Cheats are why I stopped playing FPS's and only occasionally play Rocket League. I can't tell if I'm bad at the game or if everyone else is cheating. Half of the games on this list are FPS's.

I think the more important question isn't how you implement an anti-cheat, it's why some types of games attract cheaters.

When victory in a game isn't about strategy but just about how quickly you can click o character's head, and just by doing it once you win the game, that makes the whole game a clear target for cheating. Everyone cheats as the sniper, nobody cheats as the medic.

I think you could make an FPS that cheaters hate by designing it so that it requires at least 2 players to defeat a player on the opposite team, e.g. by giving everyone weapons of different type and needing two types to defeat an enemy.

I wonder if anti-cheating game design is a thing?

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bee_rider 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Cheating and worrying about cheating in these matchmaking FPS games is a ridiculous thing to do. If you get matched with cheaters, and the ranking system actually works, they are cheaters whose cheat-augmented skill is equal to yours.

Game designers could have just worked on their ranking systems, and least the cheaters rocket off into their own domain of impossibly-high-elo games. Let there be a cheaters league. It could be fascinating, what’s fully-cheated gameplay look like? Just ban disruptive behavior like ddosing other players.

OTOH, artificially lowering your rank to stomp low-level players is a problem. But cheaters, as well as just legitimately really good players, can do this; the place to solve this is the ranking system.

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AlienRobot 5 days ago | parent [-]

I feel like it's more about trust. Once you stop trusting that you are NOT playing against cheaters, every match feels like you are just a walking target for someone else's entertainment.

To put it in another way: either I'm bad at a competitive game, or I'm playing against cheaters. Once you start feeling like that, neither scenario seems like an enjoyable time, so why play at all?

I feel like the biggest problem to me is that these types of games are INSANELY popular, but personally I'd rather play something less skill-based and more fun-based. These competitive games just keep appearing in front of me all the time despite that fact I don't enjoy them.

	▲	bee_rider 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If the matchmaking is working properly, you should be winning around half of your matches once your ranking stabilizes, right? This doesn’t feel very good, but I don’t see any alternative.

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tracker1 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that Team Fortress is pretty good in this regard... at least for some CTF maps and configurations... (I'm mostly recalling the original quake mod)... there were some maps that you had to have a scout/spy to be able to get past a strategically positioned automatic gun, and even then an HW guy by the flag was a pretty good secondary that was hard to get through.

Of course, I still remember seeing cheaters back then, in that game... usually quickly kicked off the server you were playing on.