We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.
Cheaters also do things like buy CD codes/stolen accounts which are sold cheaply on various websites.
It also doesn’t help when there are promotional campaigns that let people play the game for free or very cheaply.
We even had a problem with people buying the game with stolen credit cards.
Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job, personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot, many people don’t have that, and that’s not including the kinds of nefarious things people did with the binaries of other games gameservers we gave out (like saving garbage back to our persistence, or trying to inject statistics to the leaderboards systems if there are any.)
It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you. Maybe I’m stupid.
But I was not told (for business reasons anyway) to hold on to the game server binaries.
We did it because making the game was easier/possible that way and the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I promise you that it is not cheap to host gameservers — if we could we would have pushed that burden onto players. (Speaking purely economically)
> We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.
So you didn't check the demo corresponding to the reporter's account and timestamp? Why not? Why don't you have IDs in logs?
My experience comes from 100% free games. Codes and accounts were irrelevant. If you can't earn some reputation and trust on a public server, you can't get invited to a private one. Simple as that. It doesn't matter if wannabe-cheaters can make a million accounts.
> Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job
For many clans and gaming communities, moderating their turf is a passion project and having the keys is a sought-after position of privilege. They love to spectate and look out for potential new "hires" while keeping the chat clean and kicking out any griefers and cheaters.
> personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot
> the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I think you lack some imagination. Letting gamers operate their own servers doesn't mean they have to host their own servers. Just like discord "servers" aren't actually hosted by their "owners".
> It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you.
Sorry, not interested in AAA games.
> Maybe I’m stupid.
You're probably not stupid but it's all too common to see people not being able to think outside the box.
I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.
Logs are great, but people are not great at reporting cheaters. Some resort to recording their screen or cheaters bypass the “report” button by acting in a way that prevents that button from popping up.
We must have lost thousands of man hours on people falsely hitting the report button when someone was being better than them. Everything in it’s time.
Community moderation is a very comforting idea, but the reality is actually not conducive to a good online experience except for a very small minority; the kinds of problems that crop up are obviously exclusion but also go into the area of power abusing operators.
I know you’re going to say “go to another server” but honestly, that’s naive. Oper abuse is even more deeply unpleasant than cheating. It is enough to put you off a game entirely.
So the gatekeeping, politics aspect are obviously not good but what is also true is that there is a large contingent of people who desire good matchmaking, good matchmaking depends heavily on:
A) regionality
B) a large population to pull from
C) consistency of the platform and administration.
If you get into a “random” game and someone cheats, that’s no different than if you joined a “random” game and the admin of the server did something within their power.
Having a small population for a game like apex legends means that the outcome is nearly always the same.
Having low regionality of hosted servers means people in South America have extremely bad experiences; as severs there are expensive and finding a population to fund it amongst themselves is difficult.
Also, obviously, a 40 core 256G windows PC costs in the region of €300/mo (not including the windows server license). Given people are already very cost conscious when it comes to games; getting people to shell out the price of a game each every month to run a server seems unlikely.
> I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.
I'm sharing my experience. I can say that I had very good experience with community moderation for many many years across numerous different games.
By the sound of it, you haven't even tried it, you're just explaining why you don't believe it works?
And the end result then is that you have no moderation. Cheaters can still cheat, griefers can still grief, and hosting your game for a better experience is impossible. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that puts me off a game entirely.
Cheaters also do things like buy CD codes/stolen accounts which are sold cheaply on various websites.
It also doesn’t help when there are promotional campaigns that let people play the game for free or very cheaply.
We even had a problem with people buying the game with stolen credit cards.
Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job, personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot, many people don’t have that, and that’s not including the kinds of nefarious things people did with the binaries of other games gameservers we gave out (like saving garbage back to our persistence, or trying to inject statistics to the leaderboards systems if there are any.)
It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you. Maybe I’m stupid.
But I was not told (for business reasons anyway) to hold on to the game server binaries.
We did it because making the game was easier/possible that way and the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I promise you that it is not cheap to host gameservers — if we could we would have pushed that burden onto players. (Speaking purely economically)