Having admins is the best way of ensuring a good experience. Play on servers with the same people coming back so there is a community. Play on servers where there are admins. If your game doesn’t allow communities to form for multiplayer games then vote with your wallet. “Casual” gaming where anyone jumps into a game with 63 unknown randos is never going to be pleasant as it will need to rely on automatic measures and reports only.
Back in my younger days, I had admin privileges on a UT2k4 server. There was usually a nice group of regulars around. If I was playing and one of the regulars reported someone suspicious I could go into spectator mode, watch through their point-of-view to make sure, record it to a demo file for evidence, and then immediately ban them.
Beyond the community of regulars on our own server, we had good contacts with admins on other servers that catered to a similar gamestyle. We'd regularly exchange ban-lists with them. (I.e., there was kind of a meta community of server operators.)
I realize that that doesn't scale the same way as modern approaches, but the modern approaches also feel like they're trying to use technical means to solve a social problem.
Not sure I still play the ones that do (And there are still lots of active servers for them). Example: Battlefield 4 still has quite a lot of activity.
LAN games I used to play in had a cinderblock security system, in which if a player was cheating, someone would get up, lift, and throw a cinderblock at them or their PC.
Would have been nice to mention Valve's Overwatch system used in CSGO (not sure about CS2) and DOTA2 [0][1]. I'm not sure how effective it is in CS but it's seemed to be a remarkable improvement in DOTA2, at least for toxicity if not hacking.
Ranking systems seem to work OK, or at least seemed to 5-10 years ago when I played online shooters more. The key is just to not be too good; cheaters would shoot up out of my potential matches very quickly I think. I guess that must have been annoying for the very good players, but for the rest of us it was fine.
It would be interesting if a company would just release a shooter that has an open source client and explicitly allows plugins or alternative clients or whatnot. The server gives you what it gives you, everybody use it to the best of their ability. If everyone is cheating, it isn’t really cheating, it is just testing different skills. We’ve all got auto-aim? Then this is a game about positioning and map knowledge.
> If everyone is cheating, it isn’t really cheating, it is just testing different skills.
Reminds me of what made things like Melee or GunZ: The Duel great. You had glitches that people learned to use to make the game much faster paced and with a much higher skill-ceiling than it was supposed to have. GunZ was particularly funny, where it was supposed to be a shooter where you could do all sorts of cool matrix-style running on walls and blocking bullets with a sword, but that got amplified 100x by the worst netcode ever written along with the ability to cancel almost every animation. So the high-level players learned to fly[0] and switch weapons multiple times per second, which really just made it feel even more like what an ideal matrix-inspired game ought to be.
>. The key is just to not be too good; cheaters would shoot up out of my potential matches very quickly I think.
I've found the opposite to be true, at least to an extent.
Especially in the old counterstrike 1.6 days where 'ranked' was just privately organized matches from third party leagues, cheaters were much more of a problem for the lower ranked games because that's when you were playing against new accounts and there was no reputation on the line. Anyone who cheated would just make a new account and be right back in the entry leagues
Get good enough to rank up and you get to avoid most of the cheaters. some people still cheated, but it was also easier to spot when there are less players and you generally knew the players you play against.
These days I just play overwatch where I think both things are true. The automated matchmaking does let cheaters rank up a bit more but new accounts are still more likely to be cheating than established ones so getting to a higher rank let's you avoid a lot of them that would get banned before they can rank up enough
I was not up for the rigors of Counterstrike. I got OK (but OK in a “sometimes I’ll be the best is a random matchmaking lobby”) at Call of Duty for the first couple Modern Warfares, but there was never a time where I was playing with people good enough to worry about reputations, haha.
So far I’m a fan of megascatterbomb‘s TF2 crowdsourced cheater/bot database system that’s being developed. Especially since valve is clearly not going to do anything about the problem. Makes used of recordings that allow replay of a suspected cheaters actions for confirmation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EPsWjdkyoPo
Another really easy non technical mitigation is to simply region lock China! Fun fact: if you just lock away China away from literally everyone else, your main game will lose most of the cheaters just like that.
