Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
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Kernal level anti-cheat means I ain’t gonna play it
I don’t care where the company is based no game should be requiring kernal level access, that’s just opening the door for security concerns
I’m wondering if there’s a way we can even know they’re installing it. Windows just gives that generic admin prompt, I imagine? Tells you nothing of what’s happening.
Well if you get asked for sudo, then that’s a risk.
Installing almost anything* on Windows requires the equivalent of sudo, same as Linux.
Determining if it’s a normal install or adding a kernel driver wouldn’t be feasible just by watching the installation. (On either OS if they are not showing terminal output)
EDIT:
My context here (which I should have been explicit about sooner) is: “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
They are going to just click Next without changing defaults, and are not going to extract and inspect anything.
Most user software should NOT need sudo.
Typically you need “sudo” to use the package installer though, if that’s where you’re getting confused. But that’s because most Linux package managers are built to install software to be available for all users. However once installed that does NOT mean the package always has sudo access. And the way Linux software is typically installed is just putting the executable in a certain folder, unlike Windows where you run a software’s custom installer which asks for admin access and then does who knows what.
My context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
Sure when it’s something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.
However once installed that does NOT mean the package always has sudo access.
I didn’t suggest that it would (although it Could if it’s malicious - on Linux that would be as simple as the setuid bit. Or …back on topic… installing a kernel driver on either OS)
You usually have the option of installing for just your user, and I think that usually doesn’t require admin permissions.
Installing almost anything* on Windows requires the equivalent of sudo, same as Linux.
I feel like you’re not sure how system software like
sshand a user’s personal game software can install differently in different places, and where one needs no root access to install at all. Go see how mac does it.Macs still ask me for permissions and I have no idea what’s asking to do what.
I get it for Linux and Windows (though I don’t know how MacOS does it) my context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.
Sure when it’s something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.
same as Linux.
You couldn’t be more wrong bud. Flatpaks do not require sudo, executables run from a directory (like how Steam games are run) don’t require sudo either. You only need sudo if installing from the main package manager like deb, rpm, pacman or whatever your distro uses. Most games on Linux aren’t installed from the main package manager though.
(On either OS if they are not showing terminal output)
If it’s a package for the package manager you could download the archive for it and pull it apart to see its contents, it’s usually very clear when such software includes kernel drivers or kernel patchers. Most software on Linux uses the package manager to install or a script to unpack, both of which are relatively easy to explore even if the software isn’t open source, haven’t found too many linux apps with Binary installers, they might exist but if they do they aren’t popular or common.
Since this keeps coming up, I edited the post you replied to. TLDR is that we are assuming different contexts.
You can list all the current loaded drivers. You can examine the system event log for service start operations. You can run with a kernel debugger attached and examine any loaded driver. The driver itself is likely correctly signed and will not require additional user acknowledgement beyond what was given when the game was installed.
Unfortunately all of those just tell you it’s already installed, not that it’s about to install it. If you didn’t know, who’s going to be constantly checking for new drivers after every software install?
It would probably show up in Autoruns. Maybe even with a background service in task manager.
Kernel level drivers would not be in auto run.
What, why not?
Ask Microsoft
Good cheat prevention needs to be part of the game’s fundamental design, not some virus as a band-aid.
While I do agree with you, some cheats manipulate the memory itself so you would need some elevated privilages to dectect them as the cheats themsevles run with these privileges
Can you name one of those games that have no anticheat and also no cheaters?
Anti cheat as a fundamental design does not necessarily mean no anti cheat.
*kernel
Colonel*
Carnal
Kerbal
Cornhole
Cornell
Cornholio
That’s O’Neill, with two 'L’s
We totally won’t harvest your data.
Ignore the fact that we have political, state, and financial interest to do so, and that you would have no way of verifying or detecting if we did harvest your data, but you can trust us.
Just trust us.
It’s not only interests of the chinese government, they HAVE to oblige legally if they are asked to. So even if the company has the best intentions, the government overrules.
And don’t make that a chinese bad guy argument, as if western companies aren’t doing the same, they just don’t do that officially, which one is shadier is yours to decide.
All you can do as a company or anyone is to stop harvesting data and don’t plant blackboxes/backdoors in customers systems
Edward Snowden showed that the US is spying on their citicens but nobody seems to care. But when China is doing it, everybody seems to lose their mind.
I don’t get why they are so afraid of spyware from a country they don’t even live in, it’s the US that can prosecute you for anything they don’t like on your computer.
