What do you all think about "handicaps"?
I have put a lot of thought into how to eliminate cheating. For example, to eliminate cheating recoil, just eliminate recoil. To reduce incentives for wall hacking, just add radar. To eliminate aim c...
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I can agree in principle with many of these ideas, though I have my suspicions about whether or not they would have any real impact on the cheating epidemic. In a competitive environment people will do anything to get themselves even a minuscule advantage over their opponents - an advantage that is legitimate or otherwise.
I've often said that weapon mechanics, such as recoil, that are designed to fight the user, whether they are based in reality or not, are just another tool the developer uses to separate "us" from "them," or to give "us" something to aspire to. As if after 50k matches I'm somehow not already as good as I'm ever going to get. Recoil, reticle bloom, slow spool up, whatever it is, it needs to go.
Aim assist however is a horse of a different color. Most players would tell you that aim is the single truly important skill in the game and if you just hand it out to everyone with maximum aim assist then there's no point in playing the game. I would argue otherwise. I would argue that it simply makes other aspects of the game into the competitive mechanisms that drive play. Like strategy, positioning, use of tacticals and ults. But that is absolutely not what the typical fps player wants to hear. They do not want to play a game where the kill goes to the guy who saw the other guy first. I would also argue that shield/health mechanics and longer ttks would help keep engagements from breaking down to nothing more than "who sees who first," but I can promise you that "competitive" players still don't want to hear this and wouldn't give the game more than a single match before leaving for some other sweat-filled dumpster.
I very clearly remember saying decades ago that if devs want fewer cheaters in their games then they need to make their games cheat proof. The advice fell on deaf ears then, and now, with cheating on a scale that is multiple orders of magnitude greater than it was then, it still would. Which is why I don't bother saying it anymore.
On the general subject of handicapping: that is exactly, so the dev would say, what skill-based matchmaking is. It's a handicap system. If it operated as it's supposed to then none of these other fixes would be needed. Sadly, it doesn't. Even with the matchmaking update that hit at the beginning of this season - a huge improvement over any season of this game ever - it still isn't enough. Smurfs and cheaters rule the game, and even if they didn't then the matchmaker would still struggle with low population, faulty skill assessment, and a dozen other problems I can't be bothered to remember at the moment.
But all in all I give you huge props for addressing this subject - a subject very few competitive players would even want openly discussed, and which I'm sure the developer, if they bothered to weigh in at all, would pretty much dismiss out of hand.
"Either it's a cheater or a guy way above my pay grade in my lobby; it's hard to tell sometimes."
That is a perfect description of the single biggest problem with modern competitive multiplayer shooters: a skill ceiling so enormously high that a normal person can't distinguish between a really good player on the one hand and a cheater on the other. It's exactly the kind of game that streamers and pros demand. And that cheaters thrive on. And the rest of us are left standing around breathing their air. One day a developer somewhere will make better design decisions. I'm only sorry that neither of us will live long enough to experience it.
Recoil, reticle bloom, slow spool up, whatever it is, it needs to go.
People complain about bloom, like its some sort of disease compared to recoil. Yes, recoil is visually more realistic, but bloom is cheat proof to achieve similar results. The only thing about bloom is that you cannot master it, cheating or no cheating. So unless the server tightens the spread for bloom based upon your time using that specific gun, it isn't anything more than a mechanism to force pacing your trigger.
Ultimately I am thinking what would a shooter feel like in a competitive experience without recoil, with full aim assist, etc., to eliminate every possible incentive for cheating? I know people say it would shallow the skill gap, but it would eliminate vectors for cheating. I think there are other areas that skill gap can shine to make the game fun.
On the general subject of handicapping: that is exactly, so the dev would say, what skill-based matchmaking is.
I can't agree with this. Skill matching is to increase fun. But it can only occur when enough players of each skill tier are playing. Handicap is for when you cannot form a match with players of comparable skill level and must resort to giving less skilled players some help or they would just get stomped on.
I agree with your assessment of how cheaters can hide in modern shooters, where we can't tell in many cases. I shot at a guy once when he was looking away. I unloaded a full clip square on him. He was stationary looking into a bin. The next thing I know he boxed me with a single shot and began to loot my box.
It is unlikely he didn't cheat. The only way i can see it being done, however, is if he had some type of script that pushed him out of my line of fire immediately AND delayed packets to the server AND aimed right at me AND shot a full clip at me AND then released the packet to the server where it ruled he boxed me. Then when i get one packet, it combines all the damage and his latest pose over my box. It's only extreme cases like that where it is obvious.And if the server adjudicated it properly (as it could so easily), he would have been down due to the authoritative location was standing at the bin the whole time (which was what the server told me was happening).
All I can tell for sure about bloom is that a) it is unsatisfying when you know you're on target but the game decides to randomly deny hits based on its own **bleep**ty attitude. and b) I've had far too many instances of enemies squeezing out their shots just as fast as me and yet magically everyone of their bullets lands while half of mine are arbitrarily denied by "bloom." It's a trash mechanic meant to give the developer plausible deniability when they realize that under otherwise normal circumstances too many gun duels end in draws, where technically both players go down. Halo went through such a period several games ago. I found it much more satisfying to die knowing that I took someone with me, but apparently a lot of pro players felt it was not satisfying and so the dev changed the code again so that somebody would always win. Even if they really didn't. Draws, apparently, are anti-competitive. Who even knows what goes through idiots' heads.
