<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m3rc</author><text>I mean... sure but they&amp;#x27;re also only willing to interact with the game when they&amp;#x27;re making the experience bad for everyone else.</text></item><item><author>VectorLock</author><text>This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game.  The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they&amp;#x27;re cheating at is probably negligible.</text></item><item><author>exgamedev</author><text>Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.&lt;p&gt;You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.&lt;p&gt;The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It&amp;#x27;s actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>s_m_t</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think it is really the cheaters that degrade the experience, it is the knowledge (right or wrong) that cheaters exist that reduces trust that makes for not fun experiences.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve played online games for many thousands of hours over the past two decades and I can count the number of times I encountered a blatant cheater on my hands. Every time it actually happened people had a good laugh about it and either hopped servers or banned the person cheating. Sure I have probably unknowingly encountered a bunch of map and wall hackers but I didn&amp;#x27;t know so it didn&amp;#x27;t degrade my experience. For all I knew those players were just better than me, plenty of those around. Having played with some extremely high level players in various games, it actually feels like the good players are using map&amp;#x2F;wallhacks more than the actual hackers because they have such good gamesense.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I have been accused of cheating more times than I have actually for sure encountered real cheaters. It isn&amp;#x27;t fun when a server turns sour because everyone is accusing each other of cheating and getting salty over nothing.&lt;p&gt;Of course, if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn&amp;#x27;t the case. But any game with a modicum of community power to enforce rules won&amp;#x27;t have that problem. The major places you reliably encounter cheaters are non-private servers and matchmaking services that have essentially been abandoned by the developers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m3rc</author><text>I mean... sure but they&amp;#x27;re also only willing to interact with the game when they&amp;#x27;re making the experience bad for everyone else.</text></item><item><author>VectorLock</author><text>This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game.  The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they&amp;#x27;re cheating at is probably negligible.</text></item><item><author>exgamedev</author><text>Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.&lt;p&gt;You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.&lt;p&gt;The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It&amp;#x27;s actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephengillie</author><text>Console speed-runs have different leagues where different levels of glitches are allowed - from 0% to any%. Maybe that could work here, possibly as a &amp;quot;competitive aimbot league&amp;quot;.</text></comment>