Back when communities hosted servers instead of companies, it seemed less common, even though it was easier to do.

Back then you could just quit the server/match if somebody was obviously cheating (or they got banned).

With competitive matchmaking cheaters can hold players hostage until the end of the match, as leaving incurs penalties and cooldowns that temporarily ban you from playing.

There are also cheaters on old games (Modern Warfare II (2009)) that will inject code into your client to disable the quit menu, so you have to dashboard. I can't imagine what psyche someone must have to not only cheat, but force people to play against them.

Because those were community servers often built around community. There weren't a lot of them either.

If admins allow cheating - people that want to play would leave the server

If live in a non-metro area, you probably have a handful of server your latency allows you to play on - getting banned would be a big suck

Now you just click "play game" and you get match with some strangers you might never play ever again with. Financially, those privately hosted servers no longer make economical sense for game publishers.

Because games were less common. If you look at community hosted servers now they commonly have more anti cheat, not less. Counterstrike with FaceIT and ESEA. Even FiveM for GTA V rolled out a custom anti cheat before it was added to the official game.

That was not my personal experience. CS and Warcraft 3 community lobbies featured rampant cheating. Way more than CS:GO and Dota 2.

Life was a bit simpler then. At that point in time the leaders also did not get millions for their wins.

And Kernel level anti-cheat isn't stopping them.

Perhaps, but it's far better to have cheaters and bots than to have games require a rootkit to play them.

I think that's a matter of opinion.

Personally I find both unacceptable: I won't play a game that requires me to install a rootkit, and I won't play a game where cheaters and bots run rampant, ruining the fun for everyone.

So hopefully there's a solution to this that doesn't require a rootkit.

You definitely don't play games, this is one of the reasons why people stop playing games.

I do play games, a lot. I even play multiplayer games. So, you're wrong.

Which ones?

Well no, because they ruin the online experience making people not play the game.

(in theory, GTA online has had / still has huge problems with bots and cheats but still earns the publisher hundreds of millions a year)

They have problems because they're cheap and don't want to pay to host servers. They don't want to let people host their own authoritative server either because of the $billions in fake money.

I understand that cheaters suck. I'm saying that in this case, the cure (kernel access) is worse than the disease.

This is why I preferred console gaming. You never encountered cheaters until very late in the console's generation. Crossplay ruined that.

Yeah life sucks when everything and everyone has to be untrusted (applies not just video games).

The solution is to build trusted spaces again IMO.

For video games assume that each user is trusted by default. As soon as they violate that trust by cheating, they are banned permanently for that copy of the game. If they want to be trusted again they have to buy another copy of the game to get another license. Make it hard to become a member of a trusted community and easy to be kicked out of a trusted community for violating trust. This would eliminate the vast majority of cheating and bots because most gamers are kids and having to buy a fresh copy will hit hard. If they abuse it enough, make them jump through more hoops like ip bans and computer fingerprint bans.

This is a naive take. Of course these developers already permaban cheaters. Firstly many of these games are free to play so "getting another license" is a non issue. They're doing hardware bans nowadays which are harder to avoid but not impossible.

Half the battle is detection though. If you don't detect cheaters quick enough they ruin enough games that genuine players start getting frustrated and leave. Anti cheats help with this detection.

Probably every anti cheat idea you can think of, in terms of detection, prevention and punishment, has probably already been tried by a large online multiplayer game. It is an extremely difficult problem to solve, a constant arms race.

It's not possible to completely solve this problem with technology.

High level chess players (GMs) can win with just a few bits of information transmitted to them by a cheating accomplice (a cough if it's a critical position to spend extra time on, etc). Similarly, high level gamers only need the slightest of edges to win, and therefore only need the slightest of cheating.

That's why I think trusted user bases are the way to go. My initial ideas were naive, but I think the core idea is solid. If you had to pay $1000 to enter a "trusted club" which uses your hardware fingerprint, and all of your online interactions in a game were guaranteed to be with other people who paid $1000 to be in the club, would that not be a large deterrent to cheating?

That's just elitist though isn't it? These games are enjoyed by players from all over the world, including massive numbers of players in countries with far less average disposable income. Its common in many countries to go to an internet cafe to play these games as they don't own their own hardware even.

It would also massively reduce the number of players. Competitive multiplayer games rely on large active playerbases for fast and fair matchmaking. That's why free to play has become the dominant model for these games. If you have to pay $1000 to play one of these games, they have no chance vs. the competition.

Obviously you can't completely solve this problem, but you can minimize it as much as possible.

Also these sorts of "trusted clubs" do exist for certain games (e.g. FaceIt for CounterStrike) but ultimately it still just relies on anti-cheat to establish that trust.

Money is just one way of establishing "trust clubs". Time is another. For free-to-play games, you could make it so that users are peered with other users who have put in the same amount of time into the system. So if you've gone a whole year without being flagged for cheating in the system, you'll be paired up with other users who have also gone years without being flagged.

If you create a new account, you'll be peered with other new accounts (low trust). Still possible to cheat, but the cost is very high (years of effort to get accepted in the best trust clubs)

CSGO used to have that, more or less. You could play for free but then you were not in the "prime" matchmaking pool. Only by paying, something like 13€, and registering your phone number, which could only be registered once, would you get prime matchmaking. I thought it made quite a bit of sense but I think they scrapped the system in CS2.

It's going on a tangent, but one naive take which continues to amuse me when it comes up is community/third party servers and policing of cheating. As though delegating that responsibility is the goal or that it would scale to handle the size of modern playerbases including the ratio of admins to players to be able to monitor and respond to (alleged) cheaters

With community servers an admin only has to police their server, which is a fixed number. More players, more servers, more admins.

But as gaming has grown and become more mainstream, the ratio of enthusiasts who are willing to admin to casual players who don't has changed. Server sizes have changed over time with smaller games like 5v5 becoming way more common.

Just put a password on the server then.

False positives would very much hurt in that model. But returning to a small multiplayer experience with chosen friends would work: the in/out decision is local and personal.

It’s only a problem when you game with strangers.

Talking just about games, this really doesn't work with free games. Even if there is a lengthy 'lockout' period from the real game, many games have rampant and cheap accounts for sale and doing so will make the game experience worse.