spdragoo :
derekullo :
A solid block of concrete is more secure than a combination lock.
By blocking all possible programs from interacting with the game you reduce the attack surface that others with more nefarious purposes may try to attack.
You also don't need to constantly update your detection algorithm to determine what is a legit MSI afterburner and what is an auto headshot / infinite money hack trying to disguise itself as MSI afterburner.
Are there that many "fake" versions of MSI Afterburner out there that would really cause this problem? Considering that the best method of actually submitting
evidence of the use of hacks (other than shrilly screaming it out just because the other player is better than you are in the game) would be to submit
actual in-game screenshots & recordings, it doesn't seem like it's going to make it
harder to prove cheating.
Not to mention it'll make it that much harder for review sites to actually measure the in-game performance...unless that's the real purpose behind this ("Oh, don't worry about using the tools you use to test every other game out there, we have our own built-in tool that you can trust 100%...believe us...").
You only need 10 people with "fake" versions of MSI afterburner to take the top 10 spots in rankings.
Game moderators can watch any part of an online game without others knowing they are being watched.
A simple report player button would add a players name to a list of potential players that need to be monitored by a real gm for cheating.
If cheating was detected then the appropriate actions would be taken.
If you can't trust the maker of the game to build a simple bench-marking tool for their own game then how can you trust them to even make the game?
Assuming the makers of the game did make a bench-marking tool that wasn't honest / poorly coded, whom would they be trying to deceive, players and or themselves?
Players would immediately become suspicious if they noticed 60 fps in the benchmark, but 30 fps ingame.
Even if they modified the ingame fps tool to fps+30 it is fairly easy to determine visually if you are running at 30 fps or 60 fps.
It's possible they may be trying to deceive themselves due to a poor coding job and then place the blame on Nvidia / AMD.
Both Nvidia and AMD have the funds to dig deep into the game / drivers and find the truth if the game developer isn't truthful in order to vindicate themselves.
The more likely explanation is that game developers make honest bench-marking tools that take the work out of manually creating a script that may or may not even work for MMO games due to factors not under your control.