To be fair, China is far more authoritarian and evil than USA. Not that I’m comfortable with USA spying on me
It’s okay though, riot said they have the best team working for them! /s
If you ask me, it’s best to treat any program requiring kernel level access that isn’t part of your base operating system or something you created and have full control over as malware. All it takes is one exploit or something of similar nature and some bad actors taking advantage of it before it can be patched for your computer to become fucked.
Well base operating system or hardware driver. There are exceptions, the pps driver for timekeeping makes sense to be kernel level too.
But games developers? No, they have no right to ring 0. I understand they want to protect from cheats, but they’re just moving the battleground to a part of the system that results in blue screens/panics when it fails. And cheat developers will follow them there and even move to the hypervisor if needed, trust me on that.
Not to mention MSI releasing a monitor with built-in AI to highlight enemies for you that almost definitely counts as cheating, yet there’s nothing they can do except ban the hardware all together.
Please tell me this perfectly plausible stupidest-thing-ever isn’t a thing.
This is how I felt about those monitors with crosshair overlays built in. Silly at best, or in games that purposely don’t put a crosshair unless you’re aiming or something, scummy at worst…
It is. Check 3:44
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I find this comment funny, given the link I provided was copied from NewPiped.
NewPipe and Piped are pretty different things
Aaaand there goes linux support
Linux was never supported
Riot games official statement was that they were okay with linux players and actively went out of their way to make sure they didn’t get banned unjustly. They didn’t support linux as a software platform, which is why wine was required, but they did support linux players.
That’s cool
so… they didn’t support Linux. Got it.
I gave up League years ago when every update the launcher broke, then required some patches done to Wine. I’d known yhe kermel level anticheat would arrive someday but maybe I’m a little surprised it took as long as it did.
Who gives a shit, they’re 100% owned by Tencent
People that care about different things than you.
Difficult as it is to consider, I know.
Plenty of people do
Maybe you do, but remember that Tencent is an evil corporation sending all your data to the chinese government. Not something I wanna stand anywhere near
Gold coming from someone with over 500 hours on tencent owned games. From my very brief digging and de-anglification of your name
That’s not me lol.
Anglification of blåhaj is blaahaj, not blahaj, btw
Why are you explaining this to a random user from the instance on a random thread?
Why not?
Because why would a random user not affiliated with the creation of the instance, therefore having no power over the spelling utilized in it, in anyway care
if we’re gonna randomly pedant on people it’s “anglicization”. not that anyone cares.
I think you were looking for anglicisation the other is an Americanisation
that’s a matter of dialect, both spellings are widely used and recognized as correct by english speakers the world over, versus “anglification” being entirely made up by one joker trying to flex how smart they are.
as an aside I really don’t understand the pissing contest over minor spelling variations between the two major dialects of English (a large part of which, a devoted pedant must note, is merely bastardizations of French words), what gets me is stuff that’s the same word for totally different things depending on where you are like chips, biscuit, thong, napkin, pants, etc.
flex how smart they are.
Nah, It’s just that blå means the same in my language, and I’m annoyed by the mistyping of the colour blå/blaa (meaning the colour blue). This is not a simple comment being slightly wrong, but an entire instance doing that mistake.
Is this the death of LoL on Linux, then? It was possible to get it working pretty well a few days after every patch, but this will change all that.
For the forseeable future, unless someone is committed enough to making Darling work.
(Mac layer instead of Windowz, the mac version does not and will not have vanguard.)Yes, if Valorant hasn’t been playable on Linux due to Vanguard then so will LoL.
It’s the death of LoL anywhere. Only suckers will play it.
Isn’t that basically the entire player base anyway?
Yes unfortunately. Just gotta hope that none of those suckers can be exploited for military advantage. Probably not.
Different software purposes and all, but it vaguely puts me in the mind of the Sony compact disc DRM scandal.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal concerns the copy protection measures included by Sony BMG on compact discs in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
Good bot, if this is how you earn your keep.
That’s gonna be an uninstall for me, Tencent.
Nope. Take your rootkit and go fuck yourself with it.
There’s absolutely 0 reason a game should ever have kernel access. Ie unrestricted access to every piece of data on the system.
Funnally enoigh, the reason for and against game companies exploiting a critical vulnrability to access to ring -1 is way stronger. If you installed an anticheet to ring -1, No MoRe PiRiCy, nobody needs to know its there, nobody can remove it, its not like your system is unusable now, and best yet, its a verry big target for other shady types to join the ring -1 party. /s
Another game I’ll never play 👍🏻
Eh, probably for the best, everything I’ve heard about LoL is that it turns you into a toxic hateful shell of a human.
