference first and optimized for good performance second, nobody who enjoys games really wants that shit either.
The real issue is too many low class scum who somehow managed to derive enjoyment from cheating in a videogame have enough money and time for games now. Also doesn't help that the micro transaction monetisation, battle pass unlock dribbling progression systems all over even provide a financial/time-saving incentive to cheat. If the demand dwindled the cheat makers wouldn't have so many resources to devote to ruining games. The least intrusive solution is region locking your games and making sure the immoral members of your domestic community are too busy trying to survive being ostracized to have disposable cash for a gaming rig, a cheat subscription and multiple copies of the same game.
The least intrusive solution is region locking your games
Specifically, region locking China, the part of the world where cheating is a normal part of their culture (thank Chairman Mao for that). But that is the one thing that devs won't do because the Chinese video game market is still far too lucrative even after further restrictions by the CCP, and they would rather keep sucking up those sweet Renminbi Yuans than even begin considering the possibility of appeasing their domestic audience.
Just about every big multiplayer game (whether PUBG, Fortnite, CoD, you name it) has this problem.
No, just China. I don't know how else to convey the scale we are talking about here, but Chinese cheat in games disproportionately in the same way US blacks commit crimes disproportionately. It's not even close.
Modern Chinese culture as we know it today is a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In it, we saw (among too many other consequences to list) the destruction of ancient Chinese artifacts, the deconstruction and subsequent replacement of their culture, and a complete and total hijacking of the very idea of what it meant to get ahead in life (the Red Guard described these as the "Four Olds").
Overall, the Chinese Cultural Revolution wouldn't stop until the day Mao Zedong died in 1976.
Furthermore, a lot of what we know about ancient China today can be credited to Taiwan's preservation efforts (the famous Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 while the Cultural Revolution was still underway).
If you don't mind the risk of names being butchered, here is a video with more information, and a part 2 in the description.
Edit: Also, back when my brother played PUBG, whenever there was a cheater, they were Chinese every single time (often several at a time as well).
Edit 2: Also, check out the channels SerpentZA and LaoWhy86 for even more information on how modern Chinese culture operates.
Eye for an Eye. They enjoy hurting other people, they should get hurt in turn. If one of them ruins 50k rounds with a successful cheat at 15 minutes a round, that's 85 years equivalent lost. So take 85 years off of their life.
Cato the Elder bragged that he had destroyed more towns in Hispania than he had spent days in that country. I am no where near as extreme as my namesake.
The solution to cheating is returning to player run dedicated servers instead of shitty centrally controlled matchmaking. But that's harder to add microtransaction bullshit to.
dedicated servers instead of shitty centrally controlled matchmaking
CS2 still has support for community dedicated servers(yes, real community servers not Battefield 3 and newer's bullcrap, you're free to download the server files and host at your own leisure), and the only people seething about cheaters are those climbing the centrally controlled matchmaking ladder.
FaceIT players(which use a draconian 3rd party anti-cheat) and casual players don't care
I don't play this or TF2 but even I've heard of the 'fix TF2' movement now.
Valve, just fix and patch your games, they're STILL popular after more than a decade, what better advertisement is there in a world of shit like Suicide Squad and some other DEI/SBI swill that your games LITERALLY stand the test of time.
If you don't have experience with a Valve-run game specifically, they are not interested in PR. They aren't interested in community managers, or hubs for people to speak with developers or complain with developers.
That being said common complaints for games do usually get addressed but it is entirely on Valve Time and they do not adjust this due to people complaining (typically).
The reason I am saying this is because I have played dota 2 since closed beta (10ish years now?), TF2 in early years, and they just have always worked on their own time. And they are typically not interested in having a community facing worker, as that work fucking sucks.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all man, it is just that they run their games, the way they want to run their games. Sometimes, with cheaters, griefers, ruiners, etc, Valve works on a fucking MASSIVE update for their games, at least in my experience with Dota.
We got a massive update to dota, along with a huge cleanup of cheaters, talking about hundreds of thousands of accounts of cheaters got deleted overnight one day. It was big news for dota, and they had spent a considerable amount of time with the biggest cheats to find what they do, how they work, and how they can keep them from accessing dota. It was irreversible VAC account bans for anyone using the tools iirc, and the community rejoiced.
It didn't delete cheating, but it made a big impact, and also got rid of many smurf/griefer accounts based off of other factors so it was a big win for the game. One big part of this was overwatch (not the game) which is a system Valve uses to have players judge whether someone was actually griefing/cheating/etc. It's quite a great system, and I think it came from CS:GO originally, so hopefully they can apply the same big update they did for dota, for CS eventually.
All that to really close out with, Valve didn't say they were doing this, they didn't have a PR person saying cheating/griefing/smurfing is a priority, but they were always working on it, and dropped it on us out of nowhere.
Just region lock China, that's it. I've seen people complain about Russian players before, but with the stuff I play it's usually very few that use them (though Russian cheats tend to be very powerful, but there aren't enough people using them to really impact things).
It's strange to live in a time period where me dying in multiplayer games is very likely to actually be because the other guy cheated, not because I'm just not good enough to beat him.
Honestly I think the fix for cheating in gaming is well beyond the purview of actual devs at this point, it's a demographic issue.
Selling cheats is so profitable now, especially for the big games, that the cheat developers are very motivated these days. It seems the only way to truly stop third party interference is to have a combination of draconian, system hijacking anti-cheat software and netcode designed from the get-go around being ironclad against interference first and optimized for good performance second, nobody who enjoys games really wants that shit either.
