This actually might be a good use case for a proof of steak open ledger, kind of like a cryptocurrency, but no crypto required.
Every item in game would have a chain of custody to an origination event, duplicates would be trivially obvious, you could see where bugs are duplicating things, or at least the time they got duplicated.
Incrementing and integer in a database is fine, and efficient, but but when you start to make it a currency, then you have fungibility issues and chain the custody issues like we're seeing now.
Obviously this can always be addressed by writing perfect code and accounting for every origination in the code, but if the programmers aren't perfect, moving to a ledger makes more sense
More like inventory management and less like cryptography. It's an open ledger, which is commonly used in cryptography, but is also useful in inventory management
Right now star citizen has a database, and they control the values in the database, but these duplication glitches mean some of the code which has authority to change these values is doing it incorrectly. So the database itself just has extra integers added all willy nilly.
An open ledger, would provide a chain to custody for every new item in the game, at least the money, making these duplication glitches either impossible or, trivially obvious when they happen
There's no reason this could not be implemented on a traditional database no need to make it open, or using distributed ledger technology, but distributed ledgers exist, and depending on how they program, could be just drop in to their program.
Plus an open ledger would mean all of these space cowboys would keep an eye on it and raise hell when they saw something fishy
It shouldn't have anything to do with client-side code.
The universe infrastructure has a database now, that database now needs to track where money comes from and where it goes, so instead of saying you have a dollar and somebody else loses a dollar it says Bob sent you a dollar.
Or for the ships, instead of duplicating a ship, you update the title record of the ship to say who the current owner is, with a history of all the previous owners.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a joke is.
Looking past my clear exaggeration, all anti cheat software is going to come at a cost, either performance or being connected to their cloud. A ledger isn't going to stop anyone from cheating if it's just a text file.
That being said, none of this is necessary since it's a single player game and Bethesda shouldn't care. There should be mods that make a me a king from the start, not consequences for using glitches.
Something like this would just be cool for MMOs with craftabke items. People.could confirm you made it and now you're a virtually famous item designer or blacksmith or whatever.
Except it's a ledger, not a db. Devs can't alter the ledger, only provide transactions. You get scammed by a player, someone hacks your account and steals your stuff. The devs might be able to give you replacement stuff, but they can't take it from the hackers or who you traded to.
This gets worse with crypto where each item is unique. The devs can't then just make more money/items to replace your loss.