This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn't take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully...... even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope....
Yeah but this approach makes the game stutter and/or sluggish for everyone. Client side computation isn't just cheaper, it also ensures that you have a smooth gaming experience.
As someone else said, most games do a middle way here. Compute on client side. Verify on server side.
Yes but if you are verifying server side anyway, why do you need anti cheat client side?
Well, first off: Money. The more you verify, the more it costs you to run your game's servers.
But also because you cannot detect every kind of cheat via server side anti-cheat. How does a server detect if my flick-headshot (which won this crucial round) in counter strike was luck, or if I had help from a program running on my machine? Maybe it didn't even make me react faster, just nudged the cfosshair another few pixels to ensure the hit.
Of course you can run statistics, and can flag outliers. But it's no proof. If someone always cheats you won't catch them, while you will flag someone have a good day (or a friend playing on their machine).
This sounds like a super clever argument, until you think about the scale.
If the cost to host a game went up by 50% it probably wouldn't make it into an investor call. Its a small price. It could be 10x as much and still be completely affordable to many games companies.
How does the client detect that when running said cheat on another machine? It doesn't. The current solution isn't perfect either.
I think the one who's not thinking about the scale is you. As the server owner you pay (compute) for every additional player. This goes directly against the wish to have as many players as possible playing your game.
This discussion spun of from a company stating specifically they don't want to invest more into anti cheat solutions. And that's from a company which absolutely could afford it.
You make it sound like I said that, but I didn't. In fact I'm very much against kernel level anti cheat.
This is the sort of annoying pseudo-intellectual smarmyness that gets old quickly.
You point out that you pay for every additional player as if no one has ever thought of that or as if my initial comment didn't consider it and that's wild.
You're one step away from saying "every little bit adds up" as if my literal point wasnt that the cost of running servers is minimal to most games to the extent that multiplying them still wouldn't make them a dominant cost center.
You've literally made no arguments against anything I've said. You've just point out the obvious as if it were a point or wasn't considered in the comment you replied to.
This doesnt help your argument at all. That one company, that we both agree could afford it, didn't want to spend, absolutely does nothing to hurt my argument and is actually only you agreeing with one of the main tenants of what I'm saying.
I don't make it sound like you said that at all. I'm literally pointing out (as in, its my point that I brought up) that there are weaknesses in client side anti cheat as well, and that only pointing out differences and exaggerating their worth is disingenuous.