Definitely agree. I haven't played in some years, but when I did Apex Legends netcode was atrocious. They were clearly putting most of the workload onto the client, rather than letting the server arbitrate.
I think you've nailed the reason why these rootkits keep getting added, but I feel like there must be something else these game companies want... Why do they keep adding it to single player games for example?
They HAVE to be assumed to be hostile bad actors. I definitely hope valve stands their ground on this one.
Apex cheats are comically absurd in their scope. There was a recent one where the cheater spawns multiple bots who navigate to his ping and imitate all his actions (like a Mirage Decoy that can shoot). Last year there were incidents where a cheater would target a streamer with a swarm of 60 bots.
These kind of cheats just shouldn’t be possible from the client side. And there’s really no excuse for it when the servers have 20Hz tick rate (lowest of any AAA multiplayer shooter), so they’ve got plenty of time to perform additional computation.
The weird thing is that hackers can target a streamer in the first place, which people have speculated is due to the debug info on screen leaking the server ID. But that implies the hacker needs to perform a server exploit, too - or at least, he needs to send some untrusted data from the client that the server will interpret in a way that resembles an exploit (but is more technically a logic error).
I think you've nailed the reason why these rootkits keep getting added, but I feel like there must be something else these game companies want... Why do they keep adding it to single player games for example?
They HAVE to be assumed to be hostile bad actors. I definitely hope valve stands their ground on this one.