I think that there needs to be more thinking and discussion on anti-cheat, game hacking, and accessibility
because on some level, as much as game hackers are a terrible experience, some people are only able to play through the use of cheatengine and the like to edit their controls, convert one sense to another (sound to "visual radar display" that would be considered a hack, etc), augment impaired vision with situational zoom, etc.
who are we banning just to keep the hackers out, because we can't have the staff to deal with them in other ways?
and equally important, if we still think banning home grown solutions is the path, why aren't we talking as if these should at least be assumed to be a required part of design? like, at the unreal/unity engine level, or well publicized libraries for other frameworks.
every few months I remember the article about DCSS unintentionally being one of the few complex games blind/visually-impaired people could play because you could have it list out targets and ranges in a way a screen reader could read
and my own issues that would be better with things designers didn't implement but I could on top of it
edit: I think most people this ends up in the laps of will have watched or seen the discussion of Folding Ideas' ["Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft] (https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU) and while you can do what you want, as I mentioned in later self-shares of this post people aren't arriving here from, that covers about a third of the territory here, and misses a lot of the interplay.
yes, agreed for sure. it is an important tension and we think there needs to be a tradition of public discussion around it. corporations would generally prefer to just ban anyone who's slightly different, because that's cheaper than solving things properly, but the community doesn't have to accept that.
i want to push back a little on the framing of companies keeping out third-party tools because it's cheaper or easier than properly dealing with them as if it's some kind of laziness.
part of the problem is that these tools can raise the skill floor for the game by making the content easier, meaning that now you have to design around them. you're effectively ceding part of your game design to whoever develops these tools.
for single-player games, this is fine. but for multiplayer games, this has a few issues:
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it cheapens the reward. part of the joy of having something that's difficult to get in social spaces like MMOs is showing it to other people: "look, i have this item, this is a testament to my skill because it shows i was able to beat this hard fight". a salient example of this is FFXIV: most fights in the game have an option to "unsync" them, meaning if it's a level 70 fight and you're level 90, you can go in at level 90 and easily defeat the boss. but the "ultimate" fights, the hardest content, specifically disable this: if you want to do them, you have to do it with the same gear and stats that you would have had when they came out. no shortcuts.
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developers start having to design around the tools. if the game developer wants a fight to have a certain level of difficulty to the average player, but most people are X third-party tool, then either they take X into account (and now everyone who doesn't use X is left out) or they don't (and it winds up being easier than they want for the majority of the player base).
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players will also start expecting their teammates to use it. how much this expectation will show up depends on the advantage it gives you; a 1% advantage is pretty marginal, but a 50% advantage will result in people requiring it, especially in harder parts of the game. and this goes doubly so for PvP games; now you have to not only worry about whether your teammates are using the tool, but whether your enemies are.
ultimately i think it boils down to: what skill is the game actually trying to test? to pick warframe as an example: a known issue with the game is that you can mod some semi-automatic weapons to fire faster than you can reasonably click without giving yourself horrid RSI. so they allow players to use "autoclicker" macros that just spam the mouse button, or bind mousewheel to fire, because "clicking really fast" is not what the game is about. but an aimbot, even a very weak one, would not be allowed since the game is balanced around headshots having a certain difficulty. and anything that decreases that difficulty for disabled people will necessarily decrease it for abled people.
(of course, the real solution would be for them to just make all weapons full-auto so you can hold down the mouse button, but I digress.)
I want to push back on the idea of it being laziness when it's an impossible scale. I don't think it's a solvable problem without things being off limits, the point of the OP is that people are so staunch on this issue that the middle ground is never discussed enough for there to be more than a game-by-game arbitrary choice on this without bothering to consult more than a few of the people who deal with it who nevertheless stuck with their game enough to get it changed.
it's an industry issue, but not because GM intervention is too expensive -- GM intervention is impossible
mixed with the fact that hackers have motivations, and you can usually get more success figuring out if you can use that instead of blanket banning people, if anyone had money to pay anyone to, for a large web of reasons (with the same root cause)
In the end, the answer to Warframe doing this isn't "autoclickers are okay", it's "theres options for single action fire assist (you could even have tradeoffs!) and an option for holding a single key down to repeatedly bullet jump (if it's the thing you do anymore)". But letting third party tools work is the one they don't have to implement. But there's way more there, in that vein, of third party fixes.
