Wallhack is an obvious one or anything that reads client and modifies the display.

Absolutely, but thats strongly mitigated via not giving the client information it doesnt need to know.

It’s tellingly ironic that for you it’s totally okay to make a broad statement, then when being called out cut it back to “where relevant”.

This is you restating your dishonesty. Acting as if you found something telling when you’re just reasserting the same bad faith lie isn’t telling anything.

And in the same sentence you make a strawman yourself, claiming that I’m acting like you are “talking about not having a game at all”.

Hyperbole is not a strawman. You in essence imply that if I don’t have the bucket, I can’t have basically all other critical game features because they all share something with the bucket (being server side solely in some situations).

Given a certain observable trajectory it’s freakishly easy to get a good enough point of origin to get an unfair advantage with that information.

How can you disagree with 2 different solutions with an answer that only responds to one of them?

For the grenades, a small change in the angle of impact massively changes the angle of launch. To the player having the grenade thrown at them from out of line of sight, this means they can’t use that information to snipe or prepare other than a very general direction, and its completely lost if there are any bounces or other randomizing elements in the grenades path.

To say this isn’t solved is to be irrationally demanding.

As for the bullet tracers, if someone is in line of sight, and shooting at you, the use of tracers is extremely limited/could be used regardless client side. I’m not sure why you feel this is a strong argument. Maybe you can elaborate but it seems like something more likely to obstruct than help if a target is visible.

Correct. Client side anti cheat can only make it so hard. Never impossible.

If you are willing to go to that logical extreme, where the point of my comment was to say that decrying server side in place of as opposed to alongside client side system watching, is unexpected. It feels like you didn’t quite receive the message there, which is that every system is imperfect, but of them, technically speaking, server side is the least able to be compromised.

And that’s not true. Wall hacks would still exist, as necessary information can be used to determine an enemies position. To a certain extend.

That to a certain extent is what I’ll focus on here, because to me its “in some exceptional cases, the thing that is largely eliminated can still exist” and to that, I would say that if we are being so strict for server side, we should be so strict about client side.

If we are so strict there, then we already know that client side fails too under these overly tight considerations, and I mean client side that magically works perfectly as intended.

This is as game audio is easy to use outside of a machine, and direct memory hacking exists as mentioned earlier.

The point is, sure, but as I covered with the point about grenades, the problem is pretty much solved, with some caveats as all things have.

And yes, put to an unreasonable extreme it would eliminate wall hacks entirely. Just nobody would want to play such a game.

This is where we disagree and it goes back to conversation above.

I don’t see any reason there could not be found an acceptable balance. For instance, even if you add some frames worth of prior information, giving that to everyone instead of allowing cheaters to have it is one possible solution, that even according to your feelings on what would make a game unplayable, would keep it playable. That is just 1 solution.

I think the one who’s not thinking about the scale is you. As the server owner you pay (compute) for every additional player.

This is the sort of annoying pseudo-intellectual smarmyness that gets old quickly.

You point out that you pay for every additional player as if no one has ever thought of that or as if my initial comment didn’t consider it and that’s wild.

You’re one step away from saying “every little bit adds up” as if my literal point wasnt that the cost of running servers is minimal to most games to the extent that multiplying them still wouldn’t make them a dominant cost center.

You’ve literally made no arguments against anything I’ve said. You’ve just point out the obvious as if it were a point or wasn’t considered in the comment you replied to.

This discussion spun of from a company stating specifically they don’t want to invest more into anti cheat solutions. And that’s from a company which absolutely could afford it.

This doesnt help your argument at all. That one company, that we both agree could afford it, didn’t want to spend, absolutely does nothing to hurt my argument and is actually only you agreeing with one of the main tenants of what I’m saying.

You make it sound like I said that, but I didn’t.

I don’t make it sound like you said that at all. I’m literally pointing out (as in, its my point that I brought up) that there are weaknesses in client side anti cheat as well, and that only pointing out differences and exaggerating their worth is disingenuous.

I don’t understand how you lump my arguments into “extra latency”.

Followed by

but latency is very much the reason for the downsides I pointed out.

Is wild to me.

Seems like you understand perfectly fine.

Your examples illustrate that very well. It’s OK for PUPG or Tarkov (and even there only long distances), but a hard for Valorant.

This is both you agreeing yet disagreeing with my argument and I don’t get the point exactly.

If its feasible reasonably, the point of your argument is diminished.