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I was gonna care until I read league of legends. Clearly people already hate themselves and despise sensible choices and alternatives. Otherwise they wouldn’t play lol.
Everything bad about LoL is it being a MOBA. I think you can’t prevent toxicity in a MOBA.
In a team with randoms, if you start losing you’re stuck in an unfun game where you get crushed by the ennemi for half an hour.
What’s not to love?
tl;dr: Was never toxic or angry, and was consciously trying to not blame others but focus on my performance, but eventually gave up on DOTA, because it’s too complex to play seriously and captain a team. Switched to Starcraft2, and realized how mentally taxing and depressing it is when you don’t have a team to blame, and that you unconsciously blame teammates because it’s a powerful mental defense mechanism. I’ve never felt worse, stressed and anxious, than after a loosing spree in 1v1 Starcraft.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing DOTA in highschool, and eventually I’ve reached the conclusion that unless you play with (and ideally are a captain) in a premade team, there’s not really a point in playing - you will never get better alone, and you will unconsciously always blame other teammates, making it harder to learn your lessons and improve. (I’m deeply flegmatic and forgiving in regards to others, a archetypal support main, so i never was getting angry or toxic, thankfully. So I was usually more focused on my own performance and didn’t care that other fuck up - or so I thought)
I’ve also quickly realised that the knowledge required to be a captain is something that even after thousands of games, and hours of research, I’ll never be able to get. There’s so many variables you need to know just to pick a team comp and get through the ban and pick phase, and then you add itemization to the mix, knowing what your team should do based on the current minute, hero picks, and items chosen by your and enemy team… I really respect any pro player due to that, because its isane how many variables they have to work with.
And so I switched to Overwatch, because there, the meta is a little bit easier to follow and there’s not that many variables in play, to be able to lead your team.
I wasn’t able to get a stable team willing to take the game seriously, and eventually I’ve also noticed that I still tend to subconsciously focus on what my team did wrong, instead of my own gameplay.
So, I switched to StarCraft 2. And oh boy, those were the worst few months of my gaming life. The meta was eaiser to grasp, I knew what to do, the issue was building the muscle memory to execute it correctly. But there are plenty of resources, from training maps to The Staircase method, so I was making a pretty good progress.
However, the Ranked. Here, I’ve realized how much blaming others in team games is a necessary defense mechanism, because in this game, you have only yourself to blame for every loss. Hitting that play button in Ranked was terrifying, I was regularly depressed and felt terrible after every loss. It was so taxing to my mental well-being, because most of the games you play, just end with: “You suck. That was a beginners mistake. You’ll never be good at this game, and you have only yourself to blame. Just give up.”.
There’s no blaming teammates, theres no " I’ve made a few mistakes, but my team also…", which as it turns out, being able to do that is a tremendous help in regards to your mental health.
I still had fun, it was a great challenge and I enjoyed learning the game and slowly getting better, but the losses, and especially loss streaks, were so stessfull and taxing, to the point where I was literally anxious to the point of almost having panic attacks every time I wanted to hit that fucking Find Ranked Match button.
But the wins, oh boy I’ve never felt better in my life. But, you know - as an average player playing at your rank, you should hover around 50% win rate. And that’s a lot of losses.
I’d recommend this experience to everyone who keeps playing competitive games with random players. It was eye opening in regards to how you handle losses, and a great introspection into how I subconsciously handle losses in team games, even though I never got angry.)
I’ve found on StarCraft 2 you can just blame the enemy. You can say “omg you cheesy 10 pool garbage” or “you just mass mutas all day congrats” or “making roaches is a good skill to have” or “congrats you made siege tanks” etc. I was very competitive at one point but now I just don’t really care much for it anymore. I’ll still play ARAMs with friends but maybe not after this kernel-level anticheat lol unless it works through Geforce cloud then I guess I could keep playing it.
Generally though, I’ve started out gaming with single-player games and I’ve mostly gone back to single-player games, other than playing RuneScape (OSRS and open-source RSPS) games etc ofc.
Oh, definitely. Blaming the opponent is something that I’ve also started doing, but also quickly found out that it doesn’t really work as well as blaming teammates in regards to your mental state.
“My noob teammates kept feeding the enemy, so there’s not much I could’ve done even if I played better.” shifts your guilt almost entirely on them. “The noob enemy chose an ease cheese strat” always has the slight problem that you always have to add (consciously, or you just know it subconsciously) “that I didn’t recognize in time and I didn’t manage to counter”. And that feeling will nag you :D
While it wasn’t 100% free from hate, Heroes of the Storm had significantly less of it. Similarly, GW2 has a far friendlier community than WoW, because game design does matter.
