This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game. The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they're cheating at is probably negligible.
I don't think it is really the cheaters that degrade the experience, it is the knowledge (right or wrong) that cheaters exist that reduces trust that makes for not fun experiences.
I've played online games for many thousands of hours over the past two decades and I can count the number of times I encountered a blatant cheater on my hands. Every time it actually happened people had a good laugh about it and either hopped servers or banned the person cheating. Sure I have probably unknowingly encountered a bunch of map and wall hackers but I didn't know so it didn't degrade my experience. For all I knew those players were just better than me, plenty of those around. Having played with some extremely high level players in various games, it actually feels like the good players are using map/wallhacks more than the actual hackers because they have such good gamesense.
On the other hand, I have been accused of cheating more times than I have actually for sure encountered real cheaters. It isn't fun when a server turns sour because everyone is accusing each other of cheating and getting salty over nothing.
Of course, if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn't the case. But any game with a modicum of community power to enforce rules won't have that problem. The major places you reliably encounter cheaters are non-private servers and matchmaking services that have essentially been abandoned by the developers.
Borderlands was fun until the cheaters showed up, and this even as a cooperative game.
People with hacked 999999999-damage guns warp in, splat everything and even if they dont steal all the loot, they make the entire game pointless.
You couldnt do anything about it but leave. There was no ban system users could appeal to.
Though some fun memories were had with cheaters in other competitive games, like coordinating to try to take down or hide from literally invincible opponents.
Counterpoint: Pokemon Go is incredibly infuriating to play as a new player because of cheaters. People spoofing their location fill up gyms, making it extremely difficult to earn in-game currency. They can also prevent you from effectively raiding with members of your own team, if spoofers from another team vastly outnumber you (reducing the reward from the raid).
Not only is it not fun, it's discouraging. And it's one of the big things that led to me quitting the game.
What games do you play? Because it's at least once a play session for me. Perhaps we are playing different games or different regions have more cheaters than others.
I have also often wondered if cheaters choose other regions than their own to exploit in, hence why little ol' Australia gets so many of them.
Sorry, in "if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn't the case." I meant "the case" as something like "the perception of cheating is more damaging than the actual cheating". Poorly written on my part.
Certainly not all cheaters have the same interests.
Some are simply curious experimenters, others are trolling, others want to make videos doing the impossible etc.
I wish there was another path out of this mess than the current arms race. It would be interesting what effect would result in providing a sandbox mode where cheating were allowed to see if it would reduce cheating in general population.
I've thought a little about building cheating detection into the mechanics and lore of maybe an MMORPG by treating it like a forbidden dark art.
If a player is flagged for cheating, they could take on an "aura" in the game. Maybe different types of auras for different types of cheating or for the types of events that took place around the cheating. It could grow stronger with more flags or fade with time. Fine-grained detection of auras could be a sought-after perception skill.
The in-game community could decide how they want to treat different types of cheaters. You could see interesting things like self-segregation or vigilante organizations.
You still have to intervene a lot to block gold farming bots or whatever, but I think you can keep the vanilla players and most cheaters happy.
Console speed-runs have different leagues where different levels of glitches are allowed - from 0% to any%. Maybe that could work here, possibly as a "competitive aimbot league".
I was under the impression that 0%, 100%, and any% were completion ranges, not different levels of glitches allowed.
0% means you make as little progress as possible, level up as few times as possible, pick up as few items as possible, and otherwise avoid progress other than completing the objective.
100% means you pick up every item, finish every quest, etc...
any% means you do whatever you have to in order to get through as quickly as possible.
That said, there are different levels of glitches, exploits, and external tools allowed in different speedruns. TAS (Tool Assisted) speedruns would probably appeal to this crowd.
For instance this run[0] of the NES Super Mario Brothers games where all four games use the same controller inputs and finish in the same second. (Host says 3 games, but it's really 4.)
I’ve always heard n% refer to the completion ranges, as you say, however, the level of glitches allowed has often been a factor too (although in my limited experience its usually been simply no glitches allowed or glitches allowed). Mostly I’ve watched dark souls speedruns where the general consensus is that any in-game glitches are allowed, external tools, hacks etc are not and the % refers to how many of the bosses are defeated.
Doubt it. The one time I cheated on a game( borderlands 2) was because the game was too hard without the p2w dlcs that I had no intention to buy. I didn't mind playing along with other people that played in whatever way they wanted( cheating or not) but I was too afraid of getting banned that I disabled online play while cheating.
A friend of mine that was cheating hard for a period on CoD 4 only did so for the fun of it and had no intention to ruin the game for the rest players.
A game with prevalent hacking/cheating is going to go downhill quick and lose it's established player base. Catering to these people in any way does not seem like a wise strategy.
The options presented are 1) segregate them into a separate pool, as suggested. They can then still give you money, the arms race is short circuited, and they don't impact the enjoyment of other players.
And then they possibly create an account and tread more carefully next time so they don’t lose their skins. This is behavior you can even see in streamers that get banned.
Frankly I think a zero tolerance approach to
cheating makes sense and sends a more
serious message. It still looks bad if cheaters exist even to other cheaters, for example a shadowbanned streamer, and makes it harder to take your game seriously.
Sorry, I was meaning my comment from the context of the conversation, where they'd be in a separate pool competing against each other. If cheaters want to cheat each other, it's no skin of my nose. Might still be a good revenue stream for Riot.
