osu! is a competitive game that is open source, and its arguably the most popular rhythm game right now and there’s not much of a cheating problem.
Comment on Riot Requires Kernel Level Anti-Cheat Software
loobkoob@kbin.social 5 months agoIs open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That's not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
Euphoma@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
loobkoob@kbin.social 5 months ago
You're right about osu! Although it's probably one of the few competitive games where there's no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn't directly affect your gameplay experience.
It's not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don't think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s not so much that the source code is available. It’s that there would not be systems in place to ban cheaters, detect them, etc.
It’s open source, why would there be support teams and bans and all that?
tabular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In the past people created communities for multiplayer games around specific forums or LAN centers, and some had servers used whitelisting where only specific players were allowed (where their name and password were tied to a forum account).
I’m not a fan of needing an account to play online and if I created a multiplayer game I don’t want to host that information in a centralized server. Perhaps there are more ways than I know but I’d be more interested in finding an alternative to this arms race of banning vs avoiding bans.
tabular@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Proving source code would reduce the barrier to entry for creating cheats, but cheats are very prevalent anyway. I do not want to make proprietary games so I have no choice but to find an alternative if I ever choose to make a competitive multiplayer game.
There was a MSI monitor at CES which pops-up a warning when an enemy appears on the mini-map in LoL. Significant cheats may be accessible without going to shading sites (perhaps kernel-level anti-cheat could have some success to figure out what monitor you’re using but my understanding is that’s easily fooled in software - and I think that could be unreasonable to detectable if you clone display via external hardware). Cheats which do not run on the host machine are undetectable by traditional anti-cheats.
I think the end-game of anti-cheat is intolerable. Can one get enough data for machine learning to determining if a player is cheating without a high error rate (banning false positives)? Would players tolerate having cameras recording their inputs like it’s a submitted speedrun or an exam during Covid?