Similarly, GW2 has a far friendlier community than WoW, because game design does matter.
So much this.
GW1 was better
i mean, that’s not Moba specific, Counter Strike, you get 1 griefer and it becomes a slog fest.
it’s the people that suck, lots of raging and griefing at the slightest setback by people who have no life.
Quit that shit a long time ago, have not played multiplayer games in years.
Arent CS games a faster turnaround tho?
I don’t think so, CS games can go to up to 90 minutes theoretically, unless the game is really one-sided then the game lasts somewhere between 40-60 minutes, which I would say is a reasonable estimate for Dota 2, never played LoL so not sure how it is there.
Huh, I thought they had a max of 45. Maybe Im mixing that up with a different game
yeah probably, though CS is kinda ambiguous what the max is, but well that’s the max, unlikely to happen, this guy does a calculation of it:
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MOBA is possible to be good and have come back games but LoL is entenched in shitty game design choices from 15 years ago and largely survives because its free to play and anyone interested in MOBAs has heard of it and played it. I’d argue games like smite or monday night combat do the MOBA genre better and advance from crippling rts controls on an action oriented game, but those never caught on cause the moba crowd hates change and innovation.
You must not have paid attention to the smite “pro” scene if you believe that game is in a good spot.
Yep, a lot of recent anti-cheat is looking a lot like DRM.
more like intentionally installed malware but yes, 100 % this
Not just looking like DRM, I would say it IS DRM.
Not just DRM, a rootkit which is much worse.
Another reason not to play LoL.
This won’t change much for me considering i already have a dozen reasons not to play this shit ass game
I know two couples who got divorced because of it.
Care to elaborate?
The guys were playing all nights & weekends for years, neglected their wives and in one case children (other couple didn’t have any), the childless wife ended up cheating, the other allegedly as well (but wasn’t ever proven nor admitted to), both women eventually filed for divorce.
They also neglected their friends and came crawling back once their lives fell apart. I had since moved so didn’t really hang out with them again, but from what I hear, both got back into the game eventually and withdrew further.
What a shitty game to throw your life away over…
Alcohol doesn’t really taste good and neither do cigarettes.
People often times have illnesses that make these types of things consume their life. It’s easy to look down on them but they honestly need help.
And even then, perhaps illnesses aside even, there’s so many dark patterns built into these mass-appeal games it can grab anybody potentially. They’ll A/B test every little thing to see what holds a second’s more attention.
Everything is designed so hard to push players’ brains into a simple loop:
While(Alive == True): One_More_Match() Insert_Money()
I’d still consider it an exploitation or mental illnesses. Some people are just predisposed to getting addicted and struggle way harder. Just like some people can’t help themselves and gamble their lives away.
I agree that they clearly design games to be as addictive and consuming as possible but it’s still an exploitation of mental illnesses. I have never had to struggle with addiction so I feel a bit judgemental if I assume others are just ruining their life by choice.
Damn
Is there an open source MOBA? Players need an alternative, even if it’s not as good to begin with.
I mean Dota exists. I guess I’ll switch to that. Or maybe I’ll just take a shower.
Dota was the OG anyway, LOL coined the term MOBA to shift focus that they stole their gameplay mechanic from one dude, icefrog.
I remember when people used to type AoS-like game (Aeon of Strife) when hosting a similar custom map on SC or Warcraft III
i.e. DotA 5v5 AoS-like
Then after DotA got popular, it became DotA-like
i.e. Naruto Wars 5v5 DotA-like
And then that totally banger BassHunter song cemented DOTA into history forever 🎧
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Dota has always been a drastically better game, I see this as an absolute win for Linux. League is cancer.
Uhhhh no. Dota is slow and terrible. Not that I think anyone should touch that CCP spyware of a game League.
I would argue that the pacing of a Dota match is one of the many things that makes it better than League.
I find league is insanely repetitive and has very little room for player creativity or expression beyond “I can hit my skill shots”. It’s just rote exercise that you can map out to the minute. Dota gives heroes and players space to breathe and flexibility to play in multiple ways, not to mention having a balance team that actually wants to balance the game, not just sell the latest champions.
Whew, I can tell you never got particularly good at league. You’re probably right about macro decisions and definitely right about new champions being OP on release, but matchups and micro interactions are where it’s at!
That said, I’ll never play again.
Nope, I just realize how much better it can be when the dev team has creativity and respect for players.
