Tinfoil Hat Theory – Streamer’s Advantage

I used to play this great action game called Warhammer: Space Marine. 3rd person shooter with a lot of potential. But THQ cheaped out, never gave the game the support it deserved, and went P2P with multiplayer instead of dedicated servers.

That P2P was important; whichever player the game had selected to "host" the match played with about a 1/2 to 3/4 second advantage, as every other player had to follow that host player's machine.

So you're a small developer in a country with a less than perfect reputation for integrity or fair play and you need to make your game look good, and the best way to do that is to have good players play your game, and look good doing it.

For me, it is not a stretch to presume most streamers run ESP mods as a baseline. There's just too much reward and too little risk, especially for a game that doesn't have formal tournaments or a killcam. And how easy would it be to place a server delay on all the other players in a streamer's raid just a quarter second? Such a delay would be almost imperceptible but also effective.

With the above in mind, as the wipe gets closer, I'm also seeing streamers call out cheaters as the cause of their deaths, more than I have seen before. They weren't doing this before at the frequency they are now. I'm watching Anton at 2:56pm PST 5/6/2020 and he's attributed his last two deaths to cheaters.

I was watching Lvndmark yesterday and he was accusing the PMCs who killed him of foul play, reviewing replays of his deaths in slow-motion and scrutinizing every frame. Is the game really getting more and more vulnerable to cheaters the closer we get to the wipe?

To bring the story back my P2P reference; I wonder if in anticipation of the wipe, BSG had to remove the streamer's advantage for some technical reason, and streamers aren't getting killed by cheaters; they're just finally playing the same game the rest of us have been playing.

I'm not saying individuals can't be almost unreasonably good at FPS games; but there is a reason that CSGO and Siege do "best of" sets. In games with 1 life modes, a single match is a terrible gauge of player skill, and even in those high-stakes settings, multiple matches where 1 player goes on 4-6 player kill streaks are so rare, they make the high-light reel for the entire tournament. Lvndmark wipes the entire raid of PMC's about 1 raid in 10. That's an absurd rate of lethality.

So streamers who brag about a 60+% survival rate… are they even playing the same game?