My Life As A Gamer: Esport Cheating Is A Self-Solving Problem

As if the degeneration of videogames as a business wasn't bad enough from the business side, there is also the player side- i.e. cheating.

The problem arises once Player v. Player arises, and most of the cheating talk online is in this context. This is not, and has not been for years, idle whining; esports is still a thing, so real money is on the line, and when real paydays are to be had you better believe that serious actors will do what it takes to secure the bag. No amount of exposure of cheaters has ceases the cheating; it's only made the cheats more popular and sophisticated.

And now it's looking to conclude in favor of the cheaters.

One need only watch the most popular streamers that are known to play cleanly to see (a) how pervasive cheating is and (b) how hard it is to compete with out them. Before Corona-chan's world tour, the single strongest countermeasure for paid competitive gaming events to use was to put all qualifying players into the same space using the same hardware. That is not an option now, and will not be for some time thanks to knock-on effects of the Ukraine War.

The reason is obvious: if the event organizers can force participants to share the hardware and software needed to compete, they can control what is used and what is not, which reduces cheating to almost zero; Starcraft did this for decades with success, and others copied that format to the same effect.

Now so much is forced to be online from home that the cheaters have the advantage, and due to factors beyond their control will likely benefit so for some time to come. It is during this period of time that the perfection of cheating mentioned in the video is likely to be achieved, and if so then competitive gaming will either collapse or everyone will have to conform--to cheat--just to compete viably.

"But that won't be tolerated!"

Bullshit. Professional sports across the world has had a massive cheating problem for decades; doping is commonplace across the board, everyone knows it, and because of the money involved the organizations claiming to check against it are actually captured and only enforce bans when not doing so would do more damage to the brand image of the sport or the organization.

However, for all the money videogames make, their political clout remains poor and that is unlikely to change in the near future; rather than being accomodated, as Soccer and auto racing are, esports are likely to be crushed by state power- this has already happened in China, and signs already exist of this in the European Union. Once the money goes, so will most of the cheating.

That which remains will be done purely to pull power trips on people, just like we see with Whales in Pay To Win mobile trash with multiplayer enabled.