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tastyspleen.net / Re: Is anticheat worthless these days? 
Well-Reasoned Argument and/or Conclusion
on April 30, 2015, 08:09:42 PM to claire
Distinct from those types, however, is claire, who runs a sizable number of Q2 servers, and who ain't no dummy. So I'll have to ask him what he meant by, "it was a neat idea...but handicapped the game."
Not sure if he might have been referring to the exclusionary nature of some servers which elected to run with globally forced AC; or maybe something more along the lines that bothers me, which is that I've wanted to make some various tweaks and improvements to r1q2 over recent years, but there seems to be no point in doing so, as there's no clear path to getting such changes AC-approved. So r1q2 is effectively stagnant instead of continuing to evolve. Anyway, that would be my beef -- I dunno if it's claire's.
Both of those things are indeed what I was referring to.
AC works very well when it's used, but using it is getting harder and harder. In the US there really aren't any servers with anticheat forced (ac=2), except for the ts-tournament servers. Look farther and you'll see a lot of Euro servers with it forced. When Island55 retired the digitalfrag servers, I put up replacements and purposely didn't force AC so they would be more accessible. The more people playing this game the better. The difficulty comes when you introduce newer or updated clients. R1Q2 is a great piece of software. But it's old. Q2Pro is also a great piece of software and happens to be more up-to-date. It has more features, it's more configurable, it runs better on my laptop. For those reasons I run Q2Pro. But current versions of Q2Pro are not AC-approved and therefore will not load the DLL, hence my AC status at the top of the this thread.
Requiring a player to use older software when there is something else available that works better for them just to use AC is handicapping them. So what I chose to do, and I'm sure many others are too, is use the client that works better for me and not bother with AC.
I've heard (and this might not be accurate anymore) that the anticheat.dll library doesn't work with Windows 8. Maybe this isn't an issue anymore, I don't know I have Windows 7 on my laptop.
Nobody write perfect code. Last year a bug in the regex code for q2admin came to light that could be used to crash the server. No big deal, update some code, recompile, back in business. If no new clients/updates are being AC-approved anymore, adding features or fixing bugs is very tough to keep a valid AC system going. Again, handicapping.
Then there is the fact that AC is a windows-only animal. I happen to use windows on my main computer currently. I also happen to be a big linux user, but since there is no linux library that isn't an option. What about the poor Apple users? The only way to play for these users is to not use anticheat. Handicapping...
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