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It's not about physical vs digital games, it's about ownership (popcar.bearblog.dev)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

Do you suppose games only use obfuscation as security? In turn-based games you have the time to not trust client infomation and real-time games could give the client less info until it's actually needed. There would still be cheating via outside communication or outside tools.. as cheating isn't a technical issue solved by denying user software freedom - it's a social issue.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I want you to know that I literally work in this space and you are handwaving away an incredibly complex problem space that hundreds of smart people have been trying to solve for decades now and it's only getting harder (good cheat suites use hypervisor mods and direct memory access kits these days). I would love to educate this community but I'm under NDA (in addition to not wanting to provide information that attackers can use to better understand how we approach this problem space)

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Cheaters are preferable to your proprietary kernel-level anti-cheat and whatever sneaky plans you may have for users and their computers. Good luck winning an arms race.

    If I ever do multiplayer (I hate networking) I plan to explore treating cheaters as a service problem, like pirates are to piracy.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    Only some cheaters are a service problem. There are a number of different cheater archetypes and some of them do not respond to service offerings

    And believe it or not, while kernel level provides a level of access that could be used for nefarious spying we actually do much MORE stuff people would find distasteful when we DON'T have kernel access, because we have to infer more without direct access to the places where cheat makers do their work

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I'm unaware of any (1st party) game services being offerered to cheaters, or any explicit positive association. Best I can think of is a more neutural "anarchy" servers (i.e Minecraft). I imagine implimenting built-in "cheats" you would expect from 3rd parties (e.g. auto aim, wallhacks) but framed in a way that is hopefully tolerable to non-cheaters (perhapscalling it a handicap).

    Having control over others' computing, even with good intentions, creates a bad incentive. One must resist the temptation to use that control for your own benefit at the user's expense. So no, I wouldn't believe devs typically act more immoral when they have less unjust power over others' computing.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago

    As someone who works in this problem space, I promise you with 100% certainty that the type and quantity of data collection being done without kernel access would be far more distasteful than what's done with kernel access. You can take my word for that or not but I obviously can't say any more than that

    Including cheating functionality in games is already done and people hate it: it's called pay-to-win microtransactions.

    The archetypes for cheaters are such that they don't provide ways to please the a large portion of cheaters without harming players because harm is their goal. And the other group is trying to make money by charging for services for players and then cheating to complete those services as fast as possible. There are no in-game features that can be created to mitigate these people.

    The only class of cheaters that can be dealt with as a service problem are those that are cheating to a) catch up to others or b) offset a skill shortfall or c) offset a time shortfall. This makes up only a subset of an cheaters

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