Not that I know of, the most popular open source games I have heard of are Space Station 13 (and its newer release Space Station 14 on steam), and Beyond All Reason which is an RTS.
If we’re talking about RTSs as well, there’s 0AD, which I tried out briefly during the period between Ensemble Studios being shut down, and the revival of the Age franchise with the HD edition (over a decade ago now, and it looks like 0AD has been under constant development since then).
An open source and popular MOBA would have an even larger problem with cheating and bad actors.
Edit: people are missing the point, and I didn’t state it fully.
What open source games have moderation teams and support teams? What open source games want to deal with ban evasion? What open source games want to deal with the notoriously toxic MOBA communities?
Security through obscurity clearly isn’t working anyway
The creation of cheats would be easier in principle but maybe in knowing than then you wouldn’t design a game where you trust the client in the first place. For example; don’t tell the client the location of every (unseen/unheard) player on the map in an FPS.
Perhaps there’s an alternative to addressing cheating which hasn’t been explored. Conventional wisdom was pirates are basically people wanting stuff for free so you should invest in DRM to force them to pay for it - now some treat piracy as a service problem where they instead need to offer a better user experience. I think it’s worth investigating if some cheaters would be better satisfied with built-in cheats, and if some non-cheaters would be willing to fight some uneven battles if they knew that’s what they were getting into.
By that logic any sever running something open source like Linux would be more vulnerable than say, Windows.
I’m not saying it’s because of the source code. It’s because it’s not a commercial product where there is monetary incentive to police the activity of the community.
How many open source games have support teams and moderation teams?
Is 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.
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 perhaps undetectable via hardware video splinters). Cheats which do not run on the host machine at all 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?
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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.
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.
Chess.
I rest my case.
… No I don’t, actually, I have more opinions! Come back!
I feel like being stringently anti-cheat about video games over internet is grasping at wind. Better to be more relaxed, accept that some will cheat and ‘earn’ themselves a higher elo than they can actually play, and encourage a player base to care about enjoying the game, and to care about winning/enjoying without cheats. If you have to encourage a fanatic player base who would do anything including cheat to get a leg up, maybe you too are forgetting this is only a game.
And for serious competition? Let the tournament organisers provide the hardware on location.
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?
In the past people created communities for multiplayer games around specific forums or LAN centers and sometimes hosted allow-list servers. If you didn’t play by the rules you’d get banned off the forum, and thus that server which it was tied to.
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.
Could allow people to curate their own blacklists if they don’t want to play in groups like that, then they would have the option to play in public and online, it would be more rough and they would have to keep it up but having those tools would allow them to play publicly without needing to join a forum or group while still curating their experience. Obviously would be more work but it would be a good fallback.
If that’s too hard they’d still have the option of joining one of those groups.
An issue of users having blocklists is that they may use it against people that are merely good at playing the game.
I suppose an open source game would have no choice but to have whatever feature users are willingly to addon to their local game.
I can definately see that being a problem, all systems have their downsides. A system like that though I feel is necessary in a game with decentralized online play.
For centralized ones it doesn’t make as much sense since those already have anti-cheat (automated or human run) and bans from the service, which aren’t perfect either, innocent people often get banned when they didn’t deserve it, it’s just not as apparent because in those communities anyone banned is witch hunted afterwards, there’s a lot of appeal to authority in those communities.
All user crowd control systems, even the lack of one is going to have negative effects to their usage, even if they aren’t apparent at first.
That’s fair. But I don’t think the MOBA scene as it is would switch to small communities like that .
Also, for people wanting to cause trouble, bans are meaningless sadly. Unless you also have some rigorous system for sign up. And I guess a small community could have that. But something at scale like a popular game with millions of players can’t.
And rigorous only goes so far, before it’s impinging on privacy.
It’s a tough issue to crack. Popularity and a large scale is always the reason foe all the cheaters and trolls to come around.
Do you know if the network delay is tolerable to play with almost anyone, anywhere in the world for casual and competative MOBA games?
I see no answer to stop trolling but perhaps there is another way worth investigating for cheaters. Some companies treat piracy as people simply wanting the game without paying and would invest in DRM. Some consider it as them providing a worse service than the piracy sites so they should improve the service. Maybe cheaters are unsatified customers?
Would some cheaters be satified with in-game cheats and not look for more extreme 3rd party cheats? Suppose cheaters were provided servers as a choice (in a friendly way instead of shadow banning) which let them play against willing non-cheaters. This supposes regular players could be encouraged to fight with some level of handicap as a challenge.
