• MudMan@fedia.io
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    4 hours ago

    Okay, that’s an actually useful response to maybe help bridge the gap between what each of us is saying.

    You see cheating as only players using the game’s mechanics to gain an unfair competitive advantage over each other. I’m using it in the wider but perhaps more industry-standard way where it includes… well, basically any hostile usage that breaks the rules.

    So yeah, farming and botting absolutely count from my perspective.

    I do think maybe “security” is a better term to include both and “cheating” works better the way you’re using it, because I do see how the average user would primarily be concerned with visible cheating that is immediately annoying and feel that “hey, people paying bot farms to buy grind eventually hurt everybody” is more of a deflection from a monetization argument than a gameplay argument, particularly in a grindy free to play thing like LoL.

    But maybe you can meet me in the middle there and acknolwedge that for the devs those are both security issues they want to plug. Especially if beyond somebody selling crap to their players instead of them and costing them revenue they also add to their backend costs on top of that. And extra especially if it’s wrecking some sort of in-game economy, leaderboards or infringing on legal regulations.

    The Overwatch example, which you’ve conspicuously not mentioned, still works even with the added context, though.

    • dgdft@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Yeah, I totally agree with that framing.

      Overwatch definitely has its high-level cheaters, but the reason for that article is their ban wave model that Blizzard carried over from WoW: they often wait a few days/weeks before nuking an account. This approach means it’s possible for trolls to hack their way to high levels of the ranked ladder for a brief window, but those accounts are effectively canned in the long run. The upside is that cheaters have a much harder time figuring out why they’re getting flagged.

      I quit playing after Blitzchung (2019), so OW2 may have a totally different scene going on due to switching from P2P -> F2P, but I only ran into a single aimbotter in the span of several hundred games. I still have friends who play though, and haven’t heard many complaints. A more recent reddit thread seems to agree too, e.g.:

      Been playing for many years, and my roommate can agree with me. Probably the FPS game with the least amount of cheaters I’ve come across.

      Blizzard did something right with the anti cheat.

      https://old.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/xwk02o/how_is_the_anti_cheat_in_this_game/ir6x5k7/