Passworded rooms then! Even in games where you play on a centralized server, it’s sometimew possible to have passworded matches. GunZ online comes to mind. I think that game had passworded mqtches. TBF that game had anticheat too, but it never really worked properly. Client side anticheat doesn’t work because someone will always bypass it somehow, and then the server doesn’t know that funny things are happening. And server side anti cheat is going to decrease server performance because you have to track more things in the server and trust the clients less.
Depends on the game. In mine, that would work for matches you organize with friends, but wouldn’t work with continuous public matches. Bot hosters would find the passwords and still flood the rooms. However, the safe place during the bot crisis were indeed community servers! I don’t know what exactly they did.
That doesn’t scale to larger games. Rust, for instance, has servers with many hundreds of players (and a huge cheating problem). MMOs will have thousands (and constantly fight bots). The nature of massive, real-time games makes self-policing solutions like votekick or manual whitelists infeasible. Manually investigating user reports is slow. And you pointed out the problems with different kinds of anticheat.
It’s easy to see the allure of root-level monitoring, with all that in mind. Both for developers and players oblivious to or willing to accept the risk. Of course, it also isn’t a silver bullet…
Passworded rooms then! Even in games where you play on a centralized server, it’s sometimew possible to have passworded matches. GunZ online comes to mind. I think that game had passworded mqtches. TBF that game had anticheat too, but it never really worked properly. Client side anticheat doesn’t work because someone will always bypass it somehow, and then the server doesn’t know that funny things are happening. And server side anti cheat is going to decrease server performance because you have to track more things in the server and trust the clients less.
Depends on the game. In mine, that would work for matches you organize with friends, but wouldn’t work with continuous public matches. Bot hosters would find the passwords and still flood the rooms. However, the safe place during the bot crisis were indeed community servers! I don’t know what exactly they did.
That doesn’t scale to larger games. Rust, for instance, has servers with many hundreds of players (and a huge cheating problem). MMOs will have thousands (and constantly fight bots). The nature of massive, real-time games makes self-policing solutions like votekick or manual whitelists infeasible. Manually investigating user reports is slow. And you pointed out the problems with different kinds of anticheat.
It’s easy to see the allure of root-level monitoring, with all that in mind. Both for developers and players oblivious to or willing to accept the risk. Of course, it also isn’t a silver bullet…