this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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If you're always reacting perfectly, that too can be discovered and used to ban people.
Also, regarding cheap game keys, those would be useful for one or two matches before they'd be banned.
For reference, all Minecraft PvP anticheat is 100% serverside, and yet a competitive PvP community exists.
I think you're missing the point of why they're buying cheap game keys. In fact, it sounds like you think a 'ban' is something bad to these players or will stop them. If it did, I'd probably be enjoying Rust still.
Not even VAC bans are perfect, although it typically stops the poor unfortunate kids who truly don't know better at least.
Minecraft anticheat won't be perfect either. It is a necessary and functional safe guard as is usually the case with anticheat (minus rootkits, fuck those useless tools), but people will always slip through. Note what other people in this thread are saying.
Sorry, but being a developer I can tell when players are just repeating half-truths they read online.
There's no reason why strategies that work in any other kind of computer science shouldn't work in gaming.
The difference between an attack costing $0.00 and $$0.01 is enough to reduce attack volume by orders of magnitude.
Even just costing the attacker 30 seconds is enough to have a massive effect, which is why captchas exist.
Game keys tend to be in the $1 - $5 range, which makes bans an extremely useful tool.
I apologize as I seem to have made myself unclear. I'm not disagreeing or saying these security measures aren't useful, I was just stating the fact that people can and do get through these systems and players in this case can detect them even when security measures can't.
To your point, as that $$0.01 makes a difference, VAC bans also make a difference by preventing kiddies from jumping back in with their purchased cheat program. That's great. However, there are 'whales' that don't care for the cost, and even though they're a small number they have an influential contribution to the negative experience these people can bring.
I'm not a security researcher or a developer so I don't know what security measures are ever in place or what the hackers do to get through. I mostly play lots of games and once-upon-a-time would dig up free (likely infected) cheat programs that got through anti-cheat and contributed to the cycle that's ongoing today.