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How can developers better address cheating in games and esports?

By Kenneth Ang - 17 Aug 2020

Creating Countermeasures

Image: Unsplash

So, we've gone through some of the more common methods players are using to cheat in modern video games and esports. But what can developers do about them, on top of mere ban waves and issuing warnings to players suspected of cheating?

There are two ways we can discuss it, at least on paper. 

 

Vigilante justice?

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

This one is a bit of a - no, scratch that. It's a huge grey area. Vigilante justice is often frowned upon in many disciplines and scenarios, and gaming is no different. However, there have been some individuals who've taken it upon themselves to explicitly look for cheaters in popular titles and get them reported. 

24-year-old Mohamed "GamerDoc" Al-Sharifi is one of these individuals. A former pro gamer, he's been hunting down suspected cheaters for several years in Overwatch already, although he's recently extended his efforts into Riot Games' new tactical shooter Valorant as well. According to him, he really dislikes how cheaters ruin games for good and honest players, and says that as many as 50,000 to 70,000 cheaters have been reported to the respective game developers as a result of his work thus far. 

So, what's our proposal here? Having developers rely on vigilantes to help them weed out the bad crops from the good? Yes, but not quite. Instead of having vigilantes per se, perhaps dev teams could add a few more members to the roster as "dedicated anti-hacking agents" or something along those lines, and their role would be to actively "hunt down" offenders, rather than wait for the community to raise reports.

Image: Riot Games

Fair enough, it does sound a little whimsical, not to mention morally questionable but there's no denying that individuals with skills such as Al-Sharifi's are invaluable in cleaning up cheaters, even if the way it's done does tend to be a little...unorthodox. Plus, they can even help provide feedback to the main team to see which areas need to be patched up in terms of security.

However, you might then ask, "why not just let the community turn them in and offer incentives?", that way it saves everyone at the office a ton of work. On paper, that might sound like the ideal situation, but if that was the case, people would simply start reporting players they didn't like in-game rather than actual cheaters, and getting stuff out of it - that would really mess up the game in question, regardless of the genre. Also, such methods are just like slapping on a Band-Aid to the wound and hoping the dressing sticks - it's just a temporary thing, and cheaters might very well go back to doing so as soon as they're off the hook. That's why developers could adopt this other method we're thinking of simultaneously. 

 

A taste of their own medicine

Image: From Software

Now this second method is what I'd like to call poetic justice. Frankly, it isn't a completely new tactic, although employing it in more games could theoretically lead to lower cheating rates across the board. Plus, it's a lot less ambiguous than doling out vigilante justice. Basically, instead of banning cheaters outright, developers could opt to funnel all of these players into a dedicated server (assuming it's an online PvP game) filled with nothing but other cheaters for a set period of time. 

Amusingly, the game which we find made the best use of this method to curb a cheating problem is From Software's Dark Souls. They put all the verified cheaters reported by other players into lobbies with others of their ilk, grabbed some popcorn and watched the cheaters rage at each other until the cows came home. What's more hilarious is that some skilled (but honest) players even went into these lobbies on purpose to troll the living daylights out of them - one of the more popular videos on YouTube shows how a player managed to get a furious cheater to topple over a ledge to his death while casting a spell. 

Now, imagine if we had something like that for a battle royale game, especially one where everyone is using an invincibility cheat. It'd certainly make for some good TV, and the sheer annoyance of it all just might put cheaters off playing foul permanently. 

 

And everyone played happily ever after?

Image: From Software

Before we end off, I'll just toss in a bit of a disclaimer here - these are not cure-alls, merely theoretical measures that could work in tandem with existing efforts from the developers. After all, they don't really solve the root cause of the problem - when it comes right down to it, the onus still lies with players being good sports and playing fair in the first place.

Regardless, there's no doubt many developers are taking a more aggressive stance against cheating nowadays, and the ban hammers are coming down harder than ever. There's only so much they can do from their end, though - the gaming community also has a responsibility to discourage cheating in its various forms, because as the saying goes, it always takes two hands to clap.

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