Cheating, or lack of a hardware standard?
I have been following the cheating discussions for a while now, and I can't help feeling that it's missing something important.
Every time cheaters are banned, they come back with new accounts and new cheats. The community keeps pointing it out, and developers keep trying to stop it.
While you can discuss where the line goes between exploiting programming errors and hacking, everyone seems to agree that cheating with hacks and macros are wrong. Even people who I know are doing it, or have admitted to doing this, seem to agree that it is wrong.
So why can't we move past this?
A while ago, I was pondering the question, and I had a breakthrough. I did this by zooming out - not only thinking about digital FPS (ESport) cheating - but thinking about real-world sport cheating - Soccer, hockey, skiing, bicycling etc
Bicycling especially had a very public cheating scandal in the early 2010s, with Lance Armstrong admitting to taking stamina-enhancing substances. This was followed by several of his former teammates also getting caught doing it, hence nailing the fact that cheaters don't come alone, they take some people below them in the leaderboards with them.
It was while I was thinking about this that it suddenly hit me:
Games like Battlefield 6 has no real hardware standards for its multiplayer.
Other sports like skiing has strict standards for which tools to use, how the skiis should be graced, how heavy they should be, and so on. You might think that Esport like Battlefield will have similar standards with its million dollar tournaments and super competitive face, right?
So why is it, when I look up Playstation Dual Sense Edge controllers online, I click on their page and see them being marketed like this? "DualSense Edge gives you the upper hand against your opponents on the viritual battlefield"
Can you see the problem here? Does an official retailer really market cheating in an online game? Or could it be that something more important is missing here?
We all agree that games like Battlefield has a cheating problem. But could the cheating problem lay on an even bigger problem? - A lack of hardware standards for maximum fair play.
This would explain why the cheating discussion never seem to land, no matter how many cheaters gets caught red handed. Developers will never be able to propperly check hardwares without a standard, and players meanwhile will never agree on what constitutes as cheating if people can just buy themselves to victory.
Is it time to be even more agressive against cheaters? Or is it time for companies like EA to go out with an official hardware standard - which players have to follow - in order to access their multiplayer games in the future?