[aldarisbm]

I own a steamdeck, and have been playing BlackOps III (with no anticheat)

It's a total mess. Even with a handful of players actively playing, I almost always find a cheater. I get that anticheats are not "convenient" but to say that we should get rid of them, it's a bit naive.

[jwells89]

Yep, cheating is absolutely rampant in any game where the anticheat is ineffective or nonexistent to the point that it’s barely worth playing games like that in online mode.

It’s very frustrating, because I don’t like the idea of rootkit-like anticheat either, but if reports and moderation were the only way to keep cheating at bay, the companies building the games in question would need to keep a team employed full-time to exclusively investigate reports and dole out bans. Even then, this team probably wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough to deal with them all in a timely manner, leaving the problem still somewhat unfixed.

Perhaps the only real solution is for competitive games go current-gen-console-only, where end to end control is a given and invasive anticheat is kept separate from our computers.

[whythre]

Back when I played TF2 circa 2010 I helped friends run our own servers and we would just manually ban the cheaters. If they came back me or someone else would ban them again until they got pissy and moved on to greener pastures.

It worked back then, anyway.

[hibikir]

A great technique we used in my servers, it that involves having repeated servers, and a server culture where some trusted players are mods, as otherwise the cheaters vote to ban enough non cheaters to turn the game into a jungle. TF2 itself turned into a cheating horror as Valve servers were added, and the typical player just clicked on quick game, basically destroying the server culture, as you would almost never get new users.