This is why I avoid PvP at all costs in a game

Lots of blatant aimbotting. I've had vindictas and wraiths that snap onto my head and laser me, with enemies that confirm while spectating "oh yeah that person's cheating"

Yeah but there way more prevalent now.

That's not true at all. People figured out how to get nexto bot to play for them in ranked games. I haven't heard about it in a while so they might have fixed it. There are also invisible car exploits. Also network connection manipulation. These cheaters rank up super fast so 99% of players won't experience them, but there are absolutely cheaters.

Lame, I knew they were out there but I guess I'm lucky I haven't witnessed anything that blatant yet.

Game theory suggests implementing aim-assist officially. Like if you hold LMB, then within an onscreen circle, your crosshair drifts toward the most-central enemy at like one pixel per frame. It's not twitchy. It doesn't cancel inaccuracy. It won't help you get past silver. But if you're just plain *bad,* it's a zero-stress way to dial in on someone's backside in a long hallway. It lets you hold an angle just by being in the right place and looking the right way. It fights recoil when you don't know the pattern. It prevents you from fumbling a free opportunity. It is a set of training wheels for mechanics any able-bodied person will obviously be ten times better at if they put in the work. More importantly - it's enough to make skeezy alternatives *worthless.* Yeah, cheaters would prefer their crosshairs teleport to the other guy's skull, but games can detect that even without spyware. They've merely settled for this kind of... inverse arms race. Making the dishonest advantage shite enough that people don't even suspect you. They'd settle for even less, if "even less" was risk-free and cost nothing. Feel free to dome these people when they walk out of smoke halfway through a reload animation. That's how learning occurs.

The incentives for charging real money include "losing feels awful." If you're genuinely going *ha ha, good game, congrats,* then that's psychological manipulation that was left on the table. The studio demands that developers leverage more agony into that defeat. It'll keep people playing until they eke out a win, and then that win is so juiced with positive signalling, they'll immediately want another.

I've kind of given up on the idea of playing those types of competitive online games, both because of people cheating in them but also because of how the community these days addresses cheating, by witch-hunting and accusing people of cheating for being too good, or for sucking at the game, or for having opinions on surveillance and security (sometimes just because I'm queer). They also often harass these people they target. I have hundreds of toxic assholes on Steam blocked for this behavior alone because they came to my profile to harass me.

once, in a game of titanfall 2, there was an aimbotter. i was sorta outperforming them, which felt cool. I figured cheaters probably have their own frustrations so i was just nice and friendly and they kinda calmed down, apologized for using cheats, said they were having a bad day, and we all played normally. felt like a real gamer moment. didnt keep in touch, hope they're having less bad days now.

Anyone know how halo pvp is these days? Thinkin about goin back to playin that.

Lol you didnt bother reading the article at all.

Didn't happen to my kid, but then I did raise her right. I guess it is avoidable afterall.

I stopped online gaming as well a couple of years ago, and my life got so much better for it. Turns out the relaxation of playing online games was stressful and toxic as hell. I've been exclusively playing single player games since, and it has been a vastly improved experience relaxing with games.

It's a blog post about a dude who wrote his own aimbot and theorizing that AI could work a similar way. It's not even actual news.

Nice try to backtrack and bullshit. > Rocket League doesn't have cheaters. Everything is handled server side, so they would literally have to hack the server to cheat. This entire paragraph shows not only that you did not bother to read the article but you have no idea what you are talking about. Go read the article.

There are a handful of online games I do like to play, generally ones without competitive elements, and I limit online gaming to people I actually know. But yeah most of the games I do play are single-player.

Because I very rarely play multiplayer?

I've given up because of time. I do not have that much time to game and when games started to hide better weapons and gear behind paywalls and progression systems that will take several hundreds of hours to complete, it sucks. So you're fighting against those 14year olds who have spend an ungodly amount of time on the game and have better gear and that is not a good experience