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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I’m most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone’s week.

    The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.


  • That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…

    Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.

    All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.











  • From a strict utilitarian “this person is an active threat to the lives of others and cannot be rehabilitated” perspective, I get it. We kill wild animals for a lot less. Given perfect knowledge I don’t have a hard line against execution.

    But that’s a hell of a hypothetical. Lots of violence is circumstantial and not necessarily and indication of future behavior, especially if we actually gave a shit about mental health and improving the living conditions of struggling people. Far too many convictions are improper or outright incorrect. Society should have a responsibility to care for the worst of itself. It all stacks up to “do we trust ourselves, and our government, with something so extreme and irreversible?”