In this post, I’d like to share my take on overpriced AntiCheat licenses for FiveM and why it’s complete bullshit to spend insane amount of money just for a license.
First of all, I’m not making this post to promote my own AntiCheat, but all of these thoughts of mine have motivated me to build one.
Table of contents
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Current AntiCheat market situation
If you’re a server owner and you’re looking for an AntiCheat system, you have 3 most common options:
- Buy an AntiCheat - The easiest and most user-friendly option
- Grab some free AntiCheat on GitHub (or other platforms) - Also an easy option, but free AntiCheat won’t work well against most cheats
- Build your own AntiCheat - Time consuming, required to have some coding experience, need to understand how FiveM works, need to have some knowledge about cheats and if you want to actually build a working system, you also need to invest in a cheat license to have something to debug on.
But today, we’re focusing on the first option.
The problem
So what’s the deal with AntiCheat licenses? A LOT.
The AntiCheat market today is flooded with overpriced AntiCheats, I won’t name any, but I think everyone can think of at least one provider when it comes to AntiCheats. Some of these AntiCheats are really good, I’m not gonna lie, but there are also providers that lie to their customers, do sketchy marketing procedures etc.
Take this, most common cheats cost from 5-20$ on average, while most AntiCheat licenses range from 70$ to even 300$. Do you see the stupidity in this? To try and solve a cheating problem, you need to buy an AntiCheat license that’s more than 3 times expensive than the problem itself - the cheats.
What’s even more stupid is that these AntiCheats are not backed by someone 99% of time. By “backed by someone”, I mean something like FiveM resources on Tebex. They’re actually “backed” by two things - Tebex itself, that handles the payments for you, and FiveM, which provides the resources you bought for your server to actually be usable.
If the AntiCheat one day decides to shut down, you lose your license, you lose your money, and you lose your server protection.
Another thing to take in mind is the fact that MOST cheaters, and I really mean MOST cheaters, won’t last on your server more than 20 minutes. And I’m speaking from someone who used to cheat on FiveM servers a lot. When I cheated, I picked the most random, non whitelisted server to just have fun on by ruining it for others. I just spammed cars and explosions until:
- Some AntiCheat system banned me
- An admin saw me and banned me
Most cheaters are just hopping from server to server and do dumb and crazy stuff. It can be as basic as trying to abuse your unsecured server events, to trolling your players by for example exploding them or spamming entities. And the craziest part? You can prevent all of this by yourself! Securing server events is as easy as renaming them and obfuscating your resources with FiveM’s Escrow system, or just coding a smart logic that prevents cheaters from illegally executing them.
And let’s face it, not every server owner has hundreds of dollars they can waste on overpriced AntiCheats. One of the easiest solutions to this problem is simply transforming your server into whitelisted mode. If you have a loyal community and your players really want to stay playing on your server, then they won’t have a problem with spending few minutes applying for a whitelist to play on your servers. Most cheaters don’t even try to play on a whitelisted servers - they literally don’t have time for that. All they want is a cheap and fast form of entertainment, which they get by joining random, non whitelisted servers and doing crazy stuff there, as I mentioned earlier.
And what if one of your whitelisted player is cheating? Well sooner or later, they either:
- Get bored of it and stop playing on your server
- Get tired and start doing obvious stuff that will get them banned
- Stay cheating on your server without doing no harm to others
For this kind of server, you can have a small, simple AntiCheat system that you build yourself and it will be enough. If you just secure your server events and build a simple yet decent AntiCheat system, you have nothing else to worry about and you save yourself hundreds of dollars.
I don’t want to dictate what you should spend your money on, it’s your money on the end of the day and it’s none of my bussiness, but it’s wise that you do some kind of basic research about products you’re about to spend money on, but take a minute before you buy an overpriced AntiCheat. Do you really need such an expensive system for your server? Can you even trust these AntiCheat when you don’t have access to the source code? What if they end up shutting down the AntiCheat out of nowhere?
That’s it from me. Rant over.