Asinine move fueled by either pride or ego. Maybe even both.
Visual aids of exactly how the engine is designed.
Mostly surface-level but still confirmed details on the game’s packet structure.
If you’ve played at high sr before around early 2019, you know cheating was no where near as problematic.
Somehow, shortly after this talk, cheating became quite apparent.
Weird how that works.
To add:
A competent anticheat in todays’ landscape is one that increases the value of cheats for the game. You will never win in this fight as a game developer. But, you don’t need to. You just need to continue the cat and mouse game to make the risk of cheating not worth it to most people.
When your anticheat, usermode or not, is decent enough, it is an invitation to those who know what they’re doing. While anyone with the know-how and time finds joy messing with a game here or there just to see what they can find, the large-scale private cheat providers don’t care unless the game has enough in place to prevent any highschool comp sci student from making cheat sales.
Another common theme with these decently protected games is that they’ve always got low-hanging fruit. Things anyone with the know-how to bypass the checks will find almost instantly. An example being the recent rate-limiting oopsy where cheaters spammed voiceline packets so quickly that it crashed every other player in the lobby.
Sharing technology and engine technology details at GDC is neither pride nor ego. It’s industry standard to share what you’ve learned to help everyone else learn from your experience. It is essentially a teaching experience.
Sharing the details may have accelerated cheat design by a small amount, but it was inevitable anyway. Plenty of online games that have never revealed their source code have been hacked to pieces.
But Overwatch is genuinely sophisticated internally. It does things that very few games do internally, and it did them in 2016.
Finding memoryspace for all entities in the game world is fairly straight forward.
Try doing it in Overwatch. Entity list is self encrypting and constantly moving around in memory.
When you have sophisticated internal functionality, it does not mean you can get up on stage at GDC and give the closest thing to a YouTube tutorial on how to break your game because you have full faith in aforementioned sophisticated functionality.
“Sharing things at GDC is neither prod nor ego. It’s industry standard.”
Plenty of successful games that haven’t had major cheating issues shared nothing at GDC ever.
I didn’t say that it didn’t contribute - in fact I even claimed that it likely did in fact accelerate it, so I’m not sure what the faulty logic is that you’re speaking of.
We most definitely don’t agree on the amount of acceleration.
Detailing the engine does more than just showing the internals.
It lets people know that it’s not normal. It’s not what they’re using to seeing when reversing a game and that it will be interesting for them to learn more about. Especially when ECS at the time was a buzzword people were actively looking for large games using ECS to use as a guinea pig.
ECS may not have been widely adopted, but there was plenty of knowledge surrounding how it worked. For most engines it simply isnt feasible to rewrite it from scratch to take advantage of it. Overwatch was in a unique position to do so.
But make no mistake, hack developers are very clever people. They are not typically your average developer. They have a lot of skill disassembling code and understanding how it works.
So when you have a large game that has an abnormal engine structure, large playerbase, and a video detailing exactly how their nuanced engine functions, what did anyone expect?
I’m unsure what you mean - are you referring to the OW devs? They gain very little themselves by sharing details at GDC, so I’m unsure what you mean by fueld by money.
GDC has long been a conference about sharing trials and successes with the rest of the industry. Studios quite frequently share very sensitive information about their engines and algorithms that they’ve spent years developing for the purposes of advancing the entire industry.
I understand how as a player you see this as ego and pride, sharing secrets that can actively harm your experience, but that’s not how they see it. They’re just good people trying to share what they’ve learned. It’s purely academic to them.
To be honest , the fact that they used ECS for such a not so big game …
Ecs is suitable for vast worlds and complex games…
Among other things ecs is supposed to be very efficient cpu wise, but I don’t know how,this game is eating cpu power for lunch.