The real issue is too many low class scum who somehow managed to derive enjoyment from cheating in a videogame have enough money and time for games now. Also doesn't help that the micro transaction monetisation, battle pass unlock dribbling progression systems all over even provide a financial/time-saving incentive to cheat. If the demand dwindled the cheat makers wouldn't have so many resources to devote to ruining games. The least intrusive solution is region locking your games and making sure the immoral members of your domestic community are too busy trying to survive being ostracized to have disposable cash for a gaming rig, a cheat subscription and multiple copies of the same game.
Specifically, region locking China, the part of the world where cheating is a normal part of their culture (thank Chairman Mao for that). But that is the one thing that devs won't do because the Chinese video game market is still far too lucrative even after further restrictions by the CCP, and they would rather keep sucking up those sweet Renminbi Yuans than even begin considering the possibility of appeasing their domestic audience.
Just about every big multiplayer game (whether PUBG, Fortnite, CoD, you name it) has this problem.
Just let them have their own servers isolated away from ours.
China, Southeast Asia in general, Brazil (or South America in general), Russia (or Eastern Europe in general) all have to go.
No, just China. I don't know how else to convey the scale we are talking about here, but Chinese cheat in games disproportionately in the same way US blacks commit crimes disproportionately. It's not even close.
Honestly curious: how do you know that? Not as a gotcha, I genuenly find the topic interesting and want to read up more on it.
Modern Chinese culture as we know it today is a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In it, we saw (among too many other consequences to list) the destruction of ancient Chinese artifacts, the deconstruction and subsequent replacement of their culture, and a complete and total hijacking of the very idea of what it meant to get ahead in life (the Red Guard described these as the "Four Olds").
Overall, the Chinese Cultural Revolution wouldn't stop until the day Mao Zedong died in 1976.
Furthermore, a lot of what we know about ancient China today can be credited to Taiwan's preservation efforts (the famous Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 while the Cultural Revolution was still underway).
If you don't mind the risk of names being butchered, here is a video with more information, and a part 2 in the description.
Edit: Also, back when my brother played PUBG, whenever there was a cheater, they were Chinese every single time (often several at a time as well).
Edit 2: Also, check out the channels SerpentZA and LaoWhy86 for even more information on how modern Chinese culture operates.
You're either sick in the head or south korean.
Nobody is going to do time over a programming nerd.
Eye for an Eye. They enjoy hurting other people, they should get hurt in turn. If one of them ruins 50k rounds with a successful cheat at 15 minutes a round, that's 85 years equivalent lost. So take 85 years off of their life.
You take gaming too seriously.
If Boeing can do it why can't Valve do it?
and play them on every startup
Comment Reported for: Rule 2 - Violent Speech
Comment Removed for: Rule 2 - Violent Speech
What the hell, Cato? You seem further than actual Cato.
Cato the Elder bragged that he had destroyed more towns in Hispania than he had spent days in that country. I am no where near as extreme as my namesake.
Point taken.
The solution to cheating is returning to player run dedicated servers instead of shitty centrally controlled matchmaking. But that's harder to add microtransaction bullshit to.
CS2 still has support for community dedicated servers(yes, real community servers not Battefield 3 and newer's bullcrap, you're free to download the server files and host at your own leisure), and the only people seething about cheaters are those climbing the centrally controlled matchmaking ladder.
FaceIT players(which use a draconian 3rd party anti-cheat) and casual players don't care
I don't play this or TF2 but even I've heard of the 'fix TF2' movement now.
Valve, just fix and patch your games, they're STILL popular after more than a decade, what better advertisement is there in a world of shit like Suicide Squad and some other DEI/SBI swill that your games LITERALLY stand the test of time.
If you don't have experience with a Valve-run game specifically, they are not interested in PR. They aren't interested in community managers, or hubs for people to speak with developers or complain with developers.
That being said common complaints for games do usually get addressed but it is entirely on Valve Time and they do not adjust this due to people complaining (typically).
The reason I am saying this is because I have played dota 2 since closed beta (10ish years now?), TF2 in early years, and they just have always worked on their own time. And they are typically not interested in having a community facing worker, as that work fucking sucks.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all man, it is just that they run their games, the way they want to run their games. Sometimes, with cheaters, griefers, ruiners, etc, Valve works on a fucking MASSIVE update for their games, at least in my experience with Dota.
We got a massive update to dota, along with a huge cleanup of cheaters, talking about hundreds of thousands of accounts of cheaters got deleted overnight one day. It was big news for dota, and they had spent a considerable amount of time with the biggest cheats to find what they do, how they work, and how they can keep them from accessing dota. It was irreversible VAC account bans for anyone using the tools iirc, and the community rejoiced.
It didn't delete cheating, but it made a big impact, and also got rid of many smurf/griefer accounts based off of other factors so it was a big win for the game. One big part of this was overwatch (not the game) which is a system Valve uses to have players judge whether someone was actually griefing/cheating/etc. It's quite a great system, and I think it came from CS:GO originally, so hopefully they can apply the same big update they did for dota, for CS eventually.
All that to really close out with, Valve didn't say they were doing this, they didn't have a PR person saying cheating/griefing/smurfing is a priority, but they were always working on it, and dropped it on us out of nowhere.
Seeing how the game deadlock looks.. they are cooked as game developers.
Once gabe dies, its gonna 100% turn full gay. Right now its only like 20% gay.
Just region lock China, that's it. I've seen people complain about Russian players before, but with the stuff I play it's usually very few that use them (though Russian cheats tend to be very powerful, but there aren't enough people using them to really impact things).
It's strange to live in a time period where me dying in multiplayer games is very likely to actually be because the other guy cheated, not because I'm just not good enough to beat him.
Hopefully, maybe, people will stop heaping this unearned reverence on a company that's basically a monopoly. And also stop defending them for free.
Ironically cheaters caught valve out by showing all the bugs and flaws with counter strike over the years.