> Publisher driven esports is advertising.

Yes, of course. E-sports is advertising. All professional sports are advertising. That's what makes money. Sales of tickets, merch, guides, coverage, etc. A successful sport is a self-sustaining money printing machine. Now, traditional sports are "frozen in time" relative to business timescales; meanwhile, in e-sports, it's entirely possible for a company to introduce a new game and turn it into a worldwide phenomenon over a couple of years, and then keep getting a cut from aforementioned money printer for many more years still, all while trying to introduce a new game to keep the money running.

And it's okay, I honestly don't mind. As far as the advertising-driven economy goes, sports (traditional or otherwise) is one of the more benign fields. The problem I see is the relentless focus on building a game optimized for professional play ruins it for vast majority of players, and I fail to see why companies keep doing it instead of bifurcating the multiplayer aspect into "casual play" and "pro play", allowing for the latter while also letting the former have their fun.

> Nobody wants to play multiplayer (only) games with cheaters.

My point is that most of the cheating comes from structuring the game around pro-play. You get a global ladder, which establishes an ordinal ranking that invites cheaters who just want to score higher for less effort. All those cheaters end up ruining the game for regular people, who don't care that much about the ranking. Most of those cheaters would go away if the ladder was removed - but that ladder is critical to the company and wannabe progamers precisely because the top levels of that ladder are a gateway to pro-level play.

You can't eliminate all cheating - there's always some people who, for whatever reason, enjoy ruining the game for others. Fortunately, such people are a very small fraction of the playerbase, and most of them don't enjoy it enough to bother if you throw some small obstacles their way. It's manageable. Competitive rankings, on the other hand, are something cheaters love much more than regular players, so by adding it, you're basically creating the problem.

This is true for all competitive endeavors - the bigger the reward, the more it attracts competitive players, some of which are going to resort to cheating, and attempts at fighting cheating further ruin things for those who don't care about competing in the first place. And yes, it applies to the market economy too.

Am i bitter? Nah

> I believe they don’t get it/don’t care.

You’re right, anything that’s not obstructive is never worried about.

To me that says you’re doing a good job giving permissions, it’s also your job to manage those permissions, not the developers..

> It's just not their wheelhouse.

Your absolute bang on. And I can say from experience, it’s good you guys are there.

If someone can run a python script on your machine, it’s game over whether it’s running as admin or not.

Also, half of their shaders are broken on some configurations. Also they used a function call wrong so their game tries to render something a bunch of times instead of once.

A huge portion of NVidia and AMD GPU drivers is literally hacks to make games actually run well. Both Nvidia and AMD patch game shaders at runtime to keep things from being unusable, and hack around broken behavior or wrong usage of APIs. It's exactly reminiscent of the situation Windows 95 had when all sorts of popular programs couldn't even save interrupt flags properly because they straight up did not read the manual which had many sentences and code fragments demonstrating that what they wrote would not work.

Also, Titanfall 1 shipped with like 30gb of uncompressed audio. They did this to "reduce CPU load". In 2014.

Of course I get all the usual garbage non-arguments in response from designers who don't want to take up a challenge and actually design, and instead fall back on a "tried and true" (except it is shit) fashion.

These things are _trivial_ to implement, it's just nobody thinks about the UI as long as it 'works'.

If you're a game dev, you were taught to write optimized code that runs locally on a computer.

Not everything you do will run on the network, and networking/multiplayer might not be relevant every single time you ship a game. So it's less relevant (if still important)

When Steam Machines re-launch with the current generation of Proton compatibility it will be an entirely different story.

While I'm sure that Easy Anti-Cheat is... easier than a reporting system that would require numerous humans working it, I don't think it's the best solution for the player. It's "just enough" at best, and at worst... well see the article we're all commenting under.

If League of Legends needs super admin mode, it's no longer my computer. I'm sharing it with Tencent. I can't trust them ( specifically a disgruntled employee) to not install key loggers and other really nasty things.