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There was a recent video examining the phenomenon in Escape from Tarkov, which is a game I have really wanted to play for a long time but now, having seen how your odds of being matched up against 'undetectable' cheaters in a given match/raid approaches 1, I literally don't see the point. I play a game to have a certain kind of experience, and that experience assumes everyone is on some kind of level playing field. But no, given the chance to cheat with minimal risk, people do:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek
(the video is long but you only need to watch the first 15 minutes)
If you can't expect other players to uphold the 'spirit' of the game absent some kind of severe policing, then what is the point of being part of a 'gaming' community?
Not a new phenomena, cheating has quite the long and illustrious history in the gaming community.
But the fact that almost all games these days FORCE you play online multiplayer with randos they match you with, it's kind of an important issue if they expect people to keep playing.
With community servers, there were plenty of cheating horror stories of a different kind - people excusing/turning a blind eye to the cheating of a popular member of the community, or people turning to cheats to keep up when they care more about the community than the game.
Though I guess they were still rare enough to be stories, instead of business of usual.
I'm not sure there's ever going to be a full solution, since detection can be so difficult. Although if all game information was kept completely server-side, and the player was just receiving a datastream (like Google Stadia or Amazon Luna) it would fix a lot of the issue.
But I also place a pretty high premium on owning and controlling my own hardware, so I dislike this solution.
Another option would be a persistent, cross-platform, cross-game reputation system tied to player IDs, where proven instances of cheating would follow the player between games and games can do their best to match players with good reputations to each other.
But THAT will of course be abused for other purposes too so... I really don't know.
Oh yeah, the other problem is that cheating can be dialed up or down too. So even if someone isn't using a full-on aimbot, they can still use tools that make them just a tiny bit more accurate on average while still looking like 'natural' gameplay. So cheats can be fine-tuned to a much higher degree than detection can be.
Bring back couch-based multiplayer and LAN parties, so cheaters can immediately be nut-tapped upon detection.
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