Server side only anti-cheat is one of the problem domains that I'd really love to work on at some point in my career. This is the type of adversarial arms race that just seems really fun to think long and hard about.
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Because they're 10 years behind the curve and don't understand that a game's lifespan is contingent on anti-cheat. Once it becomes clear to the casual player that a hacker is going to effect every gaming session, the game dies quickly. Many games have gone so far as to obfuscate the presence of hackers so that players are less likely to notice them (CoD)! Other games build from the ground up with anti-cheat in mind (Valorant). Other games have an ID verified 3rd party system for competitive play (CSGO).
Personally, I think there is a middle ground between root level hardware access, and treating cheating as an afterthought. I'd lean more heavily on humans in the process... Use ML models to detect potential cheaters, and build a team of former play testers to investigate these accounts. There is zero reason a cheater should be in the top 100 accounts; An intern could investigate them in a single day! More low hanging fruit would be investigating new accounts that are over-performing. I'd also change the ToS so legal action could be persued for repeat offenders. Cheaters do real economic damage to a company, and forcing them to show up in small claims court would heavily de-incentivize ban evaders. This probably sounds expensive and overkill, but in the grand scheme of things it's cheap; it could be done on the headcount budget of 2-3 engineers. It'd also be a huge PR win for the game.
Ha ha, you mean paying for the game and holding your Steam account as collateral?
The only trace of it is that your account profile will show that you have vac bans on record, but you don't have to show your profile.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/571A-97DA-70E9-FF...
> Q: Can I use bans in other games to block users from playing in my game?
> A: No. VAC and Game bans should only prevent the user from playing on VAC secured servers in the game they received a ban in. A permanent ban should only be issued for your game if the user was caught cheating in your game.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/webapi/ICheatReportingSer...
It's complicated. Valve has conflicting guidance on this. What is Valve's actual position? The 13 year olds who cheat also buy IAP. In their opinion, if there are a lot of cheaters, sell pay to win items.
Otherwise, the consensus is hellbanning, meaning putting all the cheaters together in a server, and VAC queries are used to achieve that.
One was from letting my friend use my steam account, I wasn't using it and when I wanted to use it my password was changed and I had a vac ban in CS 1.6. He said it wasn't him, I'm not convinced.
The other was in Dungeon Defenders. The game had a confusing policy where you were allowed to cheat on the "Open" servers but not on "Ranked". You could copy your stuff from ranked to open, so I copied it and used cheat engine to test some things. Turned out you were only allowed to cheat using mods from the Steam Workshop or something like that, so I got vac banned.
Both bans are over 10 years old so things might have changed but I have never noticed any negative effects other than obviously I can't play DD or CS 1.6 online.
The cheating server situation is a similar concept to hell banning but poorly executed.
Hell banning is the status quo. If you try to play Overwatch they probably query VAC and might match make you with other people with VAC bans.
It’s hard to know without working for the game studio.
There is no hard technical solution to preventing cheating for many games. It depends how you describe insurmountable DRM or anti piracy measures, such as operating the only copy of the game’s backend server code. If people have no viable alternatives to playing on your remote servers, then you have an anti cheat solution. The net result is that all games, in a Darwinian way, start to look like this. Similarly on PS5, you cannot pirate their games practicably, so there is a vibrant single player business.
It all goes back to: are the only valid limitations on users insurmountable DRM? If we enforced copyright infringement in this or any country it would be a different story.
Seems strange that they would discriminate based on vac bans in game but not for the people selected to judge others. Then again maybe my bans were too old.