system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Anti-Cheat software? Red Dead Online

Long preamble, TLDR at bottom:

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For those who don't know, cheating/hacking is a HUGE problem in GTA Online and Red Dead Online.

**In RDO it is so bad** that cheaters can follow you from session to session, harassing you 24/7. ALL they need is your in-game screenname (which is shown everywhere).

They have incredible amounts of power, including:

* \-Spoofing their name (many use "R\*ADMINISTRATOR" in a different color to pose as Rockstar support)
* \-Changing time of day, weather
* \-Killing you anywhere on the map
* \-Teleporting anyone, anywhere.
* \-BLOCKING the in-game cheat report, and seeing WHO filed it. **This means if you use the game to report a cheater (Rockstar's official advice), they can see you filed the report and are guaranteed to harass you from that point on.**
* \-And hiding most evidence of all their activity.

Ok, so I would like an explanation from the technical side.

**Even if there isn't** a "catch-all" anti-cheat system they could implement, I refuse to believe that Rockstar couldn't just hire a small team of people to keep track of the cheating programs, and reverse engineer them to provide protection or something.

The only explanation I can see, is that the company doesn't care. I can't believe it would be that hard, especially for a huge company, to combat these cheating software.

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**TLDR** *What are some of the common programming methods used in preventing cheating online, and is it really that hard to implement or does Rockstar not care?*

Thank you so much! I have had several "hackers" ruin a ton of my progress, and would at least like to gain some understanding, out of all this frustration.

Thank you!
gpt
Sounds like they're doing something like peer to peer multiplayer rather than actually running any sort of validation server side.

In this way, the costs of hosting multiplayer servers is probably a thousandth what it would be otherwise, but they can't really do anything about the cheating because the cheat commands aren't being processed by a server, only the cheater's (compromised) client and your client.

To fix this, they'd need to

(1) completely rewrite the networking code

(2) invest in creating a completely new server side program

(3) charge people a substantial subscription fee to cover the much increased server costs.