And now, instead of the irrelevant bucket, make the same argument for a relevant object - like a grenade, or tracers. You cannot just get rid of everything or implement random delays or randomized origins.

You’re fighting a strawman by pretending that my argument was ever to “just get rid of everything or implement random delays or randomized origins”.

My point applied in specific cases where relevant, and the dishonesty in your argument here is by acting like I am talking about not having a game. The bucket example was specifically about a bucket going towards a player from an unseen location with no line of sight.

For a situation like a grenade, the grenades direction becomes visible, somewhat randomized, from when the player should be able to see it. This presents no gameplay problems and solves the edge case of figuring out its trajectory for cheats, especially as a little bit of randomization results in a wildly inaccurate origin point.

As for the bullet, where are people shooting others without line of sight, where the bullets path would also simultaneously be visible? Its not a realistic scenario to bring up at all.

If we’re going to that extent, we might as well also then say that all client side anti cheat is worthless because you can use a secondary machine to read the ram of a primary machine or other such high effort cheating strategies.

It’s not reframing. The original argument I replied to claimed these hacks only exist because the server sends everything, and it would be extremely easy to fix this. Neither of which is true.

Firstly, it absolutely is reframing, because they never claimed anything was a kill-it-all solution. They claimed one thing was a specific solution for a particular problem, which it is.

The only part that you actually have shown good reason to disagree with is the last claim, as with the second you’ve admitted that it in fact would be effective, but that there would be downsides potentially (as if there arent downsides with every option).

Its a clue in to why their argument is in bad faith.

Their game was never supported strongly enough to actually encourage people on linux to trust it.

Well, first off: Money. The more you verify, the more it costs you to run your game’s servers.

This sounds like a super clever argument, until you think about the scale.

If the cost to host a game went up by 50% it probably wouldn’t make it into an investor call. Its a small price. It could be 10x as much and still be completely affordable to many games companies.

How does a server detect if my flick-headshot (which won this crucial round) in counter strike was luck, or if I had help from a program running on my machine?

How does the client detect that when running said cheat on another machine? It doesn’t. The current solution isn’t perfect either.

Obviously. They gave one of a thousand examples. That doesnt mean their point is weak, it means they didn’t have the will (reasonably) to make their comment 50000 characters long.

If you have a specific example that doesn’t work to a reasonable extent, post that rather than this short, vauge retort.

I find a number of problems with the level of authoritativeness that you speak and some of the arguments you’ve made.

The core of your first argument lumped together is that a small amount of extra latency is the same thing as “impossible”. This is obviously not true as even with some relatively fast paced genres, what is acceptable varies wildly. Maybe such an argument could be used for Valorant, but not for Pubg or escape from Tarkov (games that are already known for netcode slow enough that this would not truly/notably harm the experiences of players if they were designed for this from the start).

Same goes for non-player objects, which are the result of a player’s action somewhere else. If a player kicks a bucket across the map, the bucket flying through your screen makes it trivially easy to calculate the point of origin - and you know something happened there / player was there.

This example is contrived, and just the type of thing where there are a number of options available.

One could simply not send the bucket, send it with a delay, the bucket could not exist (the majority of games), the buckets origin could be randomized just enough to be at the tested limit of player perception, the game could include a trace shadow by default.

For every example like this, there are options available which aren’t entrusting a black box to access all of your data with a pinky promise.

We’d be really really lucky if server side fog of war would be the kill-it-all solution to cheating.

There is no kill-it-all solution, and this is a clever little re-framing of the argument by you where the new solution has to be perfect, when the status quo can just be mid.

And yet, as demonstrated by the kerfuffle earlier, they can’t survive if Fedora makes a swing too big for them.

Its crazy to me, because if these games were designed from the ground up to have server side validation, and to share information on a needs to know basis, you wouldn’t really need any advanced client side AC and the process could just monitor itself and not spy on you as a complete black box.

Yes, this would cost money up front to develop differently such that this happened, and yes it would make the miniscule server costs slightly increased (and still miniscule), but its completely doable and they don’t want to, because thats more money and no one is forcing them to.

I like framerates over 100 even for “cinematic” games because it just feels better.

Like Cyberpunk is single player, but near 100FPS just feels so much better than 60fps and you get a lot less eye strain.

I always feel like the lower the framerate in game, the more processing my brain is doing to tell me that the game is fluid motion.

Of course its a complicated topic that has to do with animation consistency etc but higher is generally a lot better.