For some dumb reason, I had to read plenty of Latin proverbs lately.
“Timendi causa est nescire -
Ignorance is the cause of fear.”
Yeah, no wonder your friends told you to kys.
Back when I was what they called an improvised chamber pot in BF3, I was banned multiple times (they had community-run servers back then). So, I agree with you—if you are skilled to some level and have the occasional lucky shot, or, to flatter you, skill shot, you may get called a cheater. Because, as they say, “Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from magic”.
A mere months ago, I, pretty much an IT illiterate, would have said, cheating is impossible in cheat-protected games without community servers. Obviously, it’s not.
“Ignorance is the cause of fear.”
No, ignorance is the cause of levity.
Join the War Thunder subreddit to see a dozen of bot tanks run a train on poor humans trying to cap the first base. Every so often, you get video proof of hackers—in RB, of course. I even got on a web page claiming to sell undetectable, anti-cheat bypassing hacks. Could as well be a scam—if your account is ten years old, and you won’t increase your video game budget by a £100 a day to pay these ludicrous sums to get access to those hacks, you won’t give it a try for the heck of it.
But I just want to point to “Escape from Tarkov”—if you can get advantages from hacking in a video game, people will. Either because they’re rich and think effortless, stolen victories are fun. Or because they’re poor, but have the talent to build hacks – to make money with the first group of people by selling these hacks or accounts that have years worth of grinding in them.
I’m with you, catching good hackers is hard, and WT does not have a massive hacking problem in the first place.
But the thing WT has, and that is no fun, too, is a botting issue. And while you can never eliminate hacking just by game design (because this is not just a gaming topic, looking at you, professional sports), I think Gaijin is able and maybe already in the process of massively curbing down on botting. It is widely acknowledged that eradicating deviant behaviour cannot be accomplished solely through the implementation of harsher penalties (and hackers and botters already face the death penalty, kind of), but rather through the enhancement of the likelihood of being caught. And there must be some means to increase the ban chance of bot users, if automating this is a challenge, maybe employ more people to look at replays. The most challenging, but also the most rewarding way in- and outside video games is by reducing the incentives for deviant behaviour. Gaijin is attempting to achieve this objective with WT by making the grind more fair.
If that works, all power to them! They can count on my vote.
