Does this game need client-side anticheat at all? It's not PvP, so if you're cheating, you just ruin the experience for yourself and maybe your teammates. But as far as I know, there are no rankings and not really any competition.
Is it though? It had less explosive growth than Helldivers 2, but it sold 8+ million copies, not counting everyone playing it on game pass for free.
Also this is hardly scientific, but just looking at my friends list (of 60 people), over 50% of my friends own deep rock, nearly making it the single most commonly owned game among my friends. The only games I see that are more popular are left4dead 2 and the portal games. In comparison, just over 25% of my friends have Helldivers 2. Obviously a sample size of 60 isn't enough to extrapolate to overall popularity, but from what I've seen Deep Rock has been extremely consistently popular for years.
It's done well enough to turn its studio into an independent publisher, and just having a spin-off game sharing the Deep Rock name was enough to sell a million copies in a month of early access.
Not ruining the fun is kind of the point, and not all hackers and cheaters are benevolent, greifing other players in their game.
Further more, every victory adds to the score for that planet and factoring into the galactic score, which is the primary vehicle for storytelling to the community. Which the Devs clearly want to be a community effort of the players and also feedsback into how they balance the game.
So cheaters or hackers adding a lot of false data or win to that pool could result in the devs overturning new content, nerfing existing items or buffing enemies to put the difficulty curve where they want it. I don't think many players would appreciate a sudden difficulty spike because cheaters made the game too easy.
No need for pinpoint accuracy when you are doing half a ton of explosives via close air support or heavy artillery from low orbit. Or worst: a mortar turret with no regard for friendlies.
Whether or not the game needs this anti-cheat feature, players are still finding ways to give other players huge amounts of Samples (a grindable resource with limited amounts included in each mission) and spawn in unreleased equipment and stratagems.
So clearly the GameGuard isn't as useful as it could be.
the game updates based on the actions of other players, with planets being liberated and events having them taken back by the enemies. if the game had a big hacker problem it would negatively effect the game. plus having a hacker make your mission a free win would not be fun
The fuck it is. There's no economy, simultaneous instancing, raids, rarity of weapons/armor/items/mounts, and the "DM" makes completely arbitrary game-wide decisions. Hell, there's barely even a "levelling" system. You high? 🤪
edit: not only is the "anti-cheat stupid simple to bypass, should you want to, therealconcern should be that it's a kernel-level invasion of privacy for no fucking reason... but who cares, right? 😅😶
I actually joined a match with cheaters. They are dropping stratigems non-stop. Firing unlimited eats. It wasn't fun at all. And when I extracted on the mission they maxed out all of the sample types. It really ruined the gameplay loop. It was not a great time
From my understanding, devs could detect such cheats like cooldownless stratagems or obtaining phantom samples server-side without the need of anti-cheat. It's the FPS mechanics cheats that are hard to catch.
Probably they are relying on their anticheat too much.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I don't like it when people accuse someone of an altered state of consciousness just for disagreeing with them. Statistically it gets used more often on neurodivergent people, because neurodivergence is an altered state if consciousness. Neurotypicals will see that autistic people think differently, and then accuse them of drug use not realising it's actually autism. While this is done with innocent intentions, the statistical sum total result is that autistic people get accused of being high more often than neurotypicals. It terminates the discussion, and if autistic people get treated like that at all times, then they're treated as not of sound mind at all times. I don't have a problem with drugs at all, but the thing is a stoner has the option of sobering up and being treated like an adult again. While an ND person just gets infantilised at all times for existing, because their genuine experiences are dismissed by NTs as drug addled nonsense. So I think we as a society should just stop accusing strangers on the internet who disagree with us of being high. It's not clever and it's not funny, anyway.