Time for an anti-cheat

[HikariKurosawa]

There are some technical reasons why i wrote it and my postings do not contradict. It is only a matter of effort, the botters/cheaters have to do to overcome the anticheat mechanisms. You can technically prevent a working code injection. This will propably stop all textures and model altering mods, damage meters etc. Code injection is also very easy to do for the players. Just start the character altering mod/parser with Administrator rights or use a special launcher and you are done. And that is the reason why so many players do that. Because it is easy. If you stop a working code injection, then many players and developers of those tools will simply give up.

But when it comes to stop Gil selling botters, they will not give up so quickly because real money is involved. For botting, teleport hacks etc. code injection is not needed. And if you put the whole Windows installation into a virtual machine then you can do what you want with the game from the VM host. But setting up such a virtual machine, which allows you to modify a game, running in the guest OS is way harder than starting a special launcher with elevated rights.

So no, you cannot prevent cheats and bots but you can raise the effort, which would be needed to run them successfully.


Cheers

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

[Larirawiel]

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

There are so many online games with anticheat mechanisms and they are still full with bots. Again, as soon as you can earn money with botfarms, then the botfarm operators will put much more effort to neutralize the anticheat mechanisms compared to normal players. And if you make millions of Dollars with a botfarm then you can easily hire some software developers for very advanced bot software. If they put the Windows installation with the game into a virtual machine (things like KVM or Virtual Box or Hyper-V or VMware etc.) then the anticheat has no chance to detect a bot running outside of the VM. Because the anticheat mechanism runs inside of the VM and you can easily fool it. And yes, maybe an anticheat will fend off some normal players. But an anticheat is also a hack into your OS. And hacks can rise serious security holes into your Windows installation. And yes, it already happened in the past:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...ble-antivirus/


Cheers

[Jojoya]

You can prevent regular players from cheating, you can prevent cheating from being widespread and normalized. That alone justifies the means. Nobody expects the game to be free of cheaters, but it's a fair expectation for cheating to be abnormal.

Cheating is "abnormal".

Use of mods may be against the Terms of Service but it only becomes cheating when it gives a player an unfair advantage in completing content compared to those who don't use mods.

Most of the mod use in the game is not related to giving the player an unfair advantage in completing content. It's akin to taking a test where you're told to only use a black pen to mark your answers and you choose to use a blue one instead because you like blue more. Did you break the rule? Yes. Did you gain an unfair advantage in completing the test by doing so? No.

The amount of mod use that truly is cheating is small. If it were rampant, clear rates of high end content when still current would be much higher than they are and come much sooner after release.

So is there cheating? Yes, as you say you can't expect a game to be free of cheaters. Is it normalized? No. Most players will earn their clears and wins through honest skill and effort.