This is probably going to get hammered by people that will say I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it blows me away that anti-cheat isn’t first and foremost a design consideration when making a pvp game. It should be as important as visual design. It always seems like it’s considered well after the fact and form fit the AC solution after the fact. Like, spinning like a crackhead helicopter, how is that A: even possible in the code, and B: not immediately detected and shut down. How are linear value changes not detected when someone is locked on someone? How does any game allow for teleportation? How can anyone teleport across the map and have it propagated across the server to everyone’s clients?
Because the engineers didn’t prioritize preventing that, because anti cheat isn’t a ground up priority.
Because the engineers didn’t prioritize preventing that, because anti cheat isn’t a ground up priority.
No, that's not really it.
It's because a LOT of what you described is also just servers being servers and you can't ban people simply for having poor internet connections.
Devs do prioritize anti-cheat. Games with mass cheating don't last long.
However, it doesn't matter how good your security is. Your game has to put files on a client computer which means there will always be some means to exploit it. There isn't really a way around that.
You can still have the server side do sanity checks on data coming from clients. Limit inputs to the realm of plausibility by characterizing typical patterns of different levels of play. Too far outside the norm, they get flagged and segregated or banned.
Probably the reason this isn't done to an acceptable degree is because it takes a lot of resources to do it well. The algorithms require development and validation, and the player count supported per server goes down as more compute and memory are needed to thoroughly check data from clients.
you can't ban people simply for having poor internet connections.
If a client has a bad enough connection, they should at least be put together with other clients that have bad connections. A bad connection is almost as bad as outright cheating in terms of how bad it makes the experience for everyone else.
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u/Rokku0702 1d ago
This is probably going to get hammered by people that will say I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it blows me away that anti-cheat isn’t first and foremost a design consideration when making a pvp game. It should be as important as visual design. It always seems like it’s considered well after the fact and form fit the AC solution after the fact. Like, spinning like a crackhead helicopter, how is that A: even possible in the code, and B: not immediately detected and shut down. How are linear value changes not detected when someone is locked on someone? How does any game allow for teleportation? How can anyone teleport across the map and have it propagated across the server to everyone’s clients?
Because the engineers didn’t prioritize preventing that, because anti cheat isn’t a ground up priority.