I’m thinking of games like rainbow six seige and Cod war zone where hackers are so prevalent and is some of the main reasons people stop playing the game. Yet games like Fortnite or Overwatxh have little to no hackers. Is it due to the game itself?? As all the companies listed are extremely successful so they obviously have the money to do something against hacking.
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It costs a lot of extra $ to pay developers and programmers to make anti cheat software. This really doesn’t translate into direct profit so its often overlooked.
Anti-cheat stops some of it. (Stops some cheat tools from working, or detects and bans)
Rewards for winning vs risks from bans stops some of it. (You don’t win much but could lose everything)
Effectiveness of bans (do cheaters eventually get caught/reported and banned? If so, less cheaters. Is it easy/free to start up a new account to get around the ban? More cheaters)
Demographics of the player base can also reduce it.
(If the player base is mostly children [aka unskilled hackers], or very very large, the % of hackers will be smaller. If the player base is mostly adults [more likely to have hacking skills or knowledge to obtain tools], or the player base is very small, then the % of hackers can be higher)
Console games are harder to hack. (Less cheating on console games because the barrier to cheat is much more difficult to cross).
Fornite has a huge problem with cheaters. Nkt sure what you are talking about
Fortnite is filled with hackers. You can go on tiktok right now and see at least 10 people live streaming themselves using the hacks. People don’t get caught in Fortnite mainly because there is no killcam to record and report. These are massive games with millions of players you’re talking about right now. There are multiple entire businesses dedicated to making different types of hacks for these games but only a handful of devs that can actively combat the hackers. Does the company hire more devs to take on the hackers? Well that’s gonna cost more money and how do decide which game to put the devs on. It’s more complex than you think it is.
I am not a specialist, but afaik it also depends a lot on how/where the game handles it’s logic. If everything, from movement to shooting/hitting is calculated on the client, it is way easier to cheat. If you handle all that on the server, it is way harder to manipulate these calculations, but also increases the server load by a lot.
It’s a matter of culture and impact. Competitive FPS are the most targeted because a single individual with wallhack or aimbot can completely change the game for everyone involved. In games like Overwatch, these hacks are still impactful but not to the same extent since it relies less on aim. Basically, any game where mechanical skill is the main discriminator will feel like there are more cheaters.
It’s a never ending game of cat and mouse, hackers crack your anti cheat system, you patch an update to fix the exploit they exploit the fix and so on.
Some companies do a better job at handling cheaters and put more resources into it as well.
>Yet games like Fortnite or Overwatxh have little to no hackers
Both of these games are filled with hackers btw. There are very few if any multiplayer games which don’t have a hacker problem.
If the game isn’t free 2 play you can sometimes get away with a simple reporting system and relying on cheaters getting banned after the fact, the cost of having to rebuy the game usually stops repeat offenders.
If the game is authoritative, i.e. a server is running the game simultaniously and knows the true answer, it is much easier to determine cheating has happened and who did it, otherwise it can be a “he said / she said” issue.
If the game has a lot of hidden information, tools that allow you to crawl through the code on the client and look at the real values for everything is much more impactful than in a game where all information is revealed by default.
If a game relies on mechanical skill like aiming, you need to develop anti-aimbot programs to deal with that.
There are a few factors:
If you have a popular game there will always be people trying to hack it and find all sorts of exploits. If your game is slower like civilization it gets a lot easier to offload the game processing to a server where it will be significantly harder for hackers to affect it. The most critical of all is the game architecture. Some games simply trust clients too much, this is often done to provide a better experience to the players but allow hackers to do a whole lot more things.
Anti cheat software goes a long way on mitigating these issues, and are more prevalent on games with lots of players where hacking can cause significant monetary damage.
Btw, the most efficient way to deal with hackers is not to stop them, but to prevent them from affecting legit players. All big games do this but it’s not perfect.
Yes, its due to the game itself. It’s also a very hard problem to solve, and many companies don’t put the same resources into solving cheating as it can amount to more total work than building the multiplayer system in the first place.
I don’t know the specific of these games, but generally in FPS games, there are separate considerations that stack up to produce the networked effects that you experience. Here are some big problems that all have to be solved at the same time:
Lag Compensation:
Messages sent between computers are often sent at a regular rate, but don’t arrive in order or on time, so the server has to do some reconstructing of the information it gets from each client.
Interpolation:
Only samples of whatever is happening is actually reported, so the “in-between frames” of a match have to be reconstructed as some blurring of adjacent states. The information sent between players are like tiny teleports that each running game client just blurs together. The server usually just sees things as teleports because there is no human to impress with a smooth animation, nor do the “in-between” states have a practical purpose if the clients will never see them.
Reconciliation:
Think of “rubber banding”. Each system in a networked game won’t see exactly the same simulation, and that’s okay to a degree. We only snap things exactly to where the server says things should be if they’re out of place enough to affect the game in a significant way.
Whatever the server says the game’s simulation state is is considered a source of truth, so players in a game don’t get to tell the server where their player is, for example. Instead, the games report what the player is doing through their inputs, as in what keys they pressed, how much they moved their mouse, etc. The server and client both take this information and calculate the player’s movement independently and then the client checks its work against what the server got. If it differs too much, the client “snaps” to the server’s “truth” value which is what the other players see.
Favour the shooter:
There are some extra considerations whereby we sometimes have to give an advantage to some players because of how it takes time for all players in the world to see the same effects in-game, due largely to the fact that light travels at a finite speed, and so a perfectly synchronized between computers around the world is physically impossible. This might be most clear if you’ve ever been shot by a sniper after you thought you had escaped behind a corner. The “ghost” of your character hadn’t caught up with you yet, and most of the world believes that you’re still in the sights of that shooter, so you get into cover a die
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Because some games have a bigger market for cheat developers making developers fight many entities with increasing difficulty. I also assume devs also don’t want to invest most their revenue just to fight cheats.