Why online gaming sucks (Part 2) - Cheaters

Team Fortress 2 has entered a tailspin in recent years. The most popular casual mode has fallen prey to one of the most universally reviled aspects of online gaming. Cheaters.

Effects

Cheaters are one of the fastest ways to ruin an online game. They create imbalance in the teams and can frustrate players into quitting using near unbeatable advantages. If a cheater cannot be stopped then they are likely to eventually kill whatever game experience they are currently ruining. Players will scatter and be discouraged from returning. It does meaningful damage to communities and ruins players' limited time with a game.

Motivation

From listening to around a hundred interviews with cheaters, the most common reason players cheat we discovered was simply amusement at other's expense. A common theme appeared to be a much younger cheater (usually in their teens) getting entertainment out of the visible frustration they are causing "grown men".

Most showed little remorse for cheating and were generally centralized around their own entertainment rather than the quality of the experience for all players. Some claimed that they've cheated in order to "right a wrong" in the game such as balancing unfair teams or because an opposing player has cheated but in most of the cases where we saw this, it was apparent they were still willing to cheat for malicious reasons also.

Not all were as directly malicious though. In the world of speedrunning in particular, it has become all too common for an established and legitimately good player to cheat. The reasons can vary to impatience, to feeling you are owed a win after all your work to just simple social acceptance and positive feedback for your victories.

Others use cheats in a less deceptive format, HvH (Hack vs Hack). This is a format designed for players to openly cheat and to test their cheats and their ability to use them against one another.

Methods

Traditional cheating usually involved downloading some piece of software that will feed you information the developers did not intend or alter your inputs or other messages sent to the game in order to grant you some advantage. The most common methods are wall hacks which let the cheater see through walls and aim hacks that make it difficult or impossible for the cheater to miss their shots. There are also bots that can play without human input and use similarly unfair tactics. This approach has had the biggest negative impact on Team Fortress 2 and is particularly dangerous as one cheater can negatively influence several games with many accounts at once. Because you are usually running special software on your computer to achieve these effects, these cheats are often detectable with good anti-cheat software (What makes good anti-cheat is a larger topic that we will discuss another time).

However, a recent interview with one of Call of Duty's leading cheat providers reveals that hardware and computer-vision based cheating are becoming more prominent and may eventually prove undetectable.

Hardware-based cheats use external systems to cheat. For example there are special cards that can be installed onto a PC which can directly access the memory of the running game but the card itself is controlled from a second computer. That means all the big bad software that's sending the cheat commands aren't happening on the "playing" computer, making this manner of cheating more difficult to detect.

Computer vision based solutions are even more problematic. This would involve training an AI to watch professional or other highly skilled players and then imitate their movements. Combined with hardware to input commands you would have a very difficult cheat to detect (think about it, what is a mouse but an external device sending commands, how could you tell the difference?).

Whilst more theoretical at the moment, I agree with the CoD cheat provider that it is only a matter of time before these types of cheats grow in popularity. This could spell disaster for the online gaming world as cheaters appear more and more like real players to the point that it may be difficult for any system to detect them.

Solutions

Now does this mean we should give up on Valve ever #fixingTF2? Well not necessarily; despite TF2's decline we have not yet reached this dystopia where cheats cannot be stopped. The majority of cheaters do not use the advanced methods we have mentioned due to cost, access and convenience. As a result, it is relatively easy to detect most cheaters and we already have the means to do so in community TF2 servers. And as long as Team Fortress 2 is making money, I would hope that movements like #FixTF2 can encourage companies like Valve to put more time and effort into preserving the game for longer.

But that may not be the case for much longer. Eventually, any centralized power's ability to limit cheats is going to be at least partially hampered by more advanced techniques. Even if they can continue to protect their games, the costs to do so will continue to rise. This means that unless a game is actively making a lot of money it will no longer make sense for developers to support their games.

Sooner or later your beloved game, the one you thought would never lose support will start to decline. The cheaters will come and destroy the experience and you will have no means of recourse but to hope a company cares enough or earns enough to save it. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said online gaming sucks sometimes.

Taking back control

Reddit is not a perfect site but it has gotten one thing down - it's moderation approach. It is one of the most sophisticated in the world and gives users a way to craft the kind of community you want to build. As a result the vast majority of highly viewed posts have very little spam and are usually bang on the topic of the subreddit. It achieves this, partially through powerful tools but primarily by utilizing a much more powerful ability - human judgement.

For social issues like cheating, there is only so much that automated machines can do. It requires human judgement, human feedback and ultimately human decision-making to build powerful communities that agree on what is acceptable. Besides, it shouldn't just be about purging cheaters but about building an environment where you and your friends control your experience in such a way that you can all have fun. We've all met a troll who is causing headaches for other players while still "following the rules", or some exploit in a game that's technically allowed but just isn't fun for the players. We believe the long-term enjoyment of multiplayer games, independent of publisher support can only be achieved when the players are in control, not some unfeeling automated system.

That's why, after much thought, we have decided to flip the traditional live-service script by building our Gabro desktop app around small, scalable communities where humans are at the helm of every game.

Each Gabro subscriber gets their own community where they are have total control over the rules and who plays with them. Traditionally running a "dedicated server" can take a lot of time and technical knowhow to maintain properly; that's why we simply have events on Gabro. An event is a one-off game session in any game you like that's as easy to launch as a game of Fortnite. The difference is that it is YOUR game. You decide the game mode, the rules, who stays, who goes. You are in control.

Conclusion

A game losing support from it's publisher and succumbing to the risks of cheating is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. Sooner or later a game's profits will no longer justify it's cost, the game will lose support and the cheaters will take over.

Even if we caught every cheater on earth we would still have doubts about other players; discomfort with their style of play or interpretation of the rules; annoyance at their behavior or any of the many other obstacles to online gaming that we'll be tackling in this series.

The answer? Be human. It is something Valve and any other live-service game host will never provide because it is too costly. No matter how you decide to play, realise that the long term quality of a game lies in your hands. We can do everything we can to make it easy but only you can decide to save a dying game. Only you know how to make it fun for you and your friends. Only you can foster the attitudes that maximise fun and make your favorite games shine.

It's up to you.

Don't forget to subscribe to learn more about why online gaming sucks and how we can make it better. Have your own thoughts on how to make games better? Have a game you'd like to see saved? Let us know, we make changes based on player feedback constantly so your opinion genuinly matters.